Archives de catégorie : London 2021 Nonfiction

HOW THE WORD IS PASSED by Clint Smith

The Atlantic staff writer and poet Clint Smith’s revealing, contemporary portrait of America as a slave-owning nation.

HOW THE WORD IS PASSED:
A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America
by Clint Smith
Little, Brown, June 2021

Beginning in his own hometown of New Orleans, Clint Smith leads the reader through an unforgettable tour of monuments and landmarks—those that are honest about the past and those that are not—that offer an intergenerational story of how slavery has been central in shaping our nation’s collective history, and ourselves. It is the story of the Monticello Plantation in Virginia, the estate where Thomas Jefferson wrote letters espousing the urgent need for liberty while enslaving over 400 people on the premises. It is the story of the Whitney Plantation, one of the only former plantations devoted to preserving the experience of the enslaved people whose lives and work sustained it. It is the story of Angola, a former plantation-turned maximum security prison in Louisiana that is filled with Black men who work across the 18,000-acre land for virtually no pay. And it is the story of Blandford Cemetery, the final resting place of tens of thousands of Confederate soldiers. In a deeply researched and transporting exploration of the legacy of slavery and its imprint on centuries of American history, HOW THE WORD IS PASSED illustrates how some of our country’s most essential stories are hidden in plain view—whether in places we might drive by on our way to work, holidays such as Juneteenth, or entire neighborhoods—like downtown Manhattan—on which the brutal history of the trade in enslaved men, women and children has been deeply imprinted.
Informed by scholarship and brought alive by the story of people living today, Clint Smith’s debut work of nonfiction is a landmark work of reflection and insight that offers a new understanding of the hopeful role that memory and history can play in making sense of our country and how it has come to be.

Clint Smith is a staff writer at The Atlantic and the author of the poetry collection Counting Descent. The book won the 2017 Literary Award for Best Poetry Book from the Black Caucus of the American Library Association and was a finalist for an NAACP Image Award. His writing has been published in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, Poetry Magazine, The Paris Review and elsewhere. Born and raised in New Orleans, he received his B.A. in English from Davidson College and his Ph.D. in Education from Harvard University.

THE BETRAYAL de Robert Mazur

The follow-up to Mazur’s New York Times bestselling memoir The Infiltrator, of which the movie version came out in 2016 starring Bryan Cranston as Mazur.

THE BETRAYAL:
My Undercover Struggle With Deceit, Corruption & Death
by Robert Mazur
Amazon Publishing, Summer 2022

After the events of The Infiltrator, the story’s main character still wants more adrenaline. He’s come to realize the chase is like a drug for him when he’s recruited by the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) to be the lead undercover agent in another dangerous two-year covert operation. The offer to Special Agent Robert Mazur is to infiltrate the corrupt financial networks of Panama and Colombia in order to become embedded as a money launderer within Colombia’s notorious Cali Drug Cartel. He couldn’t say “No” because this was likely his last chance to resume his obsession—an addicted desire to expose more international banks and businesses laundering money and power into the heart of the underworld.

Robert Mazur was a federal agent for 27 years. During 5 years of his law enforcement career he was a long-term undercover agent, operating in deep cover within the underworld as a high-level money launderer for senior members of Colombian drug cartels. He not only dealt directly with cartel leaders, but also functioned as their counduit to corrupt international bankers around the world. He is court-certified in both the U.S. and Canada as an expert in money laundering. Mr. Mazur has been a significant contributor to news and media outlets, including the New York Times, PBS, ABC and NBC. His first book, The Infiltrator (also available) was made into a feature film starring Bryan Cranston.

THE WES ANDERSON COLLECTION: THE FRENCH DISPATCH de Matt Zoller Seitz, illustré par Max Dalton

The offcial companion to The French Dispatch and the latest volume in the bestselling Wes Anderson Collection series.

THE WES ANDERSON COLLECTION: THE FRENCH DISPATCH
by Matt Zoller Seitz, illustrated by Max Dalton
Abrams, September 2022

The French Dispatch—the tenth feature film from writer-director Wes Anderson—weaves together stories of an eccentric band of expat journalists working at the titular American newspaper in 20th-century Ennui-sur-Blasé, France. Broken out into a series of vignettes, this love letter to the New Journalism era is filled with a cast of Anderson’s frequent collaborators, including Jason Schwartzman, Bob Balaban, and Willem Dafoe, as well as new players Timothée Chalamet, Jeffrey Wright, Elisabeth Moss, and Benicio del Toro. In this latest one-volume entry in the Wes Anderson Collection series—the only book to take readers behind the scenes of The French Dispatch—everything that goes into bringing Anderson’s trademark style, intricate compositions, and meticulous staging to the screen is revealed in detail. THE WES ANDERSON COLLECTION: THE FRENCH DISPATCH presents the complete story behind the film’s conception, anecdotes about the making of the film, and behind-the-scenes photos, production materials, and conceptual artwork.

Matt Zoller Seitz is the editor in chief of RogerEbert.com; the TV critic for New York magazine; the author of The Wes Anderson Collection, The Wes Anderson Collection: The Grand Budapest Hotel, The Oliver Stone Experience, and Mad Men Carousel; and the coauthor of The Sopranos Sessions. He is based in New York City.

GOODBYE EASTERN EUROPE de Jacob Mikanowski

“Eastern Europe is disappearing. Not the physical place, but the idea. Whatever held the region together in the mind’s eye — a shared experience of occupation and exclusion, the permanent-seeming weight of economic backwardness, treasured memories of defeat — is gone, or at least not as present as it had been.” – Jacob Mikanowski

GOODBYE EASTERN EUROPE
by Jacob Mikanowski
Knopf, Winter 2021
(chez Frances Goldin Literary Agency – voir catalogue)

In the wake of the Soviet Union’s collapse, the bonds that held all the various nations of Eastern Europe together as Soviet satellites have dissolved, calling into question what exactly connects them, and whether there was ever any such place to begin with. But, Mikanowski argues, there really was something more to Eastern Europe than shared political subjection. Eastern Europe had a particular character, and this book will name and describe the peculiar flavor of the place, from the Baltics to the Balkans, from Prague to Kiev. Part history, part travelogue, part reading of the disparate canon of Eastern European literature, GOODBYE EASTERN EUROPE will be a work in the tradition of Ian Frazier’s Travels in Siberia, or Simon Winder’s Germania or Danubia—an anatomy of a region as refracted through its literature, and a fascinating exploration of an incredibly diverse, complex, and surprising terrain.

Jacob Mikanowski is a journalist, critic and essayist. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s, The Guardian, Lapham’s Quarterly, and elsewhere. He grew up in the US, but his family is Polish.

THE ENLIGHTENMENT CAMPAIGN de John Klima

The first book to prominently feature captured and declassified Nazi communiqués sent from Washington, D.C., to Berlin that show how the Nazis attempted to contaminate the American political system by meddling in the 1940 election.

THE ENLIGHTENMENT CAMPAIGN:
Fear, Propaganda and the True Story of the Nazi Plot to Steal the American Presidency
by John Klima
Pantheon/PRH, 2022

Credit: Jennifer Marder

The year: 1940. Joseph Goebbels, desperate for a favorable outcome to the US presidential election, deployed every media tool at his disposal. THE ENLIGHTENMENT CAMPAIGN is the first book to prominently feature captured and declassified Nazi communiqués sent from Washington, D.C., to Berlin that show how the Nazis attempted to contaminate the American political system by meddling in the 1940 election. The protagonist: one of the farthest-reaching voices in American media of the time—the largely forgotten dynamo Dorothy Thompson. The first woman journalist to interview Hitler, in 1931, she came back from the experience aghast, and spent the next decade—the period of this book—sounding the alarm of the creeping threat of fascism coming to America. Through her syndicated columns and her regular radio addresses, her audience numbered 13 million. She was the first woman journalist to make the cover of TIME Magazine. Since her interview with Hitler—and drawing on her decades in Europe as a foreign correspondent—she saw the way insidious propaganda and the stoking of xenophobia could drive an economically vulnerable democracy into the arms of an anti-democratic despot. In a fast-paced, informative, and reverberating narrative, John Klima recounts this battle for the hearts and minds of the American people.

John Klima, a former staff writer at The Los Angeles Times, a former National Baseball columnist at the Los Angeles Daily News, and whose work has appeared in the Best American Sports Writing, The New York Times, and elsewhere, is the author of three critically acclaimed narrative baseball histories: The Game Must Go On (Thomas Dunne, 2015) (“Zips along and offers great descriptions,” PW), Bushville Wins! (Thomas Dunne, 2012) (“[Klima] tells a great story well, makes a dead era vivid,” Wall Street Journal), and Willie’s Boys (Wiley, 2009) (“The drama is real, the stakes are high, and Klima captures it with shimmering prose and hard-nosed reporting,” Jonathan Eig).