ODY New Books Collection

Embers of the Hands

A history of the Viking Age, from mighty leaders to rebellious teenagers, told through their runes and ruins, games and combs, trash and treasure. In imagining a Viking, a certain image springs to mind: a barbaric warrior, leaping ashore from a longboat, and ready to terrorize the hapless local population of a northern European town. Yet while such characters define our imagination of the Viking Age today, they were in the minority. Instead, in the time-stopping soils, water, and ice of the North, Eleanor Barraclough excavates a preserved lost world, one that reimagines a misunderstood society. By examining artifacts of the past--remnants of wooden gaming boards, elegant antler combs, doodles by imaginative children and bored teenagers, and runes that reveal hidden loves, furious curses, and drunken spouses summoned home from the pub. Barraclough illuminates life in the medieval Nordic world as not just a world of rampaging warriors, but as full of globally networked people with recognizable concerns. This is the history of all the people--children, enslaved people, seers, artisans, travelers, writers--who inhabited the medieval Nordic world. Encompassing not just Norway, Denmark, and Sweden, but also Iceland, Greenland, the British Isles, Continental Europe, and Russia, this is a history of a Viking Age filled with real people of different ages, genders, and ethnicities, as told through the traces that they left behind. 'Embers of the hands' is a poetic kenning from the Viking Age that referred to gold. But no less precious are the embers that Barraclough blows back to life in this book--those of ordinary lives long past. -- Publisher description

The Containment

"A history of post-Brown school desegregation in Detroit, with a focus on Milliken v. Bradley."-- Provided by publisher

Black in Blues

"A surprising and beautiful meditation on the color blue -- and its fascinating role in Black history and culture -- from National Book Award winner Imani Perry."-- Provided by publisher

American Oasis

"Albuquerque. Phoenix. Tucson. El Paso. Las Vegas. Iconic American cities surrounded by desert and rust. Teeming metropolises that seem to exist independently of the seemingly inhospitable and arid landscape that surrounds them, belying the rich insight they offer into American stories of migration, industry, bloodshed, and rebirth. Charting a geographic path through America's largest and hottest deserts, acclaimed journalist Kyle Paoletta maps the past and future of these cities, and the many other settlements from rural town to urban sprawl that make up the region that has come to be called "the American Southwest." Weaving together the stories of immigrants and indigenous populations, American Oasis pulls back the layers of settlement, sediment, habit, and effect that successive empires have left on the region, from the Athapascan, Diné, Tewa, Apache, and Comanche, to the Spanish, Mexican, and, finally, American. As Paoletta's journey into the Southwest's history becomes inextricably linked to an exploration of its dependency on water, he begins to ask: where, ultimately, will cities like Las Vegas and Phoenix find themselves once the Colorado River and its branches dry up? Richly reported and sweeping in its history, American Oasis is the story of what one iconic region's past can tell us about our shared environmental and cultural future." -- Provided by publisher

You'll
Never Believe Me

"Adopted at a young age by a Mormon family in Utah, Kari struggled with questions of self-worth and identity as one of the few Asian Americans in her insulated community, leading her to run with the 'bad crowd' in an effort to fit in. Soon, stealing from superstores turned into picking up men (and picking their pockets), and before she knew it, Kari had graduated from petty theft to Utah's most wanted list. Though Kari was able to escape the Southwest, she couldn't outrun her new moniker: the Hipster Grifter. New York City's indie sleaze scene had found its newest celebrity--just as Kari found herself in a heap of trouble. Jail time, riots, bad checks, and an explosion of internet infamy and fetishization put her name in the spotlight. Beyond the gossip and Gawker posts, there's a side to Kari the media never saw--until now." -- Inside jacket flap

Superbloom

"From the telegraph and telephone in the 1800s to the internet and social media in our own day, the public has welcomed new communication systems. Whenever people gain more power to share information, the assumption goes, society prospers. Superbloom tells a startlingly different story. As communication becomes more mechanized and efficient, it breeds confusion more than understanding, strife more than harmony. Media technologies all too often bring out the worst in us. A celebrated commentator on the human consequences of technology, Nicholas Carr reorients the conversation around modern communication, challenging some of our most cherished beliefs about self-expression, free speech, and media democratization. He reveals how messaging apps strip nuance from conversation, how zdigital crowdingy erodes empathy and triggers aggression, how online political debates narrow our minds and distort our perceptions, and how advances in AI are further blurring the already hazy line between fantasy and reality. Even as Carr shows how tech companies and their tools of connection have failed us, he forces us to confront inconvenient truths about our own nature. The human psyche, it turns out, is profoundly ill-suited to the zsuperbloomy of information that technology has unleashed. With rich psychological insights and vivid examples drawn from history and science, Superbloom provides both a panoramic view of how media shapes society and an intimate examination of the fate of the self in a time of radical dislocation. It may be too late to change the system, Carr counsels, but it's not too late to change ourselves." -- Front sleeve

Rosarita

"Away from her home in India to study Spanish, Bonita sits on a bench in El Jardin de San Miguel, Mexico, basking in the park's lush beauty, when she slowly becomes aware that she is being watched. An elderly woman approaches her, claiming that she knew Bonita's mother-that they had been friends when Bonita's mother had lived in Mexico as a talented young artist. Bonita tells the stranger that she must be mistaken; her mother was not a painter and had never travelled to Mexico. Though the stranger leaves, Bonita cannot shake the feeling that she is being followed. Days later, haunted by the encounter, Bonita seeks out the woman, whom she calls The Trickster, and follows her on a tour of what may, or may not, have been her mother's past. As a series of mysterious events brilliantly unfold, Bonita is unable to escape The Trickster's presence, as she is forced to confront questions of truth and identity, and specters of familial and national violence."-- Provided by publisher

Revenge of the Tipping Point

"Revisits the world of social epidemics first explored in Gladwell's 2000 book "The tipping point," this time taking a closer look at the dark side of social engineering. Twenty-five years after the publication of his groundbreaking first book, Malcolm Gladwell returns with a brand-new volume that reframes the lessons of The Tipping Point in a startling and revealing light. Why is Miami... Miami? What does the heartbreaking fate of the cheetah tell us about the way we raise our children? Why do Ivy League schools care so much about sports? What is the Magic Third, and what does it mean for racial harmony? In this provocative new work, Malcolm Gladwell returns for the first time in twenty-five years to the subject of social epidemics and tipping points, this time with the aim of explaining the dark side of contagious phenomena. Through a series of riveting stories, Gladwell traces the rise of a new and troubling form of social engineering. He takes us to the streets of Los Angeles to meet the world's most successful bank robbers, rediscovers a forgotten television show from the 1970s that changed the world, visits the site of a historic experiment on a tiny cul-de-sac in northern California, and offers an alternate history of two of the biggest epidemics of our day: COVID and the opioid crisis. Revenge of the Tipping Point is Gladwell's most personal book yet. With his characteristic mix of storytelling and social science, he offers a guide to making sense of the contagions of modern world. It's time we took tipping points seriously."-- Provided by publisher

Mothers and Sons

"An aging writer's love letter to his elderly mother, this achingly beautiful work of autofiction traces their family's history in Greece and in exile. Theodor Kallifatides, an acclaimed Greek author exiled in Sweden for more than 4 decades at age 68, visits his 92-year-old mother, who still resides in Athens. Both know that this may be one of their last encounters before her death. During the week they spend together, they reminisce about the most important things in their lives, including the presence and absence of Theodor's father,whose life story he is reading. There, his father explains his difficult journey, from his origins as a Greek exile in Turkey through his months in a Nazi prison, and his passion for teaching. All this reveals the history of a family through the 20th century. But Kallifatides's book is above all a wonderful tribute to the love of his mother, depicted in an unforgettable way, while conveying a universal truth about the importance of our mothers."--Provided by publisher

Love, Joe

"In works that are at once ambitious, modest, humorous, and endlessly inventive, Joe Brainard was one of the most important artists and writers to emerge out of the New York School in the middle of the twentieth century. Perhaps best known for his innovative memoir, I Remember, which has now become a cult classic, or his Nancy series based on the famous comic strip character, Brainard worked in a variety of visual and literary media. In whatever medium, his art drew on the everyday, popular culture, and his friendships, always exuding a sense of playfulness and generosity. Love, Joe: The Selected Letters of Joe Brainard is an engaging record of Brainard's friendships and work. The letters also give a window into queer life during this period. In letters to his lover Kenward Elmslie and others, Brainard describes a moment when gay life and visibility was becoming more prominent in New York City. The letters and images included in the book reflect how New York City in the 1960s, 70s, and 80s was a stage for the cross-fertilization of art and life - where writing and painting intersected with music, parties, gallery openings, happenings, dance performances and more. In letters to friends such as Frank O'Hara, John Ashbery, Alex Katz, Anne Waldman, and Fairfield Porter, Brainard writes about the processes of creating avant-garde art, gossips about the New York art and poetry worlds, and recounts his daily life. Though a beloved friend and well-regarded writer and artist, Brainard was not without his complexities and these letters reveal a side of him that does not always line up to his reputation for niceness."-- Provided by publisher

Letters to Gisèle (1951-1970)

"Insightful and provocative letters by a great twentieth-century poet to his artist wife about life and, revealingly, his own writing. An intimate look at this canonical poet's process, mental health, and quotidian moments during the early 1950s. Paul Celan, a Jewish poet born in the Bukovina, now part of Romania, who survived the Nazi genocide and moved to Paris while continuing to write in German, is recognized as one of the most powerful poetic imaginations of the second half of the twentieth century. His work, a touchstone not only for poets but for historians and philosophers, has been translated into countless languages. The letters he wrote to his wife, the artist Gisèle Lestrange, now published for the first time in English, provide the best picture we have of Celan's complicated personality and the course of his life, both private and public. The life was troubled by paranoid episodes and repeated mental breakdowns ending in hospitalization, and in 1970 he committed suicide. At the same time, his devotion to his work as a poet and translator (of Shakespeare, Dickinson, and Mandelstam, among others) was unflagging. This selection of his letters to Gisèle, which also includes his letters to his young son, Eric, as well as significant number of Gisèle's own letters, covers almost all of his literary career, and while it is a personal document, offering a remarkable protrait of a great poet, a tender husband and father, and a difficult but enduring marriage, it is also a poetic one, providing Celan's translations for Gisèle of his poems from German into French and his extensive commentaries on them. It takes us to Celan's work desk, capturing him in the act of composition while also giving us Celan's reading of Celan. Bertrand Badiou's notes transmit precious information about Celan's work and life. The volume also includes photographs and a detailed chronology of the poet's life."-- Provided by publisher

Homeseeking

"An epic and intimate tale of one couple across sixty years as world events pull them together and apart, illuminating the Chinese diaspora and exploring what it means to find home far from your homeland"-- Provided by publisher

The Granddaughter

"It is only after the sudden death of his wife, Birgit, that Kaspar discovers the price she paid years earlier when she fled East Germany to join him: she had to abandon her baby. Shattered by grief, yet animated by a new hope, Kaspar closes up his bookshop in present day Berlin and sets off to find her lost child in the east. His search leads him to a rural community of neo-Nazis, intent on reclaiming and settling ancestral lands to the East. Among them, Kaspar encounters Svenja, a woman whose eyes, hair, and even voice remind him of Birgit. Beside her is a red-haired, slouching, fifteen-year-old girl. His granddaughter? Their worlds could not be more different--an ideological gulf of mistrust yawns between them--but he is determined to accept her as his own. More than twenty-five years after The Reader, Bernhard Schlink once again offers a masterfully gripping novel that powerfully probes the past's role in contemporary life, transporting us from the divided Germany of the 1960s to modern day Australia, and asking what unites or separates us."-- Provided by publisher

The Forbidden Garden

"In the summer of 1941, German troops surrounded the Russian city of Leningrad-now St. Petersburg-and began the longest blockade in recorded history, one that would ultimately claim the lives of nearly three-quarters of a million people. At the center of the besieged city stood a converted palace that housed the world's largest collection of seeds-more than 250,000 samples hand-collected over two decades from all over the globe by world-famous explorer, geneticist, and dissident Nikolai Vavilov, who had recently been disappeared by the Soviet government. After attempts to evacuate the priceless collection failed and supplies dwindled amongst the three million starving citizens, the employes at the Plant Institute were left with a terrible choice. Should they save the collection? Or themselves? These were not just any seeds. The botanists believed they could be bred into heartier, disease-resistant, and more productive varieties suited for harsh climates, therefore changing the future of food production and preventing famines like those that had plagued their countrymen before. But protecting the seeds was no idle business. The scientists rescued potato samples under enemy fire, extinguished bombs landing on the seed bank's roof, and guarded the collection from scavengers, the bitter cold, and their own hunger. Then in the war's eleventh hour, Nazi plunderers presented a new threat to the collection... Drawing from previously unseen sources, award-winning journalist Simon Parkin-who has "an inimitable capacity to find the human pulse in the underbelly of war" (The Spectator)-tells the incredible true story of the botanists who held their posts at the Plant Institute during the 872-day siege and the remarkable sacrifices they made in the name of science."-- Provided by publisher

Brooke Shields Is Not Allowed to Get Old

"From Brooke Shields, the icon who has inspired generations of women, comes a thoughtful, intimate, and candid exploration of the humility and power of aging"-- Provided by publisher

Before Elvis

"In this thought-provoking book, the Black musicians who influenced Elvis Presley's music finally receive recognition and praise. After Baz Luhrmann’s movie, Elvis, hit theaters, audiences and critics alike couldn't help but question the Black origins of Elvis Presley’s music and style, reigniting a debate that has been circling for decades. In Before Elvis: The African American Musicians Who Made the King​, author Preston Lauterbach answers these questions definitively, based on new research and extensive, previously unpublished interviews with the artists who blazed the way and the people who knew them. Within these pages, Lauterbach examines the lives, music, legacies, and interactions with Elvis Presley of the four innovative Black artists who created a style that would come to be known as Rock ’n’ Roll: Little Junior Parker, Big Mama Thornton, Arthur 'Big Boy' Crudup, and mostly-unknown eccentric Beale Street guitarist Calvin Newborn. Along the way, he delves into the injustices of copyright theft and media segregation that resulted in Black artists living in poverty as white performers, managers, and producers reaped the lucrative rewards. In the wake of continuing conversations about American music and appropriation, Before Elvis is indispensable." -- Google Books

Another Man in the Street

"Caryl Phillips, "seen by many as the father of Afro-British fiction" (The New York Times), gives us a hypnotic, heartbreaking novel lit by the bright and changing lights of 1960s London."-- Provided by publisher

Natural History of Silence

"In our busy, noisy world, we may find ourselves longing for silence. But what is silence exactly? Is it the total absence of sound? Or is it the absence of the sound created by humans – the kind of deep stillness you might experience in a remote mountain landscape covered in snow, far away from the bustle of human life? When we listen closely, silence reveals a neglected reality. Neither empty nor singular, silence is instead plentiful and multiple. In this book, eco-acoustic historian Jérôme Sueur allows us to discover a vast landscape of silences which trigger the full gamut of our emotions: anxiety, awe and peace. He takes us from vistas resplendent with full and rich natural silences to the everyday silence of predators as they stalk their prey. To explore silences in animal behaviour and ecology is to discover a counterpoint to the acoustic diversity of the natural world, throwing into sharp relief the grating reverberations of the human activity which threatens it. It is to attune ourselves to a world that our human insensitivities have closed off to us, to take a moment simply to breathe and listen to the place of silence in nature." -- Back cover

Giant Love

"A book that explores the great American novelist and playwright Edna Ferber, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, whose work was made into many Academy Award-winning movies; the writing of her controversial, international best-selling novel about Texas, and the making of George Stevens' Academy Award winning epic film of the same name, Giant."-- Provided by publisher

The Irish Republican Brotherhood 1914-1924

"In [this book], John O'Beirne Ranelagh lifts the veil on the fascinating story of the IRB during the most critical phase of its campaign for Irish independence. With a father who was a member of the IRB and took part in the Easter Rising, War of Independence and the Civil War as an anti-Treaty officer, he had unique access to the generation of men and women who populated its ranks, many of whom refused to be interviewed by anyone else. Using personal testimonies from almost 100 key figures he interviewed, such as Éamon de Valera, Sheila Humphries, Emmet Dalton, Todd Andrews, Vinnie Byrne and Moss Twomey, as well as new archival material, Ranelagh unravels the true influence of the organisation to which Michael Collins pledged his foremost loyalty." -- Dust jacket flap