Front Table 7/7/23

Built from the Fire: The Epic Story of Tulsa's Greenwood District, America's Black Wall Street
(Random House)
Victor Luckerson

When Ed Goodwin moved with his parents to Greenwood, Tulsa, in 1914, his family joined a growing community on the cusp of becoming a national center of black life. But, just seven years later, on May 31, 1921, the teenaged Ed hid in a bathtub as a white mob descended on his neighborhood, laying waste to thirty-five blocks and murdering as many as three hundred people. The Tulsa Race Massacre was one of the most brutal acts of racist violence in U.S. history, a ruthless attempt to smother a spark of black independence. But that was never the whole story of Greenwood. The Goodwins and their neighbors soon rebuilt it into "a Mecca," where nightlife thrived, small businesses flourished, and an underworld economy survived. Ed even bought a newspaper called the Oklahoma Eagle to chronicle Greenwood's resurgence and battles against white bigotry. But today, while urban renewal policies and encroaching gentrification risk wiping out Greenwood's legacy for good, the family newspaper remains, alongside a new generation of local activists. In Built from the Fire, journalist Victor Luckerson moves beyond the mythology of Black Wall Street to tell the story of an aspirant black neighborhood that, like so many others, has long been buffeted by racist government policies. Through the eyes of dozens of race massacre survivors and their descendants, Luckerson delivers an honest, moving portrait of this potent national symbol of success and solidarity--and weaves an epic tale about a neighborhood that refused, more than once, to be erased.


Cogs and Monsters: What Economics Is, and What It Should Be
(Princeton University Press)
Diane Coyle

Digital technology, big data, big tech, machine learning, and AI are revolutionizing both the tools of economics and the phenomena it seeks to measure, understand, and shape. Mainstream economics still assumes people are "cogs"--self-interested, calculating, independent agents interacting in defined contexts. But the digital economy is much more characterized by "monsters"--untethered, snowballing, and socially influenced unknowns. What is worse, by treating people as cogs, economics is creating its own monsters, leaving itself without the tools to understand the new problems it faces. In response, Diane Coyle asks whether economic individualism is still valid in the digital economy, whether we need to measure growth and progress in new ways, and whether economics can ever be objective, since it influences what it analyzes. Just as important, the discipline needs to correct its striking lack of diversity and inclusion if it is to be able to offer new solutions to new problems. In Cogs and Monsters, Coyle explores the enormous problems--but also opportunities--facing economics today and examines what it must do to help policymakers solve the world's crises, from pandemic recovery and inequality to slow growth and the climate emergency.


When the Smoke Cleared: The 1968 Rebellions and the Unfinished Battle for Civil Rights in the Nation’s Capital
(New Press) 
Kyla Sommers

In April 1968, following the murder of Martin Luther King Jr., a wave of uprisings swept across America. None was more visible--or resulted in more property damage, arrests, or federal troop involvement--than in Washington, DC, where thousands took to the streets in protest against racial inequality, looting and burning businesses in the process. When the Smoke Cleared tells the story of the Washingtonians who seized the moment to rebuild a more just society, one that would protect and foster Black political and economic power. A riveting account of activism, urban reimagination, and political transformation, Kyla Sommers's revealing and deeply researched narrative is ultimately a tale of blowback, as the Nixon administration thwarted the ambitions of DC's reformers and conservative politicians used the specter of crime in the capital to roll back the civil rights movement and create the modern carceral state. A vital chapter in the struggle for racial equality, When the Smoke Cleared is an account of open wounds, paths not taken, and their unforeseen consequences--revealed here in all of their contemporary significance.


The Seventy-Five Folios and Other Unpublished Manuscripts
(Belknap Press)
Marcel Proust, ed. by Nathalie Mauriac Dyer, trans. by Sam Taylor

One of the most significant literary events of the century, the discovery of manuscript pages containing early drafts of Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time put an end to a decades-long search for the Proustian grail. The Paris publisher Bernard de Fallois claimed to have viewed the folios, but doubts about their existence emerged when none appeared in the Proust manuscripts bequeathed to the Bibliothèque Nationale in 1962. The texts had in fact been hidden among Fallois's private papers, where they were found upon his death in 2018. The Seventy-Five Folios and Other Unpublished Manuscripts presents these folios here, along with seventeen other unpublished texts. Characterized by Fallois as the "precious guide" to understanding Proust's masterpiece, the folios provide a glimpse of the "sacred moment" when the great work burst forth for the first time. Like a painter's sketches and a composer's holographs, Proust's folios tell a story of artistic evolution. A "dream of a book, a book of a dream," Fallois called them. Here is a literary magnum opus finding its final form.


Ending Epidemics: A History of Escape from Contagion
(MIT Pres)
Richard Conniff

It may be hard to imagine a time when the best medical thinking blamed disease on noxious miasmas, bodily humors and divine dyspepsia, or when deadly diseases was a routine part of life. This all began to change on a day in April 1676, when a little-known Dutch merchant described bacteria for the first time. Beginning on that day in Delft and ending on the day in 1978 when the smallpox virus claimed its last known victim, Ending Epidemics tells the story behind "the mortality revolution." The dramatic transformation was not just in our longevity, but in the character of childhood, family life, and human society. Richard Conniff recounts the moments of inspiration and innovation, decades of dogged persistence, and, of course, periods of terrible suffering that stir individuals, institutions, and governments to act in the name of public health. And while the history of germ theory is central to this story, Ending Epidemics also describes the importance of everything from sanitation improvements and the discovery of antibiotics to the development of the microscope and the syringe--technologies we now take for granted.


Modi's India: Hindu Nationalism and the Rise of Ethnic Democracy
(Princeton University Press)
Christophe Jaffrelot, trans. by Cynthia Schoch

Over the past two decades, thanks to Narendra Modi, Hindu nationalism has been coupled with a form of national-populism that has ensured its success at the polls, first in Gujarat and then in India at large. Modi managed to seduce a substantial number of citizens by promising them development and polarizing the electorate along ethno-religious lines. Both facets of this national-populism found expression in a highly personalized political style as Modi related directly to the voters through all kinds of channels of communication in order to saturate the public space. Drawing on original interviews conducted across India, Christophe Jaffrelot shows how Modi's government has moved India toward a new form of democracy, an ethnic democracy that equates the majoritarian community with the nation and relegates Muslims and Christians to second-class citizens who are harassed by vigilante groups. Modi's India is a sobering account of how a once-vibrant democracy can go wrong when a government backed by popular consent suppresses dissent while growing increasingly intolerant of ethnic and religious minorities.


Pomegranate: A Novel
(Atria Books)
Helen Elaine Lee

Ranita Atwater is almost done with her four-year sentence for opiate possession at Oak Hills Correctional Center. Though she's regaining her freedom, she's leaving behind her lover Maxine, who has inspired her to imagine herself and the world differently. Now she must steer clear of temptation, while atoning for her missteps and facing old wounds. With three years of sobriety, she is determined to stay clean and regain custody of her two children. "My name is Ranita, and I'm an addict," she has said again and again at recovery meetings. But who else is she? Who might she choose to become? As she claims the story housed within her pomegranate-like heart, she is determined to confront the weight of the past and discover what might lie beyond mere survival. Pomegranate is a complex portrayal of how rocky and winding the path to wellness is for a Black woman: it is an unflinching portrait of the devastating effects of incarceration and addiction in America, and one woman's determination to tell her story.