ODY New Books Collection

The Maverick's
Museum

From prominent critic and biographer Blake Gopnik comes a compelling new portrait of America's first great collector of modern art, Albert Coombs Barnes. Raised in a Philadelphia slum shortly after the Civil War, Barnes rose to earn a medical degree and then made a fortune from a pioneering antiseptic treatment for newborns. Never losing sight of the working-class neighbors of his youth, Barnes became a ruthless advocate for their rights and needs. His vast art collection -- 181 Renoirs, 69 Cézannes, 59 Matisses, 46 Picassos -- was dedicated to enriching their cultural lives. A miner was more likely to get access than a mine owner. Gopnik's meticulous research reveals Barnes as a fierce advocate for the egalitarian ideals of his era's progressive movement. But while his friends in the movement worked to reshape American society, Barnes wanted to transform the nation's aesthetic life, taking art out of the hands of the elite and making it available to the average American. The Maverick's Museum offers a vivid picture of one of America's great eccentrics. The sheer ferocity of Barnes's democratic ambitions left him with more enemies than allies among people of all classes, but for a circle of intimates, he was a model of intelligence, generosity, and loyalty. In this compelling portrait, Gopnik reveals a life shaped by contradictions, one that left a lasting impact. -- Provided by publisher

Lunar : a History of the Moon in Myths, Maps, and Matter, Incorporating the USGS/NASA Geologic Atlas, 1962-74 / Matthew Shindell, Consultant Editor ; Dava Sobel, Foreword

"President John F. Kennedy’s rousing “We will go to the Moon” speech in 1961 before the US Congress catalyzed the celebrated Apollo program, spurring the US Geological Survey’s scientists to map the Moon. Over the next eleven years a team of twenty-two, including a dozen illustrator-cartographers, created forty-four charts that forever changed the path of space exploration. For the first time, each of those beautifully hand-drawn, colorful charts is presented together in one stunning book. In Lunar, National Air and Space Museum curator Matthew Shindell’s expert commentary accompanies each chart, along with the key geological characteristics and interpretations that were set out in the original Geologic Atlas of the Moon. Interwoven throughout the book are contributions from scholars devoted to studying the multifaceted significance of the Moon to humankind around the world. Traveling from the Stone Age to the present day, they explore a wide range of topics: the prehistoric lunar calendar; the role of the Moon in creation myths of Ancient Egypt, Greece, and Rome; the role of the Moon in astrology; the importance of the Moon in establishing an Earth-centered solar system; the association of the Moon with madness and the menstrual cycle; how the Moon governs the tides; and the use of the Moon in surrealist art. Combining a thoughtful retelling of the Moon’s cultural associations throughout history with the beautifully illustrated and scientifically accurate charting of its surface, Lunar is a stunning celebration of the Moon in all its guises." -- taken from publisher's website

Lucky Valley

"Written in 1774, Edward Long's History of Jamaica, attempted to define White and Black as essentially different and unequal. Catherine Hall unpicks the contradictions in Long's thinking, exposing the insidious myths and stereotypes that have allowed reconfigured forms of racial difference and racial capitalism to live on in contemporary societies."-- Provided by publisher

I Dream of Joni

"The eternal singer-songwriter Joni Mitchell is seen anew, portrayed through a witty and comprehensive exploration of anecdotes, quotes, and lyrics by "the most graceful of humorists" (Vanity Fair) and author of And Then We Danced."-- Provided by publisher

How to Write a Funny Speech...

"Learn how to write and give a flawlessly funny speech for any occasion with Emmy-winning comedy writers Carol Leifer and Rick Mitchell. With a foreword by Carol Burnett."-- Provided by publisher

Hot Air

"A mischievous story of money, marriage, sex, and revenge unspools when a billionaire crashes his hot air balloon into the middle of a post-pandemic first date. Joannie hasn't been on a date in seven years when Johnny invites her to dinner. His house is beautiful, his son is sweet, and their first kiss is, well, it's not the best, but Joannie could convince herself it was nice enough. But when Joannie's childhood crush, a summer camp fling turned famous billionaire, crash lands his hot air balloon in Johnny's swimming pool, Joannie dives in. Soon she finds herself alighting on a lost weekend with Johnny the bad kisser, Jonathan, the billionaire, and Julia his beautiful but manipulative wife. Does Joannie want Jonathan? Or does Jonathan want his assistant, Vivian? Does Joannie want Julia? Or does Julia want a baby like Joannie's? A tale of lust and money and lust for money, Hot Air is as astonishing as it is blisteringly funny, a delirious, delicious story for our billionaire era."-- Provided by publisher

Henry James Comes Home

"In this enthralling re-creation of American novelist Henry James' famous ten-month trip around the United States, lauded critic Peter Brooks brings to life both the literary giant and America in its Gilded Age. In 1904, after two decades of living and travelling abroad, Henry James returned to the United States to discover a world drastically different from the one he had left behind. Suddenly, the future of world seemed to be in his native land, which he had once considered provincial, lacking in nourishment for the novelist. James thus set forth to refamiliarize himself with the United States, travelling the width and breadth of the land and exercising his acute powers of observation to document all that he saw. James's ten-month journey across America and its product, the ethnographic work The American Scene, are the focus of Henry James Comes Home, scholar and literary critic Peter Brooks's dazzling follow-up to his book Henry James Goes to Paris. Brooks combines biography and criticism to recreate James's American journey, tracing his travels around New England, down south to Florida, across the Midwest, up the coast of California and eventually to Seattle and Portland. For James, being American was 'a complex fate,' and Brooks shows how James's keen remarks on rampant materialism and the challenges at the heart of democracy are still of enduring relevance to us in this day."-- Provided by publisher

Goddess Complex

"Sanjana Satyananda is trying to recover her life. It's been a year since she walked out on her husband, a struggling actor named Killian, at a commune in India, after a disagreement about whether to have children. Now, Sanjana is struggling to resurrect her busted anthropology dissertation and crashing at her annoyingly perfect sister's while her well-adjusted peers obsess over marriages, mortgages, and motherhood. Sanjana needs to move forward--and finalize her divorce, ASAP. There's just one problem: Killian is missing. As Sanjana tries to track him down, she's bombarded with unnerving calls from women seeking her advice on pregnancy and fertility. Soon, Sanjana comes face to face with what her life might have been if she'd chosen parenthood. And the road not taken turns out to be wilder, stranger, and more tempting than she imagined." -- Provided by publisher

The Dream Hotel

"Sara has just landed at LAX, returning home from a conference abroad, when agents from the Risk Assessment Administration pull her aside and inform her that she will soon commit a crime. Using data from her dreams, the RAA's algorithm has determined that she is at imminent risk of harming the person she loves most: her husband. For his safety, she must be kept under observation for twenty-one days. The agents transfer Sara to a retention center, where she is held with other dreamers, all of them women trying to prove their innocence from different crimes. With every deviation from the strict and ever-shifting rules of the facility, their stay is extended. Months pass and Sara seems no closer to release. Then one day, a new resident arrives, disrupting the order of the facility and leading Sara on a collision course with the very companies that have deprived her of her freedom."-- Provided by publisher

The Crossing

"A radical work of history that re-centers the American story around El Paso, Texas, gateway between north and south, center of indigenous power and resistance, locus of European colonization of North America, centuries-long hub of immigration, and underappreciated modern blueprint for a changing United States."-- From publisher description

A Climate of Truth

"Mike Berners-Lee finds new perspectives on the climate and ecological emergency by standing further back, digging deeper and joining up every element of the Polycrisis that we face. The need for radically higher standards of honesty emerges as the single most critical leverage issue for those seeking real change."-- Provided by publisher

Atomic Dreams

"On June 21, 2016, Pacific Gas & Electric Company announced a plan to shutter California’s last nuclear power plant, Diablo Canyon, in 2025. The plan was hailed by environmental groups and politicians around the country. Then, in 2022, the state’s Democratic establishment suddenly reversed the decision, and in 2024 the Biden-Harris administration awarded the plant $1.1 billion in credits to extend its life. What happened in between? In Atomic Dreams, journalist and lifelong environmentalist Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow unearths the surprising answers—and the deep-seated conflicts behind them. She follows the fascinating and lively cast of characters who are immersed in the fight over Diablo Canyon and nuclear energy, among them a world-renowned climate scientist, a fashion model turned “nuclear influencer,” and two radically opposed groups of mothers, both fiercely advocating for the kind of planet they want their children to inherit. And she chronicles how nuclear power has morphed from the stuff of cinematic nightmares—associated with world-ending weapons and terrifying meltdowns—to a rare issue with strong bipartisan support. Tuhus-Dubrow takes readers to nuclear plants and research facilities, to the halls of Congress and into the streets with activists as she explores the big questions wrapped up in the nuclear debate: questions about risk and responsibility, about nature and technology, about whether humans should be humble caretakers of the Earth or audacious innovators. She explores how these issues affect real people’s lives, and personally grapples with the viability of this controversial energy source. Can the power of the atom be freed from its historical baggage and reinvented? Could something that once threatened to doom us now hold the potential to save us?" -- Book jacket

Adaptable

"A new understanding of how our bodies work, how to keep them healthy, and how our biological diversity unites us rather than divides us. How does the body work-and why does it seem to work so differently for each of us? Why do we grow tall or short, obese or slim? Why do some of us stay healthy despite our bad habits while others who do all the right things fall ill? When we look around the planet, why do people vary in skin color, facial features, stature, body proportions, and disease risk? The answer is both simple and powerful: we're different because we're adaptable. Over the past 100,000 years, as humans expanded into every biome on the planet, our bodies were fine-tuned to our local environments. Adaptability is at the heart of being human and the engine of our diversity. Variation isn't a bug, it's a feature. As an evolutionary anthropologist working with human populations around the globe, Pontzer's research embraces our incredible diversity, documenting the connections between lifestyle, landscape, local adaptations, and health." -- Provided by publisher

The World after Gaza

"The World After Gaza takes the current war, and the polarized reaction to it, as the starting point for a broad reevaluation of two competing narratives of the last century: the Global North's triumphant account of victory over totalitarianism and the spread of liberal capitalism, and the Global South's hopeful vision of racial equality and freedom from colonial rule. At a moment when the world's balance of power is shifting, and the Global North no longer commands ultimate authority, it is critically important that we understand how and why the two halves of the world are failing to talk to each other. As old touchstones and landmarks crumble, only a new history with a sharply different emphasis can reorient us to the world and worldviews now emerging into the light. In this concise, powerful, and pointed treatise, Mishra reckons with the fundamental questions posed by our present crisis -- about whether some lives matter more than others, how identity is constructed, and what the role of the nation-state ought to be. The World After Gaza is an indispensable moral guide to our past, present, and future." -- Blurb

When the Going Was Good

"When Graydon Carter was offered the editorship of Vanity Fair in 1992, he knew he faced an uphill battle--how to make the esteemed and long-established magazine his own. Not only was he confronted with a staff that he perceived to be loyal to the previous regime, but he arrived only a few years after launching Spy magazine, which gloried in skewering the celebrated and powerful--the very people Vanity Fair venerated. With curiosity, fearlessness, and a love of recent history and glamour that would come to define his storied career in magazines, Carter succeeded in endearing himself to his editors, contributors, and readers, as well as as well as those who would grace the pages of Vanity Fair. He went on to run the magazine with overwhelming success for the next two and a half decades. Filled with colorful memories and intimate details, When the Going Was Good is Graydon Carter's lively recounting of how he made his mark as one of the most talented editors in the business. Moving to New York from Canada, he worked at Time, Life, The New York Observer, and Spy, before catching the eye of Condé Nast chairman Si Newhouse, who pulled him in to run Vanity Fair. In Newhouse he found an unwavering champion, a loyal proprietor who gave Carter the editorial and financial freedom to thrive. Annie Leibovitz's photographs would come to define the look of the magazine, as would the "New Establishment" and annual Hollywood issues. Carter further planted a flag in Los Angeles with the legendary Vanity Fair Oscar party. With his inimitable voice and signature quip, he brings readers to lunches and dinners with the great and good of America, Britain, and Europe. He assembled one of the most formidable stables of writers and photographers under one roof, and here he re-creates in real time the steps he took to ensure Vanity Fair cemented its place as the epicenter of art, culture, business, and politics, even as digital media took hold. Charming, candid, and brimming with stories, When the Going Was Good perfectly captures the last golden age of print magazines from the inside out." -- Front sleeve

What You Make of Me

"A novel following two fiercely competitive and co-dependent siblings whose desires as artists, thinkers, and lovers come to a head when they fall for the same woman, forcing them to confront not only their precarious relationship with each other, but what it means to sacrifice for the sake of art."-- Provided by publisher

Trauma Plot

"In the thick of lockdown, 2020, poet, critic, and memoirist Jamie Hood published her debut, how to be a good girl, an interrogation of modern femininity and the narratives of love, desire, and violence yoked to it. The Rumpus praised Hood's "bold vulnerability," and Vogue named it a Best Book of 2020. In Trauma Plot, Hood draws on disparate literary forms to tell the story that lurked in good girl's margins-of three decades marred by sexual violence and the wreckage left behind. With her trademark critical remove, Hood interrogates the archetype of the rape survivor, who must perform penitence long after living through the unthinkable, invoking some of art's most infamous women to have played the role: Ovid's Philomela, David Lynch's Laura Palmer, and Artemisia Gentileschi, who captured Judith's wrath. In so doing, she asks: What do we as a culture demand of survivors? And what do survivors, in turn, owe a world that has abandoned them? Trauma Plot is a scalding work of personal and literary criticism. It is a send-up of our culture's pious disdain for "trauma porn," a dirge for the broken promises of #MeToo, and a paean to finding life after death"-- Provided by publisher

Theft

"In his first new novel since winning the 2021 Nobel Prize in Literature, a master storyteller captures young people in Tanzania in a time of dizzying global change. At the turn of the twenty-first century, three young people come of age in Tanzania. Karim returns to his sleepy hometown after university in Dar es Salaam with a new swagger and sense of ambition. There he catches the eye of Fauzia, who sees in him a chance at escape from a smothering upbringing. When the two of them offer a haven to Badar, a poor boy still unsure if the future holds anything for him at all, they little imagine how deeply their fates will entwine and diverge. As rapidly accelerating global change reaches even their quiet corner of the world, bringing tourists, technology, and unexpected opportunities and perils, each arrives at a different understanding of what it means to take your fate into your own hands."-- Provided by publisher

Taking Manhattan

The author of The Island at the Center of the World offers up a thrilling narrative of how New York--that brash, bold, archetypal city--came to be.

Summer of Fire and Blood

"The German Peasants' War was the greatest popular uprising in Western Europe before the French Revolution. In 1524 and 1525, it swept across Germany with astonishing speed as well over a hundred thousand people massed in armed bands to demand a new and more egalitarian order. The peasants took control of vast areas of southern and middle Germany, torching and plundering the monasteries, convents, and castles that stood in their way. But they proved no match for the forces of the lords, who put down the revolt by slaying somewhere between seventy and a hundred thousand peasants in just over two months. In Summer of Blood, the first history of the German Peasants' War in a generation, historian Lyndal Roper exposes the far-reaching ramifications of this rebellion. Though the war's victors portrayed the uprising as naive and inchoate, Roper reveals a mass movement that sought to make good on the radical potential of the Protestant Reformation. By recovering what the people themselves felt and believed, Summer of Blood reconstructs the thrilling, tragic story of the peasants' fight to change the world."-- Provided by publisher