Poll

The Message
Ta-Nehisi Coates

Ta-Nehisi Coates originally set off to write a book about writing, in the tradition of Orwell’s classic Politics and the English Language, but found himself grappling with deeper questions about how our stories—our reporting and imaginative narratives and mythmaking—expose and distort our realities.

The first of the book’s three intertwining essays is set in Dakar, Senegal. Despite being raised as a strict Afrocentrist, Coates had never set foot on the African continent until now. He roams the “steampunk” city of “old traditions and new machinery,” but everywhere he goes he feels as if he’s in two places at once: a modern city in Senegal and a mythic kingdom in his mind. Finally he travels to the slave castles off the coast and has his own reckoning with the legacy of the Afrocentric dream.

He takes readers along with him to Columbia, South Carolina, where he meets an educator whose job is threatened for teaching one of Coates’s own books. There he discovers a community of mostly white supporters who were transformed by the “racial reckoning” of 2020. But he also explores the backlash to this reckoning and the deeper myths of the community—a capital of the confederacy with statues of segregationists looming over its public squares.

And in Palestine, Coates discovers the devastating gap between the narratives we’ve accepted and the clashing reality of life on the ground. He meets with activists and dissidents, Israelis and Palestinians—the old, who remember their dispossessions on two continents, and the young, who have only known struggle and disillusionment. He travels into Jerusalem, the heart of Zionist mythology, and to the occupied territories, where he sees the reality the myth is meant to hide. It is this hidden story that draws him in and profoundly changes him—and makes the war that would soon come all the more devastating.

Written at a dramatic moment in American and global life, this work from one of the country’s most important writers is about the urgent need to untangle ourselves from the destructive nationalist myths that shape our world—and our own souls—and embrace the liberating power of even the most difficult truths.

Booze, Babe, and the Little Black Dress: How Innovators of the Roaring 20s Created the Consumer Revolution
Jason Voiovich

The birth of America's shopping addiction.Why do you have to have the latest iPhone? Is it really that much better than the last model? How did we end up with 57 kinds of peanut butter? Who buys reduced-fat, super-chunk, peanut butter balls? What makes celebrities irresistible? Even when we want to look away, we just can't. How come "just say no" never works? Not with booze, not with drugs, and not with sex. How did we end up with so many subscriptions? Do you even know how many you have? When was the first "girl's night out"? And why can't guys dream up anything better than a sports bar? And worst of Why is there so much click-bait?!

What if I told you that the answer isn't greedy corporations or deceitful advertisers? It's not big tech, artificial intelligence, social media, or hidden algorithms either. The answers have been hiding in plain site for over 100 years.

The desire to make our own choices is hardwired into our brains, but it was not until the Roaring 20s that the combination of mass production, mass finance, and mass marketing made choice-making the American drug of choice.

Booze, Babe, and the Little Black Dress retells the epic stories of the decade that addicted all of us to the shopping experience.

Is that a good thing? A bad thing? Or something in between?

Read on...and choose for yourself.

Off the Planet: Surviving Five Perilous Months Aboard the Space Station Mir
Jerry M. Linenger


“An engrossing report.”—Booklist “Vividly captures the challenges and privations [Dr. Linenger] endured both before and during his flight.”—Library Journal One of the most gripping space survival stories of the 20th century is now available in paperback. Few episodes in man’s exploration of space can compare to Off the Planet—Dr. Jerry Linenger’s dramatic account of space exploration turned survival mission during his 132 days aboard the decaying and unstable Russian space station Mir. Not since Apollo 13 has an American astronaut faced so many catastrophic malfunctions and life-threatening emergencies in one mission. In his remarkable narrative, Linenger chronicles power outages that left the crew in complete darkness, tumbling out of control; chemical leaks and near collisions that threatened to rupture Mir’s hull; and most terrifying of all—a raging fire that almost destroyed the space station and the lives of its entire crew.