Digital New Book Display – 7-7-22

Welcome to the University of Iowa Libraries’ virtual New Book Shelf. Here we will present new titles for you to browse and check out. Titles listed here will be monographs published in the current year. If you see a title you would like to borrow, please click the link below the item and sign in with your Hawk ID and Password to request a loan.

Say Their Names: How Black Lives Came to Matter in America

An incisive, gripping exploration of the forces that pushed our unjust system to its breaking point after the death of George Floyd and a definitive guide to America’s present-day racial reckoning.
For many, the story of the weeks of protests in the summer of 2020 began with the horrific nine minutes and twenty-nine seconds when Police Officer Derek Chauvin killed George Floyd on camera, and it ended with the sweeping federal, state, and intrapersonal changes that followed. It is a simple story, wherein white America finally witnessed enough brutality to move their collective consciousness. The only problem is that it isn’t true. George Floyd was not the first Black man to be killed by police—he wasn’t even the first to inspire nation-wide protests—yet his death came at a time when America was already at a tipping point.

In SAY THEIR NAMES, five seasoned journalists probe this critical shift. With a piercing examination of how inequality has been propagated throughout history, from Black imprisonment and the Convict Leasing program to long-standing predatory medical practices to over-policing, the authors highlight the disparities that have long characterized the dangers of being Black in America. They examine the many moderate attempts to counteract these inequalities, from the modern Civil Rights movement to Ferguson, and how the killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and others pushed compliance with an unjust system to its breaking point. Finally, they outline the momentous changes that have resulted from this movement, while at the same time proposing necessary next steps to move forward.

With a combination of penetrating, focused journalism and affecting personal insight, the authors bring together their collective years of reporting, creating a cohesive and comprehensive understanding of racial inequality in America.

https://search.lib.uiowa.edu/permalink/f/9i2ftm/01IOWA_ALMA21846514230002771

South to America: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation

INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

“An elegant meditation on the complexities of the American South—and thus of America—by an esteemed daughter of the South and one of the great intellectuals of our time. An inspiration.” —Isabel Wilkerson

An essential, surprising journey through the history, rituals, and landscapes of the American South—and a revelatory argument for why you must understand the South in order to understand America

We all think we know the South. Even those who have never lived there can rattle off a list of signifiers: the Civil War, Gone with the Wind, the Ku Klux Klan, plantations, football, Jim Crow, slavery. But the idiosyncrasies, dispositions, and habits of the region are stranger and more complex than much of the country tends to acknowledge. In South to America, Imani Perry shows that the meaning of American is inextricably linked with the South, and that our understanding of its history and culture is the key to understanding the nation as a whole.

This is the story of a Black woman and native Alabaman returning to the region she has always called home and considering it with fresh eyes. Her journey is full of detours, deep dives, and surprising encounters with places and people. She renders Southerners from all walks of life with sensitivity and honesty, sharing her thoughts about a troubling history and the ritual humiliations and joys that characterize so much of Southern life.

Weaving together stories of immigrant communities, contemporary artists, exploitative opportunists, enslaved peoples, unsung heroes, her own ancestors, and her lived experiences, Imani Perry crafts a tapestry unlike any other. With uncommon insight and breathtaking clarity, South to America offers an assertion that if we want to build a more humane future for the United States, we must center our concern below the Mason-Dixon Line.

https://search.lib.uiowa.edu/permalink/f/9i2ftm/01IOWA_ALMA21844813020002771

Beyond: The Astonishing Story of the First Human to Leave Our Planet and Journey into Space

“This remarkable account of the 1961 race into space is a thrilling piece of storytelling. . . . It is high definition history: tight, thrilling and beautifully researched.”—The Times, London, Front Page Lead Review

“Beyond has the exhilaration of a fine thriller, but it is vividly embedded in the historic tensions of the Cold War, and peopled by men and women brought sympathetically, and sometimes tragically, to life.”—Colin Thubron, author of Shadow of the Silk Road

09.07 am. April 12, 1961. A top secret rocket site in the USSR. A young Russian sits inside a tiny capsule on top of the Soviet Union’s most powerful intercontinental ballistic missile—originally designed to carry a nuclear warhead—and blasts into the skies. His name is Yuri Gagarin. And he is about to make history.

Travelling at almost 18,000 miles per hour—ten times faster than a rifle bullet—Gagarin circles the globe in just 106 minutes. From his windows he sees the earth as nobody has before, crossing a sunset and a sunrise, crossing oceans and continents, witnessing its beauty and its fragility. While his launch begins in total secrecy, within hours of his landing he has become a world celebrity – the first human to leave the planet.

Beyond tells the thrilling story behind that epic flight on its 60th anniversary. It happened at the height of the Cold War as the US and USSR confronted each other across an Iron Curtain. Both superpowers took enormous risks to get a man into space first, the Americans in the full glare of the media, the Soviets under deep cover. Both trained their teams of astronauts to the edges of the endurable. In the end the race between them would come down to the wire.

Drawing on extensive original research and the vivid testimony of eyewitnesses, many of whom have never spoken before, Stephen Walker unpacks secrets that were hidden for decades and takes the reader into the drama of one of humanity’s greatest adventures – to the scientists, engineers and political leaders on both sides, and above all to the American astronauts and their Soviet rivals battling for supremacy in the heavens.

https://search.lib.uiowa.edu/permalink/f/9i2ftm/01IOWA_ALMA21844822470002771

Russia Upside Down: An Exit Strategy for the Second Cold War

A former CIA officer and the creator of the hit TV series The Americans makes the case that America’s policy towards Russia is failing–and we’ll never fix it until we rethink our relationship. Coming of age in America in the 1970s and 80s, Joe Weisberg was a Cold Warrior. After briefly studying Russian in Leningrad, he joined the CIA in 1990–just in time to watch the Soviet Union collapse. But less than a decade after the first Cold War ended, a new one broke out. Russia changed in many of the ways that America hoped it might–more capitalist, more religious, more open to Western ideas. But US sanctions have crippled Russia’s economy; and Russia’s interventions have exacerbated political problems in America. The old paradigm–America, the free capitalist good guys, fighting Russia, the repressive communist bad guys–simply doesn’t apply anymore. But we’ve continued to act as if it does. In this bold and controversial book, Joe Weisberg interrogates these assumptions, asking hard questions about American policy and attempting to understand what Russia truly wants. Russia Upside Down makes the case against the new Cold War. It suggests that we are fighting an enemy with whom we have few if any serious conflicts of interest. It argues that we are fighting with ineffective and dangerous tools. And most of all, it aims to demonstrate that our approach is not working. With our own political system in peril and continually buffeted by Russian attacks, we need a new framework, urgently. Russia Upside Down shows the stakes and begins to lay out that new plan, at a time when it is badly needed.

https://search.lib.uiowa.edu/permalink/f/9i2ftm/01IOWA_ALMA21846554100002771

Losing Our Minds: The Challenge of Defining Mental Illness

A compelling and incisive book that questions the overuse of mental health terms to describe universal human emotions

Public awareness of mental illness has been transformed in recent years, but our understanding of how to define it has yet to catch up. Too often, psychiatric disorders are confused with the inherent stresses and challenges of human experience. A narrative has taken hold that a mental health crisis has been building among young people. In this profoundly sensitive and constructive book, psychologist Lucy Foulkes argues that the crisis is one of ignorance as much as illness. Have we raised a ‘snowflake’ generation? Or are today’s young people subjected to greater stress, exacerbated by social media, than ever before? Foulkes shows that both perspectives are useful but limited. The real question in need of answering is: how should we distinguish between ‘normal’ suffering and actual illness?

Drawing on her extensive knowledge of the scientific and clinical literature, Foulkes explains what is known about mental health problems―how they arise, why they so often appear during adolescence, the various tools we have to cope with them―but also what remains unclear: distinguishing between normality and disorder is essential if we are to provide the appropriate help, but no clear line between the two exists in nature. Providing necessary clarity and nuance, Losing Our Minds argues that the widespread misunderstanding of this aspect of mental illness might be contributing to its apparent prevalence.

https://search.lib.uiowa.edu/permalink/f/9i2ftm/01IOWA_ALMA21846514620002771

Tell Me Everything: The Story of a Private Investigation

Part memoir and part literary true crime, Tell Me Everything is the mesmerizing story of a landmark sexual assault investigation and the female private investigator who helped crack it open.

Erika Krouse has one of those faces. “I don’t know why I’m telling you this,” people say, spilling confessions. In fall 2002, Erika accepts a new contract job investigating lawsuits as a private investigator. The role seems perfect for her, but she quickly realizes she has no idea what she’s doing. Then a lawyer named Grayson assigns her to investigate a sexual assault, a college student who was attacked by football players and recruits at a party a year earlier. Erika knows she should turn the assignment down. Her own history with sexual violence makes it all too personal. But she takes the job anyway, inspired by Grayson’s conviction that he could help change things forever. And maybe she could, too.

Over the next five years, Erika learns everything she can about P. I. technique, tracking down witnesses and investigating a culture of sexual assault and harassment ingrained in the university’s football program. But as the investigation grows into a national scandal and a historic civil rights case, Erika finds herself increasingly consumed. When the case and her life both implode at the same time, Erika must figure out how to help win the case without losing herself.

https://search.lib.uiowa.edu/permalink/f/9i2ftm/01IOWA_ALMA21846514020002771

A History of Women in Men’s Clothes: From Cross-Dressing to Empowerment

Traditionally, historic women have been seen as bound by social conventions, unable to travel unless accompanied and limited in their ability to do what they want when they want. But thousands of women broke those rules, put on banned clothing and traveled, worked and even lived whole lives as men. As access to novels and newspapers increased in the nineteenth century so did the number of women defying Biblical and social restrictions. They copied each other’s motives and excuses and moved into the world of men. Most were working-class women who either needed to or wanted to, break away from constricted lives; women who wanted to watch a hanging or visit a museum, to see family or escape domestic abuse, some wanted to earn a decent living when women’s wages could not keep a family. The reasons were myriad. Some were quickly arrested and put on display in court, hoping to deter other women from such shameful behavior, but many more got away with it.

For the first time, A History of Women in Men’s Clothes looks at those thousands of individuals who broke conventions in the only way they could, by disguising themselves either for a brief moment or a whole life.

Daring and bold, this is the story of the women who defied social convention to live their lives as they chose, from simply wanting more independence to move and live freely, to transgender and homosexual women cross-dressing to express themselves, this is women’s fight to wear trousers.

https://search.lib.uiowa.edu/permalink/f/9i2ftm/01IOWA_ALMA21843256370002771

The Power of Women: A Doctor’s Journey of Hope and Healing

From Nobel laureate, world-renowned doctor, and noted human rights activist Dr. Denis Mukwege comes an inspiring clarion call-to-action to confront the scourge of sexual violence and better learn from women’s resilience, strength, and power.

At the heart of Dr. Mukwege’s message will be the voices of the many women he has worked with over the years. Dr. Mukwege will use individual cases to reassure all survivors that, even if their psychological wounds may never fully heal, they can recover and thrive with the right care and support.

Dr. Mukwege’s dramatic personal story is interwoven throughout as he explores the bigger issues that have become a focus of his advocacy. He will seek to explain why sexual violence is so often overlooked during war, and how governments need to recognize and compensate victims. He will also stress the importance of breaking down the taboos surrounding assault, and the necessity of building a system that supports women who come forward.

His words advocate for saying ‘no’ to indifference and he asks readers to reckon with the West’s involvement in perpetuating sexual violence in places like the Democratic Republic of Congo, and to confront the abuse taking place in their own communities.

Sexual violence does not occur in a vacuum. The conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo, which has raged for over 20 years and has claimed an estimated 5 million lives, is inseparable from Western patriarchy and economic colonization. And this cycle of violence and spoils is not limited to Congo. Dr. Mukwege’s work has led him to South Korea, Latin America, the Middle East, and elsewhere in Africa, where he has found striking similarities in women’s testimonies.

The truth is, through the intricate ties of the global economy, we are all implicated in violence against women – whether it occurs amidst the fighting in the Democratic Republic of Congo or on college campuses in the West. And Dr. Mukwege’s writing will address men as well, encouraging and guiding them to become allies in the fight against sexual abuse, in war and in peace.

Building more inclusive, gender-balanced societies will require developing what he calls “positive masculinity” – a systemic change in male behavior and attitudes towards women. Dr. Mukwege hopes to inspire other men to speak out and join the struggle, rather than leaving women to fight the battle alone. He will also make the case, drawing from his experience and a wealth of research on the topic, that when women are involved as economic and political decision makers, all of society benefits.

The Power of Women will illuminate the enduring strength of women in the face of violence and trauma, and give hope for the potential of individuals to turn the tide.

https://search.lib.uiowa.edu/permalink/f/9i2ftm/01IOWA_ALMA21846514410002771

Please Miss: A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Penis

“The queer memoir you’ve been waiting for”—Carmen Maria Machado

Grace Lavery is a reformed druggie, an unreformed omnisexual chaos Muppet, and 100 percent, all-natural, synthetic female hormone monster. As soon as she solves her “penis problem,” she begins receiving anonymous letters, seemingly sent by a cult of sinister clowns, and sets out on a magical mystery tour to find the source of these surreal missives. Misadventures abound: Grace performs in a David Lynch remake of Sunset Boulevard and is reprogrammed as a sixties femmebot; she writes a Juggalo Ghostbusters prequel and a socialist manifesto disguised as a porn parody of a quiz show. Or is it vice versa? As Grace fumbles toward a new trans identity, she tries on dozens of different voices, creating a coat of many colors.

With more dick jokes than a transsexual should be able to pull off, Please Miss gives us what we came for, then slaps us in the face and orders us to come again.

https://search.lib.uiowa.edu/permalink/f/9i2ftm/01IOWA_ALMA21846514440002771

Entertaining Race: Performing Blackness in America

One of Kirkus Review’s Best Books About Being Black in America | On Detroit Free Press‘ Holiday Book Gift List

“Dyson’s work clearly comes from a deep well of love―for his country, for his people and for the intellectual and cultural figures he admires.” ―New York Times

“Entertaining Race is a splendid way to spend quality time reading one of the most remarkable thinkers in America today.”
―Speaker Nancy Pelosi

“To read Entertaining Race is to encounter the life-long vocation of a teacher who preaches, a preacher who teaches and an activist who cannot rest until all are set free.”
―Senator Reverend Raphael Warnock

For more than thirty years, Michael Eric Dyson has played a prominent role in the nation as a public intellectual, university professor, cultural critic, social activist and ordained Baptist minister. He has presented a rich and resourceful set of ideas about American history and culture. Now for the first time he brings together the various components of his multihued identity and eclectic pursuits.

Entertaining Race is a testament to Dyson’s consistent celebration of the outsized impact of African American culture and politics on this country. Black people were forced to entertain white people in slavery, have been forced to entertain the idea of race from the start, and must find entertaining ways to make race an object of national conversation. Dyson’s career embodies these and other ways of performing Blackness, and in these pages, ranging from 1991 to the present, he entertains race with his pen, voice and body, and occasionally, alongside luminaries like Cornel West, David Blight, Ibram X. Kendi, Master P, MC Lyte, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Alicia Garza, John McWhorter, and Jordan Peterson.

Most of this work will be new to readers, a fresh light for many of his long-time fans and an inspiring introduction for newcomers. Entertaining Race offers a compelling vision from the mind and heart of one of America’s most important and enduring voices.

https://search.lib.uiowa.edu/permalink/f/9i2ftm/01IOWA_ALMA21846514890002771

Digital New Book Display – 7-5-22

DADA KHANYISA: GOOD FEELINGS

This catalogue is published on the occasion of Dada Khanyisa’s second exhibition with Stevenson, Good Feelings, in which Khanyisa fractures their narrative process, creating solipsistic scenes set against the backdrop of communal living. In this presentation in Khanyisa’s ‘solution-based practice’ – described as nakanjani (‘by whatever means’) – place is foregrounded in an unprecedented way and the multidimensionality of the artist’s paintings is broadened formally, conceptually and referentially.

The catalogue spans early and recent works, and features an essay by Sinazo Chiya, studio notes from an interview by Sisipho Ngodwana and Alexander Richards, and a conversation between Khanyisa and Julie Nxadi looking at process, historical ugliness and the occupation of space. From one exchange:

Nxadi: There’s a lot of things that are going on at the same time and I think siyathanda uku instructor [we love instructing] and sometimes we need to take a break from the instruction and just tell the story.

Khanyisa: Yeah, tell the story. It has to come out. It has to exist, it has to be there, it has to be in the world. I guess that’s the instructive element. But as far as having to carry the load of fixing the social wrongs or social ills …? Because there’s also that thing that as Black cultural practitioners we can’t just focus on fynbos. And ‘they’ are like, okay, we get your fynbos obsession but the hood is burning.

Where is your bucket? The hood is burning, dawg.

We are here and we are doing it. So there is also a need to celebrate that. A need to celebrate the beautiful. Getting back from work and taking off your bra and just chilling – that decompression element – It’s a point of interest to me. I understand why people go out because I go out and it’s interesting the things that play out and what they say about the greater South Africa.

https://search.lib.uiowa.edu/permalink/f/9i2ftm/01IOWA_ALMA21808350950002771

Forms of Persuasion: Art and Corporate Image in the 1960s

In the 1960s, multinational corporations faced new image problems—and turned to the art world for some unexpected solutions.

The 1960s saw artists and multinational corporations exploring new ways to use art for commercial gain. Whereas many art historical accounts of this period privilege radical artistic practices that seem to oppose the dominant values of capitalism, Alex J. Taylor instead reveals an art world deeply immersed in the imperatives of big business.

From Andy Warhol’s work for packaged goods manufacturers to Richard Serra’s involvement with the steel industry, Taylor demonstrates how major artists of the period provided brands with “forms of persuasion” that bolstered corporate power, prestige, and profit. Drawing on extensive original research conducted in artist, gallery, and corporate archives, Taylor recovers a flourishing field of promotional initiatives that saw artists, advertising creatives, and executives working around the same tables. As museums continue to grapple with the ethical dilemmas posed by funding from oil companies, military suppliers, and drug manufacturers, Forms of Persuasion returns to these earlier relations between artists and multinational corporations to examine the complex aesthetic and ideological terms of their enduring entanglements.

https://search.lib.uiowa.edu/permalink/f/9i2ftm/01IOWA_ALMA21847169730002771

Crude: A Memoir

A gripping, richly illustrated recounting of the battle indigenous Ecuadorians and their allies waged against Texaco/Chevron over the energy company’s destruction of portions of the Amazon. As a teenager, Pablo Fajardo worked in the Amazonian oil fields, where he witnessed the consequences of Texaco/Chevron’s indifference to the environment and to the inhabitants of the Amazon. Fajardo mobilized with his peers to seek reparations and in time became the lead counsel for UDAPT (Union of People Affected by Texaco), a group of more than thirty thousand small farmers and indigenous people from the northern Ecuadorian Amazon who continue to fight for reparations and remediation to this day.

https://search.lib.uiowa.edu/permalink/f/9i2ftm/01IOWA_ALMA21840513980002771

Walled Gardens: Autonomy, Automation, and Art After the Internet

Walled Gardens: Autonomy, Automation, and Art After the Internet is the study of a young generation of artists characterised by their engagement with new Internet technologies that have come to reorganize life and labour online, from mobile Internet and social media to Cloud Computing. Often
grouped around the much-contested term ‘post-Internet art’, these artists work across a range of genre DS including sculpture, performance, and moving image DS in order to confront the relationship between technology and society in the twenty first century. Focusing on art works produced between 2008
and 2016 in Europe and the US, this book situates the emergence of the field in a historical context of global economic downturn and climate catastrophe, positing that new Internet technologies were developed in a mutually co-constitutive relationship with crisis. Characterised by ease of use,
portability, and accessibility, such technologies are the reason why the Internet has become an ever-increasing part of daily life. Yet they are also examples of ‘walled gardens’: proprietary formats in which one’s control over functionality or content is highly restricted. Strikingly, many artists
have chosen to work with rather than against these technologies and, in so doing, perform complicity with the very structures that they seek to interrogate. Walled Gardens asks how might we make sense of this assimilation with proprietary technologies, and argues that what these artworks reveal is a
model of subjectivity conditioned by a dynamic between autonomy and automation.

https://search.lib.uiowa.edu/permalink/f/9i2ftm/01IOWA_ALMA21847169970002771

Marcelo Brodsky – Poetics Of Resistance

Marcelo Brodskys practice is situated at the crossroads between visual arts, poetry, and human rights activism. Using images from documentary archives, he manipulates them by adding handwritten comments and highlighting details with bright colours, stimulating a dialogue between the pre-existing narratives conveyed by the original photographs and his own interpretations. Poetics of Resistance features two major groups of works created between 2014 and 2019, on the international protests of 1968 and on the process of decolonisation in Africa in the 20th century, plus ongoing inquiries into anti-Franco resistance in Spain and todays urgent topic of migrants and refugees.

https://search.lib.uiowa.edu/permalink/f/9i2ftm/01IOWA_ALMA21841306790002771

Rockers: The Making of Reggae’s Most Iconic Film

“An incredible reggae backstory; illustrated by spectacular unseen images.” – MOJO Magazine

Set amongst the reggae scene of late 70s Jamaica, the film Rockers achieved instant cult status among music and cinema fans. Rockers’ director, Ted Bafaloukos has received many accolades for his work on the film, but the fact that he was also a fine writer and undercover photographer is often overlooked. Bafaloukos penned this vivid autobiography in 2005 and passed in 2016.

Beyond Bafaloukos’ fascinating story of the “making-of” Rockers, it tells the tale of a Greek immigrant from a family of sailors and his move to New York, eventually rubbing shoulders with the likes of The Velvet Underground, Robert Frank, Jessica Lange and Philippe “Man on Wire” Petit. But there’s a twist to this 1970s’ New York story: Bafaloukos fell in love with reggae when it was still just an underground facet of Jamaican culture in the City. His experiences in New York eventually led him to shoot Rockers, praised for the portrait it paints of Kingston’s late 70s music scene along with its unique style, mentality and fashion.

The director’s intense experiences in Jamaica and New York between ’75 – ’78 provide the substance of the scorching stories within, including; gunshots at his first ever reggae concert in Brooklyn, the director’s bizarre arrest for suspicion of being a CIA operative, paranoia at the Bob Marley compound, musicians-turned actors’ “rude boy” antics, and naturally, sympathetic, highly descriptive recollections of the music that first drew Bafaloukos into Jamaica’s music and culture.

An invaluable collection of photographs taken during the conception, writing and production of the film captures the zeitgeist and breathes life into the book. Production stills and photos taken during the era by Bafaloukos form the visual, cinematic backbone of the tome, faithfully rendering the amazing people, styles, and locations in living, breathing color. Taken all together, the text and images within Rockers will uncover new facets of this all-important era in Reggae music for even the most seasoned reggae aficionados. Beyond reggae circles, this new anthology offers an unparalleled snapshot of a highly fantasized and sought after je-ne sais-quoi: the all-time Jamaican cool.

https://search.lib.uiowa.edu/permalink/f/9i2ftm/01IOWA_ALMA21841863140002771

Ramón Paolini: Caracas: Double Take

A portrait of Caracas by Ramón Paolini, architect, photographer, Venezuela’s director of Cultural Heritage and UNESCO inspector

For more than 30 years, Ramón Paolini (born 1949) has photographed the city of Caracas. This volume collects more than 120 photographs illustrating a modern city of cement, steel and glass surrounded by lush nature, mountains, valleys and rivers.

https://search.lib.uiowa.edu/permalink/f/9i2ftm/01IOWA_ALMA21841019620002771

Sebastião Salgado. Gold

“What is it about a dull yellow metal that drives men to abandon their homes, sell their belongings and cross a continent in order to risk life, limbs and sanity for a dream?” – Sebastião Salgado

When Sebastião Salgado was finally authorized to visit Serra Pelada in September 1986, having been blocked for six years by Brazil’s military authorities, he was ill-prepared to take in the extraordinary spectacle that awaited him on this remote hilltop on the edge of the Amazon rainforest. Before him opened a vast hole, some 200 meters wide and deep, teeming with tens of thousands of barely-clothed men. Half of them carried sacks weighing up to 40 kilograms up wooden ladders, the others leaping down muddy slopes back into the cavernous maw. Their bodies and faces were the color of ochre, stained by the iron ore in the earth they had excavated.

After gold was discovered in one of its streams in 1979, Serra Pelada evoked the long-promised El Dorado as the world’s largest open-air gold mine, employing some 50,000 diggers in appalling conditions. Today, Brazil’s wildest gold rush is merely the stuff of legend, kept alive by a few happy memories, many pained regrets―and Sebastião Salgado’s photographs.

Color dominated the glossy pages of magazines when Salgado shot these images. Black and white was a risky path, but the Serra Pelada portfolio would mark a return to the grace of monochrome photography, following a tradition whose masters, from Edward Weston and Brassaï to Robert Capa and Henri Cartier-Bresson, had defined the early and mid-20th century. When Salgado’s images reached The New York Times Magazine, something extraordinary happened: there was complete silence. “In my entire career at The New York Times,” recalled photo editor Peter Howe, “I never saw editors react to any set of pictures as they did to Serra Pelada.”

Today, with photography absorbed by the art world and digital manipulation, Salgado’s portfolio holds a biblical quality and projects an immediacy that makes them vividly contemporary. The mine at Serra Pelada has been long closed, yet the intense drama of the gold rush leaps out of these images.

This book gathers Salgado’s complete Serra Pelada portfolio in museum-quality reproductions, accompanied by a foreword by the photographer and an essay by Alan Riding.

Also available in a signed and limited Collector’s Edition and as an Art Edition.

https://search.lib.uiowa.edu/permalink/f/9i2ftm/01IOWA_ALMA21829570260002771

Digital New Book Display – 6-30-22

Flung Out of Space: Inspired by the Indecent Adventures of Patricia Highsmith

A fictional and complex portrait of bestselling author Patricia Highsmith caught up in the longing that would inspire her queer classic, The Price of Salt

Flung Out of Space is both a love letter to the essential lesbian novel, The Price of Salt, and an examination of its notorious author, Patricia Highsmith. Veteran comics creators Grace Ellis and Hannah Templer have teamed up to tell this story through Highsmith’s eyes—reimagining the events that inspired her to write the story that would become a foundational piece of queer literature. Flung Out of Space opens with Pat begrudgingly writing low-brow comics. A drinker, a smoker, and a hater of life, Pat knows she can do better. Her brain churns with images of the great novel she could and should be writing—what will eventually be Strangers on a Train— which would later be adapted into a classic film by Alfred Hitchcock in 1951.

At the same time, Pat, a lesbian consumed with self-loathing, is in and out of conversion therapy, leaving a trail of sexual conquests and broken hearts in her wake. However, one of those very affairs and a chance encounter in a department store give Pat the idea for her soon-to-be beloved tale of homosexual love that was the first of its kind—it gave the lesbian protagonists a happy ending.

This is not just the story behind a classic queer book, but of a queer artist who was deeply flawed. It’s a comic about what it was like to write comics in the 1950s, but also about what it means to be a writer at any time in history, struggling to find your voice.

Author Grace Ellis contextualizes Patricia Highsmith as both an unintentional queer icon and a figure whose problematic views and noted anti-Semitism have cemented her controversial legacy. Highsmith’s life imitated her art with results as devastating as the plot twists that brought her fame and fortune.

https://search.lib.uiowa.edu/permalink/f/9i2ftm/01IOWA_ALMA21809355910002771

Tunnels

A race for the Ark of the Covenant finds an exploration into the ethics and world of the international antiquity trade

When a great antiquities collector is forced to donate his entire collection to the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Nili Broshi sees her last chance to finish an archaeological expedition begun decades earlier―a dig that could possibly yield the most important religious artifact in the Middle East. Motivated by the desire to reinstate her father’s legacy as a great archaeologist after he was marginalized by his rival, Nili enlists a ragtag crew―a religious nationalist and his band of hilltop youths, her traitorous brother, and her childhood Palestinian friend, now an archaeological smuggler. As Nili’s father slips deeper into dementia, warring factions close in on and fight over the Ark of the Covenant!

Backed by extensive research into this real-world treasure hunt, Rutu Modan sets her affecting novel at the center of a political crisis. She posits that the history of biblical Israel lies in one of the most disputed regions in the world, occupied by Israel and contested by Palestine. Often in direct competition, Palestinians and Israelis dig alongside one another, hoping to find the sacred artifact believed to be a conduit to God. Two time Eisner Award winner Rutu Modan’s third graphic novel, Tunnels, is her deepest and wildest yet. Potent and funny, Modan reveals the Middle East as no westerner could.

Ishai Mishory is a longtime New York City―and newly Bay Area―based translator and sometimes illustrator. He is currently conducting research for a PhD dissertation on 16th century Italian printing.

https://search.lib.uiowa.edu/permalink/f/9i2ftm/01IOWA_ALMA21839390640002771

Queer in Asia

Who is Tian Fushi? A misunderstood manga artist, a depraved citizen of Chinese pornography, a young gay man gone astray in an ultraviolent world, a lost boy out of Peter Pan’s Neverland? How will he put the fragments of himself together and discover who he really is? Queer: differing in some way from what is usual or normal; this is definitely the case with this graphic novel. A portrait of a Chinese youth in search of love and meaning. An intimate and striking modern quest for identity.

https://search.lib.uiowa.edu/permalink/f/9i2ftm/01IOWA_ALMA21810447820002771

This Is How I Disappear

An affecting glimpse into the ways millennials cope with mental health struggles

Translated by Aleshia Jensen and Bronwyn Haslam

Clara’s at a breaking point. She’s got writer’s block, her friends ask a lot without giving much, her psychologist is useless, and her demanding publishing job leaves little time for self care. She seeks solace in the community around her, yet, while her friends provide support and comfort, she is often left feeling empty, unable to express an underlying depression that leaves her immobilized and stifles any attempts at completing her poetry collection. In This is How I Disappear, Mirion Malle paints an empathetic portait of a young woman wrestling with psychological stress and the trauma following an experience of sexual assault.

Malle displays frankness and a remarkable emotional intelligence as she explores depression, isolation, and self-harm in her expertly-drawn novel. Her heroine battles an onslaught of painful emotions and while Clara can provide consolation to those around her, she finds it difficult to bestow the same understanding unto herself. Only when she allows her community to guide her towards self-love does she find relief.

Filled with 21st century idioms and social media communication, This Is How I Disappear opens a window into the lives of young people as they face a barrage of mental health hurdles. Scenes of sisterhood, fun nights out singing karaoke, and impromptu FaceTime therapy sessions show how this generation is coping, connecting, and healing together.

https://search.lib.uiowa.edu/permalink/f/9i2ftm/01IOWA_ALMA21838356910002771

The King of Bangkok (ethnoGRAPHIC)

The English translation of this bestselling graphic novel tells the story of Nok, an old blind man who sells lottery tickets in Bangkok, as he decides to leave the city and return to his native village.Through reflections on contemporary Bangkok and flashbacks to his past, Nok reconstructs a journey through the slums of migrant workers, the rice fields of Isaan, the tourist villages of Ko Pha Ngan, and the Red Shirt protests of 2010.

Based on a decade of anthropological research, The King of Bangkok is a story of migration to the city, distant families in the countryside, economic development eroding the land, and violent political protest. Ultimately, it is a story about contemporary Thailand and how the waves of history lift, engulf, and crash against ordinary people.

https://search.lib.uiowa.edu/permalink/f/9i2ftm/01IOWA_ALMA21841061530002771

On Ajayi Crowther Street

On the noisy Ajayi Crowther Street in Lagos, neighbours gather to gossip, discuss noise complaints, and faithfully head to church each Sunday. But beneath the surface lies a hidden world of clandestine love affairs, spiritual quackery and hypocrisy that threatens to destroy the community from within.

On Ajayi Crowther Street peels back the curtains on the lives of Pastor Akpoborie and his family, to reveal a tumultuous world full of desires, secrets and lies. His only son, Godstime, is struggling to hide his sexuality whilst his daughter Keturah must hide the truth of her pregnancy to preserve her and her family’s image. But it is the Reverend himself who hides the darkest secret of them all.

https://search.lib.uiowa.edu/permalink/f/9i2ftm/01IOWA_ALMA21839694040002771

The Strange Death of Alex Raymond

“Comics’ answer to Finnegan’s Wake, an inspired work of obsessive genius that will take a long time to untangle.” – Rob Salkowitz, Senior Contributor, FORBES

“The Strange Death of Alex Raymond is one of the most spectacular comics I have ever read or seen. I can’t recommend it enough, although you may hate it. Bizarre and beautiful and completely unique.” – Jim Rugg, Cartoonist Kayfabe, Street Angel, The P.L.A.I.N. Janes

“This is a master work. I’m honoured to have even laid eyes on it.” – E.S. Glenn, author of Unsmooth, cartoonist for The New Yorker

“A must-read for anyone interested in the history and craft of comics” – Brandon Graham, King City, Warhead, Prophet

“Grubaugh provides a brilliant and fitting conclusion to what would have otherwise been one of the most notable unfinished works of recent times. I for one am excited at holding the completed Strange Death of Alex Raymond in my hands.” – Gary Spencer Millidge, Strangehaven, Alan Moore: Portrait of an Extraordinary Gentleman

Legendary creator Dave Sim is renowned world-wide for his groundbreaking Cerebus the Aardvark. Now, in The Strange Death of Alex Raymond, Sim brings to life the history of comics’ greatest creators, using their own techniques. Equal parts Understanding Comics and From Hell, Strange Death is a head-on collision of ink drawing and spiritual intrigue, pulp comics and movies, history and fiction. The story traces the lives and techniques of Alex Raymond (Flash Gordon, Rip Kirby), Stan Drake (Juliet Jones), Hal Foster (Prince Valiant), and more, dissecting their techniques through recreations of their artwork, and highlighting the metatextual resonances that bind them together.

Foreword by Eddie Campbell.

https://search.lib.uiowa.edu/permalink/f/9i2ftm/01IOWA_ALMA21808122860002771

Friday Foster: The Sunday Strips

The Friday Foster comic strip is the story ofa former nightclub “camera bunny” turned photographer’s assistant turned fashion model. With an innate inclination to help others and a natural beauty that makes her a magnet for men, Friday often finds herself in some very sticky situations and world class adventures.

For the FIRST TIME EVER, the classic FRIDAY FOSTER newspaper color comic strip created by James D. “Jim” Lawrence (of Buck Rogers and James Bond fame) and illustrated by Jorge “Jordi” Longarón then later Gray Morrow is collected. The strip ran from 1974-1970 and inspired the 1975 movie of the same name starring Pam Grier. The strip is the first mainstream comic strip starring an African-American character in the title role.

The book will also include a significant bonus section including multiple interviews, an expanded sketchbook section, artwork, photos, essays, articles, behind-the-scenes info, and more!

https://search.lib.uiowa.edu/permalink/f/9i2ftm/01IOWA_ALMA21729191120002771

Digital New Book Display – 6-27-22

The Wrong End of the Telescope

WINNER OF THE 2022 PEN/FAULKNER AWARD FOR FICTION

By National Book Award and the National Book Critics’ Circle Award finalist for An Unnecessary Woman, Rabih Alameddine, comes a transporting new novel about an Arab American trans woman’s journey among Syrian refugees on Lesbos island.

Mina Simpson, a Lebanese doctor, arrives at the infamous Moria refugee camp on Lesbos, Greece, after being urgently summoned for help by her friend who runs an NGO there. Alienated from her family except for her beloved brother, Mina has avoided being so close to her homeland for decades. But with a week off work and apart from her wife of thirty years, Mina hopes to accomplish something meaningful, among the abundance of Western volunteers who pose for selfies with beached dinghies and the camp’s children. Soon, a boat crosses bringing Sumaiya, a fiercely resolute Syrian matriarch with terminal liver cancer. Determined to protect her children and husband at all costs, Sumaiya refuses to alert her family to her diagnosis. Bonded together by Sumaiya’s secret, a deep connection sparks between the two women, and as Mina prepares a course of treatment with the limited resources on hand, she confronts the circumstances of the migrants’ displacement, as well as her own constraints in helping them.

Not since the inimitable Aaliya of An Unnecessary Woman has Rabih Alameddine conjured such a winsome heroine to lead us to one of the most wrenching conflicts of our time. Cunningly weaving in stories of other refugees into Mina’s singular own, The Wrong End of the Telescope is a bedazzling tapestry of both tragic and amusing portraits of indomitable spirits facing a humanitarian crisis.

https://search.lib.uiowa.edu/permalink/f/9i2ftm/01IOWA_ALMA21843866690002771

Today a Woman Went Mad in the Supermarket: Stories

The uncannily relevant, deliciously clear-eyed collected stories of a critically acclaimed, award-winning “American literary treasure” (Boston Globe), ripe for rediscovery―with a foreword by Elizabeth Strout.

From her many well-loved novels, Hilma Wolitzer―now ninety-one years old and at the top of her game―has gained a reputation as one of our best fiction writers, who “raises ordinary people and everyday occurrences to a new height.” (Washington Post) These collected short stories―most of them originally published in magazines including Esquire and the Saturday Evening Post, in the 1960s and 1970s, along with a new story that brings her early characters into the present―are evocative of an era that still resonates deeply today.

In the title story, a bystander tries to soothe a woman who seems to have cracked under the pressures of her life. And in several linked stories throughout, the relationship between the narrator and her husband unfolds in telling and often hilarious vignettes. Of their time and yet timeless, Wolitzer’s stories zero in on the domestic sphere with wit, candor, grace, and an acutely observant eye. Brilliantly capturing the tensions and contradictions of daily life, Today a Woman Went Mad in the Supermarket is full of heart and insight, providing a lens into a world that was often unseen at the time, and often overlooked now―reintroducing a beloved writer to be embraced by a whole new generation of readers.

https://search.lib.uiowa.edu/permalink/f/9i2ftm/01IOWA_ALMA21842913050002771

Em: A Novel

Emma-Jade and Louis are born into the havoc of the Vietnam War. Orphaned, saved and cared for by adults coping with the chaos of Saigon in free-fall, they become children of the Vietnamese diaspora. Em is not a romance in any usual sense of the word, but it is a word whose homonym–aimer, to love–resonates on every page, a book powered by love in the larger sense. A portrait of Vietnamese identity emerges that is wholly remarkable, honed in wartime violence that borders on genocide, and then by the ingenuity, sheer grit and intelligence of Vietnamese-Americans, Vietnamese-Canadians and other Vietnamese former refugees who go on to build some of the most powerful small business empires in the world. Em is a poetic story steeped in history, about those most impacted by the violence and their later accomplishments. In many ways, Em is perhaps Kim Thúy’s most personal book, the one in which she trusts her readers enough to share with them not only the pervasive love she feels but also the rage and the horror at what she and so many other children of the Vietnam War had to live through.

Written in Kim Thúy’s trademark style, near to prose poetry, Em reveals her fascination with connection. Through the linked destinies of characters connected by birth and destiny, the novel zigzags between the rubber plantations of Indochina; daily life in Saigon during the war as people find ways to survive and help each other; Operation Babylift, which evacuated thousands of biracial orphans from Saigon in April 1975 at the end of the Vietnam War; and today’s global nail polish and nail salon industry, largely driven by former Vietnamese refugees–and everything in between. Here are human lives shaped both by unspeakable trauma and also the beautiful sacrifices of those who made sure at least some of these children survived.

https://search.lib.uiowa.edu/permalink/f/9i2ftm/01IOWA_ALMA21838357480002771

One Kind Favor: A Novel

Based loosely on a tragic real-life incident, One Kind Favor explores the consequences of the lynching of a young black man in rural North Carolina. After the lynching is discovered and subsequently covered up in the small fictional community of Cord, the ghosts who frequent the all-in-one bar and consignment shop take on the responsibility of unearthing the truth and acting as the memory for the town that longs to forget and continues to hate. The down-the-rabbit-hole satirical storytelling of One Kind Favor, Kevin McIlvoy’s sixth novel, echoes Appalachian ghost stories in which haunting presences will, at last, have their way.

https://search.lib.uiowa.edu/permalink/f/9i2ftm/01IOWA_ALMA21840473640002771

Revival Season: A Novel

Every summer, fifteen-year-old Miriam Horton and her family pack themselves tight in their old minivan and travel through small southern towns for revival season: the time when Miriam’s father—one of the South’s most famous preachers—holds massive healing services for people desperate to be cured of ailments and disease. But, this summer, the revival season doesn’t go as planned, and after one service in which Reverend Horton’s healing powers are tested like never before, Miriam witnesses a shocking act of violence that shakes her belief in her father—and her faith.

When the Hortons return home, Miriam’s confusion only grows as she discovers she might have the power to heal—even though her father and the church have always made it clear that such power is denied to women. Over the course of the following year, Miriam must decide between her faith, her family, and her newfound power that might be able to save others, but if discovered by her father, could destroy Miriam.

Celebrating both feminism and faith, Revival Season is a “tender and wise” (Ann Patchett) story of spiritual awakening and disillusionment in a Southern, Black, Evangelical community.Celebrating both feminism and faith, Revival Season is a “tender and wise” (Ann Patchett) story of spiritual awakening an

https://search.lib.uiowa.edu/permalink/f/9i2ftm/01IOWA_ALMA21842913350002771

Sonia Sanchez – Collected Poems

Winner Gish Prize for Lifetime Achievement

A representative collection of the life work of the much-honored poet and a founder of the Black Arts movement, spanning the 4 decades of her literary career.

Gathering highlights from all of Sonia Sanchez’s poetry, this compilation is sure to inspire love and community engagement among her legions of fans. Beginning with her earliest work, including poems from her first volume, Homecoming (1969), through to 2019, the poet has collected her favorite work in all forms of verse, from Haiku to excerpts from book-length narratives. Her lifelong dedication to the causes of Black liberation, social equality, and women’s rights is evident throughout, as is her special attention to youth in poems addressed to children and young adults.

As Maya Angelou so aptly put it: “Sonia Sanchez is a lion in literature’s forest. When she writes she roars, and when she sleeps other creatures walk gingerly.”

https://search.lib.uiowa.edu/permalink/f/9i2ftm/01IOWA_ALMA21844005090002771

The Family Chao: A Novel

An acclaimed storyteller returns with “a gorgeous and gripping literary mystery” that explores “family, betrayal, passion, race, culture and the American Dream” (Jean Kwok).

The residents of Haven, Wisconsin, have dined on the Fine Chao restaurant’s delicious Americanized Chinese food for thirty-five years, content to ignore any unsavory whispers about the family owners. Whether or not Big Leo Chao is honest, or his wife, Winnie, is happy, their food tastes good and their three sons earned scholarships to respectable colleges. But when the brothers reunite in Haven, the Chao family’s secrets and simmering resentments erupt at last.

Before long, brash, charismatic, and tyrannical patriarch Leo is found dead—presumed murdered—and his sons find they’ve drawn the exacting gaze of the entire town. The ensuing trial brings to light potential motives for all three brothers: Dagou, the restaurant’s reckless head chef; Ming, financially successful but personally tortured; and the youngest, gentle but lost college student James. As the spotlight on the brothers tightens—and the family dog meets an unexpected fate—Dagou, Ming, and James must reckon with the legacy of their father’s outsized appetites and their own future survival.

Brimming with heartbreak, comedy, and suspense, The Family Chao offers a kaleidoscopic, highly entertaining portrait of a Chinese American family grappling with the dark undercurrents of a seemingly pleasant small town.

https://search.lib.uiowa.edu/permalink/f/9i2ftm/01IOWA_ALMA21842987530002771

The Mirror Man: A novel (Killer Instinct Book 8)

#1 INTERNATIONAL BEST SELLER • Detective Joona Linna is on the trail of a kidnapper who targets teenage girls and makes their worst nightmares a reality.

“Dark, disturbing, and chillingly relentless. Picture Hannibal Lecter sitting down to channel Stieg Larsson and then dial it way, way up!” —Brad Thor, #1 New York Times best-selling author of Black Ice

Sixteen-year-old Jenny Lind is kidnapped in broad daylight on her way home from school and thrown into the back of a truck. She’s taken to a dilapidated house, where she and other girls face horrors far beyond their worst nightmares. Though they’re desperate to escape, their captor foils everyone of their attempts.

Five years later, Jenny’s body is found hanging in a playground, strung up with a winch on a rainy night. As the police are scrambling to find a lead in the scant evidence, Detective Joona Linna recognizes an eerie connection between Jenny’s murder and a death declared a suicide years before. And when another teenage girl goes missing, it becomes clear to Joona that they’re dealing with a serial killer—and his murderous rampage may have just begun.

https://search.lib.uiowa.edu/permalink/f/9i2ftm/01IOWA_ALMA21843334030002771

The Morning Star: A Novel

One of NPR’s Best Books of 2021

“Knausgaard is among the finest writers alive.” —Dwight Garner, New York Times

The international bestseller from the author of the renowned My Struggle series, The Morning Star is an astonishing, ambitious, and rich novel about what we don’t understand, and our attempts to make sense of our world nonetheless

One long night in August, Arne and Tove are staying with their children in their summer house in southern Norway. Their friend Egil has his own place nearby. Kathrine, a priest, is flying home from a Bible seminar, questioning her marriage. Journalist Jostein is out drinking for the night, while his wife, Turid, a nurse at a psychiatric care unit, is on a night shift when one of her patients escapes.

Above them all, a huge star suddenly appears blazing in the sky. It brings with it a mysterious sense of foreboding.

Strange things start to happen as nine lives come together under the star. Hundreds of crabs amass on the road as Arne drives at night; Jostein receives a call about a death metal band found brutally murdered in a Satanic ritual; Kathrine conducts a funeral service for a man she met at the airport – but is he actually dead?

The Morning Star is about life in all its mundanity and drama, the strangeness that permeates our world, and the darkness in us all. Karl Ove Knausgaard’s astonishing new novel, his first after the My Struggle cycle, goes to the utmost limits of freedom and chaos, to what happens when forces beyond our comprehension are unleashed and the realms of the living and the dead collide.

https://search.lib.uiowa.edu/permalink/f/9i2ftm/01IOWA_ALMA21838893400002771

Sleepless – A Novel

Dark secrets past and present collide in Sleepless, a haunting novel of guilt and retribution from Romy Hausmann, the international bestselling author of Dear Child.

It’s been years since Nadja Kulka was convicted of a cruel crime. After being released from prison, she’s wanted nothing more than to live a normal life: nice flat, steady job, even a few friends. But when one of those friends, Laura von Hoven–free-spirited beauty and wife of Nadja’s boss–kills her lover and begs Nadja for her help, Nadja can’t seem to refuse.

The two women make for a remote house in the woods, the perfect place to bury a body. But their plan quickly falls apart and Nadja finds herself outplayed, a pawn in a bizarre game in which she is both the perfect victim and the perfect murderer…

https://search.lib.uiowa.edu/permalink/f/9i2ftm/01IOWA_ALMA21838893610002771

Digital New Book Display – 6-23-22

(S)kinfolk: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s AMERICANAH (…AFTERWORDS)

Literary Nonfiction. African & African American Studies. When Did You First Realize You Were Black? Provoked by the fraught relationship between the African continent and American culture in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah; acclaimed Nigerian-American novelist Tochi Onyebuchi takes an emotional and intellectual journey through his own education in Blackness–his first loves; his introduction to politics; and his eventual commitment to the struggle.

Ranging from Paris to a Connecticut boarding school to a harrowing walk through the streets of Palestine; and touching on lessons from Frantz Fanon; Sylvia Wynter; Mohsin Hamid; August Wilson; Dear White People; and Black Panther; Onyebuchi blends memoir and cultural criticism to explore the ways in which identities; like diamonds; are pressurized into existence by suffering; and how “the other side of suffering is self-determination.”

(S)KINFOLK culminates in a trip to Nigeria; the homeland; where the author realizes that “we share a future;” as Black Americans and Africans; on this “asymptotic journey” toward self-actualization.

https://search.lib.uiowa.edu/permalink/f/9i2ftm/01IOWA_ALMA21840473510002771

An Orange

Poetry. “It would be too easy to say love vanished from the earth…” begins Ted Dodson’s AN ORANGE, his thoughtful, experiential second collection of poems. It’s a provocation to which AN ORANGE wholeheartedly responds. Dodson’s work reroutes essay, narrative, and confessionalism, detouring from criticism into bisexual desire and navigating modernity as fluently as it imagines speculative destinations for language. From the graceful realism of the opening travelogues to its final long poem, “The Language the Sky Speaks,” AN ORANGE guides memory and affect into cosmopolitan forms: disalienating, expansive, and tonic.

https://search.lib.uiowa.edu/permalink/f/9i2ftm/01IOWA_ALMA21840472290002771

The Employees: A workplace novel of the 22nd century

Shortlisted for the International Booker prize, The Employees reshuffles a sci-fi voyage into a riotously original existential nightmare

Funny and doom-drenched, The Employees chronicles the fate of the Six-Thousand Ship. The human and humanoid crew members complain about their daily tasks in a series of staff reports and memos. When the ship takes on a number of strange objects from the planet New Discovery, the crew becomes strangely and deeply attached to them, even as tensions boil toward mutiny, especially among the humanoids.

Olga Ravn’s prose is chilling, crackling, exhilarating, and foreboding. The Employees probes into what makes us human, while delivering a hilariously stinging critique of life governed by the logic of productivity.

https://search.lib.uiowa.edu/permalink/f/9i2ftm/01IOWA_ALMA21843334060002771

Phototaxis

Translated from the French, Phototaxis is a fragmentary, darkly-humorous, and apocalyptic novel from a leading young voice from Montreal from Montreal centered around questions of friendship, the commodification of globalized tragedy, ecological crisis, the griefs of migration, and the possibility of political coherence in today’s world.

In a city mysteriously overflowing with meat, a museum is bombed, a classical piano player hooked on snuff films throws himself off a building, a charismatic but misled political organizer has disappeared, and a young immigrant navigates a crumbling continent. In the fallout of their friendship, Olivia Tapiero’s Phototaxis deploys a fugal language at turns surreal, scathingly comic, poetic, and revolutionary to dismantle our world and construct one even closer to its breaking point, or further along in its breaking. Here, voice and event surge up like reflux from the exhausted throats of nature and urban spaces, sounding out an architecture of failure within a suspiciously steady rise of fascism and its persistent counterpoints. A dystopic work of hope that carries its own disintegration, Phototaxis (translated by Kit Schluter) is Tapiero’s first novel to appear English.

https://search.lib.uiowa.edu/permalink/f/9i2ftm/01IOWA_ALMA21838357180002771

CORRECTION (Open Rose)

Fiction. Literary Nonfiction. Gabriel Blackwell’s CORRECTION is a book of recognition and reckoning, fiction in its newest form. These 101 short story-essays (what are they?) plunge out of the dizzying, devastating, truthy world of social media and into the depths of our daily lives. The result is relentlessly precise, ferociously ethical, damning, sly and essential. Blackwell is at the height of his powers as one of the most innovative prose writers working today. To this hyper-mediated world, its texts swollen with absent facts and bad intent, we offer

https://search.lib.uiowa.edu/permalink/f/9i2ftm/01IOWA_ALMA21840474010002771

Low Rent Prophet

Low Rent Prophet is poetry for anyone who has ever wanted to burn it all down. This book is about what’s left to be saved and the possibility of change and resurrection in our world today.

“A Midwestern mystic, a rustbelt bard, a poet of mystical insight and existential illumination, George Looney is, to my mind, a rare virtuoso. His poems are full of wit and despair, lyrical beauty and heartbreaking longing, honesty, and hope. He is the kind of poet who can take you to the edge of your consciousness, addressing mortality and loss, and then back home again–or to a bar, a coffee shop, a diner. Reading his work, I feel I am in the presence of a voluminous consciousness and a great heart.”–Nin Andrews

https://search.lib.uiowa.edu/permalink/f/9i2ftm/01IOWA_ALMA21840409740002771

Pregrets

Poetry. New poems by Anselm Berrigan.

“In the world of Anselm Berrigan sketchiness is next to godliness and repeated heavy-lifting becomes a pleasure. PREGRETS has the feel of wandering a giant armory filled with enigmatic objects and pointed memories. Dust motes in daylight betray a thin path forward so the ‘tongue’ of the book seems in constant peril, addictively so. ‘Red copter rises slicing a scraper into outer cubicle dreams…’ Possessed of a haunted style that moves beyond surface. Fathomless.”–Cedar Sigo

https://search.lib.uiowa.edu/permalink/f/9i2ftm/01IOWA_ALMA21840409320002771

Ways to Beg

The poems in Ways to Beg are in constant conversation. They speak to and of each other, to ancestors, gods, pets, strangers on planes, and, most often, directly to the reader. Their aim is mutual inquiry. They want to swap stories and jokes and secrets, to stay up all night, refilling your beverage of choice, diligently pursuing the unsaid, the unsayable. In short, they want to ask the right questions. To deliberate how we’ve come to inhabit our bodies, our families, our grief, our country, our planet–and how we intend to make good on that lonesome and curious responsibility.

https://search.lib.uiowa.edu/permalink/f/9i2ftm/01IOWA_ALMA21840472510002771

Everything I Don’t Know

“What good luck to finally have in English the writings of the brilliant Jerzy Ficowski, the poet who lived at least seventeen lives, fighting in the Warsaw Uprising, and later traveling for years with the Roma people through the roads of Poland, opposing his government, and watching the authorities ban his poems, a poet who translated from Spanish and Romanian and Yiddish and Roma, but most of all from the tongue of silence…Beautifully translated by Jennifer Grotz and Piotr Sommer, these poems also document the tragedy of the Holocaust, with the direct and uncompromising voice with which he reminds us of the great poets such as Różewicz and Świrszczyńska, while remaining, all the while, himself. Read a piece such as ‘I was unable to save / a single life’ in a bookstore, and I guarantee you will want to take this book with you, to keep it for the rest of your life.”–Ilya Kaminsky

https://search.lib.uiowa.edu/permalink/f/9i2ftm/01IOWA_ALMA21839940420002771

City of Skypapers

Poetry. Jewish Studies. On writing CITY OF SKYPAPERS: “CITY OF SKYPAPERS was an effort of daily writing in Tel Aviv for a span of about three years during which time I tried to inhabit and reconcile Jewish sacred time (holidays, Shabbat, daily prayer rituals) with private, social, and civil secular time–two wars with their worries and missiles, explosions, and a sense of solidarity, as well, with beloved friends in Gaza or West Bank, a custody lawsuit, daily small-scale agriculture, running along the Yarkon river, riding public transportation in Tel Aviv and Ramat-Gan, teaching, friendship, love and its disappointments, mothering. It attempts an openness to the daily world, and an attention to these details, charged by an interpenetration of the sacred and the secular, aspirations and reality. I wanted to mimic in writing the way the mind works, the reality its imagination builds, the relationships it creates, among people, objects, and geography.

https://search.lib.uiowa.edu/permalink/f/9i2ftm/01IOWA_ALMA21840472230002771

Women and Other Hostages

Poetry, “If you, like the speaker in Laura McCullough’s poem, ‘Almost Nothing Something [stars / plates / cells]’ have grown ‘tired & suspicious of poetry’ WOMEN AND OTHER HOSTAGES will absolutely revitalize you. These are riveting, wholly moving narratives of a life lived. Out of sorrow McCullough invokes a stunning grace where ‘What is stripped from you’ becomes a gift because ‘what’s left behind is all your own.’ Women of all circumstances inhabit these poems. They shed their skin like snakes, ‘memory in flesh,’ and consider the bones of what holds us together in these divisive times. This beautiful book will knock loose what is lodged in your heart.”–Suzanne Frischkorn

https://search.lib.uiowa.edu/permalink/f/9i2ftm/01IOWA_ALMA21840472410002771

Clamor

Literary Nonfiction. African & African American Studies. Music. Translated by Olivia C. Harrison and Teresa Villa-Ignacio. Artwork by Julie Simon-Titecat. Hocine Tandjaoui’s poetic memoir, CLAMOR, is a gripping testimonial to the transnational solidarities forged across the decolonizing world in the 1950s and 60s, from the rarely heard perspective of a child. Set against the backdrop of one of the bloodiest wars of decolonization, CLAMOR offers an account of the colonial soundscape and a dazzling poetic evocation of Tandjaoui’s discovery of African-American music during his childhood in colonized Algeria. A gorgeously written and translated poetic text or “proème,” CLAMOR reckons with the music that shaped Tandjaoui’s childhood, the soundtrack of the Black liberation movements in the US, and the voices of artists of the African diaspora that rise above the din of war, becoming the soundbox and sounding board of decolonization in Algeria.

Presented bilingually in French and English.

https://search.lib.uiowa.edu/permalink/f/9i2ftm/01IOWA_ALMA21840472810002771

Culshaw elected to Center for Research Libraries Board of Directors

John Culshaw, Jack B. King university librarian at Iowa, has been elected to a three-year term on the Center for Research Libraries (CRL) Board of Directors.

CRL, which is an international consortium of university, college, and independent research libraries, held its 73rd Annual Council of Voting Members Meeting in April 2022. Learn more about the meeting and see the 2022-23 officers elected by the Board of Directors here. Founded in 1949, CRL supports research and teaching in the humanities, sciences, and social sciences by preserving and making available to scholars a wealth of rare and uncommon primary source materials from all world regions. The University of Iowa is a founding member of CRL.

Culshaw also recently concluded his term as the president of the Association of Research Libraries (ARL), a membership organization of libraries and archives in major public and private universities, federal government agencies, and large public institutions in United States and Canada. He completes his five years of service on the ARL Board of Directors in October 2022.

In addition to these responsibilities, Culshaw has served in leadership roles with the HathiTrust Digital Library and Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL). Culshaw is currently the conference chair for ACRL 2023, ACRL’s signature biennial event slated for March 2023 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He also continues to play an active role with the Big Ten Academic Alliance Library Initiatives, which includes the BIG Collection, an effort to create collaborative processes for building a networked collective collection to benefit Big Ten scholars.

Libraries support OA book publisher Punctum Books

The University Libraries is pleased to announce it has joined Punctum Books Supporting Library Membership Program for three years. Punctum Books is a scholar-led, queer-led, and peer-reviewed academic book publisher devoted to academic and para-academic authors working in any field in the humanities, social sciences, fine arts, and architecture & design who want to publish books that are genre-bending and which take experimental risks with the forms and styles of intellectual writing. As a diamond open access (OA) publisher, all Punctum Books titles are openly available and they do not charge any author-facing fees.

The University Libraries support for Punctum Books will help to subsidize:

the publication of high-quality OA books in the Humanities, Social Sciences, Fine Arts, and Architecture & Design, with no publication fees ever imposed upon authors;
commitment and adherence to the “best practices” (as guided by librarians and the standards of academic communities) for editorial evaluation and oversight, interoperable metadata, cataloguing, indexing, discovery, dissemination, aggregation, and preservation of its OA books; and
the development and sustainable maintenance, in collaboration with other presses and research organizations, of open-source and community-owned infrastructure for OA books in the Humanities and Social Sciences.

This support is aligned with the Libraries Statement of OA Support and is one of many memberships and agreements undertaken to make more University of Iowa scholarship open access. If you have questions about the Libraries support for open access, please contact us at lib-impact@uiowa.edu.

Digital New Book Display – 6-20-22

An Elderly Lady Must Not Be Crossed

Don’t let her age fool you. Maud may be nearly ninety, but if you cross her, this elderly lady is more sinister than sweet.

Just when things have finally cooled down for 88-year-old Maud after the disturbing discovery of a dead body in her apartment in Gothenburg, a couple of detectives return to her doorstep. Though Maud dodges their questions with the skill of an Olympic gymnast a fifth of her age, she wonders if suspicion has fallen on her, little old lady that she is. The truth is, ever since Maud was a girl, death has seemed to follow her.

In these six interlocking stories, memories of unfortunate incidents from Maud’s past keep bubbling to the surface. Meanwhile, certain Problems in the present require immediate attention. Luckily, Maud is no stranger to taking matters into her own hands . . . even if it means she has to get a little blood on them in the process.

*Includes cookie recipes*

https://search.lib.uiowa.edu/permalink/f/9i2ftm/01IOWA_ALMA21838893520002771

One-Way Street

One-Way Street is a thoroughfare unlike anything else in literature―by turns exhilarating and bewildering, requiring mental agility and a special kind of urban literacy. Presented here in a new edition with expanded notes, this genre-defying meditation on the semiotics of late-1920s Weimar culture offers a fresh opportunity to encounter Walter Benjamin at his most virtuosic and experimental, writing in a vein that anticipates later masterpieces such as “On the Concept of History” and The Arcades Project.

Composed of sixty short prose pieces that vary wildly in style and theme, One-Way Street evokes a dense cityscape of shops, cafes, and apartments, alive with the hubbub of social interactions and papered over with public inscriptions of all kinds: advertisements, signs, posters, slogans. Benjamin avoids all semblance of linear narrative, enticing readers with a seemingly random sequence of aphorisms, reminiscences, jokes, off-the-cuff observations, dreamlike fantasias, serious philosophical inquiries, apparently unserious philosophical parodies, and trenchant political commentaries. Providing remarkable insight into the occluded meanings of everyday things, Benjamin time and again proves himself the unrivalled interpreter of what he called “the soul of the commodity.”

Despite the diversity of its individual sections, Benjamin’s text is far from formless. Drawing on the avant-garde aesthetics of Dada, Constructivism, and Surrealism, its unusual construction implies a practice of reading that cannot be reduced to simple formulas. Still refractory, still radical, One-Way Street is a work in perpetual progress.

https://search.lib.uiowa.edu/permalink/f/9i2ftm/01IOWA_ALMA21838215690002771

Smile: The Story of a Face

From the MacArthur genius, two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist, and playwright, this “captivating, insightful memoir” (Kirkus Reviews, starred review) is “a beautiful meditation on identity and how we see ourselves” (Real Simple).

With a play opening on Broadway, and every reason to smile, Sarah Ruhl has just survived a high-risk pregnancy when she discovers the left side of her face is completely paralyzed. She is assured that 90 percent of Bell’s palsy patients experience a full recovery—like Ruhl’s own mother. But Sarah is in the unlucky ten percent. And for a woman, wife, mother, and artist working in theater, the paralysis and the disconnect between the interior and exterior brings significant and specific challenges. So Ruhl begins an intense decade-long search for a cure while simultaneously grappling with the reality of her new face—one that, while recognizably her own—is incapable of accurately communicating feelings or intentions.

In a series of piercing, profound, and lucid meditations, Ruhl chronicles her journey as a patient, wife, mother, and artist. She explores the struggle of a body yearning to match its inner landscape, the pain of postpartum depression, the story of a marriage, being a playwright and working mom to three small children, and the desire for a resilient spiritual life in the face of illness.

An intimate and “stunning” (Publishers Weekly, starred review) examination of loss and reconciliation, “Ruhl reminds us that a smile is not just a smile but a vital form of communication, of bonding, of what makes us human” (The Washington Post). Brimming with insight, humility, and levity, Smile is a triumph by one of America’s leading playwrights.

https://search.lib.uiowa.edu/permalink/f/9i2ftm/01IOWA_ALMA21844003930002771

Lean Your Loneliness Slowly Against Mine: A Novel

A NEW YORK TIMES GLOBETROTTING PICK!

A remarkable and heartbreaking debut novel with the lyrical beauty and emotional resonance of By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept and the thematic complexity of Asymmetry, that combines fractal mathematics and classical music to explore the infinitely complex patterns of love and the thin border between great passion and great loneliness.

Rakel has always been more comfortable with numbers than with people. A gifted woman with a rare talent for math, she has never mastered the art of making friends. At nineteen, she moves to Oslo to attend university. There she meets Jakob, a brilliant older teacher who becomes fascinated by Rakel’s quick mind.

Jakob is struck by the similarities between Rakel and Sofja Kovalevskaja, the first woman to become a professor of mathematics, and the subject of the novel he is writing. Just as Kovalevskaja was close to her much older advisor, Rakel and Jakob are drawn to each other and eventually become lovers, although he is already married.

In the years to come, Rakel’s academic career soars, but her health declines, and from her bedside she spends hours imagining Sofja’s life while trying to understand her own. With a gaze both naive and mercilessly sharp, she examines what may be her life’s only love story, looking for patterns and answers in numbers, music, and literature.

Extraordinarily wise and penetrating, Lean Your Loneliness Slowly Against Mine explores the intricacies of the human heart, the complicated equation that is love, and the search to find meaning and connections when you need them most.

Translated from the Norwegian by Alison McCullough

https://search.lib.uiowa.edu/permalink/f/9i2ftm/01IOWA_ALMA21838994140002771

After the Sun

From a major new international voice, mesmerizing, inventive fiction that probes the tender places where human longings push through the cracks of a breaking world.

Under Cancún’s hard blue sky, a beach boy provides a canvas for tourists’ desires, seeing deep into the world’s underbelly. An enigmatic encounter in Copenhagen takes an IT consultant down a rabbit hole of speculation that proves more seductive than sex. The collapse of a love triangle in London leads to a dangerous, hypnotic addiction. In the Nevada desert, a grieving man tries to merge with an unearthly machine.

After the Sun opens portals to our newest realities, haunting the margins of a globalized world that’s both saturated with yearning and brutally transactional. Infused with an irrepressible urgency, Eika’s fiction seems to have conjured these far-flung characters and their encounters in a single breath. Juxtaposing startling beauty with grotesquery, balancing the hyperrealistic with the fantastical—“as though the worlds he describes are being viewed through an ultraviolet filter,” in one Danish reviewer’s words—he has invented new modes of storytelling for an era when the old ones no longer suffice.

https://search.lib.uiowa.edu/permalink/f/9i2ftm/01IOWA_ALMA21838894150002771

Damnation Spring

A stunning novel about love, work, and marriage that asks how far one family and one community will go to protect their future.

Colleen and Rich Gundersen are raising their young son, Chub, on the rugged California coast. It’s 1977, and life in this Pacific Northwest logging town isn’t what it used to be. For generations, the community has lived and breathed timber; now that way of life is threatened.

Colleen is an amateur midwife. Rich is a tree-topper. It’s a dangerous job that requires him to scale trees hundreds of feet tall—a job that both his father and grandfather died doing. Colleen and Rich want a better life for their son—and they take steps to assure their future. Rich secretly spends their savings on a swath of ancient redwoods. But when Colleen, grieving the loss of a recent pregnancy and desperate to have a second child, challenges the logging company’s use of the herbicides she believes are responsible for the many miscarriages in the community, Colleen and Rich find themselves on opposite sides of a budding conflict. As tensions in the town rise, they threaten the very thing the Gundersens are trying to protect: their family.

Told in prose as clear as a spring-fed creek, Damnation Spring is an intimate, compassionate portrait of a family whose bonds are tested and a community clinging to a vanishing way of life. An extraordinary story of the transcendent, enduring power of love—between husband and wife, mother and child, and longtime neighbors. An essential novel for our times.

https://search.lib.uiowa.edu/permalink/f/9i2ftm/01IOWA_ALMA21842900940002771

Camera Man: Buster Keaton, the Dawn of Cinema, and the Invention of the Twentieth Century

In this genre-defying work of cultural history, the chief film critic of Slate places comedy legend and acclaimed filmmaker Buster Keaton’s unique creative genius in the context of his time.

Born the same year as the film industry in 1895, Buster Keaton began his career as the child star of a family slapstick act reputed to be the most violent in vaudeville. Beginning in his early twenties, he enjoyed a decade-long stretch as the director, star, stuntman, editor, and all-around mastermind of some of the greatest silent comedies ever made, including Sherlock Jr., The General, and The Cameraman.

Even through his dark middle years as a severely depressed alcoholic finding work on the margins of show business, Keaton’s life had a way of reflecting the changes going on in the world around him. He found success in three different mediums at their creative peak: first vaudeville, then silent film, and finally the experimental early years of television. Over the course of his action-packed seventy years on earth, his life trajectory intersected with those of such influential figures as the escape artist Harry Houdini, the pioneering Black stage comedian Bert Williams, the television legend Lucille Ball, and literary innovators like F. Scott Fitzgerald and Samuel Beckett.

In Camera Man, film critic Dana Stevens pulls the lens out from Keaton’s life and work to look at concurrent developments in entertainment, journalism, law, technology, the political and social status of women, and the popular understanding of addiction. With erudition and sparkling humor, Stevens hopscotches among disciplines to bring us up to the present day, when Keaton’s breathtaking (and sometimes life-threatening) stunts remain more popular than ever as they circulate on the internet in the form of viral gifs. Far more than a biography or a work of film history, Camera Man is a wide-ranging meditation on modernity that paints a complex portrait of a one-of-a-kind artist.

https://search.lib.uiowa.edu/permalink/f/9i2ftm/01IOWA_ALMA21843334390002771

Palmares

The epic rendering of a Black woman’s journey through slavery and liberation, set in 17th-century colonial Brazil; the return of a major voice in American literature.

First discovered and edited by Toni Morrison, Gayl Jones has been described as one of the great literary writers of the 20th century. Now, for the first time in over 20 years, Jones is ready to publish again. Palmares is the first of five new works by Gayl Jones to be published in the next two years, rewarding longtime fans and bringing her talent to a new generation of readers.

Intricate and compelling, Palmares recounts the journey of Almeyda, a Black slave girl who comes of age on Portuguese plantations and escapes to a fugitive slave settlement called Palmares. Following its destruction, Almeyda embarks on a journey across colonial Brazil to find her husband, lost in battle.

Her story brings to life a world impacted by greed, conquest, and colonial desire. She encounters a mad lexicographer, desperate to avoid military service; a village that praises a god living in a nearby cave; and a medicine woman who offers great magic, at a greater price.

Combining the author’s mastery of language and voice with her unique brand of mythology and magical realism, Jones reimagines the historical novel. The result is a sweeping saga spanning a quarter century, with vibrant settings and unforgettable characters, steeped in the rich oral tradition of its world. Of Gayl Jones, the New Yorker noted, “[Her] great achievement is to reckon with both history and interiority, and to collapse the boundary between them.” Like nothing else before it, Palmares embodies this gift.

https://search.lib.uiowa.edu/permalink/f/9i2ftm/01IOWA_ALMA21843865910002771

Moon and the Mars: A Novel

In Moon and the Mars, set in the impoverished Five Points district of New York City in the years 1857-1863, we experience neighborhood life through the eyes of Theo from childhood to adolescence, an orphan living between the homes of her Black and Irish grandmothers. Throughout her formative years, Theo witnesses everything from the creation of tap dance to P.T. Barnum’s sensationalist museum to the draft riots that tear NYC asunder, amidst the daily maelstrom of Five Points work, hardship, and camaraderie. Meanwhile, white America’s attitudes towards people of color and slavery are shifting—painfully, transformationally—as the nation divides and marches to war.

As with her first novel, The Castle Cross the Magnet Carter, which was praised by Viet Thanh Nguyen, Robin D.G. Kelley, and Angela Y. Davis, among many others, Corthron’s use of dialogue brings her characters to life in a way that only an award-winning playwright and scriptwriter can do. As Theo grows and attends school, her language and grammar change, as does her own vocabulary when she’s with her Black or Irish families. It’s an extraordinary feat and a revelation for the reader.

“Moon and the Mars, [Corthron’s] latest masterpiece, is an absorbing story of family and community, of Africans and Irish, of settler and native, of slavery and abolition, of a city and a nation wracked by Civil War and racist violence, of love won and lost.” —Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original.

https://search.lib.uiowa.edu/permalink/f/9i2ftm/01IOWA_ALMA21838484650002771

Echo

Nature is calling—but they shouldn’t have answered.

Travel journalist and mountaineer Nick Grevers awakes from a coma to find that his climbing buddy, Augustin, is missing and presumed dead. Nick’s own injuries are as extensive as they are horrifying. His face wrapped in bandages and unable to speak, Nick claims amnesia—but he remembers everything.
He remembers how he and Augustin were mysteriously drawn to the Maudit, a remote and scarcely documented peak in the Swiss Alps.
He remembers how the slopes of Maudit were eerily quiet, and how, when they entered its valley, they got the ominous sense that they were not alone.
He remembers: something was waiting for them…
But it isn’t just the memory of the accident that haunts Nick. Something has awakened inside of him, something that endangers the lives of everyone around him…
It’s one thing to lose your life. It’s another to lose your soul.
Also by Thomas Olde Heuvelt
Hex
At the Publisher’s request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

https://search.lib.uiowa.edu/permalink/f/9i2ftm/01IOWA_ALMA21843861970002771

Digital New Book Display – 6-16-22

Welcome to the University of Iowa Library’s virtual New Book Shelf. Here we will present new titles for you to browse and check out. Titles listed here will be monographs published in the current year. If you see a title you would like to borrow, please click the link below the item and sign in with your Hawk ID and Password to request a loan.

To Walk About in Freedom: The Long Emancipation of Priscilla Joyner

The extraordinary life of Priscilla Joyner and her quest―along with other formerly enslaved people―to define freedom after the Civil War.

Priscilla Joyner was born into the world of slavery in 1858 North Carolina and came of age at the dawn of emancipation. Raised by a white slaveholding woman, Joyner never knew the truth about her parentage. She grew up isolated and unsure of who she was and where she belonged―feelings that no emancipation proclamation could assuage.

Her life story―candidly recounted in an oral history for the Federal Writers’ Project―captures the intimate nature of freedom. Using Joyner’s interview and the interviews of other formerly enslaved people, historian Carole Emberton uncovers the deeply personal, emotional journeys of freedom’s charter generation―the people born into slavery who walked into a new world of freedom during the Civil War. From the seemingly mundane to the most vital, emancipation opened up a myriad of new possibilities: what to wear and where to live, what jobs to take and who to love.

Although Joyner was educated at a Freedmen’s Bureau school and married a man she loved, slavery cast a long shadow. Uncertainty about her parentage haunted her life, and as Jim Crow took hold throughout the South, segregation, disfranchisement, and racial violence threatened the loving home she made for her family. But through it all, she found beauty in the world and added to it where she could.

Weaving together illuminating voices from the charter generation, To Walk About in Freedom gives us a kaleidoscopic look at the lived experiences of emancipation and challenges us to think anew about the consequences of failing to reckon with the afterlife of slavery.

https://search.lib.uiowa.edu/permalink/f/9i2ftm/01IOWA_ALMA21844813410002771

Better, Not Bitter: Living on Purpose in the Pursuit of Racial Justice

This inspirational memoir serves as a call to action from prison reform activist Yusef Salaam, of the Exonerated Five, that will inspire us all to turn our stories into tools for change in the pursuit of racial justice.

They didn’t know who they had.

So begins Yusef Salaam telling his story. No one’s life is the sum of the worst things that happened to them, and during Yusef Salaam’s seven years of wrongful incarceration as one of the Central Park Five, he grew from child to man, and gained a spiritual perspective on life. Yusef learned that we’re all “born on purpose, with a purpose.” Despite having confronted the racist heart of America while being “run over by the spiked wheels of injustice,” Yusef channeled his energy and pain into something positive, not just for himself but for other marginalized people and communities.

Better Not Bitter is the first time that one of the now Exonerated Five is telling his individual story, in his own words. Yusef writes his narrative: growing up Black in central Harlem in the ’80s, being raised by a strong, fierce mother and grandmother, his years of incarceration, his reentry, and exoneration. Yusef connects these stories to lessons and principles he learned that gave him the power to survive through the worst of life’s experiences. He inspires readers to accept their own path, to understand their own sense of purpose. With his intimate personal insights, Yusef unpacks the systems built and designed for profit and the oppression of Black and Brown people. He inspires readers to channel their fury into action, and through the spiritual, to turn that anger and trauma into a constructive force that lives alongside accountability and mobilizes change.

This memoir is an inspiring story that grew out of one of the gravest miscarriages of justice, one that not only speaks to a moment in time or the rage-filled present, but reflects a 400-year history of a nation’s inability to be held accountable for its sins. Yusef Salaam’s message is vital for our times, a motivating resource for enacting change. Better, Not Bitter has the power to soothe, inspire and transform. It is a galvanizing call to action.

https://search.lib.uiowa.edu/permalink/f/9i2ftm/01IOWA_ALMA21842905370002771

Chained to History: Slavery and US Foreign Relations to 1865

In Chained to History, Steven J. Brady places slavery at the center of the story of America’s place in the world in the years prior to the calamitous Civil War. Beginning with the immediate aftermath of the War of the American Revolution, Brady follows the military, economic, and moral lines of the diplomatic challenges of attempting to manage, on the global stage, the actuality of human servitude in a country dedicated to human freedom. Chained to History shows how slavery was interwoven with America’s foreign relations and affected policy controversies ranging from trade to extradition treaties to military alliances.

Brady highlights the limitations placed on American policymakers who, working in an international context increasingly supportive of abolition, were severely constrained regarding the formulation and execution of preferred policy. Policymakers were bound to the slave interest based in the Democratic Party and the tortured state of domestic politics bore heavily on the conduct of foreign affairs. As international powers not only abolished the slave trade but banned human servitude as such, the American position became untenable.

From the Age of Revolutions through the American Civil War, slavery was a constant factor in shaping US relations with the Atlantic World and beyond. Chained to History addresses this critical topic in its complete scope and shows the immoral practice of human bondage to have informed how the United States re-entered the community of nations after 1865.

https://search.lib.uiowa.edu/permalink/f/9i2ftm/01IOWA_ALMA21842987860002771

Fear of Black Consciousness

Lewis R. Gordon’s Fear of Black Consciousness is a groundbreaking account of Black consciousness by a leading philosopher

In this original and penetrating work, Lewis R. Gordon, one of the leading scholars of Black existentialism and anti-Blackness, takes the reader on a journey through the historical development of racialized Blackness, the problems this kind of consciousness produces, and the many creative responses from Black and non-Black communities in contemporary struggles for dignity and freedom. Skillfully navigating a difficult and traumatic terrain, Gordon cuts through the mist of white narcissism and the versions of consciousness it perpetuates. He exposes the bad faith at the heart of many discussions about race and racism not only in America but across the globe, including those who think of themselves as “color blind.” As Gordon reveals, these lies offer many white people an inherited sense of being extraordinary, a license to do as they please. But for many if not most Blacks, to live an ordinary life in a white-dominated society is an extraordinary achievement.

Informed by Gordon’s life growing up in Jamaica and the Bronx, and taking as a touchstone the pandemic and the uprisings against police violence, Fear of Black Consciousness is a groundbreaking work that positions Black consciousness as a political commitment and creative practice, richly layered through art, love, and revolutionary action.

https://search.lib.uiowa.edu/permalink/f/9i2ftm/01IOWA_ALMA21843256670002771

The Silent Shore: The Lynching of Matthew Williams and the Politics of Racism in the Free State

The definitive account of the lynching of twenty-three-year-old Matthew Williams in Maryland, the subsequent investigation, and the legacy of “modern-day” lynchings.

On December 4, 1931, a mob of white men in Salisbury, Maryland, lynched and set ablaze a twenty-three-year-old Black man named Matthew Williams. His gruesome murder was part of a wave of silent white terrorism in the wake of the stock market crash of 1929, which exposed Black laborers to white rage in response to economic anxieties. For nearly a century, the lynching of Matthew Williams has lived in the shadows of the more well-known incidents of racial terror in the deep South, haunting both the Eastern Shore and the state of Maryland as a whole. In The Silent Shore, author Charles L. Chavis Jr. draws on his discovery of previously unreleased investigative documents to meticulously reconstruct the full story of one of the last lynchings in Maryland.

Bringing the painful truth of anti-Black violence to light, Chavis breaks the silence that surrounded Williams’s death. Though Maryland lacked the notoriety for racial violence of Alabama or Mississippi, he writes, it nonetheless was the site of at least 40 spectacle lynchings after the abolition of slavery in 1864. Families of lynching victims rarely obtained any form of actual justice, but Williams’s death would have a curious afterlife: Maryland’s politically ambitious governor Albert C. Ritchie would, in an attempt to position himself as a viable challenger to FDR, become one of the first governors in the United States to investigate the lynching death of a Black person. Ritchie tasked Patsy Johnson, a member of the Pinkerton detective agency and a former prizefighter, with going undercover in Salisbury and infiltrating the mob that murdered Williams. Johnson would eventually befriend a young local who admitted to participating in the lynching and who also named several local law enforcement officers as ringleaders. Despite this, a grand jury, after hearing 124 witness statements, declined to indict the perpetrators. But this denial of justice galvanized Governor Ritchie’s Interracial Commission, which would become one of the pioneering forces in the early civil rights movement in Maryland.

Complicating historical narratives associated with the history of lynching in the city of Salisbury, The Silent Shore explores the immediate and lingering effect of Williams’s death on the politics of racism in the United States, the Black community in Salisbury, the broader Eastern Shore, the state of Maryland, and the legacy of “modern-day lynchings.”

https://search.lib.uiowa.edu/permalink/f/9i2ftm/01IOWA_ALMA21842987980002771

Black American Refugee: Escaping the Narcissism of the American Dream

After following her mother to the US at a young age to pursue economic opportunities, one woman must come to terms with the ways in which systematic racism and resultant trauma keep the American Dream inaccessible to Black people.

In the early ’90s, young Tiffanie Drayton and her siblings left Trinidad and Tobago to join their mother in New Jersey, where she’d been making her way as a domestic worker, eager to give her children a shot at the American Dream. At first, life in the US was idyllic. But chasing good school districts with affordable housing left Tiffanie and her family constantly uprooted–moving from Texas to Florida then back to New Jersey. As Tiffanie came of age in the suburbs, she began to ask questions about the binary Black and white American world. Why were the Black neighborhoods she lived in crime-ridden, and the multicultural ones safe? Why were there so few Black students in advanced classes at school, if there were any advanced classes at all? Why was it so hard for Black families to achieve stability? Why were Black girls treated as something other than worthy?

Ultimately, exhausted by the pursuit of a “better life” in America, twenty-year old Tiffanie returns to Tobago. She is suddenly able to enjoy the simple freedom of being Black without fear, and imagines a different future for her own children. But then COVID-19 and widely publicized instances of police brutality bring America front and center again. This time, as an outsider supported by a new community, Tiffanie grieves and rages for Black Americans in a way she couldn’t when she was one.

An expansion of her New York Times piece of the same name, Black American Refugee examines in depth the intersection of her personal experiences and the broader culture and historical ramifications of American racism and global white supremacy. Through thoughtful introspection and candidness, Tiffanie unravels the complex workings of the people in her life, including herself, centering Black womanhood, and illuminating the toll a lifetime of racism can take. Must Black people search beyond the shores of the “land of the free” to realize emancipation? Or will the voices that propel America’s new reckoning welcome all dreamers and dreams to this land?

https://search.lib.uiowa.edu/permalink/f/9i2ftm/01IOWA_ALMA21842987890002771

The Kaepernick Effect: Taking a Knee, Changing the World

In 2016, amid an epidemic of police shootings of African Americans, the celebrated NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick began a series of quiet protests on the field, refusing to stand during the U.S. national anthem. By “taking a knee,” Kaepernick bravely joined a long tradition of American athletes making powerful political statements. This time, however, Kaepernick’s simple act spread like wildfire throughout American society, becoming the preeminent symbol of resistance to America’s persistent racial inequality.

Critically acclaimed sports journalist and author of A People’s History of Sports in the United States, Dave Zirin chronicles “the Kaepernick effect” for the first time, through interviews with a broad cross-section of professional athletes across many different sports, college stars and high-powered athletic directors, and high school athletes and coaches. In each case, he uncovers the fascinating explanations and motivations behind a mass political movement in sports, through deeply personal and inspiring accounts of risk-taking, activism, and courage both on and off the field.

A book about the politics of sport, and the impact of sports on politics, The Kaepernick Effect is for anyone seeking to understand an essential dimension of the new movement for racial justice in America.

https://search.lib.uiowa.edu/permalink/f/9i2ftm/01IOWA_ALMA21842906180002771

Right Within: How to Heal from Racial Trauma in the Workplace

From the powerhouse author of  The Memo, the essential self-help book for women of color to heal—and thrive—in the workplace

In workplaces nationwide, women of color need frank talk and honest advice on how to deal with microaggressions, heal from racialized trauma, and find relief from invisible workplace burdens. Filled with Minda Harts’s signature wit and warmth, Right Within offers strategies for women of color to speak up during racialized moments with managers and clients, work through past triggers they may not even know still cause pain, and reframe past career disappointments as opportunities to grow into a new path. Through action points, exercises, and clear-eyed coaching, Harts encourages women to summon hidden reserves of strength and courage. She includes advice from therapists and faith leaders of color on a full range of ways to heal. Right Within will help women of color strengthen their resolve across corporate America, ensuring that we can all, finally, rise together.

https://search.lib.uiowa.edu/permalink/f/9i2ftm/01IOWA_ALMA21842905670002771

Against White Feminism: Notes on Disruption

A radically inclusive, intersectional, and transnational approach to the fight for women’s rights.

Upper-middle-class white women have long been heralded as “experts” on feminism. They have presided over multinational feminist organizations and written much of what we consider the feminist canon, espousing sexual liberation and satisfaction, LGBTQ inclusion, and racial solidarity, all while branding the language of the movement itself in whiteness and speaking over Black and Brown women in an effort to uphold privilege and perceived cultural superiority. An American Muslim woman, attorney, and political philosopher, Rafia Zakaria champions a reconstruction of feminism in Against White Feminism, centering women of color in this transformative overview and counter-manifesto to white feminism’s global, long-standing affinity with colonial, patriarchal, and white supremacist ideals.

Covering such ground as the legacy of the British feminist imperialist savior complex and “the colonial thesis that all reform comes from the West” to the condescension of the white feminist–led “aid industrial complex” and the conflation of sexual liberation as the “sum total of empowerment,” Zakaria follows in the tradition of intersectional feminist forebears Kimberlé Crenshaw, Adrienne Rich, and Audre Lorde. Zakaria ultimately refutes and reimagines the apolitical aspirations of white feminist empowerment in this staggering, radical critique, with Black and Brown feminist thought at the forefront.

https://search.lib.uiowa.edu/permalink/f/9i2ftm/01IOWA_ALMA21842905580002771

Digital New Book Display – 6-13-22

Nice White Ladies: The Truth about White Supremacy, Our Role in It, and How We Can Help Dismantle It

An acclaimed expert illuminates the distinctive role that white women play in perpetuating racism, and how they can work to fight it

In a nation deeply divided by race, the “Karens” of the world are easy to villainize. But in Nice White Ladies, Jessie Daniels addresses the unintended complicity of even well-meaning white women. She reveals how their everyday choices harm communities of color. White mothers, still expected to be the primary parents, too often uncritically choose to send their kids to the “best” schools, collectively leading to a return to segregation. She addresses a feminism that pushes women of color aside, and a wellness industry that insulates white women in a bubble of their own privilege.

Daniels then charts a better path forward. She looks to the white women who fight neo-Nazis online and in the streets, and who challenge all-white spaces from workplaces to schools to neighborhoods. In the end, she shows how her fellow white women can work toward true equality for all.

https://search.lib.uiowa.edu/permalink/f/9i2ftm/01IOWA_ALMA21842905910002771

The Secret History of Home Economics: How Trailblazing Women Harnessed the Power of Home and Changed the Way We Live

An NPR Favorite History Book of 2021

The surprising, often fiercely feminist, always fascinating, yet barely known, history of home economics.

The term “home economics” may conjure traumatic memories of lopsided hand-sewn pillows or sunken muffins. But common conception obscures the story of the revolutionary science of better living. The field exploded opportunities for women in the twentieth century by reducing domestic work and providing jobs as professors, engineers, chemists, and businesspeople. And it has something to teach us today.

In the surprising, often fiercely feminist and always fascinating The Secret History of Home Economics, Danielle Dreilinger traces the field’s history from Black colleges to Eleanor Roosevelt to Okinawa, from a Betty Crocker brigade to DIY techies. These women―and they were mostly women―became chemists and marketers, studied nutrition, health, and exercise, tested parachutes, created astronaut food, and took bold steps in childhood development and education.

Home economics followed the currents of American culture even as it shaped them. Dreilinger brings forward the racism within the movement along with the strides taken by women of color who were influential leaders and innovators. She also looks at the personal lives of home economics’ women, as they chose to be single, share lives with other women, or try for egalitarian marriages.

This groundbreaking and engaging history restores a denigrated subject to its rightful importance, as it reminds us that everyone should learn how to cook a meal, balance their account, and fight for a better world.

https://search.lib.uiowa.edu/permalink/f/9i2ftm/01IOWA_ALMA21842362550002771

Civil Rights Queen: Constance Baker Motley and the Struggle for Equality

With the US Supreme Court confirmation of Ketanji Brown Jackson, “it makes sense to revisit the life and work of another Black woman who profoundly shaped the law: Constance Baker Motley” (CNN). The first major biography of one of our most influential judges—an activist lawyer who became the first Black woman appointed to the federal judiciary—that provides an eye-opening account of the twin struggles for gender equality and civil rights in the 20th Century.

“A must-read for anyone who dares to believe that equal justice under the law is possible and is in search of a model for how to make it a reality.” —Anita Hill

Born to an aspirational blue-collar family during the Great Depression, Constance Baker Motley was expected to find herself a good career as a hair dresser. Instead, she became the first black woman to argue a case in front of the Supreme Court, the first of ten she would eventually argue. The only black woman member in the legal team at the NAACP’s Inc. Fund at the time, she defended Martin Luther King in Birmingham, helped to argue in Brown vs. The Board of Education, and played a critical role in vanquishing Jim Crow laws throughout the South. She was the first black woman elected to the state Senate in New York, the first woman elected Manhattan Borough President, and the first black woman appointed to the federal judiciary.

Civil Rights Queen captures the story of a remarkable American life, a figure who remade law and inspired the imaginations of African Americans across the country. Burnished with an extraordinary wealth of research, award-winning, esteemed Civil Rights and legal historian and dean of the Harvard Radcliffe Institute, Tomiko Brown-Nagin brings Motley to life in these pages. Brown-Nagin compels us to ponder some of our most timeless and urgent questions–how do the historically marginalized access the corridors of power? What is the price of the ticket? How does access to power shape individuals committed to social justice? In Civil Rights Queen, she dramatically fills out the picture of some of the most profound judicial and societal change made in twentieth-century America.

https://search.lib.uiowa.edu/permalink/f/18gddib/TN_cdi_proquest_reports_2618798640

The Generation Myth: Why When You’re Born Matters Less Than You Think

Millennials, Baby Boomers, Gen Z—we like to define people by when they were born, but an acclaimed social researcher explains why we shouldn’t.

Boomers are narcissists. Millennials are spoiled. Gen Zers are lazy. We assume people born around the same time have basically the same values. It makes for good headlines, but is it true?

Bobby Duffy has spent years studying generational distinctions. In The Generation Myth, he argues that our generational identities are not fixed but fluid, reforming throughout our lives. Based on an analysis of what over three million people really think about homeownership, sex, well-being, and more, Duffy offers a new model for understanding how generations form, how they shape societies, and why generational differences aren’t as sharp as we think.

The Generation Myth is a vital rejoinder to alarmist worries about generational warfare and social decline. The kids are all right, it turns out. Their parents are too.

https://search.lib.uiowa.edu/permalink/f/9i2ftm/01IOWA_ALMA21842905520002771

How Should A Government Be?: The New Levers of State Power

Global in scope, approachable and upbeat in tone, this book explores the new technological capacities of government with clear eyes and an open mind. When the art of government itself is changing, the old political divisions no longer make sense. Now, with revolutions in technology and organisational structure and a world transformed by Covid-19, a revolution is also coming in the essential business of government – whether we like it or not.

https://search.lib.uiowa.edu/permalink/f/9i2ftm/01IOWA_ALMA21843257330002771

Free Speech: A History from Socrates to Social Media

“The best history of free speech ever written and the best defense of free speech ever made.” —P.J. O’Rourke

Hailed as the “first freedom,” free speech is the bedrock of democracy. But it is a challenging principle, subject to erosion in times of upheaval. Today, in democracies and authoritarian states around the world, it is on the retreat.

In Free Speech, Jacob Mchangama traces the riveting legal, political, and cultural history of this idea. Through captivating stories of free speech’s many defenders—from the ancient Athenian orator Demosthenes and the ninth-century freethinker al-Rāzī, to the anti-lynching crusader Ida B. Wells and modern-day digital activists—Mchangama reveals how the free exchange of ideas underlies all intellectual achievement and has enabled the advancement of both freedom and equality worldwide. Yet the desire to restrict speech, too, is a constant, and he explores how even its champions can be led down this path when the rise of new and contrarian voices challenge power and privilege of all stripes.

Meticulously researched and deeply humane, Free Speech demonstrates how much we have gained from this principle—and how much we stand to lose without it.

https://search.lib.uiowa.edu/permalink/f/9i2ftm/01IOWA_ALMA21843256430002771

Hitler’s American Gamble: Pearl Harbor and Germany’s March to Global War

A riveting account of the five most crucial days in twentieth-century diplomatic history: from Pearl Harbor to Hitler’s declaration of war on the United States

By early December 1941, war had changed much of the world beyond recognition. Nazi Germany occupied most of the European continent, while in Asia, the Second Sino-Japanese War had turned China into a battleground. But these conflicts were not yet inextricably linked—and the United States remained at peace.

Hitler’s American Gamble recounts the five days that upended everything: December 7 to 11. Tracing developments in real time and backed by deep archival research, historians Brendan Simms and Charlie Laderman show how Hitler’s intervention was not the inexplicable decision of a man so bloodthirsty that he forgot all strategy, but a calculated risk that can only be understood in a truly global context. This book reveals how December 11, not Pearl Harbor, was the real watershed that created a world war and transformed international history.

https://search.lib.uiowa.edu/permalink/f/9i2ftm/01IOWA_ALMA21842751010002771

The Story Paradox: How Our Love of Storytelling Builds Societies and Tears them Down

Storytelling, a tradition that built human civilization, may soon destroy it

Humans are storytelling animals. Stories are what make our societies possible. Countless books celebrate their virtues. But Jonathan Gottschall, an expert on the science of stories, argues that there is a dark side to storytelling we can no longer ignore. Storytelling, the very tradition that built human civilization, may be the thing that destroys it.

In The Story Paradox, Gottschall explores how a broad consortium of psychologists, communications specialists, neuroscientists, and literary quants are using the scientific method to study how stories affect our brains. The results challenge the idea that storytelling is an obvious force for good in human life. Yes, storytelling can bind groups together, but it is also the main force dragging people apart. And it’s the best method we’ve ever devised for manipulating each other by circumventing rational thought. Behind all civilization’s greatest ills—environmental destruction, runaway demagogues, warfare—you will always find the same master factor: a mind-disordering story.

Gottschall argues that societies succeed or fail depending on how they manage these tensions. And it has only become harder, as new technologies that amplify the effects of disinformation campaigns, conspiracy theories, and fake news make separating fact from fiction nearly impossible.

With clarity and conviction, Gottschall reveals why our biggest asset has become our greatest threat, and what, if anything, can be done. It is a call to stop asking, “How we can change the world through stories?” and start asking, “How can we save the world from stories?”

https://search.lib.uiowa.edu/permalink/f/9i2ftm/01IOWA_ALMA21842584980002771

The World Before Us: The New Science Behind Our Human Origins

A fascinating investigation of the origin of humans based on incredible new discoveries and advanced scientific technology

Fifty thousand years ago, Homo sapiens was not the only species of humans in the world. There were also Neanderthals in what is now Europe, the Near East, and parts of Eurasia; Hobbits (H. floresiensis) on the island of Flores in Indonesia; Denisovans in Siberia and eastern Eurasia; and H. luzonensis in the Philippines. Tom Higham investigates what we know about these other human species and explores what can be learned from the genetic links between them and us. He also looks at whether H. erectus may have survived into the period when our ancestors first moved into Southeast Asia.

Filled with thrilling tales of recent scientific discoveries, this book offers an engaging synopsis of our current understanding of human origins and raises new and interesting possibilities—particularly concerning what contact, if any, these other species might have had with us prior to their extinction.

https://search.lib.uiowa.edu/permalink/f/9i2ftm/01IOWA_ALMA21843257240002771

A Natural History of the Future: What the Laws of Biology Tell Us about the Destiny of the Human Species

“An arresting vision of this relentless natural world”—New York Times Book Review

A leading ecologist argues that if humankind is to survive on a fragile planet, we must understand and obey its iron laws

Our species has amassed unprecedented knowledge of nature, which we have tried to use to seize control of life and bend the planet to our will. In A Natural History of the Future, biologist Rob Dunn argues that such efforts are futile. We may see ourselves as life’s overlords, but we are instead at its mercy. In the evolution of antibiotic resistance, the power of natural selection to create biodiversity, and even the surprising life of the London Underground, Dunn finds laws of life that no human activity can annul. When we create artificial islands of crops, dump toxic waste, or build communities, we provide new materials for old laws to shape. Life’s future flourishing is not in question. Ours is.

As ambitious as Edward Wilson’s Sociobiology and as timely as Elizabeth Kolbert’s The Sixth Extinction, A Natural History of the Future sets a new standard for understanding the diversity and destiny of life itself.

https://search.lib.uiowa.edu/permalink/f/9i2ftm/01IOWA_ALMA21843256340002771