Spring delivers exposés of the NRA and the religious right, portraits of the American immigrant experience, inquiries into financial industry malfeasance, celebrations of LGBTQ advances, and ideas for bridging the partisan divide.
Top 10
Capital and Ideology
Thomas Piketty, trans. by Arthur Goldhammer. Belknap, Mar 10 ($39.95, ISBN 978-0-674-98082-2)
Piketty asserts that an era of extreme inequality has derailed human progress since the 1980s and advocates for a new economic system based on the sharing of knowledge and power.
Conditional Citizens: On Belonging in America
Laila Lalami. Pantheon, May 12 ($25.95, ISBN 978-1-5247-4716-9)
National Book Award finalist Lalami, a native of Morocco, documents her own immigration experience to explore the nature of U.S. citizenship and what she calls America’s modern-day caste system.
Dark Mirror: Edward Snowden and the American Surveillance State
Barton Gellman. Penguin Press, May 19 ($30, ISBN 978-1-59420-601-6)
Journalist Gellman chronicles his turbulent relationship with former source Edward Snowden and the clandestine campaign waged against him as he tried to investigate the modern surveillance state.
The Folly and the Glory: America, Russia, and Political Warfare: 1945–2020
Tim Weiner. Holt, June 2 ($30, ISBN 978-1-62779-085-7)
The Legacy of Ashes author investigates the history of Russian-American political warfare in order to understand how the U.S. might defend itself against the Kremlin’s revival and modernization of Soviet-era intelligence operations.
Hood Feminism: Notes from the Women That a Movement Forgot
Mikki Kendall. Viking, Feb. 25 ($26, ISBN 978-0-525-56054-8)
Essayist Kendall critiques mainstream feminists for giving insufficient consideration to the ways in which race, class, and sexual orientation intersect with gender.
The Nine Lives of Pakistan: Dispatches from a Precarious State
Declan Walsh. Norton, July 14 ($30, ISBN 978-0-393-24991-0)
Journalist Walsh, who was expelled from Pakistan in 2013, views the country’s tumultuous recent history through the lens of nine individuals, including a retired spy and a tribal chieftain.
The NRA: The Unauthorized History
Frank Smyth. Flatiron, Mar. 31 ($28.99, ISBN 978-1-250-21028-9)
Smyth charts the evolution of the NRA from its origins in pre–Civil War New York City to its present-day status as America’s most controversial nonprofit. 200,000-copy announced first printing.
The Pink Line: Journeys Across the World’s Queer Frontiers
Mark Gevisser. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, May 12 ($30, ISBN 978-0-374-27996-7)
Gevisser profiles queer people living in the borderlands between regions of the world where gender nonconformity is celebrated and regions where homosexuality is outlawed.
Show Them You’re Good: A Portrait of Boys in the City of Angels the Year Before College
Jeff Hobbs. Scribner, June 16 ($28, ISBN 978-1-982116-33-0)
Six years after The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace, Hobbs returns with a group portrait of four Los Angeles boys as they apply to college, including the son of undocumented immigrants who plans to follow his brother’s path to the Ivy League.
Unholy: The Christian Right at the Altar of Donald Trump
Sarah Posner. Random House, May 26 ($27, ISBN 978-1-984820-42-6)
Posner examines the history of the religious right in America to understand white evangelicals’ loyalty to President Trump and the movement’s shared agenda with the “alt-right.”.
Politics Listings
Abrams Press
Up All Night: Ted Turner, CNN, and the Birth of 24-Hour News by Lisa Napoli (May 12, $27, ISBN 978-1-4197-4306-1) profiles Ted Turner and the team of cable TV visionaries and crew that launched CNN in the basement of an abandoned Atlanta country club in 1980.
Algonquin
Of Bears and Ballots: An Alaskan Adventure in Small-Town Politics by Heather Lende (June 30, $25.95, ISBN 978-1-61620-851-6) chronicles Lende’s 2016 campaign to become an assemblywoman in Haines, Alaska, and her first year in office, during which she dealt with issues ranging from outhouse funding to marijuana legalization.
All Points
Break ’em Up: Recovering Our Freedom from Big Ag, Big Tech, and Big Money by Zephyr Teachout (May 19, $28.99, ISBN 978-1-250-20089-1) makes the case that Facebook, Google, and other multinational corporations are monopolies with more power and influence than the U.S. government, and need to be broken up.
Basic
The Sum of the People: How the Census Has Shaped Nations, from the Ancient World to the Modern Age by Andrew Whitby (Mar. 31, $28, ISBN 978-1-5416-1934-0). On the eve of the 2020 U.S. census, data scientist Whitby details the history of population counting from ancient China to Nazi Germany, and presents alternatives for the mass surveillance era.
Beacon
We Keep Us Safe: Building Secure, Just, and Inclusive Communities by Zach Norris (Feb. 4, $24.95, ISBN 978-0-8070-2970-1). Human rights activist Norris seeks to bridge the divide between “us” and “them” when it comes to public safety, and offers a new model built on inclusion and growth.
Bloomsbury
The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism by Katherine Stewart (Mar. 3, $28, ISBN 978-1-63557-343-5) examines the religious right’s network of think tanks, advocacy groups, and international alliances, and contends that the movement poses a threat to American democracy.
Bold Type
A More Perfect Reunion: Race, Integration, and the Future of America by Calvin Baker (June 30, $28, ISBN 978-1-56858-923-7) argues that integration, as opposed to desegregation and diversity, is the real goal of civil rights and the only means to solving the problem of racism in America.
Counterpoint
Between Everything and Nothing: The Perilous Journey of Seidu Mohammed and Razak Iyal and the Quest for Asylum by Joe Meno (June 2, $26, ISBN 978-1-64009-314-0). Novelist Meno tells the true story of two Ghanaian asylum seekers who met in a Minneapolis bus station and ended up in a private detention facility before attempting to cross the Canadian border.
Dey Street
Dare to Speak: Defending Free Speech for All by Suzanne Nossel (May 5, $24.99, ISBN 978-0-06-296603-2). The CEO of PEN America warns against the expansion of corporate and government controls on free speech and offers guidance on how to reconcile diversity and equality with the right to speak one’s mind.
War for Eternity: Inside Bannon’s Far-Right Circle of Global Power Brokers by Benjamin R. Teitelbaum (Apr. 21, $27.99, ISBN 978-0-06-297845-5) investigates the network of right-wing powerbrokers Steve Bannon has established to promote the ideology of Traditionalism and bring prominence to xenophobic policies and nationalist parties all over the world.
Doubleday
Flash Crash: A Trading Savant, a Global Manhunt, and the Most Mysterious Market Crash in History by Liam Vaughan (May 12, $28.95, ISBN 978-0-385-54365-1) documents the case of a London trader who helped cause a trillion-dollar stock market crash in May 2010 using software he’d built to compete with high-frequency trading firms.
Dutton
Front Row at the Trump Show by Jonathan Karl (Mar. 31, $28, ISBN 978-1-5247-4562-2). The ABC News White House correspondent draws on his 25 years’ experience covering Donald Trump to chart the president’s 2016 campaign, his first term, and his preparations for the 2020 elections.
Ecco
Protocol: The Art of Diplomacy and How to Make It Work for You by Capricia Penavic Marshall (June 23, $28.99, ISBN 978-0-06-284446-0). The White House chief of protocol under President Obama explains the etiquette lessons she learned welcoming world leaders to the U.S. and advocates for the importance of diplomacy and cultural intelligence.
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Active Measures: The Secret History of Disinformation and Political Warfare by Thomas Rid (Apr. 21, $28, ISBN 978-0-374-28726-9). Cybersecurity expert Rid documents the history of modern disinformation campaigns, from the Russian Revolution
to the 2016 U.S. elections and offers suggestions for how to combat them.
Flatiron
Hiding in Plain Sight: The Invention of Donald Trump and the Erosion of America by Sarah Kendzior (Apr. 7, $27.99, ISBN 978-1-250-21071-5). Kendzior’s follow-up to The View from Flyover Country chronicles Donald Trump’s rise to the presidency and combines personal anecdotes with analysis of how America’s democratic norms have been eroded since the 1980s. 125,000-copy announced first printing.
Grand Central
She Proclaims: Our Declaration of Independence from a Man’s World by Jennifer Palmieri (Mar. 10, $28, ISBN 978-1-5387-5065-0). The former director of communications for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign declares that women must find a way to live beyond the bounds of patriarchy and offers advice and examples on how to do so. 200,000-copy announced first printing.
Hachette
The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity by Toby Ord (Mar. 24, $28, ISBN 978-0-316-48491-6). Oxford University philosopher Ord examines global existential risks including poverty, climate change, engineered pathogens, and artificial intelligence, and makes suggestions for how to safeguard humanity.
Hanover Square
MS-13: The Making of America’s Most Notorious Gang by Steven Dudley (May 12, $27.99, ISBN 978-1-335-00554-0) explores the evolution of MS-13 from a collective of El Salvadoran pot smokers and heavy metal heads in 1980s Los Angeles to one of the world’s most notorious street gangs through the lens of its cofounder’s life story.
Harper
Trumpocalypse: Restoring American Democracy by David Frum (May 5, $28.99, ISBN 978-0-06-297841-7). Atlantic writer Frum highlights the damage the Trump administration has wrought in its first term and outlines a course that liberals and conservatives can take together to set the country on the path to recovery.
How Innovation Works: And Why It Flourishes in Freedom by Matt Ridley (May 19, $29.99, ISBN 978-0-06-291659-4) scrutinizes innovations including chlorinated water and copyright to understand how the process is different from invention, why it tends to happen in just a few parts of the world at any one time, and how it will shape the 21st century.
Harvard Univ.
Why Do We Still Have the Electoral College? by Alexander Keyssar (June 16, $35, ISBN 978-0-674-66015-1). The Harvard University history professor maps the origins of the Electoral College and the institution’s persistence in the face of multiple efforts to amend or do away with it altogether.
Haymarket
The Brother You Choose: Panthers, Politics, and Revolution by Paul Coates and Eddie Conway, edited by Susie Day (June 2, $16.95 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-64259-154-5). Ta-Nehisi Coates contributes a foreword to this oral history of his father’s longtime friendship with Eddie Conway, a fellow Black Panther Party member convicted of murdering a police officer in 1971.
Knopf
The Nation City: Why Mayors Are Now Running the World by Rahm Emanuel (Feb. 25, $25.95, ISBN 978-0-525-65638-8). The former mayor of Chicago places cities at the forefront of innovation and effective governance in America and encourages would-be reformers to focus their energies on local politics. 75,000-copy announced first printing.
Little, Brown
Union: A Republican, a Democrat, and a Search for Common Ground by Jordan Blashek and Christopher Haugh (May 5, $28, ISBN 978-0-316-42379-3). Blashek, a Republican, and Haugh, a Democrat, became friends at Yale Law School. After graduating, they traveled across the country to discover how such issues as immigration and mass incarceration divide and unite them, as well as their fellow Americans.
Melville House
Shit Is Fucked Up and Bullshit: History Since the End of History by Malcolm Harris (Feb. 25, $17.99 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-61219-836-1). Titled after a sign displayed at the Occupy Wall Street protests, this essay collection examines economic inequality, student debt, and the ways in which the IKEA catalogue reflects Americans’ current worldview.
Metropolitan
Somewhere in the Unknown World: A Collective Refugee Memoir by Kao Kalia Yang (Mar. 24, $18 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-250-29685-6). Memoirist Yang (The Song Poet), a refugee from Laos, gives voice to those who have migrated to Minneapolis from the Soviet Union, Thailand, Ethiopia, Bosnia, and elsewhere over the past four decades, giving the city new life.
Morrow
Separated by Jacob Soboroff (June 23, $27.99, ISBN 978-0-06-299219-2). MSNBC correspondent Soboroff recounts his efforts to report on the Trump administration’s family separation policy at the U.S.-Mexico border and investigates when and how the plan was carried out, and how it continues to affect the children and parents involved.
New Press
Abandoned: America’s Lost Youth and the Crisis of Disconnection by Anne Kim (Feb. 11, $25.99, ISBN 978-1-62097-500-8) contends that nearly five million Americans between the ages of 16 and 24 are forced to navigate the transition into adulthood alone, in poverty-stricken communities where opportunities are scarce, and profiles programs that seek to give these young people the support they need.
Democracy, If We Can Keep It: The ACLU’s 100-Year Fight for Rights in America by Ellis Cose (July 7, $29.99, ISBN 978-1-62097-383-7). ACLU writer-in-residence Cose commemorates the organization’s centennial by charting its history from the first Red Scare through the civil rights era, the Vietnam War, 9/11, WikiLeaks, and the Trump administration.
Use the Power You Have: A Brown Woman’s Guide to Politics and Political Change by Pramila Jayapal (June 30, $25.99, ISBN 978-1-62097-143-7). Congress-woman Jayapal recounts her arrival in America at the age of 16, her grassroots activism, and her path to becoming the first Indian-American woman elected (and re-elected) to the U.S. House of Representatives.
Norton
In Deep: The FBI, the CIA, and the Truth About America’s Deep State by David Rohde (Mar. 3, $30, ISBN 978-1-324-00354-0). Pulitzer Prize–winner Rohde probes the FBI’s Abscam investigation, the CIA’s false report that Iraq had weapons of mass disruption, the NSA’s warrantless wiretapping of American citizens, and other scandals to determine whether or not the deep state exists.
Oxford Univ.
Watchdog: How Protecting Consumers Can Save Our Families, Our Economy, and Our Democracy by Richard Cordray (Mar. 30, $27.95, ISBN 978-0-19-750299-0). The first director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau shares stories of how the agency has helped consumers stand up to the power of the financial industry by simplifying mortgages, filing lawsuits, and reining in predatory lending.
Pantheon
The Engagement: A Quarter Century of Defending, Defining, and Expanding Marriage in America by Sasha Issenberg (June 2, $35, ISBN 978-1-5247-4873-9). Monocle correspondent Issenberg narrates both sides of the campaign for marriage equality in the U.S., beginning with a 1993 challenge to Hawaii’s ban on same-sex marriage licenses and concluding with the Supreme Court’s 2015 decision in Obergefell v. Hodges.
Ordinary Insanity: Fear and the Silent Crisis of Motherhood in America by Sarah Menkedick (Apr. 7, $27.95, ISBN 978-1-5247-4777-0) draws on the author’s personal experiences, interviews, and research into the changing structure of the maternal brain and the marginalization of motherhood as an identity to explore the crippling anxiety that many mothers experience in the months before and after giving birth.
Penguin Press
Baseless: My Search for Secrets in the Ruins of the Freedom of Information Act by Nicholson Baker (July 21, $30, ISBN 978-0-7352-1575-7). Frustrated in his efforts to research a book about the Korean War, Baker delivers an inquiry into secrets hidden behind the Freedom of Information Act, including CIA programs to weaponize insects and spread Lyme disease.
Picador USA
It’s Not About the Burqa, edited by Mariam Khan (Apr. 1, $27.95, ISBN 978-1-5098-8640-1). Not recognizing herself or her friends in former British prime minister David Cameron’s statement about the “traditional submissiveness” of Muslim women, Khan gathers essays from 17 Muslim women exploring faith, arranged marriages, divorce, feminism, and queer identity, among other topics.
Princeton Univ.
Billionaire Wilderness: The Ultra-wealthy and the Remaking of the American West by Justin Farrell (Mar. 3, $27.95, ISBN 978-0-691-17667-3). A Yale sociology professor documents the class divide in Teton County, Wyo., where ultra-wealthy tech CEOs, financiers, and political figures are buying up land and romanticizing rural poverty in order to improve their own socioeconomic status.
PublicAffairs
The Deficit Myth: Modern Monetary Theory and the Birth of the People’s Economy by Stephanie Kelton (June 9, $28, ISBN 978-1-5417-3618-4). A former economic adviser to the Bernie Sanders campaign argues that government deficits don’t actually harm long-term prosperity and that the risk of inflation needs to be balanced against the benefits of a safer and more equitable society.
The Dissent Channel: An American Diplomat in a Dishonest Age by Elizabeth Shackelford (May 12, $28, ISBN 978-1-5417-2448-8) recounts Shackelford’s diplomatic career, her dismay upon arriving at the U.S. embassy in South Sudan to find it underfunded and misaligned with the State Department, and her belief that the decline in American diplomacy didn’t begin with the Trump administration.
Scribner
Death in Mud Lick: A True Story of Corporate Pill Pushers in Small Town America by Eric Eyre (Mar. 31, $28, ISBN 978-1-982105-31-0). Eyre won a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on the West Virginia opioid epidemic, and narrates one woman’s efforts to hold a small-town pill mill and the drug wholesalers that supplied it responsible for her brother’s death.
Simon & Schuster
14 Miles by DW Gibson (June 9, $28, ISBN 978-1-5011-8341-6) chronicles the two-year construction of a $147 million section of the border wall in San Diego, Calif., and features the perspectives of a border patrol agent, a wealthy developer, an anti-immigrant activist, and a Haitian asylum seeker who traveled through Central America to get to the U.S.
The Second Chance Club: Hardship and Hope After Prison by Jason Hardy (Feb. 11, $27, ISBN 978-1-982128-59-3). Former New Orleans parole officer Hardy profiles seven ex-convicts as they attempt to re-enter society and makes the case that most offenders wind up back in jail or dead because of widespread failures within the parole system.
St. Martin’s/Dunne
Underwater: How Our American Dream of Home-ownership Became a Nightmare by Ryan Dezember (July 14, $28.99, ISBN 978-1-250-24180-1). A Wall Street Journal reporter investigates the lasting impact of the 2008 financial crisis on U.S. foreclosure rates and his own struggles to get rid of his Alabama home once its value fell below the cost of his mortgage.
Verso
-Who Killed Berta Caceres? The Murder of an Indigenous Defender and the Race to Save the Planet by Nina Lakhani (June 2, $26.95, ISBN 978-1-78873-306-9) investigates the murder of environmental activist Berta Caceres, who protested illegal logging and the construction of hydroelectric dams in Honduras, and posits that the men convicted of the crime were carrying out someone else’s orders.
Viking
After the Last Border: Two Families and the Story of Refuge in America by Jessica Goudeau (Apr. 28, $27, ISBN 978-0-525-55913-9) tracks the history of America’s changing policies and attitudes toward refugees through the stories of two women, one from Myanmar, the other from Syria, who settle in Austin, Tex.
Yale Univ.
Election Meltdown: Dirty Tricks, Distrust, and the Threat to American Democracy by Richard L. Hasen (Feb. 4, $27.50, ISBN 978-0-300-24819-7) addresses four causes of distrust in the integrity of the American election system—administrative incompetence, foreign and domestic disinformation campaigns, voter suppression, and inflammatory partisan rhetoric—and suggests concrete solutions.
