Detailed Event List
Garrett Neiman — Rich White Men: What It Takes to Uproot the Old Boys' Club and Transform America — at Conn Ave
It's no secret that our country has a serious problem when it comes to wealth inequality - and systemic racism and patriarchy have only exacerbated the advantages of wealthy white men. Over the past three decades, America's richest white men have only become richer, while those suffering in poverty have only gotten poorer. The divide may seem too great to bridge, but Rich White Men exposes the hidden and insidious ways that white male elites inherit, increase, and preserve their status--and, in this book, we get clear on how to uproot their monopoly on power. Serial nonprofit entrepreneur Garrett Neiman's day job is to get rich white men to donate money to good causes and organizations. In Rich White Men, Neiman brings us into corner offices of billionaires and the boardrooms of Goldman Sachs, McKinsey, Stanford, Harvard, and other enclaves of silver-spooned white men to illuminate the role of rich white men in the world and how they justify inequality. He uses the analogy of compound interest to illustrate how the advantages wealthy white men inherit give them a leg up at key moments in their lives, gilding their trajectories and shutting others out. Through this rare, insider access, readers will discover new ways to persuade the elite toward progressive solutions. A hopeful polemic, the book sheds light on dark truths about inequality and the people invested in preserving it while also providing a blueprint for how America can become an equitable democracy. Rich White Men reveals that to realize America's founding aspiration of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, we must recognize, dismantle, and transform our current system into one that liberates us all - including this nation's morally and spiritually impoverished wealthy white men.
Garrett Neiman (he/him) is a serial nonprofit entrepreneur with a focus on social justice. Neiman was the founding CEO of CollegeSpring, a national college access nonprofit that was recognized by the Obama White House. He was also a co-creator of Liberation Ventures, a philanthropic fund focused on building power toward federal reparations. Neiman has a BA in Economics from Stanford, an MBA from Harvard Business School, and a Masters in Public Policy from Harvard Kennedy School. Currently, he serves as a Senior Fellow at Prosperity Now and a Practitioner in Residence at the Stanford Center on Poverty and Inequality. He lives in Boston, Massachusetts.
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Jeff Benedict — LeBron - with Timothy Bella — at Conn Ave
LeBron James is the greatest basketball player of the twenty-first century, and he's in the conversation with Michael Jordan as the greatest of all time. The reigning king of the game and the first active NBA player to become a billionaire, LeBron wears the crown like he was born with it. Yet his ascent has been anything but effortless and predetermined-- the truth is vastly more interesting than that.
LeBron tells the full, riveting saga of how a child adrift found the will to become a titan. Jeff Benedict, the most celebrated sports biographer of our time, paints a vivid picture of LeBron's epic origin story, showing the gradual rise of a star who, surrounded by a tight-knit group of teenage friends and adult mentors, accelerated into a speeding comet during high school. Today LeBron produces Hollywood films and television shows, has a social media presence that includes more than one hundred million followers, engages in political activism, takes outspoken stances on racism and social injustice, and transforms lives through his visionary philanthropy. He went from a lost boy in Akron to a beloved hero who uses his fortune to educate underprivileged children and lift up needy families--and brought home Cleveland's first NBA championship.
To capture LeBron's extraordinary life, Benedict conducted hundreds of interviews with the people who were involved with LeBron at different stages of his life. He also obtained thousands of pages of primary source documents and mined hundreds of hours of video footage. Destined to be the authoritative account of LeBron's life, LeBron is a gripping, inspiring, and unprecedented portrait of one of the world's most captivating figures.
Jeff Benedict is the bestselling author of seventeen non-fiction books and a former features writer for Sports Illustrated and the Los Angeles Times. He’s also a film and television producer. Benedict co-wrote the #1 New York Times bestselling biography of Tiger Woods. The book was the basis of HBO's Emmy-winning documentary “Tiger,” which Benedict executive produced. He is also executive producing "The Dynasty," the forthcoming 10-part documentary series on Apple TV+. The series is based on Benedict's national bestseller The Dynasty, the definitive inside story of the New England Patriots during the Tom Brady-Bill Belichick-Robert Kraft era. Benedict's critically acclaimed book Poisoned is the basis of a forthcoming Netflix documentary, which he produced. And his legal thriller Little Pink House was adapted into a motion picture starring Catherine Keener and Jeanne Tripplehorn. Benedict also wrote Hall of Fame quarterback Steve Young’s New York Times bestselling autobiography QB, which was the basis of an NFL Films documentary.
Benedict will be in conversation with Timothy Bella. Bella is a staff writer and editor for the General Assignment team, focusing on national news. He was previously the deputy editor of Morning Mix. His work has appeared in outlets such as Esquire, the Atlantic, New York magazine and the Undefeated. He is the author of Barkley: A Biography.
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Polly Stewart — The Good Ones - with Angie Kim — at Conn Ave
The last time Nicola Bennett saw Lauren Ballard she was scraping a key along the side of a new cherry-red Chevy Silverado. That was the night before her friend mysteriously vanished from her home, leaving a bloodstained washcloth and signs of a struggle--as well as her grieving husband and young daughter--behind.
Now, nearly twenty years later, Nicola, newly unemployed and still haunted by the disappearance of her childhood friend, is returning to her Appalachian hometown. For Nicola, Tyndall County has remained frozen in time. Everywhere she turns she's reminded of Lauren. Yet shockingly, her former friends and neighbors have all moved on. Drawn to stories of missing girls, Nicola obsessively searches the internet, hoping to discover a clue to Lauren's ultimate fate.
Driven by a desperate need to know what happened to her friend, Nicola takes a job in her hometown, determined to uncover any bit of information, any small clue, that can help. Deep down she knows the answers are tucked in the hollows and valleys of this small Blue Ridge county. As secrets come to light and the truth begins to unravel, will Nicola finally find release and break free of the past--or lose herself completely to unanswered questions from her adolescence?
The Good Ones is Polly Stewart’s debut thriller. She was born and raised in the Blue Ridge, where she still lives. Her short fiction has appeared in Best New American Voices and Best American Mystery Stories, and in Epoch, Alaska Quarterly Review, as well as other journals. She writes a new monthly interview column for Crime Reads called The Backlist, and her nonfiction has appeared in the New York Times and Poets & Writers, among other publications.
Stewart will be in conversation with Angie Kim. Kim is the debut author of the international bestseller and Edgar winner Miracle Creek, named a "Best Book of the Year" by Time, The Washington Post, Kirkus, and The Today Show, among others. Her novel also won the ITW Thriller Award, the Strand Critics’ Award, and the Pinckley Prize, and is being translated into 20 languages. A Korean immigrant, former editor of the Harvard Law Review, and one of Variety Magazine’s inaugural “10 Storytellers to Watch,” Kim has written for Vogue, The New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post, Glamour, and numerous literary journals. She lives in Northern Virginia with her husband and three sons. Visit her website at www.angiekimbooks.com.
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Jennifer Pahlka — Recoding America: Why Government Is Failing in the Digital Age and How We Can Do Better — at Conn Ave
Just when we most need our government to work--to decarbonize our infrastructure and economy, to help the vulnerable through a pandemic, to defend ourselves against global threats--it is faltering. Government at all levels has limped into the digital age, offering online services that can feel even more cumbersome than the paperwork that preceded them and widening the gap between the policy outcomes we intend and what we get.
But it's not more money or more tech we need. Government is hamstrung by a rigid, industrial-era culture, in which elites dictate policy from on high, disconnected from and too often disdainful of the details of implementation. Lofty goals morph unrecognizably as they cascade through a complex hierarchy. But there is an approach taking hold that keeps pace with today's world and reclaims government for the people it is supposed to serve. Jennifer Pahlka shows why we must stop trying to move the government we have today onto new technology and instead consider what it would mean to truly recode American government.
Jennifer Pahlka is the founder of Code for America, a nonprofit that works to bring the values of the digital era to the public sector, and the former Deputy Chief Technology Officer of the United States. While at the Obama White House, she founded the United States Digital Service, an elite corps of technologists devoted to improving government operations. Pahlka is the winner of a Skoll Award for Social Entrepreneurship, a David Packard Award, and the Oxford Internet Institute’s Technology and Society Award, and has been selected by Wired magazine as one of the people who have most shaped technology and society in the past twenty-five years.
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Lorrie Moore — I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home — at Conn Ave
From "one of the most acute and lasting writers of her generation" (Caryn James; The New York Times)--a ghost story set in the nineteenth and twenty-first centuries, an elegiac consideration of grief, devotion (filial and romantic), and the vanishing and persistence of all things--seen and unseen. A teacher visiting his dying brother in the Bronx. A mysterious journal from the nineteenth century stolen from a boarding house. A therapy clown and an assassin, both presumed dead, but perhaps not dead at all . . . With her distinctive, irresistible wordplay and singular wry humor and wisdom, Lorrie Moore has given us a magic box of longing and surprise as she writes about love and rebirth and the pull towards life. Bold, meditative, theatrical, this new novel is an inventive, poetic portrait of lovers and siblings as it questions the stories we have been told which may or may not be true. I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home takes us through a trap door, into a windswept, imagined journey to the tragic-comic landscape that is, unmistakably, the world of Lorrie Moore.
Lorrie Moore is the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor of English at Vanderbilt University. She is the recipient of a Lannan Foundation Fellowship, as well as the PEN/Malamud Award and the Rea Award for her achievement in the short story. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She lives in Nashville, Tennessee.
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Wesley Lowery — American Whitelash: A Changing Nation and the Cost of Progress — at Conn Ave
In 2008, Barack Obama's historic victory was heralded as a turning point for the country. And so it would be--just not in the way that most Americans hoped. The election of the nation's first Black president fanned long-burning embers of white supremacy, igniting a new and frightening phase in a historical American cycle of racial progress and white backlash. In American Whitelash, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and best-selling author Wesley Lowery charts the return of this blood-stained trend, showing how the forces of white power retaliated against Obama's victory--and both profited from, and helped to propel, the rise of Donald Trump. Interweaving deep historical analysis with gripping firsthand reporting on both victims and perpetrators of violence, Lowery uncovers how this vicious cycle is carrying us into ever more perilous territory, how the federal government has failed to intervene, and how we still might find a route of escape.
Wesley Lowery is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and a national correspondent for CBS News and 60 Minutes. Previously, he was a national correspondent for the Washington Post and the paper's lead reporter covering race, justice, law enforcement, and the Black Lives Matter protest movement. His work has also appeared in the Boston Globe, the Los Angeles Times, the Wall Street Journal, and Sports Illustrated. His first book, the New York Times bestseller They Can't Kill Us All, was awarded the 2017 Christopher Isherwood prize for Autobiographical Prose by the Los Angeles Times Book Prizes. Lowery, who also has been named one of Forbes's "30 Under 30" and an Emerging Journalist of the Year by the National Association of Black Journalists, lives in the Washington, DC area.
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C.W. Goodyear — President Garfield: From Radical to Unifier — at Conn Ave
In this magisterial biography, C.W. Goodyear charts the life and times of one of the most remarkable Americans ever to win the Presidency. Progressive firebrand and conservative compromiser; Union war hero and founder of the first Department of Education; Supreme Court attorney and abolitionist preacher; mathematician and canalman; crooked election-fixer and clean-government champion; Congressional chieftain and gentleman-farmer; the last president to be born in a log cabin; the second to be assassinated. James Abram Garfield was all these things and more. Over nearly two decades in Congress during a polarized era--Reconstruction and the Gilded Age--Garfield served as a peacemaker in a Republican Party and America defined by divisions. He was elected President to overcome them. He was killed while trying to do so. President Garfield is American history at its finest. It is about an impoverished boy working his way from the frontier to the Presidency; a progressive statesman, trying to raise a more righteous, peaceful Republic out of the ashes of civil war; the tragically imperfect course of that reformation, and the man himself; a martyr-President, whose death succeeded in nudging the country back to cleaner, calmer politics.
C.W. Goodyear is a bestselling author and historian based in Washington, DC. He was born in New Orleans, Louisiana, and grew up abroad before graduating from Yale University.
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Sujata Massey — The Mistress of Bhatia House (A Perveen Mistry Novel #4) - with Louis Bayard — at Conn Ave
India, 1922: Perveen Mistry is the only female lawyer in Bombay, a city where child mortality is high, birth control is unavailable and very few women have ever seen a doctor.
Perveen is attending a lavish fundraiser for a new women's hospital specializing in maternal health issues when she witnesses an accident. The grandson of an influential Gujarati businessman catches fire--but a servant, his young ayah, Sunanda, rushes to save him, selflessly putting herself in harm's way. Later, Perveen learns that Sunanda, who's still ailing from her burns, has been arrested on trumped-up charges made by a man who doesn't seem to exist.
Perveen cannot stand by while Sunanda languishes in jail with no hope of justice. She takes Sunanda as a client, even inviting her to live at the Mistry home in Bombay's Dadar Parsi colony. But the joint family household is already full of tension. Perveen's father worries about their law firm taking so much personal responsibility for a client, and her brother and sister-in-law are struggling to cope with their new baby. Perveen herself is going through personal turmoil as she navigates a taboo relationship with a handsome former civil service officer.
When the hospital's chief donor dies suddenly, Miriam Penkar, a Jewish-Indian obstetrician, and Sunanda become suspects. Perveen's original case spirals into a complex investigation taking her into the Gujarati strongholds of Kalbadevi and Ghatkopar, and up the coast to Juhu Beach, where a decadent nawab lives with his Australian trophy wife. Then a second fire erupts, and Perveen realizes how much is at stake. Has someone powerful framed Sunanda to cover up another crime? Will Perveen be able to prove Sunanda's innocence without endangering her own family?
Sujata Massey was born in England to parents from India and Germany, grew up in St. Paul, Minnesota, and lives in Baltimore, Maryland. She was a features reporter for the Baltimore Evening Sun before becoming a full-time novelist. The first Perveen Mistry novel, The Widows of Malabar Hill, was an international bestseller and won the Agatha, Macavity, and Mary Higgins Clark Awards. Visit her website at sujatamassey.com.
In the words of the New York Times, Louis Bayard “reinvigorates historical fiction,” rendering the past “as if he’d witnessed it firsthand.” His acclaimed novels include The Pale Blue Eye, adapted into the global #1 Netflix release starring Christian Bale, Jackie & Me, ranked by the Washington Post as one of the top novels of 2022, the national bestseller Courting Mr. Lincoln, Roosevelt's Beast, The School of Night, The Black Tower, and Mr. Timothy, as well as the highly praised young-adult novel, Lucky Strikes. A New York Times Notable author, he has been nominated for both the Edgar and Dagger awards, and his story, “Banana Triangle Six,” was chosen for The Best American Mystery Stories. His reviews and articles have appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times and Salon. An instructor at George Washington University, he is the chair of the PEN/Faulkner Awards and was the author of the popular Downton Abbey recaps for the New York Times. His work has been translated into more than a dozen languages.
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Richard D. Kahlenberg — Excluded: How Snob Zoning, NIMBYism, and Class Bias Build the Walls We Don't See — at Conn Ave
The last, acceptable form of prejudice in America is based on class and executed through state-sponsored economic discrimination, which is hard to see because it is much more subtle than raw racism.
While the American meritocracy officially denounces prejudice based on race and gender, it has spawned a new form of bias against those with less education and income. Millions of working-class Americans have their opportunity blocked by exclusionary snob zoning. These government policies make housing unaffordable, frustrate the goals of the civil rights movement, and lock in inequality in our urban and suburban landscapes.
Through moving accounts of families excluded from economic and social opportunity as they are hemmed in through "new redlining" that limits the type of housing that can be built, Richard Kahlenberg vividly illustrates why America has a housing crisis. He also illustrates why economic segregation matters since where you live affects access to transportation, employment opportunities, decent health care, and good schools. He shows that housing choice has been socially engineered to the benefit of the affluent, and, that astonishingly the most restrictive zoning is found in politically liberal cities where racial views are more progressive .
Despite this there is hope. Kahlenberg tells the inspiring stories of growing number of local and national movements working to tear down the walls that inflicts so much damage on the lives of millions of Americans.
Richard D. Kahlenberg is a researcher and writer on education and housing policy. He is known as "the intellectual father of the economic integration movement" in K-12 schooling and "the nation's chief proponent of class-based affirmative action in higher education admissions." His articles have been published in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, the New Republic, the Atlantic and he has appeared on ABC, CBS, CNN, FOX, C-SPAN, MSNBC, PBS and NPR. A graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Law, he has been a Senior Fellow at The Century Foundation, a Fellow at the Center for National Policy, a visiting associate professor of constitutional law at George Washington University, and a legislative assistant to Senator Charles S. Robb (D-VA).
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Samuel G. Freedman — Into the Bright Sunshine: Young Hubert Humphrey and the Fight for Civil Rights - with Julia Sweig — at Conn Ave
(This book cannot be returned.)
As Samuel G. Freedman points out, Hubert Humphrey's public life began and ended in disgrace. Humphrey started out as an outlier in the post-war Democratic Party and ended the same--as the man who lost his bearings during the Vietnam War and then lost the presidency to Richard Nixon. Freedman therefore has not written a hagiography of Humphrey. Instead, he uses the stock characterization of Humphrey to illuminate his most triumphant early career, when his early efforts to promote racial justice not only transformed the Democratic Party (with its hardcore Dixiecrat, anti-integrationist element) but the nation as well. Humphrey was "woke" before anyone else in his party and he dragged them into the light. As Freedman shows, Humphrey's 1948 speech to the Democratic Convention electrified the nation. At the age of 37--younger than Beto O'Rourke, Andrew Gillum, and Stacey Abrams are today--he picked up the mantle of civil rights and carried it forward. Here is the Humphrey few know, and,
after reading Freedman's book, no one will forget.
Samuel G. Freedman is an award-winning author, journalist, and educator. He has been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award and has won the National Jewish Book Award and the New York Public Library’s Helen Bernstein Award. His columns for the New York Times about education and religion have received national prizes. He is a professor at Columbia University, and has been named the nation’s Outstanding Journalism Educator by the Society of Professional Journalists.
Freedman will be in conversation with Julia Sweig. Sweig is the author of the highly acclaimed New York Times instant bestseller, Lady Bird Johnson: Hiding in Plain Sight, a 2022 finalist for the PEN America Literary Award in biography. Sweig is the creator, host, and executive producer of the podcast In Plain Sight, a co-production of Best Case Studios and ABC News Studios. She also is the executive producer of The Lady Bird Diaries, a feature-length documentary film directed by award-winning filmmaker Dawn Porter, which is based on her book and podcast. She is currently writing a biography of Dr. Mathilde Krim, a boundary breaking scientist and unsung warrior, and hero, of the AIDS crisis. Sweig’s writing has appeared in the New York Times, The Atlantic, the Washington Post, Financial Times, Los Angeles Times, Foreign Affairs, the Nation, and in Brazil’s Folha de São Paulo where she was a columnist for three years. She is also award-winning author of books on Cuba, Latin America, and American foreign policy. She served as senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations for fifteen years and concurrently led the Aspen Institute’s congressional seminar on Latin America for ten years. She holds a doctorate and master’s degree from the Johns Hopkins University.
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Deborah Kalb — Off to Join the Circus — at Conn Ave
Off to Join the Circus focuses on an overly enmeshed, neurotic Jewish family in the Washington, D.C., area, and what happens when a relative returns after 64 years.
Adele Pinsky ran away as a teenager back in 1954, perhaps to join a circus. The repercussions from her departure reverberated down the generations, affecting her younger brother, Howard, now a 75-year-old retired lawyer; his educator wife, Marilyn; their three daughters; and their two teenaged grandsons. Adele's reappearance in 2018, at a moment when the family is preparing for the younger grandson's bar mitzvah and the birth of the middle daughter's baby, upends the Pinsky family's assumptions about one another in hilarious and poignant ways.
Deborah Kalb is the author of the novel Off to Join the Circus, her debut novel for adults. She has also written fiction for kids and nonfiction for adults, and she's the host of the blog Book Q&As with Deborah Kalb, where she interviews an eclectic range of authors. A former longtime D.C.-based journalist covering Congress and politics, she lives in the Washington, D.C., area.
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Laura Lippman — Prom Mom — at Conn Ave
Amber Glass has spent her entire adult life putting as much distance as possible between her and her hometown of Baltimore, where she fears she will forever be known as "Prom Mom"--the girl who allegedly killed her baby on the night of the prom after her date, Joe Simpson, abandoned her to pursue the girl he really liked. But when circumstances bring Amber back to the city, she realizes she can have a second chance--as long as she stays away from Joe, now a successful commercial real estate developer, married to a plastic surgeon, Meredith, to whom he is devoted.
The problem is, Amber can't stay away from Joe. And Joe finds that it's increasingly hard for him to ignore Amber, if only because she remembers the boy he was and the man he said he was going to be. Against the surreal backdrop of 2020 and early 2021, the two are slowly drawn to each other and eventually cross the line they've been trying not to cross.
And then Joe asks Amber to help him do the unthinkable...
Since Laura Lippman's debut in 1997, she has been recognized as a distinctive voice in mystery fiction and named one of the "essential" crime writers of the last 100 years. Her books have won most of the major awards in her field and been translated into more than twenty languages. She lives in Baltimore and New Orleans with her daughter.
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Richard Russo — Somebody's Fool — at Conn Ave
Ten years after the death of the magnetic Donald "Sully" Sullivan, the town of North Bath is going through a major transition as it is annexed by its much wealthier neighbor, Schuyler Springs. Peter, Sully's son, is still grappling with his father's tremendous legacy as well as his relationship to his own son, Thomas, wondering if he has been all that different a father than Sully was to him.
Meanwhile, the towns' newly consolidated police department falls into the hands of Charice Bond, after the resignation of Doug Raymer, the former North Bath police chief and Charice's ex-lover. When a decomposing body turns up in the abandoned hotel situated between the two towns, Charice and Raymer are drawn together again and forced to address their complicated attraction to one another. Across town, Ruth, Sully's married ex-lover, and her daughter Janey struggle to understand Janey's daughter, Tina, and her growing obsession with Peter's other son, Will. Amidst the turmoil, the town's residents speculate on the identity of the unidentified body, and wonder who among their number could have disappeared unnoticed.
Infused with all the wry humor and shrewd observations that Russo is known for, Somebody's Fool is another classic from a modern master.
Richard Russo is the author of nine novels, most recently Chances Are . . ., Everybody's Fool and That Old Cape Magic; two collections of stories; and the memoir Elsewhere. In 2002 he received the Pulitzer Prize for Empire Falls, which, like Nobody's Fool, was adapted into a multiple-award-winning miniseries; in 2017, he received France's Grand Prix de Littérature Américaine. He lives in Portland, Maine.
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Sarah Pekkanen — Gone Tonight — at Conn Ave
Catherine Sterling thinks she knows her mother. Ruth Sterling is quiet, hardworking, and lives for her daughter. All her life, it's been just the two of them against the world. But now, Catherine is ready to spread her wings, move from home, and begin a new career. And Ruth Sterling will do anything to prevent that from happening.
Ruth Sterling thinks she knows her daughter. Catherine would never rebel, would never question anything about her mother's past or background. But when Ruth's desperate quest to keep her daughter by her side begins to reveal cracks in Ruth's carefully-constructed world, both mother and daughter begin a dance of deception.
No one can know Ruth's history. There is a reason why Ruth kept them moving every few years, and why she was ready--in a moment's notice--to be gone in the night.
But danger is closing in. Is it coming from the outside, from Ruth's past? Is Ruth reaching a breaking point? Or is the danger coming from the darkness that may live in Catherine, herself?
Propulsive, brilliant, layered, and provocative, Gone Tonight is a thriller that showcases Sarah Pekkanen at the top of her game.
Sarah Pekkanen is the #1 New York Times bestselling co-author of several novels of suspense including An Anonymous Girl and The Wife Between Us, and the internationally and USA Today bestselling author of over half a dozen solo novels. A former investigative journalist and award-winning feature writer, her work has been published in numerous national magazines and newspapers. She lives just outside of Washington, D.C. with her family.
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Christopher Miller — The War Came To Us: Life and Death in Ukraine — at Conn Ave
When President Putin ordered Russian troops to invade Ukraine, he unleashed a terror which struck at the very heart of Europe and broke the world order that had been in place since the fall of the Soviet Union.
Financial Times reporter Christopher Miller has been embedded in Ukraine for 13 years and is one of the few journalists who knows Ukraine inside out, who was at the frontline in Crimea and who reported from bombed out Mariupol.
This book takes the reader from the coal-dusted, sunflower-covered steppe of the Donbas to the heart of the Euromaidan revolution camp in Kyiv; from the Black Sea shores of Crimea where Russian troops stealthily annexed Ukraine's peninsula to the bloody battlefields where warlords ruled with iron fists; to the destruction and terror wrought by Russian bombs in Bucha, Kharkiv, Mariupol, and beyond.
This is the story of modern Ukraine and its transformation, as told through the lives of Ukrainians, their fears and struggles. It is Ukraine in all its glory: vast, weird, exhilarating, defiant, resilient, trying to escape the long shadow of its former imperial ruler while fighting to build a new future.
Christopher Miller is a writer and journalist based in Kyiv, Ukraine and Brooklyn, New York. Since 2022 he has been lead correspondent in Ukraine for the Financial Times. He was previously a world and national security reporter for POLITICO and a Ukraine correspondent for BuzzFeed News, where he covered the Euromaidan revolution and the invasion of Crimea. Before that he spent five years as a correspondent for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty in Kyiv. He has lived and worked in Ukraine for 13 years.
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Leah Redmond Chang — Young Queens: Three Renaissance Women and the Price of Power — at Conn Ave
Orphaned from infancy, Catherine de' Medici endured a tumultuous childhood. Married to the French king, she was widowed by forty, only to become the power behind the French throne during a period of intense civil strife. In 1546, Catherine gave birth to a daughter, Elisabeth de Valois, who would become Queen of Spain. Two years later, Catherine welcomed to her nursery the beguiling young Mary Queen of Scots, who would later become her daughter-in-law.
Together, Catherine, Elisabeth, and Mary lived through the sea changes that transformed sixteenth-century Europe, a time of expanding empires, religious discord, and populist revolt, as concepts of nationhood began to emerge and ideas of sovereignty inched closer to absolutism. They would learn that to rule as a queen was to wage a constant war against the deeply entrenched misogyny of their time.
Following the intertwined stories of the three women from girlhood through young adulthood, Leah Redmond Chang's Young Queens paints a picture of a world in which a woman could wield power at the highest level yet remain at the mercy of the state, her body serving as the currency of empire and dynasty, sacrificed to the will of husband, family, kingdom.
Leah Redmond Chang is a former Associate Professor of French Literature and Culture at The George Washington University. Her writing draws on her extensive experience as a researcher in the archives and in rare book libraries. Her books include Into Print: The Invention of Female Authorship in Early Modern France, which focused on women and book culture in the sixteenth century, and (with Katherine Kong) Portraits of the Queen Mother, about the many public faces of Catherine de Medici. With her husband and three children, she lives and writes in Washington D.C. and London U.K.
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Drew Gilpin Faust — Necessary Trouble: Growing Up at Midcentury — at Conn Ave
To grow up in the 1950s was to enter a world of polarized national alliances, nuclear threat, and destabilized social hierarchies. Two world wars and the depression that connected them had unleashed a torrent of expectations and dissatisfactions--not only in global affairs but in American society and Americans' lives.
To be a privileged white girl in conservative, segregated Virginia was to be expected to adopt a willful blindness to the inequities of race and the constraints of gender. For young Drew Gilpin Faust, the acceptance of both female subordination and racial privilege proved intolerable and galvanizing. Urged to become "well adjusted" and to fill the role of a poised young lady that her upbringing imposed, she found resistance was the necessary price of survival. During the 1960s, through her love of learning and her active engagement in the civil rights, student, and antiwar movements, Faust forged a path of her own--one that would eventually lead her to become a historian of the very conflicts that were instrumental in shaping the world she grew up in.
Culminating in the upheavals of 1968, Necessary Trouble captures a time of rapid change and fierce reaction in one young woman's life, tracing the transformations and aftershocks that we continue to grapple with today.
Drew Gilpin Faust is the Arthur Kingsley Porter University Professor at Harvard University. She was Dean of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study from 2001 to 2007, and after twenty-five years on the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania, she served as Harvard's president from 2007 to 2018. Faust is the author of several previous books, including This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War, winner of the Bancroft Prize and a finalist for the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize; and Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War, which won the Francis Parkman Prize. She and her husband live in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
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Nelson Lichtenstein — A Fabulous Failure: The Clinton Presidency and the Transformation of American Capitalism — at Conn Ave
A Fabulous Failure: The Clinton Presidency and the Transformation of American Capitalism (Hardcover)
When Bill Clinton was elected president in 1992, he ended twelve years of Republican rule and seemed poised to enact a progressive transformation of the US economy, touching everything from health care to trade to labor relations. Yet by the time he left office, the nation's economic and social policies had instead lurched dramatically rightward, exacerbating the inequalities so troubling in our own time. This book reveals why Clinton's expansive agenda was a fabulous failure, and why its demise still haunts us today.
Nelson Lichtenstein and Judith Stein show how the administration's progressive reformers--people like Robert Reich, Ira Magaziner, Laura Tyson, and Joseph Stiglitz--were stymied by a new world of global capitalism that heightened Wall Street influence, undermined domestic manufacturing, and eviscerated the labor movement. Robert Rubin, Larry Summers, and Al Gore proved champions of this financialized world. Meanwhile, Clinton divided his own party when he relied on Republican votes to overhaul welfare, liberalize trade, and deregulate the banking and telecommunications industries. Even the economic boom Clinton ushered in--which tamed unemployment and sent the stock market soaring in what Alan Blinder and Janet Yellen termed a "fabulous decade"--ended with a series of exploding asset bubbles that his neoliberal economic advisors neither foresaw nor prevented.
A Fabulous Failure is a study of ideas in action, some powerfully persuasive, others illusionary and self-defeating. It explains why and how the Clinton presidency's progressive statecraft floundered in a world where the labor movement was weak, civil rights forces quiescent, and corporate America ever more powerful.
Nelson Lichtenstein is Research Professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His books include State of the Union: A Century of American Labor (Princeton).
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Lauren Groff — The Vaster Wilds — at Conn Ave
(This book cannot be returned.)
A servant girl escapes from a colonial settlement in the wilderness. She carries nothing with her but her wits, a few possessions, and the spark of god that burns hot within her. What she finds in this terra incognita is beyond the limits of her imagination and will bend her belief in everything that her own civilization has taught her.
Lauren Groff's new novel is at once a thrilling adventure story and a penetrating fable about trying to find a new way of living in a world succumbing to the churn of colonialism. The Vaster Wilds is a work of raw and prophetic power that tells the story of America in miniature, through one girl at a hinge point in history, to ask how--and if--we can adapt quickly enough to save ourselves.
Lauren Groff is a three-time National Book Award finalist and the New York Times bestselling author of the novels The Monsters of Templeton, Arcadia, Fates and Furies and Matrix, and the short story collections Delicate Edible Birds and Florida. She has won the Story Prize and has been a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Groff’s work regularly appears in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and elsewhere, and she was named one of Granta’s 2017 Best Young American Novelists.
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Dr. Bettina Love — Punished for Dreaming: How School Reform Harms Black Children and How We Heal — at Conn Ave
In Punished for Dreaming Dr. Bettina Love argues forcefully that Reagan's presidency ushered in a War on Black Children, pathologizing and penalizing them in concert with the War on Drugs. New policies punished schools with policing, closure, and loss of funding in the name of reform, as white savior, egalitarian efforts increasingly allowed private interests to infiltrate the system. These changes implicated children of color, and Black children in particular, as low performing, making it all too easy to turn a blind eye to their disproportionate conviction and incarceration. Today, there is little national conversation about a structural overhaul of American schools; cosmetic changes, rooted in anti-Blackness, are now passed off as justice.
It is time to put a price tag on the miseducation of Black children. In this prequel to The New Jim Crow, Dr. Love serves up a blistering account of four decades of educational reform through the lens of the people who lived it. Punished for Dreaming lays bare the devastating effect on 25 Black Americans caught in the intersection of economic gain and racist ideology. Then, with input from leading U.S. economists , Dr. Love offers a road map for repair, arguing for reparations with transformation for all children at its core.
Dr. Bettina L. Love is the William F. Russell Professor at Teachers College, Columbia University and the bestselling author of We Want To Do More Than Survive. In 2022, the Kennedy Center named Dr. Love one of the Next 50 Leaders making the world more inspired, inclusive, and compassionate. A co-founder of the Abolitionist Teaching Network (ATN), whose mission is to develop and support teachers and parents fighting injustice within their schools and communities, they have granted over $250,000 to abolitionists around the country. She is also a founding member of the Task Force that launched the program In Her Hands, distributing more than $15 million to Black women living in Georgia. In Her Hands is one of the largest guaranteed income pilot programs in the U.S. Dr. Love is a sought-after public speaker on a range of topics, including abolitionist teaching, anti-racism, Hip Hop education, Black girlhood, queer youth, educational reparations, and art-based education to foster youth civic engagement. In 2018, she was granted a resolution by Georgia's House of Representatives for her impact on the field of education.
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Adam Goodheart — The Last Island: Discovery, Defiance, and the Most Elusive Tribe on Earth - with Wil Haygood — at Conn Ave
Adam Goodheart is a historian, essayist, and journalist. His articles have appeared in National Geographic, Outside, Smithsonian, The Atlantic, and The New York Times Magazine, among others, and he is a regular columnist for The New York Times's acclaimed online Civil War series, Disunion. He lives in Washington, D.C., and on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, where he is the Hodson Trust-Griswold Director of Washington College's C. V. Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience.
Goodheart will be in conversation with Wil Haygood. Haygood is the author of Tigerland, which was a finalist for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize; Showdown, a finalist for an NAACP Image Award; In Black and White; and The Butler, which was made into a film directed by Lee Daniels. He has been a correspondent for The Washington Post and The Boston Globe, where he was a Pulitzer finalist. Haygood is a Guggenheim and National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow, and is currently Boadway Visiting Distinguished Scholar at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio.
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Alejandra Campoverdi — First Gen — at Conn Ave
To be a First and Only in America is a delicate balancing act of surviving where you come from while acting like you belong where you're going.
Alejandra Campoverdi has been a child on welfare, a White House aide to President Obama, a gang member's girlfriend, and a candidate for U.S. Congress. She's ridden on Air Force One and in G-rides. She's modeled on the pages of Maxim and had a double mastectomy. Living a life of contradictory extremes often comes with the territory when you're a "First and Only." It also comes at a price.
With candor and heart, Alejandra retraces her trajectory as a Mexican American woman raised by an immigrant single mother in Los Angeles, foregoing the tidy bullet points of her resume and shining a light on the spaces between them instead. What emerges is a moving testimony of personal struggle and triumph that shatters the one-dimensional glossy narrative we are often sold of what it takes to achieve the American Dream. Alejandra uses her own experiences to illustrate the emotional tolls First and Onlys often face that are widespread yet rarely acknowledged, providing a road to truth and healing in the process. It is a timely and revealing reflection, as social class continues to be a key determinant of career success.
Part memoir, part manifesto, First Gen is a story of generational inheritance, aspiration, and belonging - a poignant journey to "reclaim the parts of ourselves we sacrificed in order to survive."
Alejandra Campoverdi is a nationally-recognized women's health advocate, founder, producer, writer, and a former Obama White House official. She produced the PBS health documentary Inheritance, founded Latinos & BRCA in partnership with Penn Medicine's Basser Center, and served as White House Deputy Director of Hispanic Media. Alejandra holds a Master in Public Policy from Harvard's Kennedy School of Government and graduated cum laude from the Annenberg School at the University of Southern California. She currently serves on the boards of Harvard's Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics, and Public Policy, the Friends of the National Museum of the American Latino, and the California Community Foundation, and previously received a gubernatorial appointment to the Medical Board of California and was a Commissioner for First 5 California.
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Daniel Baer — The Four Tests: What It Will Take to Keep America Strong and Good — at Conn Ave
With today's fraught global and political climate, American hegemony is over and the assumption that America maintains its status as a superpower is no longer a given. The divisions between us, economic changes driven by globalization and technology, as well as climate change, pandemics, and the resurgence of authoritarianism, make it difficult to be optimistic about America's future. But what if we use this moment as an opportunity to think about what might come next, and how to build what we need to succeed in the next era?
Here, former US Ambassador Daniel Baer argues that we are living through a transition moment and lays out the four tests we must face in the next ten years that will determine whether we succeed over the next fifty. These are: scale; investment; fairness; and identity. The first two tests are familiar to strategists, but we must think about the impact of scale differently when our country's population and economy are shrinking in relative terms rather than growing. And while investment is essential to productivity growth and economic competitiveness, investment in human beings themselves matters more than it ever has.
The second pair of tests may seem unusual for a book about geopolitics--but fairness and identity are crucial to the success of the United States as a political entity. Fairness is essential to sustaining both domestic economic and political systems and to building international influence as US military dominance declines. When the Founders declared that each person was entitled not only to life and liberty but also to "the pursuit of happiness," they recognized that one of democracy's tenets was its citizens' pursuit of a meaningful life of their own choosing--a life consistent with their own understandings of themselves and their place in their community. Identity, and minimum sense of security in it, is a core element of the purpose and process of democracy, and a prerequisite for the ability to fulfil our roles as democratic citizens.
While each test poses significant challenges, the US has advantages that some of our most vexing competitors lack. The Four Tests demand changes in behavior and culture--from politicians, corporate leaders, and citizens. But if we meet these tests, then we can be confident of America's future. The question is not whether we can succeed--but whether we will.
Daniel Baer is senior vice president for policy research and director of the Europe Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He served in Governor John Hickenlooper's cabinet as executive director of the Colorado Department of Higher Education from 2018 to 2019. Under President Obama, he was US ambassador to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) from 2013 to 2017. Previously, he was a deputy assistant secretary of state for Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor from 2009 to 2013. Before his government service, Baer was an assistant professor at Georgetown's McDonough School of Business, a faculty fellow at Harvard's Safra Center for Ethics, and a project leader at the Boston Consulting Group. He has appeared on CNN, FOX, MSNBC, BBC, PBS Frontline, Al Jazeera, Sky, and The Colbert Report. His writing has appeared in The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, POLITICO, The Christian Science Monitor, and numerous other publications. He holds a doctorate in international relations from Oxford, where he was a Marshall Scholar, and a degree in social studies and African American studies from Harvard. He is married to Brian Walsh, an economist at the World Bank.
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Janet Hulstrand — A Long Way from Iowa: From the Heartland to the Heart of France — at Conn Ave
This story, about three generations of women with a passion for reading, writing, and travel, begins in 1992, in an unfinished attic in Brooklyn, as a young writer reads journals written by her grandmother as a schoolgirl nearly 100 years earlier. This sets her on a 30-year quest to uncover the hidden lives and unfulfilled dreams of her mother and grandmother. In this coming-of-middle-age memoir, the author comes to realize that the passion for travel and for literature that has fueled her life's journey is a gift that was passed down to her by the very role models she was determined to escape.
This is a story of the life-changing journey of the author as she comes to terms with the complicated relationships she had with her mother and grandmother; about her travels in the US and France; and the emotional journey she takes as she recovers from the breakup of her marriage. It is also about the journeys--geographic, intellectual, and emotional--of her mother and grandmother.
It is also a story about the tenacity and strength of even difficult family relationships; and about the role of luck, both good and bad, in shaping human lives. It is about the importance of dreams, whether or not they are entirely fulfilled. And it is about the importance of persistence in making dreams come true, as well as the kind of wisdom that allows one to quietly enjoy one's life, accepting its limitations while pushing its boundaries.
Janet Hulstrand is a writer/editor and teacher of literature who grew up in Minnesota, lived for many years in New York and Washington DC, and is currently living in a beautiful little village in the Champagne region of France. She writes frequently for BonjourParis.com, France Today, France Revisited, and for her blog, Writing from the Heart, Reading for the Road. She has taught classes for Politics and Prose since 2011, and for City University of New York study abroad programs since 1997. Her other books include Demystifying the French: How to Love Them, and Make Them Love You, and Moving On: A Practical Guide to Downsizing the Family Home.
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Burt Solomon — The Murder of Andrew Johnson (The John Hay Mysteries #3) — at Conn Ave
Andrew Johnson was called The Great Commoner, appealing to the masses and loathing the establishment and all others he deemed elitists. Once Johnson made an enemy, you became his enemy for life. He saw insults where none was intended and personal loyalty meant everything...and his devoted fans would follow him into the depths of Hell. And he was the first U.S. president to be impeached.
Sound familiar?
When a man has as many enemies as the Devil, what death could really be a natural one?
Burt Solomon is an author and journalist. A native of Baltimore and a graduate of Harvard, he is a longtime resident of Arlington, Virginia, where he and his wife raised two children who still live nearby. He covered the White House and other beats for National Journal, winning the Gerald R. Ford Prize for Distinguished Reporting on the Presidency, and is a contributing editor at The Atlantic. He has written for, among other outlets, The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the Baltimore Sun, and the Texas Observer. The Murder of Andrew Johnson is his sixth book—and the sixth to be presented at Politics and Prose. It completes a trilogy of novels that feature presidents from Lincoln to Theodore Roosevelt, all shaped by real events and characters, with John Hay as the detective at different stages of his life.
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