Staff Picks

Snyder asserts that we actually can learn from history instead of repeating it. This book is a call to small actions in these troubling political times.

 

Publisher's description:

The Founding Fathers tried to protect us from the threat they knew, the tyranny that overcame ancient democracy. Today, our political order faces new threats, not unlike the totalitarianism of the twentieth century. We are no wiser than the Europeans who saw democracy yield to fascism, Nazism, or communism. Our one advantage is that we might learn from their experience.

 

By now you're probably aware of the Koch brothers and their influence on modern politics. However, until recently, most of America had no idea who they were. They spent decades quietly building an empire that would become one of the most profitable ventures in the world. Leonard's book is a thorough unveiling of their behind-the-scenes operations, and is a must-read for anyone curious to know what Bernie Sanders has been shouting about for the last several years.

 

Publisher's description:
For five decades, CEO Charles Koch has kept Koch Industries quietly operating in deepest secrecy, with a view toward very, very long-term profits. He's a genius businessman: patient with earnings, able to learn from his mistakes, determined that his employees develop a reverence for free-market ruthlessness, and a master disrupter. These strategies made him and his brother David together richer than Bill Gates.
 

But there's another side to this story. If you want to understand how we killed the unions in this country, how we widened the income divide, stalled progress on climate change, and how our corporations bought the influence industry, all you have to do is read this book.

Seven years in the making, Kochland "is a dazzling feat of investigative reporting and epic narrative writing, a tour de force that takes the reader deep inside the rise of a vastly powerful family corporation that has come to influence American workers, markets, elections, and the very ideas debated in our public square. Leonard's work is fair and meticulous, even as it reveals the Kochs as industrial Citizens Kane of our time" (Steve Coll, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Private Empire).

Find Kockland in our online catalog

 

Publisher's description:

In May 2016, Fort McMurray, the hub of Canada's oil industry and America's biggest foreign supplier, was overrun by wildfire. The multi-billion-dollar disaster melted vehicles, turned entire neighborhoods into firebombs, and drove 88,000 people from their homes in a single afternoon. Through the lens of this apocalyptic conflagration--the wildfire equivalent of Hurricane Katrina--John Vaillant warns that this was not a unique event, but a shocking preview of what we must prepare for in a hotter, more flammable world. Fire has been a partner in our evolution for hundreds of millennia, shaping culture, civilization, and, very likely, our brains. Fire has enabled us to cook our food, defend and heat our homes, and power the machines that drive our titanic economy. Yet this volatile energy source has always threatened to elude our control, and in our new age of intensifying climate change, we are seeing its destructive power unleashed in previously unimaginable ways. With masterly prose and a cinematic eye, Vaillant takes us on a riveting journey through the intertwined histories of North America's oil industry and the birth of climate science, to the unprecedented devastation wrought by modern forest fires, and into lives forever changed by these disasters. John Vaillant's urgent work is a book for--and from--our new century of fire, which has only just begun.

 

This new book of essays is perfect for readers of the One Book One Boulder selection All We Can Save. In much the same way, this is a hopeful and engaging collection of writing from around the world, "a book that provides some brightness, passion, and intelligence in dark times." (Kirkus Reviews).

 

Publisher's description:

An energizing case for hope about the climate, from Rebecca Solnit ("the voice of the resistance"--New York Times), climate activist Thelma Young Lutunatabua, and a chorus of voices calling on us to rise to the moment. Not Too Late is the book for anyone who is despondent, defeatist, or unsure about climate change and seeking answers. As the contributors to this volume make clear, the future will be decided by whether we act in the present--and we must act to counter institutional inertia, fossil fuel interests, and political obduracy. These dispatches from the climate movement around the world feature the voices of organizers like Guam-based lawyer and writer Julian Aguon; climate scientists like Dr. Jacquelyn Gill and Dr. Edward Carr; poets like Marshall Islands activist Kathy Jetnil-Kijner; and longtime organizers like The Tyranny of Oil author Antonia Juhasz. Guided by Rebecca Solnit's typical clear-eyed wisdom and enriched by photographs and quotes, Not Too Late leads readers from discouragement to possibilities, from climate despair to climate hope.

Find Not Too Late in our online catalog.

This follow-up to the author's first book, Red Notice, about why he fought so hard for passage of the Magnitsky Act, is impossible to put down. The story of corruption and money laundering is full of intrigue and danger and the constant fear for those brave enough to speak out.

 

Publisher's description:

When Bill Browder's young Russian lawyer, Sergei Magnitsky, was beaten to death in a Moscow jail, Browder made it his life's mission to go after his killers and make sure they faced justice. The first step of that mission was to uncover who was behind the $230 million tax refund scheme that Magnitsky was killed over. As Browder and his team tracked the money as it flowed out of Russia through the Baltics and Cyprus and on to Western Europe and the Americas, they were shocked to discover that Vladimir Putin himself was a beneficiary of the crime. As law enforcement agencies began freezing the money, Putin retaliated. He and his cronies set up honey traps, hired process servers to chase Browder through cities, murdered more of his Russian allies, and enlisted some of the top lawyers and politicians in America to bring him down. Putin will stop at nothing to protect his money. As Freezing Order reveals, it was Browder's campaign to expose Putin's corruption that prompted Russia's intervention in the 2016 US presidential election.

 

This accessible history charts the trajectory of the American conservative movement between the Reagan and Trump presidencies. Hemmer argues that even as he was lionized as a conservative icon, Reagan was divisive within the conservative movement, and that his administration represented the closing of a decades-long ideological chapter. Into this void came Gingrich, Limbaugh, Buchanan, and other "partisans" to define the future of American conservatism and beat the path to the Trump presidency. This is a worthwhile read for the politically passionate; whether encountering '90s culture warriors for the first time or for the first time in a long time, you're guaranteed to learn something new.

 

Publisher's description:

For decades, Ronald Reagan's name has served as shorthand for the entirety of the modern conservative movement. Contrary to conventional wisdom, however, Reaganism was, from today's vantage point, a brief digression in conservatism's history. In the 1980s, an unusual set of economic and political conditions and an unusually charismatic leader combined to win huge majorities for Reagan's vision of American exceptionalism, commitment to small government, and faith in free markets and free movement in an era of rapid globalization. But from the very moment Reagan left office in 1989, dissatisfaction with Reaganism in the GOP rank-and-file began to grow. In Partisans, historian Nicole B. Hemmer identifies the forces that were, often imperceptibly, rewriting the DNA of conservatism in the 1990s. Propelled by former Reagan devotees, from Pat Buchanan to Rush Limbaugh, the Republican Party abandoned the optimistic Reagan worldview that once seemed to bind the conservative movement together. Changing demographics, shifting congressional coalitions, and the emerging political-entertainment media fueled the rise of combative far-right politicians and pundits who mixed anti-globalism, appeals to white resentment, and skepticism about democracy. Under their leadership a new American right emerged. It would have far more in common with the isolationist, pessimistic Old Right of the 1930s and 1940s than with the Reagan coalition of the 1980s. Tracking the transformation of Reagan acolytes into Trump cheerleaders, Partisans is essential reading for anyone wanting to understand the right's turn toward divisive, populist politics.

 

Find Partisans in our online catalog.

Why is climate change largely absent from the modern novel? Is there something about our expectations of narrative that make climate change unthinkable? Ghosh explores these questions while implicating the climate crisis within a crisis of culture, calling our time of climate inaction a derangement.

 

Publisher's description:
Are we deranged? The acclaimed Indian novelist Amitav Ghosh argues that future generations may well think so. How else to explain our imaginative failure in the face of global warming? In his first major book of nonfiction since In an Antique Land, Ghosh examines our inability—at the level of literature, history, and politics—to grasp the scale and violence of climate change. The extreme nature of today’s climate events, Ghosh asserts, make them peculiarly resistant to contemporary modes of thinking and imagining. This is particularly true of serious literary fiction: hundred-year storms and freakish tornadoes simply feel too improbable for the novel; they are automatically consigned to other genres. In the writing of history, too, the climate crisis has sometimes led to gross simplifications; Ghosh shows that the history of the carbon economy is a tangled global story with many contradictory and counter-intuitive elements. Ghosh ends by suggesting that politics, much like literature, has become a matter of personal moral reckoning rather than an arena of collective action. But to limit fiction and politics to individual moral adventure comes at a great cost. The climate crisis asks us to imagine other forms of human existence—a task to which fiction, Ghosh argues, is the best suited of all cultural forms. His book serves as a great writer’s challenge to his peers to create works that confront this urgent need before it is too late.

 

We recommend this new book about living off the grid in the San Luis Valley from Pulitzer Prize finalist Conover, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Newjack. In her insightful review, New York Times book critic Jennifer Szalai calls Conover "one of our great narrative journalists."

 

Publisher's description:

In May 2017, Ted Conover went to Colorado to explore firsthand a rural way of life that is about living cheaply, on your own land--and keeping clear of the mainstream. The failed subdivisions of the enormous San Luis Valley make this possible. Five-acre lots on the high prairie can be had for five thousand dollars, sometimes less. Conover volunteered for a local group trying to prevent homelessness during the bitter winters. He encountered an unexpected diversity: veterans with PTSD, families homeschooling, addicts young and old, gay people, people of color, lovers of guns and marijuana, people with social anxiety--most of them spurning charity and aiming, and sometimes failing, to be self-sufficient. And more than a few predicting they'll be the last ones standing when society collapses. Conover bought his own five acres and immersed himself for parts of four years in the often contentious culture of the far margins. He found many who dislike the government but depend on its subsidies; who love their space but nevertheless find themselves in each other's business; who are generous but wary of thieves; who endure squalor but appreciate beauty. In their struggles to survive and get along, they tell us about an America riven by difference where the edges speak more and more loudly to the mainstream.