ODY New Books Collection

Done in a Day

"Elisa Tamarkin has written a searing reflection on America's abrupt defeat in the Vietnam War and the simultaneous demise of foreign reporting in the nation's daily newspapers, many of them soon to close. Done in a Day turns on a singular event: the April 30, 1975, departure of the last helicopter evacuating American civilians from the rooftop of the US embassy in Saigon, rising above a crowd of desperate Vietnamese looking for a way to escape. Elisa Tamarkin's interest in that helicopter begins with the fact that her father, Bob Tamarkin, the Saigon bureau chief for the Chicago Daily News, was on it-the last American correspondent evacuated from Saigon. Bob Tamarkin's report, "Diary of S. Viet's Last Hours," was filed from a Navy ship at a time when no other telexes seemed to be going through and was a major exclusive. It was also the beginning of the end of a long history of war coverage in city newspapers-papers once proud, in the words of the Chicago Daily News, for bringing readers the "literature of the day" that was "done in a day." Elisa Tamarkin braids history, memoir, and cultural criticism to tell the paired stories of Saigon's fall and America's journalistic decline. The result is a haunting essay about all that ended with America's chaotic withdrawal-and about what it means to recognize and to write about endings at all."-- Provided by publisher

Being Reasonable

"Krista Lawlor offers the first comprehensive study of reasonableness. Being reasonable is critical to law, politics, and daily life. But what exactly is reasonableness? Distinguishing it from rationality and thoughtfulness, Lawlor shows that reasonable people seek to know what is valuable and do so by attending to their emotions and to each other."-- Provided by publisher

Anxietyland

"In 2018, Gemma Correll had a panic attack that lasted for weeks on end. Unable to do much more than walk aimlessly through the streets of Berkeley, Correll admitted herself to the hospital to reckon with The Bad Feeling that had been her companion since she was a child. With her ingenious and charming illustrations "bursting with personality...peppered with witty asides" (Publishers Weekly), Correll leads readers through the amusement park in her own mind--featuring severe anxiety, depression, agoraphobia, and disassociation--a frightening and darkly funny world that "feels like a place apart from 'real' life." A hilarious thrill ride exploring the mysteries of the mind-body connection, Gemma Correll's graphic memoir is shot through with the absurd knowledge that there is no linear way through Anxietyland, nor any cure-alls--but there are ways to feel better if you keep trying to move forward." -- Publisher description

Where the Music Had to Go

"From Dylan's initial dismissal of the Beatles as being for "teenyboppers" to his realization that they were "pointing the direction where music had to go"-- and from the Beatles' obsessive spinning of early Dylan records to their impromptu renditions of fifteen Dylan songs during the 1969 Get Back sessions -- the book captures the moments that pushed Dylan to "go electric" and inspired the Beatles to deepen their lyrics. Highly entertaining and packed with backstage anecdotes, Where the Music Had to Go is a deep-focus portrait of a heretofore unexamined relationship, one full of camaraderie, competition, and mutual evolution. More than a music biography, this is a front-row seat to the forces that shaped an era -- an unmissable experience for music lovers, pop-culture buffs, and anyone curious about the magic that happens when legends collide."-- Dust jacket

True Color

"An irresistibly wry, culturally rich exploration of color and how it shapes our world--from the leading lexicographer of our time." -- Provided by publisher

This Story Might Save Your Life

"Benny Abbott and Joy Moore host one of the most beloved podcasts in the world. Each week, they delight listeners with a different 'against-all-odds' survival story, gleefully finding the weird, life-affirming humor in near-death experiences. Since their first episode on Joy's experience with severe narcolepsy, they've been the best friends everyone wants to befriend -- and thanks to the meticulous management of Joy's husband, Xander, they've built a lucrative empire. The problem is, their next survival story may be their own. When Benny arrives at Joy and Xander's home one morning to record, he finds shattered glass and an empty house. The one clue shedding light on the couple's disappearance is the incomplete, previously unseen first draft of Joy's memoir. Benny will stop at nothing to find them, even as the police soon zero in on him as their prime suspect. Millions of devoted listeners think they know the 'real' Benny and Joy. But as the hours tick by and the odds seem increasingly stacked against Joy and Xander being found alive, not even the most devoted fans could guess the terrible secrets their favorite famous BFFs have hidden from the world -- and from each other."-- Book jacket flap

See You on the Other Side

"The celebration of the thirty-fifth wedding anniversary of Russell Calloway's best friend, Washington Lee--the least likely monogamist of his acquaintance somehow having become over the years a model husband and father--at the Odeon in the spring of 2020 sparks an at once funny and moving autumnal reckoning with mortality for Russell and his wife, Corinne, as the specter of the COVID-19 virus spreads. In this moment of unprecedented upheaval--frantic and fraught real-time response, piercing personal and political impact--the Calloways find themselves and their marriage tested in ways they could never have expected as fatal consequences inexorably ensue." -- Provided by publisher

Questions 27 & 28

"In February 1942, shortly after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, Franklin D. Roosevelt issued an executive order authorizing the secretary of war to remove 120,000 Japanese Americans from their homes on the West Coast and corral them into inland concentration camps. To be considered for release, they were required to answer the so-called loyalty questionnaire. Question 27 asked the inmates--who had been imprisoned without cause by the US military--whether they were willing to serve in combat for the US military. Question 28 asked them--many of whom American citizens who had never visited Japan--to renounce allegiance to the Japanese emperor. Answering these questions caused volatile divisions within the camps, tore families and friends apart, and had lasting repercussions in the decades postwar. Questions 27 & 28 reaches backward and forward from the time of the questionnaire, chronicling the individuals who arrived in the US from Japan at the turn of the century, their children who came of age during war and incarceration, and their descendants who lived in its aftermath. Yamashita mixes fact with fiction and layers genres from James Bond movies to haiku to oral history, transfiguring an enormity of archival research into a chorus of stories. With her signature wit and aplomb, she gives voice to laborers, artists, scholars, informants, and activists who, over three generations, defined an immigrant community." -- Provided by publisher

The Power of Life

"In the early nineteenth century, the French naturalist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck proposed the first evolutionary theory of life and, with it, a new science: biology. Yet for centuries, evolutionary theorists have endeavored to discredit Lamarck and his theory of self-transforming organisms. In this melding of biography, history, politics, and science, Jessica Riskin sets out to correct the record, telling the story of Lamarck's life and work as an intense struggle between rival forces to answer questions that remain foundational to our modern worldview: What is a living being, and what is science?" -- Provided by publisher

Most Wonderful Terrible Person

"On October 7, 1964, Debra Miller's life turns upside down when her mother is arrested for the murder of her father. At only fourteen years old, Debra becomes a ward of the court, grappling with the unfathomable trauma of watching her mother's trial and conviction--a devastation that is only amplified when her family's tragedy is splashed across headlines nationwide and featured in Joan Didion's 'Slouching Towards Bethlehem'. Desperate to escape the notoriety of her family and utterly ill equipped to face the world, Debra spends her young adulthood sinking into mental illness, toxic relationships, and substance abuse. Meanwhile, her unrepentant mother, Lucille, uses Debra to supply contraband in prison. When Lucille is released, twentysomething Debra, seeking the love and support she so desperately desires, moves in with her--only to find herself constantly manipulated and dragged into her mother's illegal activities. Torn between love and survival, Debra spends years trying to escape her mother's vortex even as she battles her own demons. Ultimately, it's only when Lucille passes away that Debra finally frees herself from her grip--and realizes she needs to change her life. In this raw and poignant memoir, Debra Miller bares the scars of an adolescence and adulthood shaped by the impact of a destructive mother and demonstrates that healing is always possible--even in the face of a past that just won't let go." -- Provided by publisher

The Monuments of Paris

"A remarkable novel drawn from life about a Frenchwoman's efforts to come to terms with the legacy of her father and grandfather, both powerful forces who left a mark on their country's culture but whose incorrigible womanizing also left a complex mark on their wives and children. Violaine Huisman grew up in Paris with her beautiful, often hospitalized, manic-depressive mother--the subject of Huisman's acclaimed debut novel The Book of Mother--and her iconoclastic, flamboyant, Balzacian character of a father, a larger-than-life figure whose paternal love for his youngest daughter was as dramatically narcissistic as it was untrustworthy. The one constant in her father's personal narrative was always his obsession with the story of his childhood during the Vichy regime in France and of his father Georges, long dead, a Belgian Jew whose heroic and tragic biography had taken on the trappings of family myth. In The Monuments of Paris, Violaine Huisman has transformed these complex layers of history into an elegant and moving novel about exile and belonging, about the lies families are built on and the truths they hold dear. As the novel opens, 'Violaine' returns to Paris from her adopted home of New York City to visit her dying father for the last time. And as his conversation once again obsessively circles the story of his father's rise and fall during the war, Violaine, who always felt herself and her mother to be exiles within their own clan, becomes herself obsessed with this myth of her grandfather Georges--and especially with the nearly erased story of the most significant of his many mistresses, a beautiful and aristocratic woman named Choute. With the help of a local historian, she sets out to hunt down the truth as it might be known, and in so doing creates the necessary and deeply compelling fiction that is this singular book. In prose as elegant as it is precise, The Monuments of Paris draws a haunting portrait of twentieth-century France through the outsized ambitions, infidelities, and tragedies of the author's own family, both real and imagined." -- Provided by publisher

Like, Follow, Subscribe

"A searing investigation into the child influencer industry and the perils of childhood internet fame, Like, Follow, Subscribe is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand the costs of internet fame, and the ethics of online content. What is it like to grow up with a camera in your face 24/7? To have your childhood moments sold as 'content' to millions online? What happens when someone who works in a largely unregulated multi-billion-dollar industry sells away their childhood and has no financial safety net as an adult? What does it feel like to have your private moments--your medical diagnoses, your first period, your first break up, your tantrums, potty-training, and breastfeeding-weaning--broadcast to an audience of millions? Like, Follow, Subscribe shines a spotlight on the deeply troubling world of the child influencer industry. Journalist Fortesa Latifi dives into the lives of children whose parents mine their everyday activities for monetizable content, exposing issues like privacy violations, financial abuse, and the absence of child labor protections. Through expert interviews with psychologists, labor scientists, and even former child influencers and family vloggers, she uncovers the pressures, trauma, and consequences for children thrust into the spotlight. This timely and eye-opening book doesn't just reveal the harm of toxic social media culture: it also provides a roadmap to better regulating influencer families, safeguarding children, and questioning the role of audiences in perpetuating these cycles of exploitation." -- Provided by publisher

Lázár

"At the turn of the 20th century, the Lázárs welcome their newest member in their rural summer estate, surrounded by a menacingly dark, enchanting forest. Lajos von Lázár is a baby boy with translucent skin and light-blue eyes who looks nothing like the rest of his family. Sándor, the imposing patriarch, is ashamed of his son's peculiarity. Ilona finds her baby brother quite ugly. Mária is terrified that her son's uncanny resemblance to the stagehand who died a couple weeks earlier might spell disaster. While Imre, Sándor's brother whose otherworldly foresight is often confused for insanity, is struck by visions of a great catastrophe. Lajos's birth is emblematic of the many secrets, affairs, and peculiar otherworldly happenings that plague the Lázárs. As the decades go by, they will continue to fall prey to their desires, leading grand lives, and experiencing even greater tragedies as they're swept by the tides of war and revolution that befall their country. But time and again, in the lighter years, extraordinary love and hope shine through."-- Provided by publisher

In Search of Now

"[The author] takes us on a grand tour of the latest thinking in cosmology, quantum mechanics, psychology, and neuroscience to ... explore the fundamental essence of time."--Flap page 1 of dust jacket

How It Feels to Be Alive

"Barbara Kruger once defined art as the ability “to show and tell, through a kind of eloquent shorthand, how it feels to be alive.” Testing that claim, Megan O’Grady takes us on a journey to explore art’s intimate effects and how it might help us find clarity in an uncertain world. When O’Grady was a teenager, she saw a photograph in a museum that changed her life. When she was at the end of an early marriage, art stoked new ways of thinking about connection and transformation. When she was a new parent, it guided her to confront vulnerability and shame. Whether she was seeking a home or contending with crises personal, political, and ecological, art was a critical lifeline, a source of beauty, solace, and provocation. Looking closely at five artworks and the context in which each was made―and often drawing on personal conversations with the artists―O’Grady traces the works’ rippling impacts, suggesting sometimes unexpected lineages and genres. How does art expand and redirect our imagination and attention? When bottom-line or nihilistic thinking dominates our public sphere, what meanings and alternatives does art offer? A vital call to engage deeply, to see in new ways, and to consider all that we take for granted, How It Feels to Be Alive inspires and exhorts, providing a template for thinking through the knottiest problems in our culture and our selves, and the connections between the two." -- Amazon

How Flowers Made Our World

"An exquisite exploration of the power of flowers, placing them at the center of the story of how evolution created the world we know today. We live on a floral planet, yet flowers don't get the credit they deserve. We admire them for their aesthetics, not their world-changing power. Inspired by the most up-to-date scientific research, David George Haskell observes, smells, and studies flowers such as magnolias, orchids, and roses, as well as fascinating but less well-known flowers such as seagrasses, to show us what we've been missing. Flowers are beautiful revolutionaries. When they evolved, they remade the natural world: They used beauty to transform former enemies into cooperative partners. They reinvented plant growth, sex, and motherhood. Through radical genetic flexibility, they turned past environmental upheavals into opportunities for renewal. This inventiveness allowed them to build and sustain rain forests, savannahs, prairies, and even ocean shores. Without flowers, human beings would not exist. We are a floral species, dependent on flowers for food and our habitats, as well as using flowers for beauty, scent, and culturally important rituals. Looking to the future, flowers offer us lessons on resilience and creativity in the face of rapid environmental change. How Flowers Made Our World combines lyrical writing, sensual exploration, and scientific expertise to explore some of the most consequential life forms ever to have evolved, showing how our planet came to be and how it thrives today."-- Provided by publisher

Half City

"Welcome to Harker Academy for Deviant Defense. Keep your daggers sharp and your wits sharper. Viv Abbot is just like any other twenty-one-year-old girl. She lives in an expensive city where the rent is too high, works long hours at a thankless job, and is dating a guy she doesn't even like in the hopes of winning her mother's approval. She also happens to lead a double life as a demon hunter. After Viv's hunter father died, she became a lone wolf. Not only does she hunt deviants alone now, but everyone, including her family, sees her as an outsider...until she crosses paths with the dangerously alluring Reid Graveheart. The reformed demon tells her of a school for people like her: Harker Academy for Deviant Defense. If she enrolls, not only will she learn to hone her craft, she'll never be alone again. Though if it were that easy, wouldn't Viv's father have told her about it before he died? Viv has a deadly secret. One that she can't reveal to her new friends at Harker. Not when the school holds the answer to the many questions Viv has, from untangling the mystery surrounding her father's death to understanding her very existence. All she has to do is try not to fall for a demon and make it through her first year of school in one piece. How hard can that be?"-- Provided by publisher

Green & Deadly Things

"Centuries ago, necromancy almost destroyed the world. That's how history remembers it. History remembers it wrong. Mathaiik has trained all his life to join the sacred order of the Idallik Knights, charged with defending their world from the forces of necromancy. Only vestiges of that cursed magic remain, nothing like the fabled days of the Grim Lords, the undead wizards who once nearly destroyed the world. But when an even stranger kind of monster begins to wake, the Knights quickly prove powerless to stop them. Whole forests are coming alive and devouring anyone so foolish as to trespass, as if the land itself has turned upon humanity. It's a good thing, then, that the Grim Lords were never truly destroyed. One of their number sleeps below the Knights' very fortress. And when an army of twisted tree monsters attacks the young initiates in his charge, Math decides to do the unthinkable: he wakes her up. This is only the beginning of his problems. Because said necromancer, Kaiataris, knows something history has forgotten. The threat of this wild magic is part of a cycle that has repeated countless times-life after death, chaos after order. And if she and Math can't find a new way to balance the scales, this won't just be the end of the world as they know it, but the end of all life, everywhere."-- Provided by publisher

Go Gentle

"Adora Hazzard has it all figured out. A Stoic philosopher and divorcee, she lives amongst friends and culture on New York's Upper West Side, and works for the ultra-wealthy and secretive Lockwood family as a private ethics tutor for their tween boys. Her main life hack, and the key to her own enviable happiness, is to desire only what you have. Everything else life throws at you? Don't just accept it; love it. Amor Fati. Adora believes it so deeply she has it tattooed on her wrist. But when Adora meets Digby, a handsome stranger at the ballet, she finds herself loving fate indeed. But soon, she's pulled into a world of secret rendezvous, black-market art deals, and international intrigue. Driven by an unexpected and maddening desire, Adora risks reputation, job and hard-won serenity for the feelings Digby has awoken in her."-- Provided by publisher

The Geomagician

"When a Victorian fossil hunter discovers a baby pterodactyl, she vows to protect him, with the help of a fellow scholar--her former fiancé."-- Provided by publisher