Posts filed under ‘History’
Charles Murray, Author of Coming Apart, Examines Demographic Shifts In This New Decade
Random House is currently giving away free versions of Charles Murray’s Coming Apart (Crown Forum, January 2013), which has been adopted for Common Reading at Stonehill College, Georgetown University and Florida State University. Please email rhacademic@randomhouse.com to request a complimentary copy. Coming Apart offers a thought-provoking commentary on class in contemporary America. Drawing on five decades of statistics and research, the book demonstrates that a new upper class, who live in hyper-wealthy zip codes called SuperZIPS, and a new lower class have diverged so far in core behaviors and values that they barely recognize their underlying American kinship—divergence that has nothing to do with income inequality and that has grown during good economic times and bad. In the below essay, Murray discusses trends that have occurred since 2010.
I began the discussion of the SuperZips with a promise to update the results in later editions of Coming Apart when the 2010 census results became available. Those results were published from December 2011 through the spring of 2012. This is the story they tell: (more…)
Fredrik Logevall’s Embers of War, Winner of the 2013 Pulitzer Prize in History, Chronicles US and French Intervention in Vietnam
by Fredrik Logevall, author of Embers of War (Random House, August 2012), winner of the 2013 Pulitzer Prize in history.
Embers of War studies the conflict that drew in all the world’s powers and saw two of them—first France, then the United States—attempt to subdue the revolutionary Vietnamese forces. For France, the defeat marked the effective end of her colonial empire, while for America the war left a gaping wound in the body politic that remains open to this day. In the below essay, Logevall distills key points from his book. (more…)
Generation Roe: A Perspective On The Current Pro-Choice Landscape And What The Future Holds
By Sarah Erdreich, author of Generation Roe (Seven Stories Press, March 2013). 
In the spring of 2008, I was living in Washington, D.C. and working as a freelance editor. I enjoyed the work, but missed having someone besides my dog to talk with during the day. So when I came across a job posting for part-time work on the National Abortion Federation’s hotline, I jumped at the opportunity.
I had never worked in the reproductive rights field, but I had always believed that women should have the right to choose: I grew up in a politically liberal town (Ann Arbor) in a politically liberal family, where I took lots of rights for granted.
And I thought that I knew plenty about abortion before I began working on the NAF hotline: the legendary court cases, the anti-choice violence, the reasons that a woman would make this choice. But working on the hotline was a real eye-opener. Every day, I heard from women of all racial, religious, and socioeconomic backgrounds that were unable to access a legal medical service because of their income, their lack of reliable transportation, or the restrictions their state placed on abortion care. (more…)
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks: The Top Common Reading Book of 2011 and 2012
Winner of the National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, and Institute of Medicine’s Communication Award for Best Book
Winner of the Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize for Nonfiction
Winner of the Wellcome Trust Book Prize
Named by more than 60 critics as one of the best books of 2010, including: Best Book of the Year at: O, The Oprah Magazine, Publishers Weekly, Library Journal, Bookmarks Magazine, Kirkus Reviews, Booklist, Entertainment Weekly, East Bay Express, and Kansas City Star, A Discover Magazine 2010 Must Read, National Public Radio, Best of the Bestsellers
In 1951, an African American woman named Henrietta Lacks, stricken with cervical cancer, became an involuntary donor of cells from her cancerous tumor, which were propagated by scientist George Otto Gey to create an immortal cell line for medical research. These cells are now known worldwide as HeLa. In The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, award-winning science writer Rebecca Skloot brilliantly weaves together the Lacks’s story–past and present–with the story of the birth of bioethics, the story of HeLa cells, and the dark history of experimentation on African Americans. Important, powerful, and compassionate, this is a remarkable work of science and social journalism. (more…)
Professors: Free Examination Copy Available. The Taste of Ashes by Marci Shore, professor of history at Yale
Interweaving archival history, scholarly research, personal recollections, and first-person vignettes, Yale historian and professor Marci Shore has written a unique treatise on post-communist Eastern Europe. Drawing on recently opened communist archives, and the memories of colleagues, acquaintances, and family members, Shore gives a platform to former communists and dissidents, Zionists, Stalinists, and their children and grandchildren. Moving across Berlin, Vienna, Prague, Warsaw, Bucharest, and Moscow, The Taste of Ashes is a scholarly yet personal portrait of events that, even as they recede into history, continue to resonate and reverberate today.
Here is a message from Marci Shore:
I was at an impressionable age when the revolutions came. This is the short answer I often give when asked by Poles or Czechs or Russians why I became interested in their part of the world. In 1989, I was seventeen years old and knew nothing about Eastern Europe. Yet growing up in suburban Pennsylvania, it was impossible not to absorb that we were locked in a struggle with the Evil Empire that might well bring about the end of the world. (more…)
Two Colleges Choose Behind the Beautiful Forevers for Fall courses
The University of Arkansas’s Department of Journalism and Vassar College’s Sociology Department have chosen Behind the Beautiful Forevers for their fall courses.
From Pulitzer Prize-winner Katherine Boo, a landmark work of narrative nonfiction that tells the dramatic and sometimes heartbreaking story of families striving toward a better life in one of the twenty-first century’s great, unequal cities.
In this brilliantly written, fast-paced book, based on three years of uncompromising reporting, a bewildering age of global change and inequality is made human.
Annawadi is a makeshift settlement in the shadow of luxury hotels near the Mumbai airport, and as India starts to prosper, Annawadians are electric with hope. Abdul, a reflective and enterprising Muslim teenager, sees “a fortune beyond counting” in the recyclable garbage that richer people throw away. Asha, a woman of formidable wit and deep scars from a childhood in rural poverty, has identified an alternate route to the middle class: political corruption. With a little luck, her sensitive, beautiful daughter—Annawadi’s “most-everything girl”—will soon become its first female college graduate. And even the poorest Annawadians, like Kalu, a fifteen-year-old scrap-metal thief, believe themselves inching closer to the good lives and good times they call “the full enjoy.” (more…)
A Life of Montaigne in One Question: HOW TO LIVE
Below is a note from Sarah Bakewell, author of How to Live, on why she chose to write Montaigne’s new biography:
Why did I write about Montaigne? Mostly because I wanted to keep on reading him.
Ever since my early 20s, when I picked up his Essays by chance, wanting a good book for a long train journey, he never really left me. My first response to his work on that train was one of astonishment. How could someone who wrote in the 1500s sound so familiar, so conversational, so like me? It was like having a friend or a traveling companion sitting opposite me as we whizzed through the landscape. For years after that, Montaigne was never far from my side. And I discovered that practically everything else I read had the power of leading me back to him in some way—for Montaigne is the first truly modern author, the great hidden presence behind 400 years of literature, and indeed behind much of philosophy, politics, and social theory over those centuries.
This is mainly for one simple reason: No one before Montaigne had written so honestly and minutely about the inner world of a human being. He followed every twist and turn of his psyche, believing that every individual is worth writing about at such length, for “each man bears the entire form of the human condition.” But he also paid plenty of attention to the world outside. He was interested in everything; he traveled widely, held offices as magistrate and mayor, ran diplomatic missions for kings and princes, and tried his best to end the religious civil wars that tore apart the France of his day. These experiences led him to a deep fascination with human variety and difference. We share our essential humanity, he knew, but each of us has a radically different cultural, historical, and personal perspective, and that is just as fundamental. (more…)
University of California, Santa Barbara Picks the Acclaimed Book Apollo’s Angels
Finalist, 2010 National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction
(winner to be announced March 10th, 2011)
Named one of “The 10 Best Books of 2010” by the editors of the New York Times Book Review
“It has never been done before, what Jennifer Homans has done in Apollo’s Angels. She has written the only truly definitive history of the most impossibly fantastic art form, ballet…Homans accomplishment is akin to setting the most delicate and beautiful of all the imperial Faberge eggs into a fissure high on Mount Rushmore and tracking its unlikely survival…Inspired…The story of Balanchine has been told before, and at greater lengths, but never better…An eloquent and lasting elegy to an unlasting art.”—Cover Review, The New York Times Book Review
University of California, Santa Barbara selects Apollo’s Angels for its History of Modern Dance course this winter. (more…)
Author Rebecca Skloot Shares Inspiration Behind The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
The phenomenal story behind a woman named Henrietta Lacks, or better known as HeLa by scientists worldwide, is grabbing the attention of teachers and students alike.
Henrietta was a poor Southern tobacco farmer who worked the same land as her slave ancestors, yet her cells—taken without her knowledge—became one of the most important tools in medicine. The first “immortal” human cells grown in culture, they are still alive today, though she has been dead for more than sixty years.
In the following video clip, author Rebecca Skloot shares her inspiration for writing the book and how one woman’s life changed the world and came to be The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks.
Author website: www.rebeccaskloot.com
To read an excerpt, click here
To order an examination copy, click here (more…)
Recommended for Course Adoption: Power in Words: The Stories behind Barack Obama’s Speeches, from the State House to the White House, by Two Political Insiders
Professors: Be one of the first to assign Power in Words for your course. Email rhacademic@randomhouse.com to request a free copy. Mention that you saw it at “Make Me Required Reading.”
“In the long sweep of history, readers will be able to refer to this work to better understand and appreciate the power of words of our forty-fourth president of the United States.”–Dana Perino, former White House press secretary
In his foreword, Ted Sorensen, former special counsel and adviser to President John F. Kennedy, suggests that President Obama’s campaign speeches place him with the oratorical greats, “the first indication that he would rank with Jefferson, Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt and Kennedy.” In Power in Words, political insiders Mary Frances Berry and Josh Gottheimer introduce Obama’s most memorable speeches, from his October 2002 speech against the war in Iraq and his November 2008 election-night victory speech to “A More Perfect Union,” his March 2008 response to the Reverend Wright controversy, and lesser-known but revealing speeches, such as one given in Nairobi, Kenya, in August 2006. Berry and Gottheimer include a rich introduction to every speech that features political analysis and provides insight and historical context. Power in Words includes commentary from Jon Favreau, Obama’s chief speechwriter, as well as former presidential speechwriters such as Michael Waldman (Bill Clinton) and Michael Gerson (George W. Bush). (more…)
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