Nonfiction

A New York Times Bestseller!

2019 was the last great year for the world economy.

For generations, everything has been getting faster, better, and cheaper. Finally, we reached the point that almost anything you could ever want could be sent to your home within days - even hours - of when you decided you wanted it.

America made that happen, but now America has lost interest in keeping it going.

Globe-spanning supply chains are only possible with the protection of the U.S. Navy. The American dollar underpins internationalized energy and financial markets. Complex, innovative industries were created to satisfy American consumers. American security policy forced warring nations to lay down their arms. Billions of people have been fed and educated as the American-led trade system spread across the globe.

All of this was artificial. All this was temporary. All this is ending.

In The End of the World is Just the Beginning, author and geopolitical strategist Peter Zeihan maps out the next world: a world where countries or regions will have no choice but to make their own goods, grow their own food, secure their own energy, fight their own battles, and do it all with populations that are both shrinking and aging.

The list of countries that make it all work is smaller than you think. Which means everything about our interconnected world - from how we manufacture products, to how we grow food, to how we keep the lights on, to how we shuttle stuff about, to how we pay for it all - is about to change.

A world ending. A world beginning. Zeihan brings readers along for an illuminating (and a bit terrifying) ride packed with foresight, wit, and his trademark irreverence.

The essential book from online tennis coaching sensation Ian Westermann, founder of EssentialTennis.com

What's the number one thing stopping you from playing your best tennis?

Ian Westermann, founder of the world's #1 online tennis instruction portal, Essentialtennis.com, will confidently say it's an obstacle you probably never thought of: The ball. You might think this sounds ridiculous. The whole point of tennis is to hit the ball over the net and in, so how can the ball be the thing that's standing in the way? In fact, this is why the ball is such an impediment: your desire to hit a good shot, with the right mix of power and spin, to a specific spot on the court, prevents you from striking the ball the way you should.

In Essential Tennis, readers - players and coaches, alike - will learn how improving at tennis actually happens and how to easily implement these lessons and integrate them into better play on the court. Players will hit stronger shots, make fewer errors, and beat players who are currently beating them. Coaches will look differently at what it means to provide a student with a holistic learning experience.

Essential Tennis contains technique-based instruction for executing groundstrokes, volleys, and serves, as well as progressions, drills, and mindsets players should incorporate. Westermann illuminates strokes, movement, strategy, and mental toughness - all proven to be successful over 20 years with clients of all ages and skill levels.

Pre-Algebra & Algebra 1? No Problem!
The BIG FAT NOTEBOOK covers everything you need to know during a year of Pre-Algebra and Algebra 1 class, breaking down one big fat subject into accessible units. Including: The number system, ratios, and proportions, scientific notation, introduction and equations, functions, graphing a line, square roots and cube roots, polynomial operations, quadratic functions, and more.
Study better with:
-Mnemonic devices
-Definitions
-Diagrams
-Educational doodles
-and quizzes to recap it all
and get better grades!

--Jenny Blake, author of Pivot and Free Time: Lose the Busywork, Love Your Business

As leaders, we face difficult questions each day:

- What kind of leader do I want to be?

- How can I stay true to myself, while also meeting the expectations of others?

- How best can I handle the most challenging leadership situations?

- How can I accept this uncomfortable and sometimes painful truth: no matter what I do, and no matter how hard I try, someone will likely be upset with my choices and actions?

Expansive Impact helps answer these questions and will empower you to handle the stickiest leadership situations, feel more confident as a leader, and create significant positive change without relying on outside forces or external circumstances. With fresh language, powerful inquiries, and a nuanced exploration of the often opposing tensions we hold as leaders, this book is a compelling and insightful guide to improving your leadership and your life.

THE EYE TEST is a necessary course correction, a call for a more balanced, personal approach to problem-solving. Award-winning journalist Chris Jones makes the case for the human element--for what smart, practiced, devoted people can bring to situations that have proved resistant to analytics. Jones shares what he's learned from an army of extraordinary talents, including some of the best doctors, executives, athletes, meteorologists, magicians, designers, astrophysicists, and detectives in the world. There are lessons in their mastery.

Of course, there is a place for numbers in decision-making. No baseball player should be judged by his jawline. But the analytics revolution sparked by Michael Lewis's Moneyball now threatens to replace one kind of absurdity with another. We have developed a blind faith in the machine, the way a driver overly reliant on his GPS might be led off the edge of a cliff. Not all statistical analysis is sound. Algorithms aren't infallible, and spreadsheets aren't testaments. Trust in them too much, and they risk becoming instruments of destruction rather than understanding.

Worse, data's supremacy in our daily lives has led to a dangerous strain of anti-expertise: the belief that every problem is a math problem, and anyone given access to the right information will find the right answer. That taste doesn't matter, experience doesn't matter, creativity doesn't matter. That we can't believe our eyes, no matter how much they've seen.

Privacy is disappearing. From our sex lives to our workout routines, the details of our lives once relegated to pen and paper have joined the slipstream of new technology. As a MacArthur fellow and distinguished professor of law at the University of Virginia, acclaimed civil rights advocate Danielle Citron has spent decades working with lawmakers and stakeholders across the globe to protect what she calls intimate privacy--encompassing our bodies, health, gender, and relationships. When intimate privacy becomes data, corporations know exactly when to flash that ad for a new drug or pregnancy test. Social and political forces know how to manipulate what you think and who you trust, leveraging sensitive secrets and deepfake videos to ruin or silence opponents. And as new technologies invite new violations, people have power over one another like never before, from revenge porn to blackmail, attaching life-altering risks to growing up, dating online, or falling in love.

A masterful new look at privacy in the twenty-first century, The Fight for Privacy takes the focus off Silicon Valley moguls to investigate the price we pay as technology migrates deeper into every aspect of our lives: entering our bedrooms and our bathrooms and our midnight texts; our relationships with friends, family, lovers, and kids; and even our relationship with ourselves.

Drawing on in-depth interviews with victims, activists, and advocates, Citron brings this headline issue home for readers by weaving together visceral stories about the countless ways that corporate and individual violators exploit privacy loopholes. Exploring why the law has struggled to keep up, she reveals how our current system leaves victims--particularly women, LGBTQ+ people, and marginalized groups--shamed and powerless while perpetrators profit, warping cultural norms around the world.

Yet there is a solution to our toxic relationship with technology and privacy: fighting for intimate privacy as a civil right. Collectively, Citron argues, citizens, lawmakers, and corporations have the power to create a new reality where privacy is valued and people are protected as they embrace what technology offers. Introducing readers to the trailblazing work of advocates today, Citron urges readers to join the fight. Your intimate life shouldn't be traded for profit or wielded against you for power: it belongs to you. With Citron as our guide, we can take back control of our data and build a better future for the next, ever more digital, generation.

The triumphant story of how an all-Black Broadway cast and crew changed musical theatre--and the world--forever.

This musical introduced Black excellence to the Great White Way. Broadway was forever changed and we, who stand on the shoulders of our brilliant ancestors, are charged with the very often elusive task of carrying that torch into our present.--Billy Porter, Tony, Grammy, and Emmy Award-winning actor

If Hamilton, Rent, or West Side Story captured your heart, you'll love this in-depth look into the rise of the 1921 Broadway hit, Shuffle Along, the first all-Black musical to succeed on Broadway. No one was sure if America was ready for a show featuring nuanced, thoughtful portrayals of Black characters--and the potential fallout was terrifying. But from the first jazzy, syncopated beats of composers Noble Sissle and Eubie Blake, New York audiences fell head over heels.

Footnotes is the story of how Sissle and Blake, along with comedians Flournoy Miller and Aubrey Lyles, overcame poverty, racism, and violence to harness the energy of the Harlem Renaissance and produce a runaway Broadway hit that launched the careers of many of the twentieth century's most beloved Black performers. Born in the shadow of slavery and establishing their careers at a time of increasing demands for racial justice and representation for people of color, they broke down innumerable barriers between Black and white communities at a crucial point in our history.

Author and pop culture expert Caseen Gaines leads readers through the glitz and glamour of New York City during the Roaring Twenties to reveal the revolutionary impact one show had on generations of Americans, and how its legacy continues to resonate today.

Praise for Footnotes:

A major contribution to culture.--Brian Jay Jones, New York Times bestselling author of Jim Henson: The Biography

With meticulous research and smooth storytelling, Caseen Gaines significantly deepens our understanding of one of the key cultural events that launched the Harlem Renaissance.--A Lelia Bundles, New York Times bestselling author of On Her Own Ground: The Life and Times of Madam C.J. Walker

Absorbing...--The Wall Street Journal

Skateboarding isn't just a recreational activity, but a professional sport, lifestyle, art form, and cultural phenomenon. The striking book Four Wheels and a Board captures its spirited history, iconic skateboarders, diverse community, and the palpable passion of the people who love it. It includes contributions from the most influential names in the game, including Rodney Mullen, Tony Hawk, Mimi Knoop, and more.

The gorgeously designed book presents objects, artifacts, and photographs from the Smithsonian's collections that exemplify the vitality and innovation of skate culture. Book chapters are organized chronologically by decade from the '60s to present day, starting with 20th-century surfboards, moving through technological changes, the disappearance of skate parks, the rise of social media and collaborations, and ending with never-before-seen objects from the 2020 Summer Olympics, where skateboarding made its historic Olympic debut.

Largely invented by youth, skateboarding has attracted punks, misfits, and dreamers looking for somewhere to belong. The book features skateboards and skaters who open dialogues about race, the gender binary, queerness, the displacement of Native people, and so much more, shining a light on people and places not often represented in traditional skateboard history. Four Wheels and a Board is a fresh look at a transformative culture, and one hell of a ride.

A garden of geologic delights for all Earthlings

Geopedia is a trove of geologic wonders and the evocative terms that humans have devised to describe them. Featuring dozens of entries--from Acasta gneiss to Zircon--this illustrated compendium is brimming with lapidary and lexical insights that will delight rockhounds and word lovers alike.

Geoscientists are magpies for words, and with good reason. The sheer profusion of minerals, landforms, and geologic events produced by our creative planet demands an immense vocabulary to match. Marcia Bjornerud shows how this lexicon reflects not only the diversity of rocks and geologic processes but also the long history of human interactions with them.

With wit and warmth, she invites all readers to celebrate the geologic glossary--a gallimaufry of allusions to mythology, imports from diverse languages, embarrassing anachronisms, and recent neologisms. This captivating book includes cross-references at the end of each entry, inviting you to leave the alphabetic trail and meander through it like a river. Its pocket-friendly size makes it the perfect travel companion no matter where your own geologic forays may lead you.

With whimsical illustrations by Haley Hagerman, Geopedia is a mix of engaging and entertaining facts about how the earth works, how it has coevolved with life over billions of years, and how our understanding of the planet has deepened over time.

An inspired collection of profiles, featuring environmental changemakers, social entrepreneurs, visionaries and activists.

Journalist Diana Kapp has crisscrossed this country writing for and about empowered girls, girls who expect to be leaders, founders and inventors. This book takes it a step further. It says to girls: while you're striving to be CEOs and world leaders, consider solving the biggest challenge of our lifetime, too--because you can do both at the same time, and here are 34 women doing just that.

For fans of Radium Girls and history and WWII buffs, The Girls Who Stepped Out of Line takes you inside the lives and experiences of 15 unknown women heroes from the Greatest Generation, the women who served, fought, struggled, and made things happen during WWII--in and out of uniform, for theirs is a legacy destined to embolden generations of women to come.

The Girls Who Stepped Out of Line are the heroes of the Greatest Generation that you hardly ever hear about. These women who did extraordinary things didn't expect thanks and shied away from medals and recognition. Despite their amazing accomplishments, they've gone mostly unheralded and unrewarded. No longer. These are the women of World War II who served, fought, struggled, and made things happen--in and out of uniform.

Young Hilda Eisen was captured twice by the Nazis and twice escaped, going on to fight with the Resistance in Poland. Determined to survive, she and her husband later emigrated to the U.S. where they became entrepreneurs and successful business leaders. Ola Mildred Rexroat was the only Native American woman pilot to serve with the Women's Airforce Service Pilots (WASP) in World War II. She persisted against all odds--to earn her silver wings and fly, helping train other pilots and gunners. Ida and Louise Cook were British sisters and opera buffs who smuggled Jews out of Germany, often wearing their jewelry and furs, to help with their finances. They served as sponsors for refugees, and established temporary housing for immigrant families in London. Alice Marble was a grand-slam winning tennis star who found her own path to serve during the war--she was an editor with Wonder Woman comics, played tennis exhibitions for the troops, and undertook a dangerous undercover mission to expose Nazi theft. After the war she was instrumental in desegregating women's professional tennis. Others also stepped out of line--as cartographers, spies, combat nurses, and troop commanders.

Retired U.S. Army Major General Mari K. Eder wrote this book because she knew their stories needed to be told--and the sooner the better. For theirs is a legacy destined to embolden generations of women to come.

"[A] short but moving book . . . Even better, the volume's advice is not only pragmatically political--necessary during a time of threats to democracy and mounting failures to deal with the climate crisis--but modestly uplifting."--Bill Marx, Arts Fuse

"An intimate and timely meditation on dark times, Hermsen's illuminating essay offers readers a way to think with Hannah Arendt and Rosa Luxemburg about how to build a more humane world in common."--Samantha Rose Hill, author of Hannah Arendt

Rosa Luxemburg (1871-1919) and Hannah Arendt (1906-1975) were critical Jewish mavericks who both suffered under violent political regimes and sought to reform systems of power. Although temporally separated by the Second World War and the rise of totalitarianism, they held in common strikingly similar convictions about freedom, human dignity, capitalism, democracy, and political commitment.

In this powerful book, Joke J. Hermsen explores the lives and works of these two remarkable thinkers and the essential hope that emboldened them in the political struggle. Luxemburg and Arendt were spurred on by a restless love for the world and an unwavering belief in the possibility of new beginnings; for them, hope was an absolute prerequisite of resistance and a counterpoint to melancholy--a defense against despair that kept them attuned to what could be.

Exploring the intertwined nature of philosophy and the active pursuit of justice, this is an urgent, courageous reminder to remain alert to the glimmers of hope in dark times.