ODY New Books Collection

Berlin Shuffle

"A prophetic lost classic from interwar Germany, now translated into English for the first time, following a group of Berliners on the skids as their nation unravels. Berlin in the 1920s is the largest city in Europe, a cultural mecca, and a political mess: a hedonistic Babylon, though there's little glamour for the hundreds of thousands out of work, the war wounded, the prostitutes, and the beggars. Come evening, they too want to shed their cares at the Jolly Huntsman pub, where they gather to drink, dance, and reassert their pride. But there's always disaster lurking in the alleys and flophouses, a disaster that the twenty-two-year-old author Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz clearly saw coming for his nation. In this dark comedy of petty theft, soapbox speeches, and bar fights is the disarray of a country devouring itself. Tragically, Germany's self-destruction engulfed the author, who was killed five years after finishing this novel. When Boschwitz's The Passenger was rediscovered in 2021, it was heralded as a masterpiece that terrifyingly captured the zeitgeist of life under Nazism. Now, Berlin Shuffle-his literary debut from 1937, finally available in English, with a preface by the preeminent translator Philip Boehm-brings to life the society that would enable fascism's takeover. The triumph of one of world literature's spectacular talents, Berlin Shuffle is a dire warning, sent from a pivotal moment in history to our own time."-- Provided by publisher

We Are the World (Cup)

"Every four years, millions of viewers all over the globe are united in the drama of the world's biggest sporting event. Geopolitical turmoil, popular culture, clashes of custom and style all weave together on the pitch, making the World Cup about so much more than soccer. For fans, it is a series of triumphs, heartbreaks, and shocking twists of fate. For the players, single matches, single plays, single glorious moments can be life changing. In We are the World (Cup),Roger Bennett imbues his unmitigated love for and dedication to the game into a deeply researched and deeply personal distillation of every tournament he has experienced from the 1978 to 2022." -- Providedby publisher

Walter Benjamin

"Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) is widely considered one of the most creative cultural critics of the twentieth century. Esteemed for his literary acumen and capacious imagination, he developed a unique style of criticism--his friend Hannah Arendt called it pearl-diving--that sought out fragments of redemption in the ruins of bourgeois civilization. Award-winning author Peter E. Gordon tells Benjamin's story in a vivid and poetic style, inviting the reader to look beyond the image of Benjamin as a tragic figure of German-Jewish history and portraying him as a complex personality of unique and multifaceted gifts. Tracing Benjamin's life from his Berlin childhood to his Parisian exile, through the romanticism of the youth movements and the conflicts over modernism and Marxism, Gordon brings Benjamin to life." -- Dust jacket

Turner

"Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775-1851) is perhaps the most recognizable name in the history of British art. Elected to the Royal Academy in 1802, Turner broke new ground with landscapes in oil, watercolor, and printmaking, which are widely considered to be crowning achievement of British Romantic painting. This book, the inaugural installment in the YCBA's Collections Series, explores the museum's Turner holdings-the largest outside the United Kingdom-in a manner designed to engage the general reader and expert alike. Seven 'galleries' of plates, arranged chronologically and thematically, place the works within their historical and cultural context. Forrester's supplementary essay provides a groundbreaking account of Turner as printmaker and his frequently fraught collaborations with other printmakers. Complements an exhibition at the YCBA marking the 250th anniversary of the artist's birth."-- Provided by publisher

Turner and Constable

Born just fourteen months apart, one in London and the other in rural Suffolk, J. M. W. Turner and John Constable went on to change the face of British art. The two men have routinely been seen as polar opposites, not least by their peers. Differing in temperament, background, beliefs, and vision, they created images as dissimilar as their personalities. Yet in many ways they were fellow travellers. As children of the late eighteenth century, both faced the same challenges and opportunities. Above all, they shared common cause as champions of a distinctively British art. Through their work, they fought for the recognition and appreciation of landscape painting--and in doing so ensured their reputations were forever intertwined and interlinked. Nicola Moorby offers us a fresh perspective on two extraordinary artists, uncovering the layers of fiction that have embellished and disguised their greatest achievements. For Turner & Constable is not just a tale of two artists; it is also the story of the triumph of landscape painting.

Tiny Gardens Everywhere

"Rooted in a fruitful history, this manifesto for the next food revolution by acclaimed environmental historian Kate Brown speaks to nature lovers, food activists, social justice warriors, urban planners, WOOFers, and Idealists of all varieties. Is a trip to the farmer's market nearly a religious ritual for you? Do you love composting? This rich and fascinating history justifies your passions. Beginning in the 17th century, British peasants lost the commons from which they had fed themselves for generations when capitalists frowned on self-provisioning in order to encourage wage labor. But small-scale gardeners in Paris, Berlin, London and elsewhere fought back, building topsoil in the city with composted garbage and other animal and human waste. They created the most productive, sustainable agriculture in recorded human history, growing local, diverse, organic food on marginal land without burning fossil fuels, creating ecologically and socially diverse networks of flora, fauna, and people. In Nazi Berlin, working-class gardeners harbored dissidents ands Jews throughout the war. On the fringes of Washington, DC, Black Southern migrants built communities around gardens and orchards, the produce funding home-ownership. Behind the Iron Curtain, Soviet and post-Soviet garden allotments prevented a recurrence of mass famine. In post-war America, suburban lawns took on a totalitarian character: gardeners, particularly gardeners of color, fined and harangued for defying the flat green conformity of turf. Yet the creativity of gardeners inspires hope in the 21st century; in rust-belt Mansfield, OH, helping prisoners to imagine fruitful lives. in the sinking, nitrogen-soaked Netherlands, dependent on industrial food, a progressive movement for community gardens and food forests provide an inspiring vision of a vastly more sustainable future. Down to earth gardeners, working with each other and with nature, have reaped abundant harvests while fostering mutual aid and political engagement. Grafting contemporary experience and concerns onto every historical chapter, Kate Brown creates a mesmerizing hybrid of archival historical research (about half or two-thirds of the book) and contemporary personal interviews and experience, resulting in an eloquent narrative deeply rooted in history, full of colorful stories delivering eye-opening information. The food-industrial complex is the primary contributor to climate change. Call it a utopian dream, but urban gardening offers much-needed hope." -- Provided by publisher

Salt Lakes

"Salt lakes are some of the world's most extraordinary ecosystems, but nearly all of them-from the Great Salt Lake to the Aral Sea and beyond-are drying up. Their decline is already the second-largest contributor to sea level rise, and their future loss will create widespread dust storms, threatening the water cycle, migratory birds, and human health. In Salt Lakes, Caroline Tracey takes readers on her travels across the American West, to Mexico, Argentina, and Kazakhstan, exquisitely describing the strange world of salt lakes, documenting their loss, and tracing efforts to save them. She delves into Mormon diaries, Soviet realist novels, and Australian Aboriginal paintings to make sense of how salt lakes have reflected the fast-changing natural world around us, while unraveling the lakes' lessons for her own life as she finds queer love and a sense of home in an imperfect world. Salt Lakes is a love letter to a strange and delicate ecosystem-and a moving call to fight for all that is fragile in our lives." -- Provided by publisher

Murder Bimbo

"A thirty-two-year-old sex worker is shocked when she's approached by undercover government agents to aid them in a top-secret plot to assassinate a politician known as Meat Neck. But once the deed is done, she realizes what made her the perfect recruit: She's 100% disposable. Holed up in an off-the-grid cabin in the woods, she now has only two days, her wits, and a laptop to save her own life. Her best bet is to reach out to the wildly popular feminist investigative podcast Justice for Bimbos. In a hastily typed series of emails, the newly minted "Murder Bimbo" explains how she was recruited and then trained by a cabal of code-named US agents to take out Meat Neck. Then she opens a new email. This time, it's addressed to her ex, and the facts line up a little differently... Constructed in three increasingly unhinged acts, each a more subversive version of the story than the last, Murder Bimbo can be read as a gloriously bold literary thriller, a satirical vigilante's manifesto, or a raucous send-up of the political insanity we all live inside every day. Either way, it's a dead-serious announcement of an electric new voice in American literature." -- Amazon

The Mending of Broken Bones

"In The Mending of Broken Bones, mathematician Paul Lockhart reimagines algebra not as a utilitarian tool but as a form of artistic expression. Through exploring patterns, numerical puzzles, and the deep ties between algebra and geometry, he reveals the subject's intrinsic beauty and elegance, encouraging readers to see it as a creative and intellectually rewarding pursuit rather than a tedious school subject." -- Provided by publisher

Gilded Rage

"A searing insight into the political radicalization of Silicon Valley, from Elon Musk to Peter Thiel, JD Vance and Donald Trump, and how it will affect the future of all our lives. From the pursuit of potentially apocalyptic artificial intelligence to life-extension startups that promise billionaires eternal youth, and those who encourage the political far right around the world, the Silicon Valley techno-utopian dream has curdled. The global innovator class has the world in their hands, but they can't stand the touch. New York Times bestselling author Jacob Silverman leads us on a critical investigation into the radicalization of Silicon Valley and the billionaires that increasingly run our lives, shape the global economy, and support Donald Trump. At the center of this book lies Elon Musk, but this is about more than just one man and his obsession with the "woke mind virus", as Silverman reveals a network of tech and finance oligarchs, emboldened by the zero-interest rate years, now using their wealth to exert an increasingly radical political program. Transiting San Francisco and Silicon Valley, Austin and Miami, New York, Washington DC, and various global capitals of tech, finance, and political power, Silverman talks to the people who are already living with the real-life consequences of the political revolution underway. It's a bizarre, sometimes frightening, darkly humorous world where moguls preach populist revolt while dismantling the few remaining checks on their influence." -- Jacket flap

Floodlines

In the summer of 2014, three long estranged Iraqi-British sisters are pulled back into each other's orbit by the rediscovery of their late father's long-lost paintings. Beautiful, elusive Zainab; embittered, practical Mediha; and headstrong, queer Ishtar each lay claim to their father's legacy--an artistic and personal inheritance entwined with betrayal, exile, and a homeland they no longer recognize. As the sisters fight to preserve, erase, or repurpose the past, Zainab's estranged son Nizar, a war correspondent haunted by trauma and heartbreak, returns to the family fold. With the reemergence of buried memories comes a reckoning, and the family is forced to confront the personal and political betrayals that tore them apart. Spanning continents and decades--from 1950s Baghdad to contemporary London, from the Tigris River to Yemeni refugee camps--Floodlines is at once an intimate family drama and, in its scope, a modern epic. It is a rare novel that bridges the historic and the immediate and a heartfelt meditation on what it means to belong, to create, to endure

By Flesh and Toil

"In By Flesh and Toil, Mélanie Lamotte explores the rise of the French Empire across both the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. Charting the development of a pan-imperial legal culture of race, she also shows how people of African, Malagasy, South Asian, and Native American descent played key roles in shaping the Empire and setting its limits."-- Provided by publisher

Young Man in a Hurry

"'Go slow,' his political elders advised him, but Gavin Newsom has never known such a speed. For Newsom, the California Dream is what lured his father's family from County Cork, Ireland, six generations ago. His great-great-grandfather, a cop, walked a beat in San Francisco, where almost 150 years later, Newsom would be elected as mayor, running on the values instilled in him by his family history: that California's open arms must continue to extend to each new generation. Newsom has never lived anywhere but California. Born in San Francisco, his parents divorced at a young age, and his childhood was spent being tugged between two worlds: his mother worked three jobs in order to care for her children while his father, a close friend of the Getty family, brought Newsom into San Francisco society, a world of wealth and connections. The dissonance was frustrating, and made all the more difficult because of undiagnosed dyslexia, but the vantage point was valuable: he inherited his mother's perseverance and his father's reverence of California, not only its wildness, but its opportunity. In Young Man in a Hurry, Newsom traces the forces that have defined his ambitions as a politician and have pushed him to outpace the nation on myriad cutting-edge social issues that have since entered the mainstream. As mayor of San Francisco, he made waves when he violated state law in order to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples, more than ten years before the Supreme Court made such unions legal. He launched bold efforts to counter climate change, improve mental health care, and enhance gun safety, and worked to preserve the California Dream for his constituents. Elected as governor on the eve of unprecedented wildfires and entering office into immediate hyper-partisan headwinds from Washington, DC, Newsom has constantly and consistently stuck his neck out. Here for the first time, he reflects on the long personal journey that ultimately shaped him into one of the most recognizable and accomplished elected officials in America. Filled with intimate family history and written with candor and remarkable personal insight, here is a deeply resilient California story of identity, belonging, and the defining moments that inspired a life in politics." Provided by publisher

Worse than a Lie

"It's the night of November 4, 2008. America's first Black president has just been elected. And fifty-three-year-old Hollis Montrose--a Black ex-police officer from the suburbs of Chicago--has become the latest victim of a brutal attack. As the result of a traffic stop gone wrong, Hollis is shot ten times in cold blood, by four white men who could have been his colleagues back in his police days. Beau Lee Cooper was born serious, as if on an urgent mission with little time to waste. Raised in the tumultuous world of 1970s Texas, he always dreamed of becoming a lawyer and fighting for what's right, ever since he was a little boy reading To Kill a Mockingbird. And now, ten years into running his own law firm with his best friend and partner in crime, Nelson 'Nellie' Rivers, and his suave right-hand-man, Brent 'Cape' Capers, he feels he's finally making a difference. When Beau Lee learns about Hollis's situation, he's determined to help. Miraculously, Hollis survives the encounter, but the Chicago police department has already spun the narrative in its favor, and Hollis is given a wrongful prison sentence with an unreasonable bail. What really happened that night the car was pulled over? Was it random or was Hollis targeted? Beau Lee knows he's treading in dangerous waters, and finding evidence of the truth will be his biggest challenge yet, but with troubling powers at play, one innocent man's life hangs in the balance." -- Amazon

White River Crossing

"A ragged fur peddler arrives at a remote outpost of the Hudson Bay Company in the winter of 1766 with a lump of gold, claiming that there is plenty more like it further north at a place called Ox Lake. The outpost's chief factor, Magnus Norton, dreams of instant riches and launches a secret and perilous expedition to find the treasure and bring it back. Led by a family of native guides, the party of prospectors includes Norton's brutish deputy, John Shaw, and Thomas Hearn, the insular and intellectual first mate from the factory's whaling sloop. During their long journey north, Shaw's callousness and arrogance lead him to commit an act of sexual violence whose disastrous consequences will only fully emerge once they reach their final destination. There, amidst the bleak beauty of the Barren Grounds, as Norton's carefully crafted plans begin to fall apart and the brutal arctic winter starts to descend, Hearn is forced to make a choice that will define his character and determine his future forever. Utterly captivating, White River Crossing transports us back to the furthest edges of the eighteenth-century British empire where two radically different worlds-indigenous and European-collide with calamitous and deadly results."-- Provided by publisher

The War within a War

An examination of the relationship between the Vietnam War and the civil rights struggle in the United States, focusing on the experiences of African Americans during the 1960s and 1970s. Drawing on the lives of soldiers, medical personnel, journalists, activists, artists, and political leaders, the work explores how military service in Vietnam intersected with domestic movements for racial equality. Through individual narratives and broader historical context, the book analyzes the social, political, and cultural forces that shaped the era and assesses the war's impact on race relations in the United States.

The Valley of Vengeful Ghosts

"In the aftermath of her mother's death, Eleanor is unmoored. For years, her mother orchestrated every detail of her life--from meals, to laundry, to finances--as Eleanor focused on her career as an online therapist. Left to navigate the world on her own, Eleanor clings to her mother's final directive: use her inheritance to buy a house. Desperate to obey her mother one last time, Eleanor impulsively buys a model home in a valley-turned-construction site, a picturesque development steeped in a shadowy history. It feels like a fresh start, until the rain comes--an endless, torrential downpour. As water seeps in through the house's cracks, the line between what is real and what is not begins to blur. Haunted by the stories of her clients, a stream of workmen and bureaucrats she can't trust, and visions of ghosts from her past and present, Eleanor's reality unravels, and she is forced to reckon with the secrets she's buried and the choices she's made."-- Provided by publisher

State of Ridicule

"This will be the first proper history of English satire, from its origins in the late medieval period to the present day. This book is a history of political satire in English literature, from the Middle Ages through the nineteenth century. The aim is to present a coherent history of what has been an everchanging, complex series of literary traditions that we refer to as satire, from its beginnings in various kinds of medieval grotesque up to the proliferation of the modern novel. Author Dan Sperrin presents interesting and original insights into the satirist's paradoxical situation at both the periphery and the centre of culture. The text is organised chronologically by period and is concentrated upon canonical figures - including Chaucer, Dryden, Swift, Pope, Johnson and Dickens - but also including more obscure writers in such a way as to be focused enough to tell a story but broad enough to include variation, of which there is decidedly a great deal by the very nature of what the author describes as a mercurial literary form. Satire, as Sperrin demonstrates, often takes aim at grand narratives and comprehensive taxonomies, and the book accounts for eccentricity and individuality as a matter of principle."-- Provided by publisher

Simple Heart

This novel follows Nana, a Korean-born playwright who was adopted as a child and raised in France. When she becomes pregnant, she begins to reflect on questions of identity, family history, and belonging. Around the same time, a filmmaker proposes creating a documentary about her life. Prompted by a desire to learn more about her origins, Nana travels to Seoul, where she encounters people and situations that lead her to reconsider memories from her childhood and adoption. As she prepares for motherhood, she examines her connections to both her birth country and her adoptive home. The narrative explores themes of international adoption, cultural identity, and family relationships, while also referencing historical and social contexts, including the presence of the United States Armed Forces in South Korea.

Red Dawn Over China

From renowned, prize-winning historian Frank Dikotter, a commanding new history of China's path to Communism.