Front Table Newsletter 8/5

Don't Talk About Politics: How to Change 21st-Century Minds
(Bloomsbury Continuum)
Sarah Stein Lubrano

Democracy is dying because we are clinging to a dangerous and outdated myth: talking about politics can change people's minds. It doesn't. This provocative debut from a bold new voice combines a fascinating range of research to show us the psychological and sociological factors that really shape our politics. Drawing from ancient philosophy to modern neuroscience and social science, Dr Sarah Stein Lubrano reveals the surprising truth about how people think and behave politically. In a world where politics keeps getting more irrational, dishonest, violent and chaotic, it's getting much harder to reach people with words alone. So people who really care about democracy must ask: how can we stop arguing and do the deep work to build stronger foundations for political life, and a better world for us all?


Fake Work: How I Began to Suspect Capitalism is a Joke
(Haymarket Books)
Leigh Claire La Berge

In this genre-bending memoir, Leigh Claire La Berge reflects on her stint at one of the most prestigious management consulting firms in the country and what it teaches us about the absurdity of work. While headlines blazed with doomsaying prophecies about the looming Y2K apocalypse, Leigh Claire was quickly introduced to the mysterious workings of The Process—a mythical and ever-changing corporate ethos The Andersen People (her fellow consultants) believed held world-saving powers. Her heroic task: printing physical copies of spreadsheets and sending them to a secure storage facility somewhere in the bowels of New Jersey. By the end of her brief time as a businessman at a fake firm, in a fake industry, dedicated to solving a fake crisis, Leigh Claire had accumulated a lifetime's worth of lessons about the absurdity of work and financialized capitalism. Fake Work blends memoir with post-facto theoretical interjections on the philosophical problems posed by contemporary corporate culture to tell the story of the techno-armageddon that wasn't.


Everything Is Predictable: How Bayesian Statistics Explain Our World
(Atria/One Signal Publishers)
Tom Chivers

At its simplest, Bayes's theorem describes the probability of an event, based on prior knowledge of conditions that might be related to the event. But in Everything Is Predictable, Tom Chivers lays out how it affects every aspect of our lives. He explains why highly accurate screening tests can lead to false positives and how a failure to account for it in court has put innocent people in jail. A cornerstone of rational thought, many argue that Bayes's theorem is a description of almost everything. But who was the man who lent his name to this theorem? How did an 18th-century Presbyterian minister and amateur mathematician uncover a theorem that would affect fields as diverse as medicine, law, and artificial intelligence? Everything Is Predictable is an entertaining and accessible illustration of how a single compelling idea can have far reaching consequences.

Midwest Unrest: 1960s Urban Rebellions and the Black Freedom Movement

(The University of North Carolina Press)
Ashley Howard

When Black communities across the United States went up in flames in the 1960s, Midwest cities, where racial inequity was endemic, were among those most likely to burn. Midwest Unrest explores those rebellions, paying particular attention to the ways that region, race, class, and gender all played critical and often overlapping roles in shaping Black people's resistance to racialized oppression. Utilizing arrest records, Kerner Commission documents, and author-conducted oral history interviews, Howard registers the significant impact the rebellions had in transforming the consciousness of African Americans and in altering the relationship between Black urban communities and the state. Howard moves the understanding of these disturbances from aberrant acts of violence to historically contingent acts of resistance, highlighting the coeval nature of organized protests and violent outbursts.

Exhibit
(Riverhead Books)
R. O. Kwon

A brilliant young photographer, Jin is at a crossroads in her work, in her marriage to her college love Philip, and in who she is and who she wants to be. Lidija is an alluring, injured world-class ballerina on hiatus from her ballet company under mysterious circumstances. Drawn to each other by their intense artistic drives, the two women talk all night. Cracked open, Jin finds herself telling Lidija about an old familial curse, breaking a lifelong promise. She's been told that if she doesn't keep the curse a secret, she risks losing everything; death and ruin could lie ahead. As Jin and Lidija become more entangled, they realize they share more than the ferocity of their ambition, and begin to explore hidden desires. Something is ignited in Jin: her art, her body, and her sense of self irrevocably changed. But can she avoid the specter of the curse? 

There Is a Rio Grande in Heaven
(Mariner Books)
Ruben Reyes Jr.

An electrifying debut story collection about Central American identity that spans past, present, and future worlds to reveal what happens when your life is no longer your own. In There Is a Rio Grande in Heaven, Ruben Reyes Jr. conjures strange dreamlike worlds to explore what we would do if we woke up one morning and our lives were unrecognizable. The characters, from mango farmers to popstars to ex-guerilla fighters to cyborgs, are forced to make uncomfortable choices—choices that not only mean life or death, but might also allow them to be heard in a world set on silencing the voices of Central Americans. Blazing with heart, humor, and inimitable style, There Is a Rio Grande in Heaven subverts everything we think we know about migration and its consequences, capturing what it means to take up a new life with piercing and brilliant clarity.

Tomb of Sand
(HarperVia)
Geetanjali Shree, Daisy Rockwell (trans.)

Eighty-year-old Ma slips into a deep depression after the death of her husband. Despite her family's cajoling, she refuses to leave her bed. But it is only after her grandson—Serious Son, a young man pathologically incapable of laughing—brings her a sparkling golden cane covered with butterflies that things begin to change. With a new lease on life thanks to the cane's seemingly magical powers, Ma gets out of bed and embarks on a series of adventures that baffle even her unconventional feminist daughter, Beti. Rich with fantastical elements, folklore, and exuberant wordplay, Geetanjali Shree's magnificent novel explores timely and timeless topics, including Buddhism, global warming, feminism, Partition, gender binary, transcending borders, and the profound joys of life.