ODY New Books Collection

Losing Our Religion

"Former Southern Baptist pastor and Christianity Today editor-in-chief Russell Moore calls for repentance and renewal in American evangelicalism. American evangelical Christianity has lost its way. While the witness of the church before a watching world is diminished beyond recognition, congregations are torn apart over Donald Trump, Christian nationalism, racial injustice, sexual predation, disgraced leaders, and covered-up scandals. Left behind are millions of believers who counted on the church to be a place of belonging and hope. As greater and greater numbers of younger Americans bleed out from the church, even the most rooted evangelicals are wondering, "Can American Christianity survive?" In Losing Our Religion, Russell Moore calls his fellow evangelical Christians to conversion over culture wars, to truth over tribalism, to the gospel over politics, to integrity over influence, and to renewal over nostalgia. With both prophetic honesty and pastoral love, Moore offers a word of counsel for how a new generation of disillusioned and exhausted believers can find a path forward after the crisis and confusion of the last several years. Believing the gospel is too important to leave it to hucksters and grifters, he shows how a Christian can avoid both cynicism and complicity in order to imagine a different, hopeful vision for the church. The altar call of the old evangelical revivals was both a call to repentance and the offer of a new start. In the same way, this book invites unmoored and discouraged Christians to step out into an uncertain future, first by letting go of the kind of cultural, politicized, status quo Christianity that led us to this moment of reckoning. Only when we see how lost we are, we can find our way again. Only when we bury what's dead can we experience life again. Only when we lose our religion can we be amazed by grace again" -- Provided by publisher

The Indispensable Right

"This book places the current attacks on the right of free speech in their proper historical, legal, and political context. The United States was born in an age of rage and for 250 years we have periodically lost sight of the value of free expression. The history of the struggle for free speech is the story of extraordinary people-nonconformists who refuse to yield to abusive authority-and here is a mosaic of vivid characters and controversies. Jonathan Turley takes readers through the figures and failures that have shaped us and then shows the unique dangers of our current moment. The alliance of academic, media, and corporate interests with the government's traditional wish to control speech has put us on an almost irresistible path toward censorship. Turley reminds us that we remain a nation grappling with the implications of free expression and with the limits of our tolerance for the speech of others."-- Provided by the publisher

How the World Ran Out of Everything

"In 'How the World Ran Out of Everything,' . . . journalist Peter S. Goodman reveals the fascinating inner workings of our supply chain and the factors that have led to its constant, dangerous vulnerability. His reporting takes readers deep into the elaborate system, showcasing the triumphs and struggles of the human players who operate it--from factories in Asia and an almond grower in Northern California, to a group of striking railroad workers in Texas, to a truck driver who Goodman accompanies across hundreds of miles of the Great Plains. Through their stories, Goodman weaves a powerful argument for reforming a supply chain to become truly reliable and resilient, demanding a radical redrawing of the bargain between labor and shareholders, and deeper attention paid to how we get the things we need."-- Amazon.com

Hombrecito

"A novel by a brilliant new voice, Hombrecito is a queer coming-of-age story about a young immigrant's complex relationships with his mother and his motherland."-- Provided by publisher

The Hammer

"The thesis is simple: Inequality is America's biggest problem. Unions are the single strongest tool that working people have to fix this problem. But the labor movement of today has failed to enable enough individuals to join unions. Thus, organized labor's powerful potential is being wielded incompetently. And what is happening inside of organized labor will--far more than most people realize--determine the economic and social course of American life for years to come. In deeply reported chapters that span the country, Nolan shows readers how organized labor can and does wield power effectively--in spots--but also why it has long been unable to build itself into the powerful institution that the working class needs. These narratives both inspire by example and motivate by counter-example. Whether it's a union that has succeeded in a single city, and is trying to scale that effectiveness nationally, or the ins and outs of a historically large and transformative union campaign, or the human face of a strike, or a profile of the most anti-union state in America, Nolan highlights the actual mechanisms that connect labor to politics to real change. Throughout, Nolan follows Sara Nelson, the powerful and charismatic head of the flight attendants' union, as she struggles with how (and whether) to assert herself as a national leader of the labor movement, to try to fix what is broken about it. The Hammer draws the line from forgotten workplaces to Washington's halls of power, and shows how labor can utterly transform American politics--if it can first transform itself. Nolan is an expert who has covered labor and politics for more than a decade, and has helped to unionize his own industry. The time has come for his poignant and enlightening book as we prepare for the historic 2024 presidential election. The Hammer is a unique on-the-ground excavation of the present and the future of the labor movement. It is the story of what the labor movement can be, and why it isn't that...yet."-- Provided by publisher

The Garden against Time

"In 2020, Olivia Laing began to restore an eighteenth-century walled garden in Suffolk, an overgrown Eden of unusual plants. The work brought to light a crucial question for our age: Who gets to live in paradise, and how can we share it while there's still time? Moving between real and imagined gardens, from Milton's Paradise Lost to John Clare's enclosure elegies, from a wartime sanctuary in Italy to a grotesque aristocratic pleasure ground funded by slavery, Laing interrogates the sometimes shocking cost of making paradise on earth. But the story of the garden doesn't always enact larger patterns of privilege and exclusion. It's also a place of rebel outposts and communal dreams. From the improbable queer utopia conjured by Derek Jarman on the beach at Dungeness to the fertile vision of a common Eden propagated by William Morris, new modes of living can and have been attempted amidst the flower beds, experiments that could prove vital in the coming era of climate change. The result is a humming, glowing tapestry, a beautiful and exacting account of the abundant pleasures and possibilities of gardens: not as a place to hide from the world but as a site of encounter and discovery, bee-loud and pollen-laden."-- Publisher description

The Fall of Roe

In June 2022, Americans watched in shock as the Supreme Court reversed one of the nation's landmark rulings. For nearly a half century, Roe v. Wade was synonymous with women's rights and freedoms. This book reveals the inside story of how it happened. The authors' investigation charts the political and religious campaign to take down abortion rights and remake American families, womanhood, and the nation itself. Reeling from Barack Obama's 2012 landslide presidential victory--and motivated by a spiritual mission--a small but determined network of elite conservative Christian lawyers and powerbrokers worked quietly and methodically to keep their true cause alive: ending abortion rights. Thinking in generational terms, they devised a strategic, top-down takeover at every level of political and legal life, from little-known anti-abortion lobbyists in far flung statehouses to the arbiters of the Constitution at the highest court in the land. Broad swaths of liberal America did not register the severity of the threat until it was far too late. At a moment when women had more power than ever before, the feminist movement suffered one of the greatest political defeats in American history. -- Adapted from the dust jacket

Countdown

"For fans of Oppenheimer, a riveting investigation into the modern nuclear weapons landscape."-- kirkusreviews.com

Cosmic Connections

"The Language Animal, Charles Taylor's 2016 account of human linguistic capacity, was a revelation, toppling scholarly conventions and illuminating our most fundamental selves. But, as Taylor noted in that work, there was much more to be said. Cosmic Connections continues Taylor's exploration of Romantic and post-Romantic responses to disenchantment and innovations in language. Reacting to the fall of cosmic orders that were at once metaphysical and moral, the Romantics used the symbols and music of poetry to recover contact with reality beyond fragmented existence. They sought to overcome disenchantment and groped toward a new meaning of life. Their accomplishments have been extended by post-Romantic generations into the present day. Taylor's magisterial work takes us from Hölderlin, Novalis, Keats, and Shelley to Hopkins, Rilke, Baudelaire, and Mallarmé, and on to Eliot, Miłosz, and beyond.In seeking deeper understanding and a different orientation to life, the language of poetry is not merely a pleasurable presentation of doctrines already elaborated elsewhere. Rather, Taylor insists, poetry persuades us through the experience of connection. The resulting conviction is very different from that gained through the force of argument. By its very nature, poetry's reasoning will often be incomplete, tentative, and enigmatic. But at the same time, its insight is too moving--too obviously true--to be ignored."-- Provided by publisher

But Everyone Feels This Way

"For far too long, I was told I was just like everyone else. All my struggles and feelings were supposedly universal, and the real difference was that I was just a weak, manipulative, selfish, emotional baby. I had to toughen up. But as much as everyone tried to convince me, I knew it couldn't be true. Living just seemed so much harder for me than everyone else. Whilst the people around me seemed to have no problem being calm and happy, I had panic attacks multiple times a day, where my hyperventilating made my legs numb and sometimes I lost consciousness. I cried almost every day from stress, frustration, exhaustion, or all three at once. This wasn't okay. This wasn't normal. This wasn't functioning. And it certainly wasn't fine." Paige Layle was normal. She lived in the countryside with her mom, dad, and brother Graham. She went to school, hung out with friends, and all the while everything seemed so much harder than it needed to be. A break in routine threw off the whole day. If her teacher couldn't answer "why" in class, she dissolved into tears, unable to articulate her own confusion or explain her lack of control. But Paige was normal. She smiled in photos, picked her feet up when her mom needed to vacuum instead of fleeing the room, and received high grades. She was popular and well-liked. And until she had a full mental breakdown, no one believed her when she claimed that she was not okay. In "But Everyone Feels This Way," Paige Layle shares her story as an autistic woman diagnosed late. Women are frequently diagnosed with autism much later than men--in their late teens or early twenties. Armed with the phrase "Autism Spectrum Disorder" (ASD), Paige set out to learn how to live her authentic, autistic life. She challenges stigmas, taboos, and stereotypes so that everyone can see themselves. Along the way, her online activism has spread awareness, acceptance, and self-recognition in millions of others."-- Provided by publisher

Brotherless Night

"Jaffna, 1981. Sixteen-year-old Sashi wants to become a doctor. But over the next decade, as a vicious civil war subsumes Sri Lanka, her dream takes a different path as she watches those around her, including her four beloved brothers, swept up in violent political ideologies and their consequences. She must ask herself: is it possible for anyone to move through life without doing harm? Sashi begins working as a medic at a field hospital for the militant Tamil Tigers, who, following years of state discrimination and violence, are fighting for a separate homeland for Sri Lanka's Tamil minority. But after the Tigers murder one of her teachers, and the arrival of Indian peacekeepers brings further atrocities, she turns to one of her professors, a feminist and dissident who invites her to join in a dangerous, secret project of documenting human rights violations as a mode of civil resistance to war. In gorgeous, fearless writing, Ganeshananthan captures furious mothers marching to demand news of their disappeared sons; a young student attending the hunger strike of an equally young militant; and a feminist reading group that tries to side with community and justice over any single political belief. Set during the early years of Sri Lanka's thirty-year civil war, and based on over a decade of research, Movement explores the blurred lines between formal participation in conflict and civilian life. This is a heartrending portrait of one woman's moral journey, and a testament to both the enduring impact of war and the bonds of home."-- Provided by publisher

The Bright Sword

"Collum, a brilliantly gifted young knight from the provinces, arrives at Camelot two weeks after the Battle of Camlann, hoping to compete for a spot on the Round Table. But he finds the city empty, King Arthur dead, and the Table destroyed. The remaining six knights aren't the mighty heroes, the legends, like Lancelot and Gawain and Tristram and Galahad. These are the survivors, a grab-bag of minor oddball knights from the margins--Sir Palomides, the Saracen Knight; Sir Bedivere, Arthur's one-handed longtime companion; Sir Dagonet, Arthur's fool, knighted as a joke; Sir Dinadan, a cutting wit who's hiding a deep secret. Arthur's death has exposed the splinters of his kingdom, and a void has opened in the heart of Britain. As power-hungry lords from the north descend on Camelot to seize control of the land, Collum is thrust into the front lines. Here lies the battlefield between pagans and Christians, fantasy and empire, power and destiny. Monsters and fairies are reawakening, the moral center is gone, and the fragile alliances that held Britain together are breaking. It is up to the surviving knights, the rebellious sorceress Nimue, and young Collum to avenge Arthur's murder and save Camelot. Can they re-build the Table and bring back the glory that was Camelot? Should they even try? The first major Arthurian epic of the new millennium, full of duels and quests, battles and tournaments, magic swords and Fisher Kings, The Bright Sword is a story about power and hope, and the struggle for the soul of England between the new Christian God and the old gods of fairy. But most of all it's a story about flawed men and women full of strength and pain who are looking for a way to reforge a broken land, in spite of being broken themselves."-- Provided by publisher

The Anthropologists

"From White on White author and frequent New Yorker contributor Aysegül Savas--a warm, elegant, and playful novel of home-hunting and life-building away from one's family of origin. Asya and Manu are looking at apartments, envisioning their future in a foreign city. What should their life here look like? Can they create their own traditions and rituals? Whom can they consider family? As the young couple dreams about the possibilities of each new listing, Asya, a documentarian, spends her days gathering footage from the neighborhood park like an anthropologist observing local customs. "Forget about daily life," chides her grandmother on the phone. "We named you for a whole continent and you're filming a park." Life back in Asya and Manu's respective home countries continues--parents age, grandparents get sick, nieces and nephews grow up--all just slightly beyond their reach. But the world they're making in their new city is growing, too, they hope, into something that will be distinctly theirs. As they open up the horizons of their lives, what and whom will they hold onto, and what will they need to release? Hailed by Lauren Groff and Marina Abramovic, Savas's fine, precise craft turns The Anthropologist's simple apartment search into a soulful, often funny, examination of modern coupledom, home-building, and expat life in the universal modern city." -- Provided by publisher

The Andy Warhol Diaries

"This international literary sensation turns the spotlight on one of the most influential and controversial figures in American culture. Filled with shocking observations about the lives, loves, and careers of the rich, famous, and fabulous, Warhol's journal is endlessly fun and fascinating. Spanning the mid-1970s until just a few days before his death in 1987, THE ANDY WARHOL DIARIES is a compendium of the more than twenty thousand pages of the artist's diary that he dictated daily to Pat Hackett. In it, Warhol gives us the ultimate backstage pass to practically everything that went on in the world-both high and low. He hangs out with "everybody": Jackie O ("thinks she's so grand she doesn't even owe it to the public to have another great marriage to somebody big"), Yoko Ono ("We dialed F-U-C-K-Y-O-U and L-O-V-E-Y-O-U to see what happened, we had so much fun"), and "Princess Marina of, I guess, Greece," along with art-world rock stars Jean-Michel Basquiat, Francis Bacon, Salvador Dali, and Keith Haring. Warhol had something to say about everyone who crossed his path, whether it was Lou Reed or Liberace, Patti Smith or Diana Ross, Frank Sinatra or Michael Jackson. A true cultural artifact, THE ANDY WARHOL DIARIES amounts to a portrait of an artist-and an era-unlike any other."-- Page 4 of cover

The Ancient Art of Thinking for Yourself

"For most of the 2,000-plus years since its foundation as a discipline by ancient Greek thinkers, rhetoric - the art of using language to persuade - was a keystone of a Western education. But in the early 20th century, studying rhetoric fell out of fashion. In The Ancient Art of Thinking for Yourself, Robin Reames, one of the world's leading scholars of rhetoric, argues that it's high time to bring it back. Drawing on examples ranging from the Sophist Alcibiades, whose speeches in favor of war led ancient Athens to destruction and defeat, to modern-day conspiracists like Alex Jones, Reames breaks down the major techniques of rhetoric, pulling back the curtain on how politicians, journalists, and "journalists" convince us to believe what we believe - and to vote and act accordingly. Understanding these techniques helps us avoid being manipulated by modern-day sophists who don't have our best interests at heart. But it also grants us rare insight into our own beliefs, and the values that shape them. Learning rhetoric, she argues, doesn't teach what to think but how to think - allowing us to understand our ideological commitments, and those of others, in a completely new way. Thoughtful, nuanced, and leavened with dry humor, The Ancient Art of Thinking for Yourself offers an antidote to our polarized, post-truth world."-- Provided by publisher

The after Party

"From public theologian Curtis Chang and journalist Nancy French, The After Party: Toward Better Christian Politics separates Christian political identity from the partisan politics that divide our country, churches, and families. This is the companion volume to the interactive video series created by Curtis Chang, David French, and Russell Moore."-- Provided by publisher

Abolition Labor

"Abolition Labor chronicles the national movement to end forced labor, much of it unpaid, in American prisons. It draws on interviews with formerly incarcerated persons in Alabama, Texas, Georgia and New York to give a more holistic picture of these work conditions, and it covers the new prisoner rights movement that began with system-wide work strikes involving more than 50,000 people in the 2010s. Incarcerated people work for penny wages (15 cents an hour is not unusual), and, in several states, for nothing at all, as cooks, dishwashers, janitors, groundskeepers, barbers, painters, or plumbers; in laundries, kitchens, factories, and hospitals. They provide vital public services such as repairing roads, fighting wildfires, or clearing debris after hurricanes. They manufacture products like office furniture, mattresses, license plates, dentures, glasses, traffic signs, garbage cans, athletic equipment, and uniforms. And they harvest crops, work as welders and carpenters, and labor in meat and poultry processing plants. Abolition Labor provides a wealth of insights into what has become a vast underground economy. It draws connections between the risky trade forced on prisoners who hustle to survive on the inside and the precarious economy on the outside. And it argues that, far from being quarantined off from society, prisons and their forced work regime have a sizable impact on the economic and social lives of millions of American households." -- Publisher's website

Erotic Vagrancy

"Thirteen years in the writing, Erotic vagrancy doesn't only surpass every other biography of Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton yet to appear, this rich, vital and passionately articulated book, which is as extravagant and wayward as its two subjects, is also about celebrity, creativity, being flawed, being brilliant, sexuality, the intermingling of a low and a highbrow existence, pride, insecurity, attraction and repulsion, and devilry. We see Taylor the child actress exchanging dogs and horses for husbands. We see Burton emerging from the mists and brimstone of Wales to be the greatest theatrical animal of his generation. The pair come together in Rome during the making of Cleopatra, which gives Lewis the opportunity for a major farcical set-piece. We then enter a world of jewels and private jets, vodka, yachts and furs -- the splendid vulgarity of the Sixties, where the narrative of Taylor and Burton becomes a Pop Art story. Then, inevitably, it all goes wrong, with alcoholism, violence, recrimination and divorce (twice) -- with Burton, whom Lewis depicts as a Faustus figure, damned by fame, dead at fifty-eight." -- Back cover of the paperback edition

This Great Hemisphere

"From the award-winning and bestselling author of Black Buck, a speculative novel about a young woman--invisible by birth and relegated to second-class citizenship--who sets off on a mission to find her older brother, whom she had presumed dead but who is now the primary suspect in a high-profile political murder."-- Provided by publisher

Someone like Us

"After abandoning his once-promising career as a journalist in search of a new life in Paris, Mamush meets Hannah--a photographer whose way of seeing the world shows him the possibility of finding not only love but family. Now, five years later, with his marriage to Hannah on the verge of collapse, he returns to the close-knit immigrant Ethiopian community of Washington, DC, that defined his childhood. At its center is Mamush's stoic, implacable mother, and Samuel, the larger-than-life father figure whose ceaseless charm and humor have always served as a cover for a harder, more troubling truth. But on the same day that Mamush arrives home in Washington, Samuel is found dead in his garage. With Hannah and their two-year-old son back in Paris, Mamush sets out on an unexpected journey across America in search of answers to questions he'd been told never to ask. As he does so, he begins to understand that perhaps the only chance he has of saving his family and making it back home is to confront not only the unresolved mystery around Samuel's life and death, but his own troubled memories, and the years spent masking them. Breathtaking, commanding, unforgettable work from one of America's most prodigiously gifted novelists."-- Provided by publisher