ODY New Books Collection

The Place of Tides

Many years ago, James Rebanks met an old woman on a remote Norwegian island. She lived and worked alone on a tiny rocky outcrop, gathering the down of wild Eider ducks: a centuries-old trade that had once made men and women rich, but had long been in decline. Back at home, Rebanks couldn't stop thinking about the woman. Years passed. Then, one day, he wrote to her, asking if he could return. Bring work clothes, she replied, and good boots, and come quickly: her health was failing. And so he travelled to the edge of the Arctic to witness her last season on the island. This is the story of that season. It is the story of a unique and ancient landscape, and of the woman who brought it back to life. As Rebanks follows her from the rough, isolated toil of bitter winter into the summer light, his understanding of her life and work - and of his own - is utterly transformed. What began as a journey of escape becomes an extraordinary lesson in self-knowledge and forgiveness.

The once and Future World Order

"Since the dawn of the twenty-first century, the West has been in crisis. Social unrest, political polarization, and the rise of other great powers-especially China-threaten to unravel today's Western-led world order. Many fear this would lead to global chaos. But the West has never had a monopoly on order. Surveying five thousand years of global history, political scientist Amitav Acharya reveals that world order-the political architecture enabling cooperation and peace among nations-existed long before the rise of the West. Moving from ancient Sumer, India, Greece, and Mesoamerica, through medieval caliphates and Eurasian empires into the present, Acharya shows that humanitarian values, economic interdependence, and rules of inter-state conduct emerged across the globe over millennia. History suggests order will endure even as the West retreats. In fact, the end of Western dominance offers us the opportunity to build a better world, where non-Western nations find more voice, power, and prosperity. Instead of fearing the future, the West should learn from history and cooperate with the Rest to forge a more equitable order. This is the definitive account of how world order evolved and why it will survive the decline of the West."-- Provided by publisher

Murder in the Dollhouse

"The full account of the disappearance and murder of Jennifer Dulos, the Connecticut mother whose life and tragic death captured the minds of America."-- Provided by publisher

The Mission

"... Tells the gripping, high-stakes story of the CIA through the first quarter of the twenty-first century, revealing how the agency fought to rebuild the espionage powers it lost during the war on terror--and finally succeeded in penetrating the Kremlin. The struggle has life-and-death consequences for America and its allies. The CIA must reclaim its original mission: know thy enemies. The fate of the free world hangs in the balance."-- Provided by publisher

The Line

"The line that distinguishes people from animals, systems, and things is getting harder to draw. For all the concern about AI and genetic engineering, there has been surprisingly little discussion of the possible personhood of the new entities this century will bring us: what about their claims to be inside the line, to be "us" -- not machines or animals but persons -- deserving all the moral and legal respect that any other person has by virtue of their status?"-- Provided by publisher

It Rhymes with Takei

"Following the award-winning bestseller They Called Us Enemy, George Takei's new full-color graphic memoir reveals his most personal story of all--told in full for the first time anywhere! George Takei has shown the world many faces: actor, author, outspoken activist, helmsman of the starship Enterprise, living witness to the internment of Japanese Americans, and king of social media. But until October 27, 2005, there was always one piece missing--one face he did not show the world. There was one very intimate fact about George that he never shared . . . and it rhymes with Takei. Now, for the first time ever, George shares the full story of his life in the closet, his decision to come out as gay at the age of 68, and the way that moment transformed everything. Following the phenomenal success of his first graphic memoir, They Called Us Enemy, George Takei reunites with the team of Harmony Becker, Steven Scott, and Justin Eisinger for a jaw-dropping new testament. From his earliest childhood crushes and youthful experiments in the rigidly conformist 1950s, to global fame as an actor and the terrible fear of exposure, to the watershed moment of speaking his truth and becoming one of the most high-profile gay men on the planet, It Rhymes with Takei offers a sweeping portrait of one iconic American navigating the tides of LGBTQ+ history. Combining historical context with intimate subjectivity, It Rhymes with Takei shows how the personal and the political have always been intertwined. Its richly emotional words and images depict the terror of entrapment even in gay community spaces, the anguish of speaking up for so many issues while remaining silent on his most personal issue, the grief of losing friends to AIDS, the joy of finding true love with Brad Altman, and the determination to declare that love openly--and legally--before the whole world. Looking back on his astonishing life on both sides of the closet door, George Takei presents a charismatic and candid account of how far America has come . . . and how precious that progress is."-- Provided by publisher

The Invention of Design

"Design has penetrated every dimension of contemporary society, from classrooms to statehouses to corporate boardrooms. It's seen as a kind of mega-power, one that can solve all our problems and elevate our experiences to make a more beautiful, more functional world. But there's a backstory here. In The Invention of Design, designer and historian Maggie Gram investigates how, over the twentieth century, our economic hopes, fears, and fantasies shaped the idea of "design"-then repeatedly redefined it. Nearly a century ago, resistance to New Deal-era government intervention helped transform design from an idea about aesthetics into one about function. And at century's end, the dot-com crash brought us 'design thinking': the idea that design methodology can solve any problem, small or large. To this day, design captures imaginations as a tool for fixing market society's broken parts from within, supposedly enabling us to thrive within capitalism's sometimes violent constraints. A captivating critical history, The Invention of Design shows how design became the hero of many of our most hopeful stories-dreams, fantasies, utopias-about how we might better live in a modern world."-- Provided by publisher

How to Dodge a Cannonball

"A cutting, revealing caricature of the American Civil War, told through the story of a white teenager who joins an all-Black regiment of soldiers, for fans of Colson Whitehead and James McBride. How to Dodge a Cannonball is a razor-sharp and bitterly hilarious Civil War satire about American racism. It tells the story of a friendless, fatherless, and guileless white teenager named Anders who volunteers for the Union army as a flag-twirler to escape his abusive mother. In desperate acts of self-preservation, he defects--twice--before joining a Black regiment at Gettysburg, claiming to be an octoroon. In his new and entirely incredulous regiment, Anders becomes entangled with questionable military men and an arms dealer working for both sides. But more importantly he forms an awkward bond with the other men in the regiment, finding a family he desperately needs and gaining an intimate understanding of the lives of Black people. After deploying to New York City to suppress the draft riots and to Nevada to suppress Native Americans, Anders begins to see the war through the eyes of his newfound brothers, comprehending it not so much as a fight for Black liberation but as a negotiation among white people over which kinds of oppression will be acceptable in the re-United States. Uproariously funny and revelatory, How to Dodge a Cannonball is an insightful take on which America is worth fighting for."-- Provided by publisher

Hollywood High

From a longtime Vanity Fair writer and editor, a delightfully entertaining, intelligent, and illuminating history and tribute to teen movies-from Rebel Without a Cause to Fast Times at Ridgemont High, and on to John Hughes, Mean Girls, The Hunger Games, and more. -- Provided by publisher

Gingko Season

"After suffering her first big heartbreak two years earlier, Penelope Lin has built a quiet life with no romantic entanglements. She spends her days cataloging a museum's vast collection of Qing Dynasty bound-foot shoes and in the comfortable company of close friends. One day, she happens to meet Hoang, who confesses to releasing mice from the cancer research lab where he works. Hoang's openness catches Penelope off guard; from then on, she finds her carefully constructed life slowly start to unravel. Told in Penelope's witty, vulnerable, and thoroughly endearing voice, Gingko Season captures three seasons of reawakening, challenges, and transformation. This wise and tenderhearted novel explores the nature of our deepest friendships as seriously as it does the dizzying terror and thrill of falling in love, and the complications of trying to live a life that matches your ideals."-- Provided by publisher

Deep House

It's 1996, and Jeremy Atherton Lin has met the boy of his dreams -- a mumbling, starry-eyed Brit -- just as, amid a media frenzy, US Congress prepares the Defense of Marriage Act, denying same-sex couples federal rights including immigration. The pair steals away to remote forests and vast deserts, London fashion shows and Berlin sex clubs, dinner parties, back alleys, East Village hotel rooms, and San Francisco dives. Finding no other way to stay together, they shack up illicitly among unlikely allies in a "city of refuge."

Daughters of the Bamboo Grove

"On a warm day in September 2000, a twenty-eight-year-old woman named Zanhua gave birth to twin girls in a small hut nestled in bamboo behind her brother's rural home in China's Hunan province. The twins, Fangfang and Shuangjie, were welcome additions to her young family but also not her first children. Hidden in the hut, they were born under the shadow of China's notorious one-child policy. Fearing the ire of family planning officials, Zanhua and her husband decided to leave one twin in the care of relatives, hoping each toddler on their own might stay under the radar. But, in late 2002, Fangfang was violently snatched away from her aunt's care. The family worried they would never see her again, but they didn't imagine she could be sent to the United States. She might as well have been sent to another world. Following her stories written as the Beijing bureau chief for the Los Angeles Times, Barbara Demick, author of National Book Award finalist Nothing to Envy, embarks on a journey that encompasses the origins, shocking cruelty, and long term impact of China's one-child rule; the rise of international adoption and the religious currents that buoyed it; and the exceedingly rare phenomenon of twin separation. Today, Esther--formerly Fangfang--is a photographer in Texas, and Demick brings to vivid life the Christian family that felt called to adopt her, having no idea that she was kidnapped. Through Demick's indefatigable reporting and the activist work to find these lost children, will these two long-lost sisters finally find each other, and if they do, will they feel whole again? A remarkable window into the volatile, constantly changing China of the last half century and the long-reaching legacy of the country's most infamous law, Daughters of the Bamboo Grove is also the moving story of two sisters torn apart by the forces of history and brought together again by their families' determination and one reporter's dogged work."-- Provided by publisher

Charlottesville

"In August 2017, over a thousand neo-Nazis, fascists, Klan members, and neo-Confederates descended on a small southern city to protest the pending removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee. Within an hour of their arrival, the city's historic downtown was a scene of bedlam as armored far right cadres battled activists in the streets. Before the weekend was over, a neo-Nazi had driven a car into a throng of counterprotesters, killing a young woman and injuring dozens. Pulitzer Prize finalist Deborah Baker has written a riveting and panoptic account of what unfolded that weekend, focusing less on the rally's far right leaders than on the story of the city itself. University, local, and state officials, including law enforcement, were unable or unwilling to grasp the gathering threat. Clergy, activists, and organizers from all walks of life saw more clearly what was coming and, at great personal risk, worked to warn and defend their city. To understand why their warnings fell on deaf ears, Baker does a deep dive into American history. In her research she discovers an uncannily similar event that took place decades before when an emissary of the poet and fascist Ezra Pound arrived in Charlottesville intending to start a race war. In Charlottesville, Baker shows how a city more associated with Thomas Jefferson than civil unrest became a flashpoint in a continuing struggle over our nation's founding myths."-- Provided by publisher

Charles Sumner

"Charles Sumner is mainly known as the statesman who barely survived a brutal caning on the Senate floor by the slaveholder Preston Brooks in 1856. This violent episode has obscured Sumner's epic life as one of America's most visionary constitutional thinkers, a man who advocated for multiracial democracy and championed equal rights more than one hundred years before the civil rights movement. A friend of Alexis de Tocqueville, an ally of Frederick Douglass, and an adviser to Abraham Lincoln, Sumner helped devise the Emancipation Proclamation, the Thirteenth Amendment, the Freedmen's Bureau, and the blueprint for what eventually became the Civil Rights Act of 1964. He valued principles above politics and was prepared to put his life on the line for the sake of racial justice... With fresh research and lucid prose, Tameez chronicles Sumner's childhood upbringing--only decades after the American Revolution--in a poor white family that lived in a free Black neighborhood in Boston. He argues that Sumner was likely a gay man who struggled with love and heartbreak at a time when homosexuality wasn't well understood. And he depicts Sumner as a towering intellectual, one of the legal masterminds behind Reconstruction, and one of the founding fathers of the postwar Constitution premised on equality for all."-- Provided by publisher

Among Friends

"What begins as a celebration takes a sudden turn when a shocking betrayal shatters the trust between families."-- Provided by publisher

How We Grow up

Greatly expanding his award-winning New York Times series on the contemporary teen mental-health crisis, Pulitzer Prize-winning science reporter Matt Richtel delivers a groundbreaking investigation into adolescence, the pivotal life stage undergoing profound - and often confounding - transformation. The transition from childhood to adulthood is a natural, evolution-honed cycle that now faces radical change and challenge. The adolescent brain, sculpted for this transition over eons of evolution, confronts a modern world that creates so much social pressure as to regularly exceed the capacities of the evolving mind. The problem comes as a bombardment of screen-based information pelts the brain just as adolescence is undergoing a second key change: puberty is hitting earlier. The result is a neurological mismatch between an ultra-potent environment and a still-maturing brain that can lead to anxiety, depression, and other mental health challenges. It is a crisis that is part of modern life but can only be truly grasped through a broad, grounded lens of the biology of adolescence itself. Through this lens, Richtel shows us how adolescents can understand themselves, and parents and educators can better help. For decades, this transition to adulthood has been defined by hormonal shifts that trigger the onset of puberty. But Richtel takes us where science now understands so much of the action is: the brain. A growing body of research that looks for the first time into budding adult neurobiology explains with untold clarity the emergence of the "social brain," a craving for peer connection, and how the behaviors that follow pave the way for economic and social survival. This period necessarily involves testing-as the adolescent brain is programmed from birth to take risks and explore themselves and their environment - so that they may be able to thrive as they leave the insulated care of childhood. Richtel, diving deeply into new research and gripping personal stories, offers accessible, scientifically grounded answers to the most pressing questions about generational change. What explains adolescent behaviors, risk-taking, reward-seeking, and the ongoing mental health crisis? How does adolescence shape the future of the species? What is the nature of adolescence itself?

Deep Breath

"Vera's body and mind are on a precipice. She's just left her marital home with her two young daughters to live with her father after her husband's violent outbursts reached a breaking point. She's experiencing sudden losses of consciousness, spells of insomnia, and difficulty eating. Over the course of the year that follows, she reignites a high school romance, looks to her divorced parents for guidance, attempts couples therapy, struggles to be a good mother, develops a brief cocaine dependency, and tries to rekindle her artistic practice. All the while, she confronts the conflicting narratives of her marriage and separation, questions the infinite number of choices that led her to this moment, and dreads the one she has to make now: repair her marriage or start a new life and learn how to breathe again."-- Provided by publisher

Endling

Set in Ukraine, an eccentric scientist breeding rare snails crosses paths with sisters posing as members of the marriage industry to find their activist mother. As Russia invades, they embark on a wild journey with kidnapped bachelors and a last-of-its-kind snail. This darkly comic novel explores survival, love, and the impact of war.

The Genius Myth

"From acclaimed Atlantic staff writer and host of BBC's podcast 'The New Gurus' Helen Lewis comes a timely and provocative interrogation of the myth of genius, exploring the surprising inventions, inspirations and distortions by which some lives are elevated to 'greatness' - and others are not.... You can tell what a society values by who it labels as a genius. You can also tell who it excludes, who it enables, and what it is prepared to tolerate. In The Genius Myth, Helen Lewis unearths how this one word has shaped (and distorted) our ideas of success and achievement. Ultimately, argues Lewis, the modern idea of genius -- a single preternaturally gifted individual, usually white and male, exempt from social niceties and sometimes even the law -- has run its course. Braiding deep research with her signature wit and lightness, Lewis dissects past and present models of genius in the West, and reveals a far deeper and more interesting picture of human creativity than conventional wisdom allows. She uncovers a battalion of overlooked wives and collaborators. She asks whether most inventions are inevitable. She wonders if the Beatles would succeed today. And she confronts the vexing puzzle of Elon Musk, the tech disrupter who fancies himself as an ubermensch. Smart, funny, and provocative, The Genius Myth will challenge your assumptions about creativity, productivity, and innovation -- and forever alter your mental image of the so-called 'genius.'" -- Provided by publisher

Warhol's
Muses

"From the New York Times bestselling author of Capote's Women comes an astonishing account of the revolutionary artist Andy Warhol and his scandalous relationships with the ten women he deemed his 'superstars," beginning in 1964 and culminating four years later when Warhol was shot and almost killed."-- Provided by publisher