Archives de catégorie : History

THE REVENGE OF POWER de Moisés Naím

In his New York Times bestselling book The End of Power, Moises Naim examined power-diluting forces. Now, in THE REVENGE OF POWER, Naim turns to the trends, conditions, and behaviors that are contributing to the concentration and augmentation of power and to the clash between the forces that weaken power and those that strengthen it.

THE REVENGE OF POWER:
The Global Assault on Democracy and How to Defeat It
by Moisés Naím
St. Martin’s Press, February 2022

Moisés Naím concentrates on the three “P”s—populism, polarization, and post-truths. Using the best available data and insights taken from recent research in the social sciences, Naim reveals how the same set of strategies to consolidate power pop up again and again in places with vastly different political, economic, and social circumstances. The outcomes of these battles for power will determine if our future will be more autocratic or more democratic. These outcomes will, in turn, depend on the capacity of our democracies to survive the attacks and dirty tricks of autocratic leaders bent on weakening the checks and balances that limit their power. Naim addresses the questions at the heart of the matter: What are, in practice, those attacks and tricks? Why is power concentrating in some places while in others it is fragmenting and degrading? And the big question: what is the future of freedom?

Moisés Naím is a scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and an internationally syndicated columnist. For over a decade he was the editor-in-chief of Foreign Policy magazine and under his leadership, the magazine was re-launched, won the National Magazine award for General Excellence three times and became one of the world’s most influential publications in international affairs. Naím also served as Venezuela’s Minister of Industry and Trade and as executive director of the World Bank. He holds a PhD from MIT and lives in Washington, DC.

BEHOLD THE TRIUMPH OF VIRTUE de Jennifer Ashley Wright

BEHOLD THE TRIUMPH OF VIRTUE is a little bit You Never Forget Your First, a little bit The Knick, a dash of The Age of Innocence, and a sprinkle of The Shawshank Redemption.

BEHOLD THE TRIUMPH OF VIRTUE
by Jennifer Ashley Wright
Hachette Books, Spring 2023

This sharp, witty Gilded Age medical history stars Madame Restell, a glamorous women’s healthcare provider in Manhattan, who was a celebrity in her era and a Moira Rose-esque figure with a flair for high fashion and petty public beefs. The story of Restell’s struggle to care for New York’s unmarried women—providing abortions, birth control, and other assistance—in defiance of increasing persecution from powerful men, it ends not in outright tragedy, but with a glorious, life-affirming, bittersweet twist. That this book doubles as a history of women’s health—and the propaganda on which the “pro-life” movement was founded—makes it not just entertaining, but profoundly comforting for feminist readers. Few and far between are the books expanding our sense of hope, humor, and what’s possible for women’s rights in this politicized arena, one which augurs some real downer developments in the coming years. BEHOLD THE TRIUMPH OF VIRTUE does just that, and it does so in a sumptuous, character-driven, frequently funny package.

Jennifer Ashley Wright has written beloved pop history collections from It Ended Badly and Get Well Soon (Holt) to the forthcoming She Kills Me, an illustrated field guide to righteous women who have committed murder (Abrams Image). BEHOLD THE TRIUMPH OF VIRTUE is Wright’s first work of single narrative history.

ROCK CONCERT de Marc Myers

From renowned music journalist Marc Myers comes a lively, entertaining, wide-ranging oral history of the golden age of the rock concert based on over ninety interviews with musicians, promoters, stagehands, and others who contributed to the huge cultural phenomenon that is live rock.

ROCK CONCERT: The Oral History of a Rite of Passage
by Marc Myers
Grove Press, November 2021

Wall Street Journal contributing writer and acclaimed music journalist Marc Myers dives into the fascinating history of rock ‘n’ roll in ROCK CONCERT. Myers’s Anatomy of a Song received high praise: the New York Times Book Review raved that “each story is a pleasure to read and will deepen your listening experience.” Myers raises the bar in his enthralling new book, informed by riveting interviews with influential people from the raucous rock ‘n’ roll scene through the ages.
Decades after the rise of rock music in the 1950s, the rock concert retains its allure and its power as a unifying experience—and as an influential multi-billion-dollar industry. In ROCK CONCERT, acclaimed interviewer Marc Myers sets out to uncover the history of this compelling phenomenon, weaving together ground-breaking accounts from the people who were there.
Myers combines the tales of icons like Joan Baez, Ian Anderson, Alice Cooper, Steve Miller, Roger Waters, and Angus Young with figures such as the disc jockeys who first began playing rock on the radio, like Alan Freed in Cleveland and New York; the audio engineers that developed new technologies to accommodate ever-growing rock audiences; music journalists, like Rolling Stone’s Cameron Crowe; and the promoters who organized it all, like Michael Lang, co-founder of Woodstock, to create a rounded and vivid account of live rock’s stratospheric rise.
ROCK CONCERT provides a fascinating, immediate look at the evolution of rock ‘n’ roll through the lens of live performances — spanning from the rise of R&B in the 1950s, through the hippie gatherings of the ’60s, to the growing arena tours of the ’70s and ’80s. Elvis Presley’s gyrating hips, the British Invasion that brought the Beatles in the ’60s, the Grateful Dead’s free flowing jams, and Pink Floyd’s The Wall are just a few of the defining musical acts that drive this rich narrative. Featuring dozens of key players in the history of rock and filled with colorful anecdotes, ROCK CONCERT will speak to anyone who has experienced the transcendence of live rock.

Marc Myers is a frequent contributor to the Wall Street Journal, where he writes about rock, soul, and jazz, as well as the arts. He is the author of the critically acclaimed books Anatomy of a Song and Why Jazz Happened, and posts daily at JazzWax.com, winner of the 2015 Jazz Journalists Association’s award for Jazz Blog of the Year.

THE GIRLS WHO STEPPED OUT OF LINE de Mari K. Eder

For fans of Radium Girls and history and WWII buffs, THE GIRLS WHO STEPPED OUT OF LINE takes you inside the lives and experiences of 15 unknown women heroes from the Greatest Generation, the women who served, fought, struggled, and made things happen during WWII―in and out of uniform, for theirs is a legacy destined to embolden generations of women to come.

THE GIRLS WHO STEPPED OUT OF LINE:
Untold Stories of the Women Who Changed the Course of World War II
by Mari K. Eder
Sourcebooks, August 2021

The Girls Who Stepped Out of Line are the heroes of the Greatest Generation that you hardly ever hear about. These women who did extraordinary things didn’t expect thanks and shied away from medals and recognition. Despite their amazing accomplishments, they’ve gone mostly unheralded and unrewarded. No longer. These are the women of World War II who served, fought, struggled, and made things happen―in and out of uniform. Liane B. Russell fled Austria with nothing and later became a renowned U.S. scientist whose research on the effects of radiation on embryos made a difference to thousands of lives. Gena Turgel was a prisoner who worked in the hospital at Bergen-Belsen and cared for the young Anne Frank, who was dying of typhus. Gena survived and went on to write a memoir and spent her life educating children about the Holocaust. Ida and Louise Cook were British sisters who repeatedly smuggled out jewelry and furs and served as sponsors for refugees, and they also established temporary housing for immigrant families in London. Retired U.S. Army Major General Mari K. Eder wrote this book because she knew their stories needed to be told―and the sooner the better. For theirs is a legacy destined to embolden generations of women to come.

Mari K. Eder is a retired U.S. Army Major General, a renowned speaker and author, and a thought leader on strategic communication and leadership. General Eder is the former Commanding General of the U.S. Army Reserve Joint and Special Troops Support Command, former Deputy Chief of the Army Reserve and former Deputy Chief of Public Affairs for the U.S. Army. General Eder is the author of Leading the Narrative: The Case for Strategic Communication, published by the Naval Institute Press.

THE DINOSAUR WARS de Gerta Keller

Hope Jahren’s Lab Girl meets Elizabeth Kolbert’s The Sixth Extinction in this work of popular science which blends the personal narrative of a trailblazing woman’s life in a male-dominated scientific field with a highstakes inquiry into what really killed the dinosaurs, the greatest scientific detective story of our time.

THE DINOSAUR WARS: MY LIFE AS A WARRIOR SCIENTIST IN THE DINOSAUR WARS
by Gerta Keller
Penguin Press, October 2022
(via Writers House)

World-renowned geologist and paleontologist Gerta Keller is at the center of what has been called the nastiest feud in science, a contentious debate popularly known as “The Dinosaur Wars” over what triggered the fifth mass extinction at the end of the Cretaceous Era sixty-six million years ago. Dinosaurs have enthralled us for generations, and the question of what caused their demise is more relevant than ever, as humankind confronts the paroxysms of an imperiled planet and the possibility that we may become the dinosaurs of the sixth extinction.
Born into a life of poverty on a small farm in Switzerland as the sixth of a dozen children, Gerta was told her dreams of becoming a doctor were impossible. Defying the odds, Gerta reclaimed her childhood dream of studying science, ultimately completing her graduate studies in geology at Stanford and becoming a professor at Princeton University and a major voice in her field. Along the way, she overcame the hostility and disdain of her male colleagues, who sabotaged her work, took credit for her discoveries, and chided her for not “knowing her place.”
Driven by a relentless passion to discover the truth of Earth’s catastrophic upheavals, Gerta continued her research in a series of incredible adventures across the globe that have caused some to liken her to a female Indiana Jones and which led her to uncover a growing mass of evidence that contradicted the then-widely-accepted asteroid impact theory. Rather, Gerta discovered, the real cause of the dinosaurs’ extinction was Deccan volcanism, a series of cataclysmic volcanic eruptions on the Indian peninsula. Outraged by her daring to challenge them, the toxic, male scientific establishment launched an all-out war against Gerta, doing their utmost to sabotage her work, destroy her reputation, and suppress the publication of her research. But they picked a fight with the wrong woman.

Gerta Keller is a Professor of Paleontology and Geology in the Department of Geosciences at Princeton University, where she has been a tenured faculty member since 1984. She has placed over 260 scientific publications in international journals and is considered a leading authority on catastrophes and mass extinctions, and the biotic and environmental effects of impacts and volcanism. She has co-authored five academic books, is a frequent lecturer, and regularly receives invitations from academic institutions around the world. In recent years, her work has received increased recognition and continues to make waves in the mainstream media, including TV documentaries and news features, radio and podcast interviews, and print and web media, most notably in a widely circulated profile in The Atlantic.