ODY New Books Collection

Life, Law & Liberty

"Justice Anthony Kennedy was at the ideological center of a closely divided U.S. Supreme Court for thirty years. Often writing landmark opinions in pivotal cases, he affirmed and redefined liberty for our nation--protecting political speech, upholding a women's right to choose, abolishing the death penalty or minors, and legalizing gay marriage... In [this book], Kennedy tells his story--filled with personal heartbreak and incredible accomplishment--and reflects on the nuanced role of a judge." -- Dust jacket flap

If You Love It, Let It Kill You

"Divorced and childless by choice, Hana P.-the metafictional version-has built a cozy life in Lexington, Kentucky, teaching at the flagship university, living with a fellow academic, and helping raise his pre-teen daughter. Her sister's sprawling family lives just across the street, and their long-divorced, deeply complicated parents have also newly moved to town. One day, Hana learns that an unflattering version of herself will appear prominently-and soon-in her ex-husband's debut novel. For a week, her life continues largely unaffected by the news-she cooks, runs, teaches, entertains-but the morning after baking mac 'n' cheese from scratch for her nephew's sixth birthday, she wakes up changed. The contentment she's long been enjoying is gone. In its place: nothing. A remarkably ridiculous mid-life crisis ensues, featuring a talking cat, a visit to the dean's office, a shadowy figure from the past, a Greek-like chorus of indignant students whose primary complaints concern Hana's auto-fictional narrative, and a game called Dead Body. Playing with the subtleties and strangeness of contemporary life, If You Love It, Let It Kill You is a deeply nuanced and disturbingly funny examination of memory, ownership, and artistic expression for readers of Miranda July's All Fours and Sigrid Nunez's The Friend."-- Provided by publisher

I Went to Prison so You Won't
Have to

"Ambushed by five armed FBI agents at Reagan airport, shackled in leg irons, and strip-searched, [Peter] Navarro became the first ever top presidential aide in US history to be put in federal prison for defending the Constitution. ... [This book] presents Peter's raw, unfiltered account ot what really happens when the American justice system is weaponized for political revenge. Told through a powerful exchange of personal letters between Peter and his fiancée [Bonnie Brenner], this book pulls back the curtain on a corrupt and bloated federal prison system." --Flap page 1 of dust jacket

How to Think about AI

"People are confused about what artificial intelligence is, what it can and cannot do, what is yet to come, and whether AI is good or bad for humanity and civilization -- whether it will provide solutions to mankind's major challenges or become our gravest existential threat. There is also ongoing debate how we should regulate AI and where we should draw moral boundaries on its use. In How to Think About AI, Richard Susskind draws on his experience of working on AI since the early 1980s. For Susskind, balancing the benefits and threats of artificial intelligence -- saving humanity with and from AI -- is the defining challenge of our age. He explores the history of AI and possible scenarios for its future. His views on AI are not always conventional. He positions ChatGPT and generative AI as no more than the latest chapter in the ongoing story of AI and claims we are still at the foothills of developments. He argues that to think responsibly about the impact of AI requires us to look well beyond today's technologies, suggesting that not yet invented technologies will have far greater impact on us in the 2030s than the tools we have today. This leads Susskind to discuss the possibility of conscious machines, remarkable new AI-enabled virtual worlds, and the impact of AI on the evolution of human beings." -- Jacket flap

Heart the Lover

"'You knew I'd write a book about you someday.' Our narrator understands good love stories--their secrets and subtext, their highs and their free falls. But her greatest love story, the one she lived, never followed the simple rules. In the fall of her senior year of college, she meets two star students from her 17th-Century Lit class: Sam and Yash. Best friends living off campus in the elegant house of a professor on sabbatical, the boys invite her into their intoxicating world of academic fervor, rapid-fire banter and raucous card games. They nickname her Jordan, and she quickly discovers the pleasures of friendship, love and her own intellectual ambition. Youthful passion is unpredictable though, and she soon finds herself at the center of a charged and intricate triangle. As graduation comes and goes, choices made will alter these three lives forever. Decades later, Jordan is living the life she dreamed of, and the vulnerable days of her youth seem comfortably behind her. But when a surprise visit and unexpected news brings the past crashing into the present, she returns to a world she left behind and is forced to confront the decisions and deceptions of her younger self. Written with the superb wit and emotional sensitivity fans and critics of Lily King have come to adore, Heart the Lover is a deeply moving story that celebrates love, friendship, and the transformative nature of forgiveness. Wise, unforgettable, and with a delightful connective thread to Writers & Lovers, this is King at her very best, affirming her as a masterful chronicler of the human experience and one of the finest novelists at work today." -- Provided by publisher

Gertrude Stein

"Gertrude Stein's salon at 27 rue de Fleurus in the 6th arrondissement of Paris is the stuff of literary legend. Many have tried to capture the spirit and glamour of the place that once entertained andfostered the likes of Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Pablo Picasso, and Henri Matisse, but perhaps none as determinedly, and self-consciously, as Stein herself. In this ... biography of the polarizing, trailblazing author, collector, salonniáere, and tastemaker, Francesca Wade rescues Stein from the tangle of contradictions that has characterized her legacy, ... presenting us with this towering literary figure as we've never seen her before. ... Pushing beyond the conventions of literary biography, [this book] is a bold, innovative examination of the nature of legacy and memory itself,in which Wade uncovers the origins of Stein's radical writing and reveals new depths to the storied relationship that made it possible."-- Provided by publisher

Friends until the End

"Edmund Burke and Charles Fox made common political cause in 18th-century Britain: they supported the rebellious American colonies, attacked the British slave trade, defended religious liberty and attempted to shield Britain's credit from the crisis-prone East India Company. The two men were an improbable pair. But the hard-drinking, mistress-collecting Fox loved and admired Burke, feelings that the clean-living political philosopher and statesman warmly reciprocated. 'Friends Until the End' traces Burke and Fox's relationship through three key events: the American Revolution; the impeachment of the East India Company's governor-general; and the French Revolution, which ended their political union and shattered their friendship."-- Provided by publisher

Food Fight

"Food is life but our food system is killing us. Designed in a different century for a different purpose--to mass-produce cheap calories to prevent famine--it's now generating obesity, ill-health and premature death. We need to transform it, into one that is capable of nourishing all eight billion of us and the planet we live on. In Food Fight, Stuart Gillespie reveals how the food system we once relied upon for global nutrition has warped into the very thing making us sick. From its origins in colonial plunder, through the last few decades of neoliberalism, the system now lies in the tight grip of a handful of powerful transnationals whose playbook is geared to profit at any cost. Both unflinching exposé and revolutionary call to arms, Food Fight shines a light inside the black box of politics and power and, crucially, maps a way towards a new system that gives us hope for a future of global health and justice."-- Provided by publisher

The Feeling of Iron

"In 1941, SS Major Hans Lichtblau is put in charge of a research program that uses concentration camp prisoners as guinea pigs, but also as lab assistants, organized into a unit known as the Kommando Gardenia. The experiments are conducted as part of the infamous 'final solution to the Jewish problem' and with the Nazi advance in Russia and the colonization of the Eastern territories as the backdrop. The Kommando includes Shlomo Libowitz, born in a Polish shtetl and converted to Zionism in the Lager, and Anton Epstein, an assimilated Jew from the Prague bourgeoisie, convinced that the only possible answer to barbarism is socialism. Shlomo and Anton survive the war and Lichtblau's treatment of them to become inconvenient witnesses of a world that has ended and yet still determines the present. Forty years later, on behalf of different and apparently irreconcilable clients, the two veterans set out on the trail of Lichtblau, who is fighting the Sandinistas on behalf of the CIA, raiding villages and trafficking in drugs. Anton and Shlomo's manhunt is a race against time, because one life may be too short to settle all accounts. At once a thrilling spy story that spans two continents and two eras and a novel of ideas about a civilization in crisis, 'The feeling of iron' is Alonge's English-language debut." -- Inside cover flap

Exit Lane

"After a postgraduation drive from Iowa City to NYC, Teddy and Marin have both had enough of each other to last the rest of their lives. But that doesn't stop their paths from crossing over eight rocky years, punctuated by chance encounters and transatlantic visits, on a journey that eventually brings them right back to where it all started." --Page 4 of cover

The Einstein of Sex

An illuminating portrait of a lost thinker, German-Jewish sexologist and activist Magnus Hirschfeld. More than a century ago, Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld, dubbed the "Einstein of Sex," grew famous (and infamous) for his liberating theory of sexual relativity. Today, he's been largely forgotten. Journalist Daniel Brook retraces Hirschfeld's rollicking life and reinvigorates his legacy, recovering one of the great visionaries of the twentieth century. In an era when gay sex was a crime and gender roles rigid, Hirschfeld taught that each of us is their own unique mixture of masculinity and femininity. Through his public advocacy for gay rights and his private counseling of patients toward self-acceptance, he became the intellectual impresario of Berlin's cabaret scene and helped turn his hometown into the world's queer capital. But he also enraged the Nazis, who ransacked his Institute for Sexual Science and burned his books Driven from his homeland, Hirschfeld traveled to America, Asia, and the Middle East to research sexuality on a global scale. Through his harrowing lived experience of antisemitic persecution and a pivotal late-in-life interracial romance, he came to see that race, like gender, was a human invention. Hirschfeld spent his final years in exile trying to warn the world of the genocidal dangers of racism. Rich in passion and intellect, The Einstein of Sex at last brings together this unsung icon's work on sexuality, gender, and race and recovers the visionary who first saw beyond the binaries. A century after his groundbreaking work--as the fights for personal freedom and societal acceptance rage on - Hirschfeld's gift for thinking beyond the confines of his world has much to teach us.

Dominion

"A novel with a big cast, Dominion explores the lies and complicity of a Baptist church and the family that leads it-a philandering minister, a pill-popping first lady, and a favorite son whose fall will expose them all."-- Provided by publisher

The Chinese Tragedy of King Lear

"Nan Z. Da, who immigrated to the United States from China as a child, analyzes Shakespeare's King Lear as a way to understand her family's experience in China during and after the Cultural Revolution."-- Provided by publisher

Cannon

"We arrive to wreckage--a restaurant smashed to rubble, with tables and chairs upended riotously. Under the swampy nighttime cover of a Montreal heat-wave, this is where we meet our protagonist, Cannon, dripping in little beads of regret sweat. She was supposed to be closing the restaurant for the night, but instead, well, she destroyed it. The mess feels a bit like a horror-scape--not unlike the horror films Cannon and her best friend, Trish, watch together. Cooking dinner and digging into deep cuts of Australian horror films on their scheduled weekly hangs has become the glue in their rote relationship. In high school, they were each other's lifeline--two queer second-generation Chinese nerds trapped in the suburbs. Now, on the uncool side of their twenties, the essentialness of one another feels harder to pin down. Yet, when our stoic and unbendingly well-behaved Cannon finds herself--very uncharacteristically--surrounded by smashed plates, it is Trish who shows up to pull her the hell outta there. In Cannon, Lee Lai's much anticipated follow-up to the critically acclaimed and award-winning Stone Fruit, the full palette of a nervous breakdown is just a slice of what Lai has on offer. As Cannon's shoulders bend under the weight of an aging Gung-gung and an avoidant mother, Lai's sharp sense of humor and sensitive eye produce a story that will hit readers with a smash."--Amazon.com

Born in Flames

"A young historian's superlative debut . . . this excellent book delivers the truth about 'the burning years." --Kirkus Reviews (starred review) "[R]iveting . . . an outstanding expose of the predatory capitalist machinations behind the 'Bronx is burning' saga."--Publishers Weekly (starred review) The explosive account of the arson wave that hit the Bronx and other American cities in the 1970s--and its legacy today.

Born Equal

"In Born Equal, the prizewinning constitutional historian Akhil Reed Amar recounts the dramatic constitutional debates that unfolded across these eight decades, when four glorious amendments abolished slavery, secured Black and female citizenship, and extended suffrage regardless of race or gender. At the heart of this era was the epic and ever-evolving idea that all Americans are created equal. The promise of birth equality sat at the base of the 1776 Declaration of Independence. But in the nineteenth century, remarkable American women and men-especially Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Abraham Lincoln-elaborated a new vision of what this ideal demanded. Their debates played out from Seneca Falls to the halls of Congress, from Bloody Kansas to Gettysburg, from Ford's Theater to the White House gates, ultimately transforming the nation and the world." -- Provided by publisher

The Book of Guilt

After a very different outcome to WWII than the one history recorded, 1979 England is a country ruled by a government whose aims have sinister underpinnings and alliances. In the Hampshire countryside, 13-year-old triplets Vincent, Lawrence and William are the last remaining residents at the Captain Scott Home for Boys, where every day they must take medicine to protect themselves from a mysterious illness to which many of their friends have succumbed. The lucky ones who recover are allowed to move to Margate, a seaside resort of mythical proportions. In nearby Exeter, 13-year-old Nancy lives a secluded life with her parents, who dote on her but never let her leave the house. As the triplets' lives begin to intersect with Nancy's, bringing to light a horrifying truth about their origins and their likely fate, the children must unite to escape - and survive.

Augustine the African

Augustine the African by Catherine Conybeare re-centers Augustine of Hippo's African identity, showing how his major works emerged not from Europe but from North Africa during the fall of the Western Roman Empire. Drawing on letters and historical evidence, Conybeare reveals how Augustine's exile and African context shaped his theology, challenging traditional narratives and highlighting Christianity's deep roots in Africa.

The Afterlife of Malcolm X

Explores the iconic freedom fighter's posthumous influence on Black Power, hip-hop, literature, sports, and politics while also detailing the wrongful convictions in his assassination, offering a broad view of his lasting impact on American culture and history.

Lin-Manuel Miranda

Traces Miranda's path from a friendly but isolated child to the winner of multiple Tonys and Grammys for Broadway hits Hamilton and In the Heights, a global chart-topping sensation for songs in Disney's Moana and Encanto, and the recipient of a Pulitzer Prize and a MacArthur Genius Grant.