Archives de catégorie : Nonfiction

VOYAGERS de Lauren Fuge

Journeying through remote landscapes across the Earth and beyond, VOYAGERS seeks to understand how human exploration has driven us into the Anthropocene.

VOYAGERS:
Our Journey into the Anthropocene
by Lauren Fuge
Text Publishing (Australia), August 2024

At night, as I stargazed from my tiny tent, I’d hear the primal whalesong roll up along the ocean floor and onto the beach where I lay. The ethereal melodies seeped through my shivering skin, like a relic of an ancient time. I felt as if I was eavesdropping across millennia, the sound stirring some faint genetic memory deep inside me.
Come home.
Since the beginning of human history, we have been wanderers. Modern humans left Africa by 150,000 years ago, heading first to Asia and Europe, then Australia, the Americas, and finally—in an incredible feat of innovation and imagination—across the Pacific. Our explorations yielded great rewards: land and resources, food and knowledge. In every landscape we have explored, we have become a force of change. Humans are the dominant influence on the environment. And our surging population and insatiable industrial metabolism are outgunning the planet’s own forces: the sea is sucking at our doorsteps; the forests fall too quickly for us to hear. Still, we seek new seas to fish, new oil deposits to drill, new land to develop. A compelling blend of natural history, science and memoir, journeying from the dramatic fjords of British Columbia to the ancient geology of outback Australia to the shifting coastlines of Norway, VOYAGERS asks: What drives our urge to explore? How has it influenced our relationship with the planet? And, in the face of imminent environmental collapse, can we find in our voyaging history the tools to reimagine our future?

Lauren Fuge is an award-winning science writer. She has been a science journalist for Cosmos magazine and was awarded the 2022 UNSW Bragg Prize for Science Writing; her writing features regularly in the Best Australian Science Writing anthology. She is undertaking a PhD exploring creative forms of climate communication.

JUST BENEATH THE SOIL de Clint Smith

Prize-winning author Clint Smith visits World War II sites around the world alongside survivors, descendants, and residents who have a particular relationship to each place, largely focusing on the experiences of groups of people whose stories often sit at the peripheries of the conflict’s dominant narrative, giving an intimate account of their lived experiences during the war.

JUST BENEATH THE SOIL
by Clint Smith
Random House, publication date TBD
(via The Gernert Company)

Photo by Carletta Girma

Clint Smith is a singular, once-in-a-generation talent. From the universal critical acclaim of his bestselling debut How The Word Is Passed to his widely read and influential articles at The Atlantic, each new piece of Clint’s writing transforms stories from our past into resonant living history. JUST BENEATH THE SOIL is the next step in Clint’s journey towards a fuller exploration of public memory.
In JUST BENEATH THE SOIL, Clint Smith trains his expert eye on a new time period: World War II. With his poetic, effortless prose, he brings us along as he interrogates what it means to have an “American perspective” on the most consequential and brutal global event of the past century. He spends time with one of the last Navajo Code Talkers, also a survivor of the infamous boarding schools for Native children. He sits with the still-living Korean “comfort women” who were subjected to sexual slavery at the hands of the Japanese military. He remembers his great uncle, a Black American veteran who signed up to fight for a country that subjected him to racial terror. He asks, why do we lift Germany up as an exemplar of remembrance for their willingness to build memorials, monuments, and museums dedicated to the Holocaust? And should we? Weaving together his powerful personal ethos, historical analysis, and cultural criticism, JUST BENEATH THE SOIL reveals that our history is not, in fact, buried deep, and instead lies just below our feet.
With his nuanced and thoughtful determination to look at the painful past that is his hallmark, Clint Smith unveils a new way to consider the history of World War II–in a Du Boisian spirit and tradition. Clint will take a global history and make it personal. He will also be the first Black author of a history of World War II not specifically about the experiences of Black people and soldiers during the war.
And as with everything he writes, accessibility to a broad audience and intellectual rigor are his goal. Clint puts it best: “I wrote it for the 15-year-old version of myself. This book represents a new way of thinking about the greatest conflict of the past century, and provides new eyes through which we might collectively understand it.”

Clint Smith is a staff writer at The Atlantic. He is the author of How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning With the History of Slavery Across America, which was a #1 New York Times bestseller, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction, the Hillman Prize for Book Journalism, the Stowe Prize, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and selected by the New York Times as one of the 10 Best Books of 2021. He is also the author of Counting Descent, which 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.

YOU COULD MAKE THIS PLACE BEAUTIFUL de Maggie Smith

“A sparklingly beautiful memoir-in-vignettes” (Isaac Fitzgerald, New York Times bestselling author) that explores coming of age in your middle age—from the bestselling poet and author of Keep Moving.

YOU COULD MAKE THIS PLACE BEAUTIFUL: A Memoir
by Maggie Smith
Publisher, April 2023
(via David Black Literary)

In her memoir, poet Maggie Smith explores the disintegration of her marriage and her renewed commitment to herself. The book begins with one woman’s personal heartbreak, but its circles widen into a reckoning with contemporary womanhood, traditional gender roles, and the power dynamics that persist even in many progressive homes. With the spirit of self-inquiry and empathy she’s known for, Smith interweaves snapshots of a life with meditations on secrets, anger, forgiveness, and narrative itself. The power of these pieces is cumulative: page after page, they build into a larger interrogation of family, work, and patriarchy.
YOU COULD MAKE THIS PLACE BEAUTIFUL, like the work of Deborah Levy, Rachel Cusk, and Gina Frangello, is an unflinching look at what it means to live and write our own lives. It is a story about a mother’s fierce and constant love for her children, and a woman’s love and regard for herself. Above all, this memoir is “extraordinary” (Ann Patchett) in the way that it reveals how, in the aftermath of loss, we can discover our power and make something new and beautiful.

Maggie Smith is the award-winning author of Good Bones, The Well Speaks of Its Own Poison, Lamp of the Body, and the national bestsellers Goldenrod and Keep Moving: Notes on Loss, Creativity, and Change. A 2011 recipient of a Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, Smith has also received several Individual Excellence Awards from the Ohio Arts Council, two Academy of American Poets Prizes, a Pushcart Prize, and fellowships from the Sustainable Arts Foundation and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. She has been widely published, appearing in The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The Best American Poetry, and more.

THE MYSTERIOUS CASE OF RUDOLF DIESEL de Douglas Brunt

The hidden history of one of the world’s greatest inventors, a man who disrupted the status quo and then disappeared into thin air on the eve of World War I—this book answers the hundred-year-old mystery of what really became of Rudolf Diesel.

THE MYSTERIOUS CASE OF RUDOLF DIESEL:
Genius, Power, and Deception on the Eve of World War I
by Douglas Brunt
Atria, September 2023
(via Javelin)

September 29, 1913: the steamship Dresden is halfway between Belgium and England. On board is one of the most famous men in the world, Rudolf Diesel, whose new internal combustion engine is on the verge of revolutionizing global industry forever. But Diesel never arrives at his destination. He vanishes during the night and headlines around the world wonder if it was an accident, suicide, or murder.
After rising from an impoverished European childhood, Diesel had become a multi-millionaire with his powerful engine that does not require expensive petroleum-based fuel. In doing so, he became not only an international celebrity but also the enemy of two extremely powerful men: Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany and John D. Rockefeller, the founder of Standard Oil and the richest man in the world.
The Kaiser wanted the engine to power a fleet of submarines that would finally allow him to challenge Great Britain’s Royal Navy. But Diesel had intended for his engine to be used for the betterment of mankind and refused to keep the technology out of the hands of the British or any other nation. For John D. Rockefeller, the engine was nothing less than an existential threat to his vast and lucrative oil empire. As electric lighting began to replace kerosene lamps, Rockefeller’s bottom line depended on the world’s growing thirst for gasoline to power its automobiles and industries.
At the outset of this new age of electricity and oil, Europe stood on the precipice of war. Rudolf Diesel grew increasingly concerned about Germany’s rising nationalism and military spending. The inventor was on his way to London to establish a new company that would help Britain improve its failing submarine program when he disappeared.
Now, New York Times bestselling author Douglas Brunt reopens the case and provides an astonishing new conclusion about Diesel’s fate.

“[A] thrilling investigation…Brunt’s audacious yet surprisingly tenable theory makes for a wildly enjoyable outing.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“The author’s interest in history and politics shines through in his well-researched, engaging book…fascinating…a worthy read.” –Kirkus

“Outstanding—Brunt mixes a historian’s respect for research with a novelist’s eye for character, adds fascinating context and connections, and reaches a conclusion worthy of James Bond.” —Lee Child, #1 New York Times bestselling author

Douglas Brunt is the New York Times bestselling author of Ghosts of Manhattan and The Means, Trophy Son, and host of the top-rated SiriusXM author podcast Dedicated with Doug Brunt. A Philadelphia native, he lives in New York with his wife and three children.

CRY, BABY de Benjamin Perry

What happens when we cry—and when we don’t?.

CRY, BABY:
Why Our Tears Matter
by Benjamin Perry
Broadleaf, May 2023
(via Kaplan/Defiore Rights)

One of our most private acts, weeping can forge connection. Tears may obscure our vision, but they can also bring great clarity. And in both literature and life, weeping often opens a door to transformation or even resurrection. But many of us have been taught to suppress our emotions and hide our tears. When writer Benjamin Perry realized he hadn’t cried in more than ten years, he undertook an experiment: to cry every day. But he didn’t anticipate how tears would bring him into deeper relationship with a world that’s breaking.
CRY, BABY explores humans’ rich legacy of weeping—and why some of us stopped. With the keen gaze of a journalist and the vulnerability of a good friend, Perry explores the great paradoxes of our tears. Why do we cry? In societies marked by racism, sexism, and homophobia, who is allowed to cry—and who isn’t? And if weeping tells us something fundamental about who we are, what do our tears say? Exploring the vast history, literature, physiology, psychology, and spirituality of crying, we can recognize our deepest hopes and longings, how we connect to others, and the social forces bent on keeping us from mourning. When faced with the private and sometimes unspeakable sorrows of daily life, not to mention existential threats like climate change and systemic racism, we cry for the world in which we long to live. As we reclaim our crying as a central part of being human, we not only care for ourselves and relearn how to express our vulnerable emotions; we also prophetically reimagine the future. Ultimately, weeping can bring us closer to each other and to the world we desire and deserve.

Benjamin Perry is a minister at Middle Church and an award-winning writer whose work has appeared in outlets like The Washington Post, Slate, Sojourners, and Bustle. With a degree in psychology from SUNY Geneseo and an MDiv from Union Theological Seminary, Perry has worked as an organizer with the New York chapter of the Poor People’s Campaign and as an editor at Time, Inc. Perry has appeared on MSNBC, Al Jazeera, and NY1, and is the editor of the Queer Faith photojournalism series. He and his spouse, Erin Mayer, live with his best friend and brother in Maine, nurturing a small apple orchard.