ODY New Books Collection

Gerontocracy in America

"A leading social critic identifies our least-discussed major crisis, and sets out to solve it."-- Amazon

The Frenzy

"Frenzy (noun): a temporary madness; a violent mental or emotional agitation; intense usually wild and often disorderly compulsive or agitated activity. Joyce Carol Oates is a master of the short story and one of the legends of the form. Her collections of short fiction have twice been finalists for the Pulitzer Prize and have won numerous awards, including the O. Henry Award and the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in the Art of the Short Story. In The Frenzy: Stories, Oates plunges us into the lives of her characters at moments of crisis and confusion, when much of what they understand about themselves and those they love comes undone. A young woman on a supposedly romantic weekend trip to Cape May, New Jersey, turns the tables on her older, married lover. An alienated boy learns that life is not a video game. A freak bicycle accident on a bridge haunts one family for decades. A girl jealous of her popular cousin discovers she is the lucky one. A widow waits at her riverside house for her dead husband's return. A young man hiking in the woods comes upon a couple in a heated, possibly violent argument--should he intervene? Suspenseful and psychologically astute, Oates's short stories enthrall and captivate as they dissect her character's deepest fears--revealing our own in turn. 'Literature is a texture of words,' says Oates of her short fiction, 'evoking life in the most vivid ways--psychologically, physically.' These new stories blazingly evoke life at its most vivid and perilous, when fate and free will intersect, and one ominous encounter or bad choice can be the difference between an ordinary day and the point of no return."-- Provided by publisher

Force of Nature

"Most of us learned about natural selection back in high school science class and think we understand it pretty well-or, at least, we get the basics of how it works. Many of us even have a sense of its implications for everyday life, like how we should be cautious about overusing antibiotics, but also take care to finish out a full prescription even after we're already feeling better. Yet studies show that significant misconceptions about evolution and natural selection abound, even among highly educated specialists in biology, from medical students to high school biology teachers-not to mention the rest of us. In Force of Nature, professor of biology and law Owen D. Jones shows how we misunderstand and neglect natural selection to our detriment, both missing opportunities to better achieve our goals and, sometimes, even imperiling lives and livelihoods. Ranging across the natural world and spheres of human endeavor alike, from medicine, agriculture, and AI to economics, law, and beyond, Jones demonstrates how a finer appreciation of the speed, scale, and applications of natural selection-including its influence on behavior, both human and animal-can help open new horizons in cancer treatment and space exploration; create faster machines and more maneuverable robots; design more effective, just laws; and more. We all know that evolution put us here in the first place, but Force of Nature shows how a richer understanding of it can be even more useful than we may think." -- Provided by publisher

The Fall of Republics

"What caused the world's great republics to fall -- and what their fate reveals about the dangers facing modern democracies today. In this timely book, distinguished historian Thomas Madden explores the people, events, and factors that led to the collapse of some of the world's most enduring republics -- from Carthage to Rome to Venice and beyond -- and examines the worrying lessons these failures hold for the United States and other democracies today. The Fall of Republics not only tells the story of fallen states but also opens a window into how modern democratic republics were built on the ashes of the old. From Machiavelli to John Adams, philosophers and statesmen applied the lessons of lost republics to forge new ones that they hoped would be inoculated against the calamities that brought down their predecessors. The book reveals that republics thrive because they pit interests and powers against each other, balancing them across government branches to ensure stability and avoid tyranny. Republics are strengthened by adversity, which unites citizens despite their differences, and weakened by prosperity and security, which breeds division and partisan strife. With their eyes on the ancient world, America's founders built important safeguards into the Constitution-- but those safeguards are being tested today as the United States accumulates historical hallmarks of broken republics, from political violence to the politicization of the courts. The Fall of Republics offers valuable lessons and insights about what threatens republics -- and what's needed to keep them alive."-- Front jacket flap

Every Inch a Lady

"There has never been, nor will there ever be anyone like Audrey Smaltz. Towering six-feet-tall (her superpower) since she was a teenager in Harlem, she has always stood out from the crowd. Smaltz's details her colorful journey as a groundbreaking model, Wall Street broker, department store dynamo, fashion coordinator, commentator, editor, and entrepreneur. With her creative vision and business acumen earning her the support of legendary designers and brands such as Giorgio Armani, Jason Wu, Donna Karan, Victoria's Secret, Calvin Klein, Ferragamo, Michael Kors, Stephen Burrows, and Vera Wang. Reflecting on significant people and moments in her life Smaltz's reveals how she managed to balance life, racism, and the obstacles in her marriage to former WNBA and Olympic silver medalist Gail Marquis. Forthright and contemplative, Every Inch a Lady is a long-overdue life reckoning from a cultural powerhouse and one of the most important style figures in modern times."-- Amazon.com

The Emergency Playbook

"Unlike doomsday-leaning survival guides that focus on the darker side of prepping, The Emergency Playbook delivers straightforward advice to get you -- along with your family, friends, neighbors, and pets -- through a disaster safely. Being prepared is empowering and reduces stress, whether you're evacuating due to a hurricane or sheltering in place during a tornado. With step-by-step checklists addressing city, suburban, and rural issues, this fact-filled handbook prepares you for myriad possibilities, such as: disrupted access to clean water, lengthy power outages, downed communication, housing loss. It also emphasizes the importance of positive thinking and community building -- because when disaster strikes, we'll have to work together to get through it. Featuring tips on packing a go bag, storing food and water in small spaces, and mastering the useful skills you should learn ahead of time (first aid, self-defense), this is the practical guide you need before things go sideways." --Page [4] of cover

Catch the Devil

"The gripping true story of a serial con man and the innocent man he sent to death row by award-winning New York Times Magazine writer Pamela Colloff."-- Provided by publisher

Blunt Instrument

"The case of the bludgeoned lecturer has all of Cromwell University reeling, even though the elderly Professor Bullfinch wasn't particularly well-liked. His ornery nature and Old World approach to campus politics ruffled more than a few feathers over the years, and there are more suspects than mourners in the wake of his death. And the murder weapon--a bronze bust of Nathaniel Hawthorne--does seem to indicate that the attack may have been academically motivated... Enter Dell Chandler, the failed English professor turned self-taught private detective whom the icy university president calls in to investigate the crime. Dell has the background to tease out the motives among the staff and just enough experience to conduct a thorough inquiry. If she solves the case before the cops do, the university can keep the whole thing quiet. To do so, she'll have to dodge her own demons from her past life as a disgraced academic." -- Front book flap

Aging Out

"A deeply personal investigation into the current state of eldercare and what it means to grow old in America. Unlike many other cultures, our collective stance toward older people in the United States has long been one of casual avoidance and neglect. This attitude became brutally clear during the height of the COVID pandemic, when too many people saw elderly deaths not as tragedies but as foregone conclusions. Like many of us, Lucy Schiller experienced this callousness firsthand when her grandmother passed away during the pandemic. In the wake of this trauma, propelled by equal parts grief and curiosity about her own fear of aging, Schiller embarked on an investigative journey to understand why the prospect of aging is so frightening and how being 'old' in America intersects with class, race, disability, and public policy. From profit-driven networks of care facilities to systemic failures in economic support, the future of older Americans looks increasingly uncertain. In Aging Out, Schiller reports this crisis, sharing the human toll of inadequate housing, health care, and community, while simultaneously excavating her own complicated relationship with aging. Combining the incisive reporting of Evicted with the beautifully rendered introspection of The Empathy Exams, Aging Out is an intimate and unflinching exploration of what it means to age in this country and why Americans--including Schiller herself--are so terrified of getting old."-- Provided by publisher

What Really Went Wrong

"An ambitious revisionist history of the modern Middle East, 'What Really Went Wrong' offers a fresh and incisive assessment of American foreign policy's impact on the history and politics of the modern Middle East. Looking at flashpoints in Iranian, Egyptian, Syrian, and Lebanese history, Fawaz A. Gerges shows how postwar U.S. leaders made a devil's pact with potentates, autocrats, and strongmen around the world. Washington sought to tame assertive nationalists and to protect repressive Middle Eastern regimes in return for compliance with American hegemonic designs and uninterrupted flows of cheap oil. The book takes a counterfactual approach, asking readers to consider how the political trajectories of these countries and, by extension, the entire region may have differed had U.S. foreign policy privileged the nationalist aspirations of patriotic and independent Middle Eastern leaders and people. Gerges argues that rather than focusing on rolling back communism, extracting oil, and pursuing interventionist and imperial policies in Iran, Egypt, and beyond, postwar U.S. leaders should have allowed the Middle East greater autonomy in charting its own political and economic development. In so doing, the contemporary Middle East may have had better prospects for stability, prosperity, peace, and democracy."-- Provided by publisher

A Perfect Hand

"Miss Alice Lockey, daughter of a tenant farmer, has by dint of hard work, innate intelligence, and a cunning ability to predict the moods of her betters, raised herself to the lofty status of lady's maid at Marlecombe Park. Though her mother has advised Alice to work only until marriage, Alice has thus far resisted the temptations of matrimony among the neighboring widowers and pig farmers, more content to enjoy the fruits of her labor--or at least the portion of them her father will share after they are paid to him. Alice spends her days arranging Lady Jemima Alderwick's blond hair into the latest French styles--chignons and plaits--laundering her lady's surprisingly malodorous petticoats and drawers, and carefully sewing all manner of fripperies--ribbons, lace, and silk flowers--to her lady's bonnets and gowns. But when a visiting servant, a valet named Charlie Wells, catches her eye, Alice begins to understand the constraints of her position. In a ploy to spend time with the object of her affection, Alice attempts to arrange a romance between Lady Jemima and Charlie's employer, one Nigel Deverell, seventh Viscount Wynstowe. If only they would fall in love--then Alice and Charlie might live together as man and wife! Challenged by Lady Jemima's love for another and Lord Wynstowe's eccentric personality, Alice must use all of her cunning to bring about this unlikely romantic union. Will this lowborn servant successfully manipulate the hearts of this lord and lady? Will Charlie and Alice ever improve their stations? Or, as talk of women's suffrage begins to percolate in the drawing rooms and salons of London, will Alice discover a different sort of path for herself?" -- Dust jacket flap

Air

"A hauntingly beautiful and radically disorienting tale by the International Booker Prize-nominated author of Eurotrash. Paul, a Swiss interior designer living alone in the remote Orkney Islands, receives an unusual commission from Kuki, a prestigious design magazine: travel to a massive data center in Norway and coat its cavernous interior in the "perfect white." But after a solar storm disrupts the facility, Paul mysteriously vanishes into space and time. Ildr, a young girl living in another realm, mistakes an oddly dressed stranger for a deer and shoots him with an arrow. Nursing the stranger back to health, she begins to suspect he is not of her world. Soon, the two are fleeing the Duke of Tviot's murderous soldiers through a myth-haunted landscape, heading toward a subterranean city carved into a cliff above the Frozen Sea--a place rumored to lie beyond the duke's reach. Air is Christian Kracht's most seductively disorienting work yet: a haunting journey through a world that may be a dream, the afterlife, or reality's inverted twin." -- Amazon.com

The Chip Age

"Has it occurred to you that the next world war could be fought over computer chips? Or that a single chip could trigger a nuclear crisis, upend a government, or decide the future of clean water, air, and energy? Welcome to The Chip Age — where tiny bits of silicon are reshaping the destiny of nations and the structure of our planet. In this deeply researched and compellingly told book, Rakesh Kumar reveals how semiconductors — the invisible engines of modern life — are no longer just the backbone of our gadgets, but the frontline of global power, economic might, and environmental strain. From Taiwan’s critical role in global chip supply and China’s escalating ambitions, to AI’s trillion-dollar hunger and datacenters resurrecting nuclear plants, The Chip Age exposes the political, military, and ecological consequences of our chip obsession. Spanning six decades of innovation, espionage, warfare, and disruption, this is not just a history of technology — it’s a vivid account of how chips quietly came to command the world. The book tackles the triumphs and trade-offs of globalization, the fragility of our supply chains, and the existential risks of trust in tampered hardware. As geopolitical fault lines harden and the world races to build chip sovereignty, one truth becomes clear: whoever controls the chips may control the future. Clear, accessible, and filled with gripping stories, The Chip Age is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand the forces that will shape the next era — and the hidden circuits powering it." -- Amazon

Nebraska

"The captivating and tragicomic story of the Chatterjee family and the catastrophe that tore them apart. For fans of Kiran Desai's The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny and Jonathan Franzen's Crossroads."-- Provided by publisher

Portrait of an Unknown Woman

"A saga inspired by the incredible but true story of the iconic Klimt painting. Painted in Vienna in 1910, Gustav Klimt's "Portrait of a Lady" was purchased by an anonymous collector in 1916, retouched by the master a year later, then stolen in 1997 before reappearing in the gardens of an Italian modern art museum in 2019. No art experts, museum curators, or police investigators know the identity of the young woman in the painting, nor the mysteries that surround the turbulent history of her portrait. From the streets of Vienna in 1900 to Texas in the 1980s, and from Manhattan during the Great Depression to contemporary Italy, de Peretti imagines the destiny of this young woman as well as that of her descendants, and creates a masterful fresco that intertwines family secrets, disappearances, and thwarted loves."-- Provided by publisher

Two Ships

"In the bitterly polarized decades leading up to the American Civil War, it was commonplace to argue that America's strife could be traced back to the arrival of two ships, less than a year apart--The White Lion, which brought the first enslaved Africans to Jamestown in 1619, and the Mayflower, which brought the Pilgrims to Plymouth Rock in 1620. In a deeper sense, David S. Reynolds shows us, in this magnificent book, those two ships, invoked by Frederick Douglass and many others, stood for two quite distinct realities: the Puritans and the Cavaliers, names and ideologies born in the bloodshed of the English Civil War. The Virginia colony, founded by royalists, was steeped in the ideas of divine right, which flowed down in rigid patriarchal hierarchies. Plymouth Colony's dissenters to the king and his church, while hardly perfect, carried the seeds of a more egalitarian political vision. These two ships of 1619 and 1620 played a key role in the battle of images and words that marked the roiling fight, and then war, over slavery. As Reynolds shows, there was a long stretch of time in America when everyone knew what Cavaliers and Puritans meant. It was North versus South, but more deeply, it was about whether social hierarchy was the natural order of things. But then, as America descended into the long night of Jim Crow, the metaphor of the two ships went to sleep as well. The meaning of the Mayflower and of Thanksgiving changed as they became mainstream, apolitical ideas. If the ships' status as cultural touchpoints before the Civil War tells us something vital about that conflict, their forgetting afterward tells us much about why the road to true equality has proved so stony. By dredging up these two ships' dueling images, the great David S. Reynolds enables us to make the same use of them that Frederick Douglass and his contemporaries did to challenge us, and to give us hope that we are up to the task." -- Provided by publisher

Trash!

"This fascinating no-bullshit account of twenty years in waste management paints a vivid portrait of the heroic labor, anarchic spirit, and violent conditions of the people who keep our cities clean. Paré-Poupart's story is atypical: he started working as a garbageman to pay for college, yet even after earning graduate degrees in sociology and business, and working in more 'respectable' fields, he is still on a truck--out of love for the physical rush, for his rough-and-tumble colleagues, and for an honesty and freedom that no other job has yet given him. His sociology background informs his inquiry into our collective failure to confront the trash we produce. Every observation comes with hilarious and hair-raising stories from the collection route." -- Back cover

The Tapestry of Fate

"Amina al-Sirafi thinks she's struck gold. Tasked with hunting down arcane artifacts for the council of immortal peris, she can savor the occasional rollicking adventure on the high seas with her cherished criminal companions while still returning home to raise her beloved daughter, Marjana. But when Raksh, the spirit of discord with whom she is reluctantly wed, provokes the council's wrath, Amina is charged with a seemingly impossible quest: steal a spindle capable of rewriting fate from a mysterious sorceress on an island no one can escape. Forced to leave Marjana--who is increasingly frustrated at being peddled what are clearly lies about her mother's life and her own past--Amina finds her mission almost immediately thrown into peril. But deadly storms, an erratic poison mistress, and old enemies are the least of her worries. For the peris' story is unraveling, hinting at a far deadlier game whose rules Amina must swiftly puzzle out. A game that sets her against an adversary more cunning and powerful than she has ever faced. A game that not everyone on her crew wants her to win."-- Dust jacket flap

The Simp

"A razor-sharp novel about the rise and fall of Raj Ladlani, a morose and unemployed actor who lands the greatest role of his life when he's hired as a personal assistant to a powerful Hollywood family that tasks him with a series of pointless, relentless menial tasks as the darkly absurd realities of their domestic life surface." -- Provided by publisher

Regime Change

From the two reporters who have covered him more closely than perhaps anyone else over the past decade comes this definitive portrait of Donald Trump in the White House. Regime Change covers the first year of Trump's second presidency--a term liberated from every constraint that defined his first. The generals who once told him "no" are gone, and the lawyers have learned to pick their battles. His administration has flouted court orders and he has claimed powers that Congress once checked. What remains is a President willing to take enormous risks that have upended global markets and toppled heads of state--an imperial President operating almost entirely on instinct alone. Based on hundreds of interviews and unprecedented reporting from deep within the administration's most closely guarded rooms, Regime Change takes the reader inside the Situation Room and into the secret Oval Office deliberations that have launched a new war in the Middle East and seen Trump seal the border, deploy National Guard troops into cities, and send immigration agents into deadly clashes with protesters. Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan bring us behind the scenes of a presidency that has transformed the culture, the Justice Department into an agent of retribution against the President's enemies, and the office itself into a brazen vehicle for profit. They reveal a second term propelled by a historical irony that Trump himself has come to understand: that the indictments, the convictions, the assassination attempts, and four years of exile made him not weaker but far more powerful, more vengeful, and more willing to gamble than any President in modern history. This is the story of how Trump has used that power, who has tried to stop him, and why nearly all of them have failed. It is also the story of something American journalists are more accustomed to chronicling in distant capitals than in their own: a President who has fundamentally altered the nature of the office he holds--and how the rest of the world understands American power. It is an account of Regime Change right here in America--a landmark real-time history of a modern presidency like no other. -- Front book flap