Week's Best Deals

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Guarded Gate by Daniel Okrent

Pulitzer Prize finalist Okrent (Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition) takes look at a particularly ugly period in American history. In the early 1920s, with some scientists arguing that biological laws proved certain nationalities to be inherently inferior, America shamefully restricted immigration from eastern and southern Europe, keeping out Jews, Italians, and other suspect groups for decades. One of the narrative's great strengths is the author's inclusion of dozens of minibiographies illuminating the backgrounds of the racist politicians and the promoters of phony eugenics "research." Available in hardcover, $9.98.

House of Broken Angels by Luis Alberto Urrea

House of Broken Angels is a story of the De La Cruzes, a family in San Diego who gather together for the birthday of their beloved and ailing patriarch Miguel Angel de La Cruz. But as the party approaches, his mother, nearly one hundred, dies, transforming the weekend into a farewell doubleheader. Over a weekend, the revelers mingle among the palm trees and cacti, celebrating the lives of Big Angel and his mother, and recounting the many inspiring tales that have passed into family lore, the acts both ordinary and heroic that brought these citizens to a fraught and sublime country and allowed them to flourish in the land they have come to call home. Available in hardcover, $8.98.

Age of Disenchantments by Aaron Shulman

In this absorbing and atmospheric historical narrative, journalist Aaron Shulman takes us deeply into the circumstances surrounding the Spanish Civil War through the lives, loves, and poetry of the Paneros, Spain’s most compelling and eccentric family, whose lives intersected memorably with many of the most storied figures in the art, literature, and politics of the time—from Neruda to Salvador Dalí, from Ava Gardner to Pablo Picasso to Roberto Bolaño. Available in hardcover, $11.98.