Politics and Prose Presents

This event is in collaboration with the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture. This powerful collection of essays brought to life with more than 150 illustrations investigates the intertwined legacies of slavery, freedom, and capitalism.  In Slavery's Wake  frames the history of slavery in a global context to show how it created systems of oppression that contin...

On the coast of southern China, an eccentric entrepreneur spent three decades steadily building an obscure telecom company into one of the world's most powerful technological empires with hardly anyone noticing. This all changed in December 2018, when the detention of Meng Wanzhou, Huawei Technologies' female scion, sparked an international hostage standoff, poured fuel on the US-China tra...

Big Goals: The Science of Setting Them, Achieving Them, and Creating Your Best Life   delves deeply into effective goal setting practices for both personal growth and corporate excellence, empowering individuals across all ages to pursue their ambitions with a newfound sense of confidence and mastery. Readers of this book will gain a nuanced understanding of the little-known science of goal settin...

In this book, Nathan Kalman-Lamb and Derek Silva offer an existential challenge to one of America's favorite pastimes: college football. Drawing on twenty-five in-depth interviews with former players at some of the country's most prominent college football schools, Kalman-Lamb and Silva explore how football is both predicated on a foundation of coercion and suffused with racialized harm an...

"You're as likely to be hit twice by lightning on a Monday as see a wood chipper pull a man into its maw." So begins  North of Ordinary , John Rolfe Gardner's virtuosic story collection of survivors getting by despite the odds in a shifting world. In these pages, we meet a nervous young apprentice to a weathered tree climber; a dangerously obsessed student at a Southern Bible col...

In 1972, Martha "Marty" Goddard volunteered at a crisis hotline, counseling girls who had been molested by their fathers, their teachers, their uncles. Soon, Marty was on a mission to answer a question: Why were so many sexual predators getting away with these crimes? By the end of the decade, she had launched a campaign pushing hospitals and police departments to collect evidence of sex...

How many times have you wanted to object, disagree, or opt out of something--but ended up swallowing your words, shaking your head, and just going along? Analyzing cases from corporate corruption to sexual abuse to everyday acquiescence at work, the doctor's office, and in our personal lives, award-winning organizational psychologist Dr. Sunita Sah delves deep into why the pressure to comply i...

More people traveled internationally in 2019 than in any year in history. After COVID began its rapid spread throughout the world, though, international travel plummeted, and nations across the world hardened their borders. For the first time, governments took the same tools that have been used against less privileged migrants and asylum seekers and turned them on citizens from countries that had...

"Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration."  This phrase, arguably Thomas Edison's most famous quote, has been drilled into the minds of generations of Americans. A fairly straightforward iteration of the idea that innovation, discovery, and ingenuity are the result of drive and grit above all, it has also come to represent much darker myths: that hard w...

US Senator Ron Wyden is widely praised for coming up with sensible-sounding ideas no one else had thought of and making the counter-intuitive political alliances that prove helpful in passing bills. In  It Takes   Chutzpah , he offers a progressive leader's manifesto for being a courageous warrior during turbulent times. It is an inspirational guide to get important things accomplished with a...

Partisanship is a dirty word in American politics. If there is one issue on which almost everyone in our divided country seems to agree, it's the belief that the intense loyalty within the electorate toward Democrats and Republicans is the source of our democratic ills--division, dysfunction, distrust, and disinformation. The possibilities that responsible partisanship can offer were at the he...

When writer Paula Whyman climbs to a peak in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains in search of an empty-nester home in the country, her plans for a tidy backyard ecology project quickly morph into a massive endeavor. Just as quickly, she discovers how little she knows about hands-on conservation work. In  Bad Naturalist , Whyman struggles with conflicting advice from experts, an influx of inv...

Gangsters and presidents have long captured the American imagination, but how much does the underworld actually affect presidential power? How deep are their "connections"? As Eric Dezenhall reveals in this eye-opening history, in some instances, one couldn't have functioned without the other. From Franklin Delano Roosevelt to Richard Nixon to Joseph R. Biden, the mob has done presid...

"In this book, I have sought to blend personal experience, journalism, and scholarship. It is history written by a journalist who was there."-Peter L. W. Osnos LBJ and McNamara: The Vietnam Partnership Destined to Fail details how President Lyndon B. Johnson and his secretary of defense, Robert McNamara, made choices central to U.S. strategy in Vietnam, ending in defeat. The portrait eme...

Perle Mesta was a force to be reckoned with. In her heyday - the 1940's, 50's and 60's - this extremely wealthy globe-trotting Washington widow was one of the most famous women in America, garnering as much media attention as Eleanor Roosevelt. Renowned for her world-class parties featuring politicians and celebrities, she was very close to three presidents - Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower and Ly...

Griffin Hurt is in over his head. Between his role as Peter Proton on the hit TV show  The Nuclear Family  and the pressure of high school at New York's elite Boyd Prep--along with the increasingly compromising demands of his wrestling coach--he's teetering on the edge of collapse. Then comes Naomi Shah, twenty-two years Griffin's senior. Unwilling to lay his burdens on his shrink--who...

This dramatic, revealing book offers an insider account of the planning and aftermath of the racist riot in Charlottesville on August 12, 2017, and the insurrection at the US. Capitol on January 6, 2021. PURCHASE BOOK HERE: https://politics-prose.com/book/9781586424015?ic_referral=H6P1Qa2zjJunL9oyeC7KGbiwkoS5tJAYSshnyIUkH4cwMz2nIYRA4-9a51v-pJP_M_Lqez1IiGbkLFzrKjXYhp7Vt959WUFiwm6AnaE1_FgFzrbiO2dfE5...

More than a century after he dominated American politics, Woodrow Wilson still fascinates. With panoramic sweep,  Woodrow   Wilson: The Light Withdrawn   reassesses his life and his role in the movements for racial equality and women's suffrage. The Wilson that emerges is a man superbly unsuited to the moment when he ascended to the presidency in 1912, as the struggle for women's voting ri...

In the early 1960’s, the most dangerous years of the Cold War, Kalb brought the excitement of a young American journalist to Moscow, where he kept a record of his daily CBS broadcasts on the building confrontation between Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev and American President John F. Kennedy. Kalb, who spoke the language, covered both leaders at the Vienna summit, the building of the Berlin Wall a...

Kamala is a beautiful tribute to Kamala Harris's remarkable rise from District Attorney in California to her historic presidential run in 2024. Curated by Deborah Willis and Kevin Merida, this visually captivating book features nearly 150 vibrant photographs that capture the joy, challenges, and triumphs of Harris's campaign. Rather than following a strict timeline, the book is thematicall...

More than a million people lose a pregnancy each year, whether through miscarriage, stillbirth, or termination for medical reasons. For most, the experience often casts a shadow of isolation, shame, and blame. In the aftermath of the 2022 decision to overturn Roe v Wade, 25 million people of childbearing age live in states with laws that restrict access to abortion, including for those who never w...