Essays Social

Black Music is a book about the brilliant young jazz musicians of the early 1960s: John Coltrane, Thelonious Monk, Miles Davis, Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor, Archie Shepp, Sun Ra, and others. It is composed of essays, reviews, interviews, liner notes, musical analyses, and personal impressions from 1959-1967. Also includes Amiri Baraka's reflections in a 2009 interview with Calvin Reid of Publishers Weekly.

This highly regarded volume features a modern translation of all ten books of The Republic. Translated by Raymond Larson. The Republic is an explosion of thought; a ten-book brainstorm of one of the greatest minds of all-time.

When Phil Klay left the marines a decade ago after serving as an officer in Iraq, he found himself a part of the community of veterans who have no choice but to grapple with the meaning of their wartime experiences—for themselves and for the country. American identity has always been bound up in war—from the revolutionary war of our founding, to the civil war that ended slavery, to the two world wars that launched America as a superpower. What did the current wars say about who we are as a country, and how should we respond as citizens?

In Don't Call Me Princess, Orenstein's most resonant and important essays are available for the first time in collected form, updated with both an original introduction and personal reflections on each piece. Her takes on reproductive justice, the infertility industry, tensions between working and stay-at-home moms, pink ribbon fear-mongering and the complications of girl culture are not merely timeless - they have, like Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, become more urgent in our contemporary political climate.

Acclaimed author of The Real Lolita and editor of Women Crime Writers: Eight Suspense Novels of the 1940s & 50s (Library of America) and Troubled Daughters, Twisted Wives (Penguin), Sarah Weinman brings together an exemplary collection of recent true-crime tales. She culls together some of the most refreshing and exciting contemporary journalists and chroniclers of crime working today.

What draws our species to war? What makes us see violence as a kind of sacred duty, or a ritual that boys must undergo to "become" men? Newly reissued, Blood Rites takes listeners on an original journey from the elaborate human sacrifices of the ancient world to the carnage and holocaust of 20th-century "total war." Ehrenreich sifts deftly through the fragile records of prehistory and discovers the wellspring of war in an unexpected place - not in a "killer instinct" unique to the males of our species, but in the blood rites early humans performed.

In a series of penetrating and alarming essays, whose centerpiece is a commentary on the events of September 11, 2001 (deemed then too controversial to publish), Gore Vidal challenges the comforting consensus following September 11th and goes back and draws connections to Timothy McVeigh’s bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City. He asks were these simply the acts of “evil-doers?”

In this powerful, concise set of essays, world-renowned finance PhD Dr. Boyce Watkins explains that African Americans must dramatically and immediately shift the way we think about wealth, education, family, and community. We must educate our own children, own our own businesses, strengthen our families, and do what is necessary to ensure that the next generation is able to compete in a global, high-tech society.

Almost two hundred years before the liberal tradition of religious freedom, toleration, and consent was birthed in the west, a group of radical Christians in northern Europe had already rediscovered these ideas in the New Testament. They were called the Anabaptists. Western Protestant and Catholicism eventually caught on to these ideas, but Anabaptists have largely been ignored in the intellectual history of these ideas which informed the liberal tradition, libertarianism, and philosophical anarchism. The Anarchist Anabaptist seeks to restore Anabaptism to its rightful place in this history.

Famines are becoming smaller and rarer, but optimism about the possibility of a famine-free future must be tempered by the threat of global warming. That is just one of the arguments that Cormac Ó Gráda, one of the world's leading authorities on the history and economics of famine, develops in this wide-ranging audiobook, which provides crucial new perspectives on key questions raised by famines around the globe between the 17th and 21st centuries.

Is it smart to skip your annual physical? Should you put your trust in medical research? Is "low T" an actual disease? This book will examine these questions and more you've always wondered about in a collection of 50 essays on the medicine. The Doctor Will See You Now is a quirky and eclectic collection of short essays that explore evolving patient-physician relationship and reporting on medicine; famous doctors and notorious patients; surprising hospital practices and the future of healthcare; medical research, ethics, drugs, and money; and the brave new world of neurology.

Dr. Jeanne Safer has dedicated much of her decades-long career in psychotherapy to exploring taboo subjects that we all think about in private but seldom discuss in public. From conflicted sibling relationships to the choice not to have children, Safer's work has always been unflinching in its aim to dive deep into topics that make most of us blush but which are present in all of our lives. In The Golden Condom, Safer turns her sharp and fearless eye to a subject perhaps more universal than any other: love in all its permutations.

At nine years old, D. Watkins has three concerns in life: picking his dad’s Lotto numbers, keeping his Nikes free of creases, and being a man. Directly in his periphery is east Baltimore, a poverty-stricken city battling the height of the crack epidemic just hours from the nation’s capital. For 30 years, Watkins is forced to safeguard every moment of joy he experiences or risk losing himself entirely. Now, for the first time, Watkins harnesses these moments to tell the story of how he matured into the D. Watkins we know today.

"In wilderness is the preservation of the world. Life consists with wilderness. The most alive is the wildest. Not yet subdued to man, its presence refreshes him." Philosopher and writer Henry David Thoreau preferred to contemplate the nature of man and his environment while walking.

Mara Altman's volatile and apprehensive relationship with her body has led her to wonder about a lot of stuff over the years. Like, who decided that women shouldn't have body hair? And how sweaty is too sweaty? Also, why is breast cleavage sexy but camel toe revolting? Isn't it all just cleavage? These questions and others like them have led to the comforting and sometimes smelly revelations that constitute Gross Anatomy, an essay collection about what it's like to operate the bags of meat we call our bodies.

Australia is on the brink of momentous change, but only if its citizens and politicians can come to new terms with the past. In this inspiring essay, Mark McKenna considers the role of history in making and unmaking the nation. From Captain Cook to the frontier wars, from Australia Day to the Uluru Statement, we are seeing fresh debates and recognitions. McKenna argues that it is time to move beyond the history wars and that truth-telling about the past will be liberating and healing. This is an urgent essay about a nation’s moment of truth.

For everyone who's had their fill of politicians, TV trials and the daily events seen on the evening news, Simon & Schuster Audio offers some relief with this collection of the funniest opening monologues from Comedy Central's hit show, Politically Incorrect starring Bill Maher.

The Last Empire is a collection of provocative, witty, and eloquent essays by Gore Vidal about all things USA. In more than two dozen essays, Vidal brings his keen intellect, experience, and razor-edged wit to bear on an astonishing range of subjects, offering incisive observations about terrorism, civil liberties, the CIA, Al Gore, and the Clintons—interwoven with a rich tapestry of personal anecdote, critical insight, and historical detail.

Thomas Piketty's work has proved that unfettered markets lead to increasing inequality. Without meaningful regulation, capitalist economies will concentrate wealth in an ever smaller number of hands. Armed with this knowledge, democratic societies face a defining challenge: fending off a new aristocracy. For years Piketty has wrestled with this problem in his monthly newspaper column, which pierces the surface of current events to reveal the economic forces underneath.

Time does not hold history—people do. Emerson's History is not a chronicle of names and dates, not a reverence for the past, but a revelation: every life is a vessel of all that came before. The individual is not separate from history but its continuation, its living pulse. Emerson does not ask his readers to study history; he asks them to recognize themselves within it. Every triumph, every downfall, every flash of genius from ages past is not distant—it is ours, woven into the mind that thinks, the hand that writes, the heart that dares.