Non-fiction

MY OLD KENTUCKY HOME, from its enormous success in the early 1850s, written by a white man, considered the father of American music, about a Black man being sold downriver, performed for decades by white men in blackface, and the song, an anthem of longing and pain, turned upside down and, over time, becoming a celebration of happy plantation life.

It is the state song of Kentucky, a song that has inhabited hearts and memories, and in perpetual reprise, stands outside time; sung each May, before every Kentucky Derby, since 1930.

Written by Stephen Foster nine years before the Civil War, "My Old Kentucky Home" made its way through the wartime years to its decades-long run as a national minstrel sensation for which it was written; from its reference in the pages of Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind to being sung on The Simpsons and Mad Men.

Originally called "Poor Uncle Tom, Good-Night!" and inspired by America's most famous abolitionist novel, it was a lament by an enslaved man, sold by his master, who must say goodbye to his beloved family and birthplace, with hints of the brutality to come: "The head must bow and the back will have to bend / Wherever the darky may go / A few more days, and the trouble all will end / In the field where the sugar-canes grow . . ."

In My Old Kentucky Home, Emily Bingham explores the long, strange journey of what has come to be seen by some as an American anthem, an integral part of our folklore, culture, customs, foundation, a living symbol of a "happy past." But "My Old Kentucky Home" was never just a song. It was always a song about slavery with the real Kentucky home inhabited by the enslaved and shot through with violence, despair, and degradation.

Bingham explores the song's history and permutations from its decades of performances across the continent, entering into the bloodstream of American life, through its twenty-first-century reassessment. It is a song that has been repeated and taught for almost two hundred years, a resonant changing emblem of America's original sin whose blood-drenched shadow hovers and haunts us still.

February 20, 1933, an unremarkable day during a harsh Berlin winter: A meeting of twenty-four German captains of industry and senior Nazi officials is being held in secret in the plush lounge of the Reichstag. They are there to extract funds for the accession to power of the National Socialist Party and its Chancellor. This opening scene sets a tone of consent that will lead to the worst possible repercussions.

March 12, 1938, the annexation of Austria is on the agenda: A grotesque day intended to make history--the newsreels capture a motorized army on the move, a terrible, inexorable power. But behind Goebbels's splendid propaganda, an ersatz Blitzkrieg unfolds, the Panzers breaking down en masse on the roads into Austria. The true behind-the-scenes account of the Anschluss--a patchwork of minor flourishes of strength and fine words, fevered telephone calls, and vulgar threats--all reveal a starkly different picture. It is not strength of character or the determination of a people that wins the day, but rather a combination of intimidation and bluff.

With this vivid, compelling history, Éric Vuillard warns against the peril of willfully blind acquiescence, and offers a reminder that, ultimately, the worst is not inescapable.

Out of the Shadows tells the stories of the enterprising women whose supposedly clairvoyant gifts granted them fame, fortune, and most important, influence as they crossed rigid boundaries of gender and class as easily as they passed between the realms of the living and the dead. The Fox sisters inspired some of the era's best-known political activists and set off a transatlantic séance craze. While in the throes of a trance, Emma Hardinge Britten delivered powerful speeches to crowds of thousands. Victoria Woodhull claimed guidance from the spirit world as she took on the millionaires of Wall Street before becoming America's first female presidential candidate. And Georgina Weldon narrowly escaped the asylum before becoming a celebrity campaigner against archaic lunacy laws. Drawing on diaries, letters, and rarely seen memoirs and texts, Emily Midorikawa illuminates a radical history of female influence that has been confined to the dark until now.

Tim Marshall's global bestseller Prisoners of Geography offered us a "fresh way of looking at maps" (The New York Times Book Review), showing how every nation's choices are limited by mountains, rivers, seas, and walls. Since then, the geography hasn't changed, but the world has.

Now, in this "wonderfully entertaining and lucid account, written with wit, pace, and clarity" (Mirror, UK), Marshall takes us into ten regions set to shape global politics. Find out why US interest in the Middle East will wane; why Australia is now beginning an epic contest with China; how Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and the UK are cleverly positioning themselves for greater power; why Ethiopia can control Egypt; and why Europe's next refugee crisis looms closer than we think, as does a cutting-edge arms race to control space.

Innovative, compelling, and delivered with Marshall's trademark wit and insight, this is "an immersive blend of history, economics, and political analysis that puts geography at the center of human affairs" (Publishers Weekly).

Published in the 50th anniversary year of the landmark Title IX gender equity legislation becoming law, "The Right Thing to Do" is both a chronicle of the rise of women's intercollegiate athletics in the United States and a biography of one of the movement's leaders, Kit Saunders-Nordeen, the first director of women's athletics at the University of Wisconsin and vice president of the Association for Intercollegiate Athletics for Women (AIAW).

When Kit arrived on the Madison campus for graduate school in 1964, competitive athletics for women was actively discouraged. The longtime director of women's physical education at UW-Madison, Blanche Trilling, had been a national voice in advocating participation, but never competition, for women collegians.

Across the next decade, Kit changed hearts and minds, establishing a vibrant non-varsity women's sports program at UW. It took some doing. Funds for travel and uniforms were so scarce the athletes sold Christmas trees and did odd jobs to help.

The passage of Title IX in 1972 - requiring universities receiving federal funds to not discriminate by gender - provided a boost. Kit was named the UW's first director of women's intercollegiate athletics in 1974, signaling varsity status for women. But Title IX was not a panacea. In 1979, seven years after it became law, the UW women's crew famously changed clothes outside men's athletic director Elroy Hirsch's office because they still didn't have a locker room.

A short time later, as women's programs continued to grow, the NCAA - having ignored women's athletics for years - moved to usurp the AIAW, resulting in a bitter battle.

Against this backdrop of administrative struggle and intrigue, the young women athletes shined. UW produced celebrated stars like Carie Graves (crew) and Cindy Bremser (track), while earning early national championships in crew and cross-country. The public took notice. In 1990, a women's volleyball match in Madison drew nearly 11,000 fans.

Kit Saunders-Nordeen watched that match from the stands with tears in her eyes. Her story, alongside the larger narrative of women intercollegiate athletes refusing to be denied and emerging triumphant, will stir any reader who cares about sports and fair play - on and off the field.

As Judy Sweet, the first woman president of the NCAA, who as a student was mentored by Kit in Madison, writes in the book's foreword: "We must remain vigilant and ensure that our daughters have the same opportunities and support as our sons."

"Masked intruders dragged Jean McConville, a 38-year-old widow and mother of 10, from her Belfast home in 1972. In this meticulously reported book--as finely paced as a novel--Keefe uses McConville's murder as a prism to tell the history of the Troubles in Northern Ireland. Interviewing people on both sides of the conflict, he transforms the tragic damage and waste of the era into a searing, utterly gripping saga." --New York Times Book Review

Jean McConville's abduction was one of the most notorious episodes of the vicious conflict known as The Troubles. Everyone in the neighborhood knew the I.R.A. was responsible. But in a climate of fear and paranoia, no one would speak of it. In 2003, five years after an accord brought an uneasy peace to Northern Ireland, a set of human bones was discovered on a beach. McConville's children knew it was their mother when they were told a blue safety pin was attached to the dress--with so many kids, she had always kept it handy for diapers or ripped clothes.

Patrick Radden Keefe's mesmerizing book on the bitter conflict in Northern Ireland and its aftermath uses the McConville case as a starting point for the tale of a society wracked by a violent guerrilla war, a war whose consequences have never been reckoned with. The brutal violence seared not only people like the McConville children, but also I.R.A. members embittered by a peace that fell far short of the goal of a united Ireland, and left them wondering whether the killings they committed were not justified acts of war, but simple murders.

From radical and impetuous I.R.A. terrorists such as Dolours Price, who, when she was barely out of her teens, was already planting bombs in London and targeting informers for execution, to the ferocious I.R.A. mastermind known as The Dark, to the spy games and dirty schemes of the British Army, to Gerry Adams, who negotiated the peace but betrayed his hardcore comrades by denying his I.R.A. past--Say Nothing conjures a world of passion, betrayal, vengeance, and anguish.

Look for Patrick Radden Keefe's latest bestseller, Empire of Pain

An intimate portrait of a legendary generation of artists, writers, activists, and dreamers who created a utopia on the shores of Cape Cod during the first half of the twentieth century.

John Taylor "Ike" Williams, who married into the Cape's artistic world and has spent half a century talking about and walking along its shores with these cultural and political luminaries, renders the twisting lives and careers of a generation of staggering American thinkers and creators. The Shores of Bohemia records a great set of shifts in American culture and the ideas and arguments fueled by drink, infidelity, and competition that made for a fifty-year conversation among intellectual leaders and creative revolutionaries. Together they found a community as they created some of the great works of the American Century. This is their story. Welcome to the party!

China is in the midst of one of the world's great spiritual awakenings: some 300 million Chinese currently practice a faith, while tens of millions more follow personal gurus, populist masters and New Age sages. This astonishing revival began in 1982 when the Communist Party pledged to allow what it thought would be a small-scale practice of religion under government supervision. But the faithful have expanded far beyond the Party's expectations: Today, China's cities and villages are filled with new temples, churches, and mosques as well as cults, sects and politicians trying to harness religion for their own ends. Fueling this resurgence is a popular desire to rediscover a moral compass in a society driven by naked capitalism.

For six years, Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Ian Johnson lived for extended periods with three religious communities: the underground Early Rain Protestant congregation in Chengdu, the Ni family's Buddhist pilgrimage association in Beijing, and yinyang Daoist priests in rural Shanxi. Johnson distills these experiences into a cycle of festivals, births, deaths, detentions, and struggle that reveals the hearts and minds of the Chinese people--a great awakening of faith that is shaping the soul of the world's newest superpower.

Set between events depicted in Fiddler on the Roof and Schindler's List, Lisa Brahin's Tears over Russia brings to life a piece of Jewish history that has never before been told.

Between 1917 and 1921, twenty years before the Holocaust began, an estimated 100,000 to 250,000 Jews were murdered in anti-Jewish pogroms across Ukraine. Lisa grew up transfixed by her grandmother Channa's stories about her family being forced to flee their hometown of Stavishche, as armies and bandit groups raided village after village, killing Jewish residents. Channa described a perilous three-year journey through Russia and Romania, led at first by a gallant American who had snuck into Ukraine to save his immediate family and ended up leading an exodus of nearly eighty to safety.

With almost no published sources to validate her grandmother's tales, Lisa embarked on her incredible journey to tell Channa's story, forging connections with archivists around the world to find elusive documents to fill in the gaps of what happened in Stavishche. She also tapped into connections closer to home, gathering testimonies from her grandmother's relatives, childhood friends and neighbors.

The result is a moving historical family narrative that speaks to universal human themes--the resilience and hope of ordinary people surviving the ravages of history and human cruelty. With the growing passage of time, it is unlikely that we will see another family saga emerge so richly detailing this forgotten time period. Tears Over Russia eloquently proves that true life is sometimes more compelling than fiction.

From the bestselling author of SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome, the fascinating story of how images of Roman autocrats have influenced art, culture, and the representation of power for more than 2,000 years

What does the face of power look like? Who gets commemorated in art and why? And how do we react to statues of politicians we deplore? In this book--against a background of today's "sculpture wars"--Mary Beard tells the story of how for more than two millennia portraits of the rich, powerful, and famous in the western world have been shaped by the image of Roman emperors, especially the "Twelve Caesars," from the ruthless Julius Caesar to the fly-torturing Domitian. Twelve Caesars asks why these murderous autocrats have loomed so large in art from antiquity and the Renaissance to today, when hapless leaders are still caricatured as Neros fiddling while Rome burns.

Beginning with the importance of imperial portraits in Roman politics, this richly illustrated book offers a tour through 2,000 years of art and cultural history, presenting a fresh look at works by artists from Memling and Mantegna to the nineteenth-century American sculptor Edmonia Lewis, as well as by generations of weavers, cabinetmakers, silversmiths, printers, and ceramicists. Rather than a story of a simple repetition of stable, blandly conservative images of imperial men and women, Twelve Caesars is an unexpected tale of changing identities, clueless or deliberate misidentifications, fakes, and often ambivalent representations of authority.

From Beard's reconstruction of Titian's extraordinary lost Room of the Emperors to her reinterpretation of Henry VIII's famous Caesarian tapestries, Twelve Caesars includes fascinating detective work and offers a gripping story of some of the most challenging and disturbing portraits of power ever created.

Published in association with the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC

Focusing on the citizens of four towns-- Luverne, Minnesota; Sacramento, California; Waterbury, Connecticut; Mobile, Alabama;--The War follows more than forty people from 1941 to 1945. Woven largely from their memories, the compelling, unflinching narrative unfolds month by bloody month, with the outcome always in doubt. All the iconic events are here, from Pearl Harbor to the liberation of the concentration camps--but we also move among prisoners of war and Japanese American internees, defense workers and schoolchildren, and families who struggled simply to stay together while their men were shipped off to Europe, the Pacific, and North Africa.

Enriched by maps and hundreds of photographs, including many never published before, this is an intimate, profoundly affecting chronicle of the war that shaped our world.