Front Table Newsletter 8/19

On this week’s Front Table, take an exacting look at gentrification and the lives devastated in the process, and debunk the myth surrounding AI's military potential. Explore how love and betrayal can coexist, and consider the ripple effects of familial legacies over generations. Lastly, enjoy an absurdist romp in search of a stolen snuffbox, and reflect on a journey through time guided by economics, culture, and spirituality. Find these titles and more at semcoop.com.

How to Kill a City
(Bold Type Books)
P.E. Moskowitz

The term gentrification has become a buzzword to describe the changes in urban neighborhoods across the country, but we don’t realize just how threatening it is. A vigorous exposé revealing who holds power in our cities, How to Kill a City uncovers the massive systemic forces behind gentrification in New Orleans, Detroit, San Francisco, and New York. 

Seduction Theory
(Little, Brown and Company)
Emily Adrian

When two married professors tiptoe toward infidelity, their transgressions are brought to light in a graduate student's searing thesis project. Simultaneously provocative and tender, Seduction Theory exposes the intoxicating nature of power and attraction, and is a masterful demonstration of how love and betrayal can coexist


AI, Automation, and War: The Rise of a Military-Tech Complex
(Princeton University Press)
Anthony King

Is AI about to automate war? Will autonomous drone swarms and killer robots controlled by AI dominate the battlespace and determine the winner? In AI, Automation, and War, Anthony King debunks this science fiction-tinged narrative of AI's military potential, exploring instead the actual applications of AI by the armed forces over the last decade.

Patchwork
(Coffee House Press)
Tom Comitta
 
Tom Comitta returns with a novella that is at once a picaresque quest for a stolen snuffbox and a marvel of literary découpage, equal parts love story, old-fashioned thriller, and absurdist romp.

How to be Unmothered
(Restless Books)
Camille U. Adams

Mapping the fault lines between mother and child (humanity's first and supposedly strongest bond), and with a poet's homeric vision of her native Trinidad, Camille U. Adams weaves the Caribbean island's history of colonial violence with her own family's legacy of abandonment.

Iode
(Bloodaxe Books)
Gillian Allnutt

Denise Levertov described Gillian Allnutt's poems as 'at once hard and delicate, like wrought iron'. They are both serious and light in touch, deeply humane and spiritually profound, showing the spirit surviving amongst the tatters of Christianity in a modern wilderness.

The Sassoons
(Vintage)
Joseph Sassoon

A spectacular generational saga of the making (and undoing) of a family dynasty: the riveting untold story of the gilded Jewish Bagdadi Sassoons, who built a vast empire through global finance and trade--cotton, opium, shipping, banking--that reached across three continents and ultimately changed the destinies of nations. With full access to rare family photographs and archives.