ODY New Books Collection

A Hymn to Life

"In 2024, Gisèle Pelicot waived her right to anonymity in her legal fight against her ex-husband and the fifty men accused of sexually assaulting her, a courageous decision that inspired millions of people around the world. Only four years prior, [she] had made the shattering discovery that her partner, Dominique Pelicot, had been secretly drugging and raping her, and inviting strangers to also abuse her in their home for nearly a decade. 'Shame must change sides,' Gisèle bravely declared at the opening of the trial in Avignon, France, and the dictum soon became an international rallying cry to radically transform public sentiment and legislation surrounding cases of sexual violence. Beginning in 2020, when she received the first phone call from a local police station, Gisèle recounts the fateful investigation that turned her life inside out. She retraces the steps of a life built over the course of five decades, the final decade of her marriage and its hidden abuse, and the long path of emotional healing that ensues. Part memoir, part act of defiance, A Hymn to Life is a story of survival, testimony, and courage, and a portrait of a woman who broke her silence, reclaimed her voice, and forced a reckoning." -- Provided by publisher

A World Appears

"When it comes to the phenomenon that is consciousness, there is one point on which scientists, philosophers, and artists all agree: that it feels like something to be us. Yet the fact we have subjective experience of the world remains one of nature's greatest mysteries. How is it that our mental operations are accompanied by feelings, thoughts, and a sense of self? What would a scientific investigation of our inner life look like, considering we have as little distance and perspective on it as fish do of the sea? In A World Appears, Michael Pollan traces the unmapped continent that is consciousness, bringing radically different perspectives -- scientific, philosophical, literary, spiritual and psychedelic -- to see what each can teach us about this central fact of life. When neuroscientists began studying consciousness in the early 1990s, they sought to explain how and why three pounds of spongy grey matter could generate a subjective point of view -- assuming that the brain is the source of our felt reality. Pollan takes us to the cutting edge of the field, where scientists are entertaining more radical (and less materialist) theories of consciousness. He introduces us to "plant neurobiologists" searching for the first flicker of consciousness in plants; scientists striving to engineer feelings into AI, and psychologists and novelists seeking to capture the felt experience of our slippery stream of consciousness. In Pollan's dazzling exploration of consciousness, he discovers a world far deeper and stranger than our everyday reality. Eye-opening and mind-expanding, A World Appears takes us into the laboratories of our own minds, ultimately showing us how we might make better use of the gift of awareness to more meaningfully connect with our deepest selves." -- Provided by publisher

The Wall Dancers

"An indelible, deeply reported human narrative of contemporary China in which the country's carefully controlled internet offers a lens into the broader national tension between freedom and control. In the late 1990s, as the world was waking up to the power of the internet as a space of unprecedented connection and opportunity, Chinese authorities began constructing a system of online surveillance and censorship that became known as the Great Firewall. The online world that sprouted up behind the firewall was no less vibrant for being controlled, and in the years that followed China incubated a booming tech culture and a digital public square. But today, as the country's leadership has tightened the reins on public discourse and western headlines reduce the Chinese populace to a faceless monolith, journalist Yi-Ling Liu argues, China's singular online ecosystem may well be the most direct lens we have into the on-the-ground reality of life there. In tracing the evolution of the Chinese internet-from its lexicon to its memes to the precise nature of its censorship-Liu equips readers with a critical tool to assess the past, present, and future of a global power. Ingeniously conceived and meticulously reported, Dancing in Shackles spans the last three decades in China, a period that encapsulates the country's transformation into both the world's largest online userbase and one of its most dominant authoritarian states-from 1995, when ordinary Chinese people first logged onto the internet, swept up by its emancipatory promise, to the present day, as China polices its physical and virtual borders with unprecedented intensity. Drawing on years of intimate reporting, Liu weaves together the stories of individual citizens striving for freedom and community within state boundaries. A journalist-turned-activist taps into a nationwide feminist awakening, stoking a grassroots revolution on social media before being forced underground. The CEO of a gay dating app steers the company to a successful IPO despite laws prohibiting same-sex marriage. A disillusioned tech worker turns to writing science fiction to construct alternative visions of China's future. As Liu's subjects experience firsthand the internet's power as a tool of both state control and individual liberation, they grapple with universal questions of success and authenticity, love and solidarity, faith and survival. Dancing in Shackles is at once an unforgettable work of human storytelling and a vital window into a global power that we simplify and misunderstand at our peril." -- Provided by publisher

A Very Cold Winter

"In A Very Cold Winter, it is 1946 and Milan is in ruins. A woman named Camilla opens her illegally occupied attic to her extended family as they rebuild their lives among the rubble. The absence of men--lost to war, death, or abandonment--leaves the burden of survival to the women, who use the attic to incubate fragile futures: Camilla works to carry the family toward dignity and normalcy; Lalla dreams of becoming a novelist to escape their grim reality; Regina, widowed by the war, pins her hopes on her infant daughter; Alba chases independence and love. Varying political ideologies, loyalties, and wartime secrets filter through the house, creating a thick net of tension. As the narrative roams from the thoughts of character to character, the residents of this 'hotel for the poor' consider their own complicity and moral compromises, wondering if they're able to escape the weight of what they've lived through. Fausta Cialente's exquisite prose captures the frailty of the human heart in its desperate search for connection. An introduction from author and Italian translator Claudia Durastanti frames this classic feminist icon for the modern American reader. Tender, thought-provoking, and devastatingly beautiful, A Very Cold Winter is about the impossibility of forgetting the past and the difficulty of living with it." -- Publisher's description

Until I Find You

"In 2009 Dolores Preat went to a small Maya town in Guatemala to find her birth mother. At the address retrieved from her adoption file, she was told that her supposed mother, one Rosario Colop Chim, never gave up a child for adoption―but in 1984 a girl across the street was abducted. At that house, Preat met a woman who strongly resembled her. Colop Chim, it turned out, was not Preat’s mother at all, but a jaladora―a baby broker. Some 40,000 children, many Indigenous, were kidnapped or otherwise coercively parted from families scarred by Guatemala’s civil war or made desperate by unrelenting poverty. Amid the US-backed army’s genocide against Indigenous Maya, children were wrested from their villages and put up for adoption illegally, mostly in the United States. During the war’s second decade, adoption was privatized, overseen by lawyers who made good money matching children to overseas families. Private adoptions skyrocketed to the point where tiny Guatemala overtook giants like China and Russia as a “sender” state. Drawing on government archives, oral histories, and a rare cache of adoption files opened briefly for war crimes investigations, Rachel Nolan explores the human toll of an international industry that thrives on exploitation. Would-be parents in rich countries have fostered a commercial market for children from poor countries, with Guatemala becoming the most extreme case. Until I Find You reckons with the hard truths of a practice that builds loving families in the Global North out of economic exploitation, endemic violence, and dislocation in the Global South." -- Amazon

The Typewriter and the Guillotine

"In 1925, the Indianapolis-born Janet Flanner took an assignment to write a regular 'Letter from Paris' for a lighthearted humor magazine called The New Yorker, started by some friends in New York. She'd come to Paris with dreams of writing about 'Beauty with a Capital B.' Her employer, self-consciously apolitical, sought only breezy reports on French art and culture. But as she woke to the frightening signs of rising extremism, economic turmoil, and widespread discontent in Europe, Flanner ignored her editor's directives, reinventing herself, her assignment, and The New Yorker in the process. While working tirelessly to alert American readers to the dangers of the Third Reich, including producing one of the first detailed profiles of Hitler in an American publication, Flanner became gripped by the disturbing crimes of a man who embodied all of the darkness she was being forced to confront. Eugen Weidmann, a German con-man who killed six people in and around Paris in the late 1930s, was the last man to be publicly executed in France--mere weeks before the outbreak of WWII. Flanner covered his crimes, capture, and highly politicized trial, seeing the case as a guiding metaphor through which to understand the tumultuous years through which she'd just passed and to prepare herself for the dangers to come. The Typewriter and The Guillotine offers the personal and professional coming-of-age story of an indomitable journalist set against a glamorous, high-stakes backdrop--a tightly-coiled drama full of romance and intrigue."-- Provided by publisher

Traversal

"In Traversal, Maria Popova illuminates our various instruments of reckoning with the bewilderment of being alive--our telescopes and our treatises, our postulates and our poems--through the intertwined lives, loves, and legacies of visionaries both celebrated and sidelined by history, people born into the margins of their time and place who lived to write the future: Mary Shelley, Walt Whitman, Frederick Douglass, Fanny Wright, Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin, Marie Tharp, Alfred Wegener, Humphry Davy, Ruth Benedict, and Margaret Mead. Woven throughout their stories are other threads--the first global scientific collaboration, the Irish potato famine, the decoding of the insulin molecule, the invention of the bicycle, how nature creates blue--to make the tapestry of meaning more elaborate yet clearer as the book advances, converging on the ultimate question of what makes life alive and worth living. By turns epic and intimate--as concerned with the physical laws binding atoms into molecules as with the psychic forces binding us to one other--Traversal explores the universe between cells and souls to reveal the world, and our lives, in a dazzling new light.."-- Amazon

Tools of the Scribe

"People all around the world now carry out nearly synchronous conversations using text. This puts a premium on efficient writing, something that is easier in some writing systems than others and for some individuals than for others. Fast production of text, however, is not a new problem, and has its roots in typesetting, stenography and assistive technologies. Some of these areas of technological innovation were hugely successful in the West, but were less successful in other parts of the world, such as Asia, where differences in scripts and writing systems made simple solutions to fast text production elusive. Many of these same problems remain today, but the existence of very large text corpora and the advances in Al that this has enabled now permit the use of natural language technology that makes text production faster and more accurate. This book presents writing technology past and present with a broad focus, discussing both widely used technology as well as technology serving communities of writers with special needs. For example, text is the principal communication modality for many with severe motor disabilities such as cerebral palsy: How does one type if one cannot easily or reliably point to a specific key on a keyboard? Cross cutting the discussion are several themes: How does one's language and script influence the technology and its use? How does the technology interact with the user's motor abilities? How does text input differ when one is writing in one's own language, writing in several languages, or writing in a second language in which one may not be fully competent? And if one's immediate goal is not efficiency but learning, does technology that aids efficient writing also support efficient learning? This book is the first treatment of writing technology that considers the process of writing from such a broad range of perspectives." -- back cover

Strangers

"It was a great love story, one for the ages. The speed of our beginning and the speed of our ending felt like matching bookends. They both came out of nowhere. He wanted it, he wanted me. And then he didn't. In March 2020, Belle Burden was safe and secure with her family at their house on Martha's Vineyard, navigating the early days of the pandemic together--building fires in the late afternoons, drinking whiskey sours, making roast chicken. Then, with no warning or explanation, her husband of twenty years announced that he was leaving her. Overnight, her caring, steady partner became a man she hardly recognized. He exited his life with her like an actor shrugging off a costume. In Strangers, Burden revisits her marriage, searching for clues that her husband was not who she always thought he was. As she examines her relationship through a new lens, she reckons with her own family history and the lessons she intuited about how a woman is expected to behave in the face of betrayal. Through all of it, she is transformed. The discreet, compliant woman she once was--someone nicknamed 'Belle the Good'--gives way to someone braver, someone determined to use her voice. With unflinching honesty and profound grace, Burden charts a path through heartbreak to show the power of a woman who refuses to give up on love. Strangers is a stunning, deeply moving, compulsively readable memoir heralding the arrival of a thrilling new literary talent"-- Dust jacket flap

Rebel English Academy

"From the brilliant Booker-longlisted Mohammed Hanif comes a lively, rich novel about the power of language, friendship, and protest in the face of political turmoil. When Pakistan's first elected Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto is hanged, the people of OK Town refuse to believe he is dead and fight to bring him back. In the heart of the city, Sir Baghi is surprised by a knock at the door of the Rebel English Academy, his tuition center that offers affordable English lessons. An unexpected visitor, Sabiha, seeks refuge at the Academy, her husband has just died in a house fire, and she is suspected of killing him, although she insists she only ran away from a burning building. Baghi encourages Sabiha to write, and a lifetime of secrets begin to unspool on the page. Meanwhile Captain Gul, who botched his hanging duty, has been banished to OK Town, where he aims to squash the protestors wanting to bring Bhutto back from the dead. But his duties and romantic desires begin to overlap, and his already-dubious power is threatened. In Rebel English Academy, Pakistan is struggling under martial law after the execution of its former leader. Mohammed Hanif has constructed a vibrant cast of interconnected characters that face this changing landscape with violence, passion, and sharp humor. Wry, searing, and deeply relevant, Rebel English Academy is a triumphant new novel about political power, religion, education, sexuality, and perpetual dissent."-- Provided by publisher

Radical Universalism

"The entire political spectrum of our day, from left to right, reflects the politics of identity. The left speaks of race and gender; the right of blood and soil, homeland and people: the animosity between them is only the difference between the two sides of the same coin. As to universalism? Of that great cause all that seems to remain is an empty shell of legalism and proceduralism. Modern liberalism's prejudicial focus on the rights of individual citizens comes at the expense of a larger commitment to the richness and variety of the human, a focus that can seem as narrow and hidebound as the nationalisms with which it seeks to do battle. In Radical Universalism, Omri Boehm presents a startling and revelatory new reading of Kant as heir to the Biblical prophets and as progenitor of the revolutionary commitment to freedom and equality that is modernity's moral lodestone. His book offers a powerful plea to put this much misunderstood and long forsaken tradition of humanistic universalism at the heart of political life." -- Provided by publisher

Private Finance, Public Power

"How regulating the banks became a separate and strange category of government power. Banks are unlike most other businesses, and over centuries, regulating banks has become a category of government power all its own. For some, the appropriate role of those supervising the banks approximates cops on the beat patrolling for crime; for others they should be more like fire wardens responding to emergencies. In real life they are compliance officers and auditors, risk managers and crisis responders, the bane of international drug cartels, and the friends of bank CEOs. The mandate of "supervising the banks" is not regulation and it is not the implementation of regulation. Rather, it is a fundamentally different way that the government exercises power over, and sometimes with, markets and society. The Banker's Thumb tells the history of this unusual form of public power. It argues that bank supervision is the "institutionalization of discretion" exercised by government actors over private banks and, eventually, the financial system as a whole. Authors Peter Conti-Brown and Sean H. Vanatta show how this supervision developed in fits and starts from roots in state law to become a residual category into which Congress has tossed a hodgepodge of distinct and at times conflicting paradigms of power, across a growing group of organizations engaged in interminable conflict. Understanding what this system is, where it came from, and how political actors and financial market participants engage with it can help organize the growing field of financial regulation. Conti-Brown and Vanatta also show how the history of bank supervision expands and sometimes challenges prevailing historical conceptions of state power and its many twists and turns through the 19th and 20th centuries, which can inform broader discussions about politics, law, finance, and the development of state and administrative capacity in the United States."-- Provided by publisher

Our Money

"The power to create money is foundational to the state. In the United States, that power has been largely delegated to private banks governed by an independent central bank. Putting monetary policy in the hands of a set of insulated, nonelected experts has fueled the popular rejection of expertise as well as a widespread dissatisfaction with democratically elected officials. In Our Money, Leah Downey makes a principled case against central bank independence (CBI) by both challenging the economic theory behind it and developing a democratic rationale for sustaining the power of the legislature to determine who can create money and on what terms. How states govern money creation has an impact on the capacity of the people and their elected officials to steer policy over time. In a healthy democracy, Downey argues, the balance of power over money creation matters. Downey applies and develops democratic theory through an exploration of monetary policy. In so doing, she develops a novel theory of independent agencies in the context of democratic government, arguing that states can employ expertise without being ruled by experts. Downey argues that it is through iterative governance, the legislature knowing and regularly showing its power over policy, that the people can retain their democratic power to guide policy in the modern state. As for contemporary macroeconomic arguments in defense of central bank independence, Downey suggests that the purported economic benefits do not outweigh the democratic costs." --Page [2] of Cover

Our Dollar, Your Problem

"'Our Dollar, Your Problem' argues that America's currency might not have reached today's lofty pinnacle without a certain amount of good luck. Drawing in part on his own experiences, including with policymakers and world leaders, Kenneth Rogoff animates the remarkable postwar run of the dollar--how it beat out the Japanese yen, the Soviet ruble, and the euro--and the challenges it faces today from crypto and the Chinese yuan, the end of reliably low inflation and inter-est rates, political instability, and the fracturing of the dollar bloc. Americans cannot take for granted that the Pax Dollar era will last indefinitely, not only because many countries are deeply frustrated with the system, but also because overconfidence and arrogance can lead to unforced errors. Rogoff shows how America's outsized power and exorbitant privilege can spur financial instability--not just abroad but also at home."-- Book jacket

The Oak and the Larch

"Russia has three times as many trees as there are stars in our galaxy. From the Baltic to the Pacific, from the Arctic to the steppes of Central Asia, Russia's forests account for nearly one-fifth of the world's wooded lands. In this astonishing work of cultural and environmental history, award-winning journalist, critic, and scholar Sophie Pinkham presents the first-ever English-language exploration of this vast expanse, offering an eloquent and absorbing account of how forests have shaped Russia. Written from the ground up, The Oak and the Larch spans centuries, from medieval times to the present, and draws on literature, art, music, and original reportage. Pinkham describes the varied forests and trees that grow within Russia's borders, from the hardy Siberian larch to the majestic oaks of central Russia, and the diverse peoples who live deep in the Russian wilderness and make their living there. She analyzes the forest's role in Russia's long history of imperial conquest-including its attacks on Ukraine today-and discusses the ways the mythologies of the forest shaped Russian culture, from pre-Christian forest spirits to the great works of Russian literature, from Turgenev to Tolstoy, from Chekhov to Nabokov and beyond. By examining Russia from the forest's perspective, The Oak and the Larch offers an urgent new understanding of the nature of Russian power, and of Russia's ideas of itself."-- Provided by publisher

Lost Lambs

"Lost Lambs follows a suburban family of five unspooling at the seams, navigating a disastrous open marriage, teenage rebellion, and an unexpected human trafficking/body-hacking crime conspiracy." -- Provided by publisher

The Last of Earth

"1869. Tibet is closed to Europeans, an infuriating obstruction for the rapidly expanding British Empire. In response, Britain begins training Indians-permitted to cross borders that white men may not-to undertake illicit, dangerous surveying expeditions into Tibet. Balram is one such surveyor-spy, an Indian schoolteacher who, for several years, has worked for the British, often alongside his dearest friend, Gyan. But Gyan went missing on his last expedition and is rumored to be imprisoned within Tibet. Desperate to rescue his friend, Balram agrees to guide an English captain on a foolhardy mission: After years of paying others to do the exploring, the captain, disguised as a monk, wants to personally chart a river that runs through southern Tibet. Their path will cross fatefully with that of another Westerner in disguise, fifty-year-old Katherine. Denied a fellowship in the all-male Royal Geographical Society in London, she intends to be the first European woman to reach Lhasa. As Balram and Katherine make their way into Tibet, they will face storms and bandits, snow leopards and soldiers, fevers and frostbite. What's more, they will have to battle their own doubts, ambitions, grief, and pasts in order to survive the treacherous landscape. A polyphonic novel about the various ways humans try to leave a mark on the world-from the enduring nature of family and friendship to the egomania and obsessions of the colonial enterprise--The Last of Earth confirms Deepa Anappara as one of our greatest and most ambitious storytellers."-- Provided by publisher

A Journey North

"These topics, scattered as they might seem at first, reflect the breadth of these men's interests in entomology, racial classification, botany, and linguistics and their ideas about horticulture, history, and anthropology. The northern journey allows us to see Jefferson and Madison in a different light, not just as politicians, but as tourists and friends. The journey, from May 21 to June 16, 1791, was taken at a precarious moment. Political parties had emerged that pitted Jefferson and Madison on one side and Alexander Hamilton and John Adams on the other, feuding over issues that would determine the future of the nation. The trip provided escape from the cauldron of political engagement and its toll on their spirits and physical well-being. A gambol through upstate New York and parts of New England offered them the promise of recovering both."-- Provided by publisher

The Infamous Gilberts

Thornwalk, a once-stately English manor, is on the brink of transformation. Its keys are being handed over to a luxury hotelier who will undertake a complete renovation, but in doing so, what will they erase? Through the keen eyes of an enigmatic neighbor, the listener is taken on a guided tour into rooms filled with secrets and memories, each revealing the story of the five Gilbert siblings.

How Rabbis Became Experts

"This book tells the story of how a small group of Jewish scholars became religious experts within the Jewish communities of Roman Palestine from the second through fifth centuries C.E. -- thereby becoming the first rabbis."-- Publisher