"George Washington: His Quest for Honor and Fame"

New from the University of Virginia Press: George Washington: His Quest for Honor and Fame by Peter R. Henriques.

About the book, from the publisher:

A concise, compelling biography of Washington and the forces that drove him

What drove George Washington to become the preeminent man of his time and to secure a lasting reputation as one of history’s great leaders? In this concise and engaging profile, Peter Henriques—a renowned Washington expert—recounts how Washington possessed a desperate desire to be seen, admired, honored, and above all to be remembered. Over the course of his life, Washington deliberately and self-consciously shaped his public image. Even his decision, dictated in his last will and testament, to emancipate the men and women he had held in slavery during his lifetime related directly to his desire to be perceived as honorable after his death and to safeguard his posthumous reputation. The complicated and controversial question of Washington and slavery is examined in an afterword. Written with a clarity that comes only from deep understanding, this biography goes right to the heart of what made Washington live, and succeed, as the greatest of America's founding fathers.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Last Spirits of Manhattan"

New from Atria Books: The Last Spirits of Manhattan: A Novel by John A McDermott.

About the book, from the publisher:

Based on a true story, this sparkling and witty novel whisks you to 1956 Manhattan, where famed director Alfred Hitchcock is hosting a star-studded party in an allegedly haunted house...only for the soiree to be interrupted by a ghostly party crasher.

After fleeing her mundane life in the Midwest, Carolyn Banks finds herself in her enigmatic great-aunts’ eerie mansion on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. Inside its crumbling façade, suspense director Alfred Hitchcock is throwing a party, gleefully informing his celebrity guests that the venue is supposedly haunted. It all seems like a fun gag, but Carolyn knows that the line between reality and the supernatural is dangerously blurred here.

Soon, the paranormal entities are mingling with guests like Charles Addams and Henry Fonda. As Carolyn grapples with romantic entanglements and ghostly encounters, she discovers long-buried family secrets, challenging her understanding of love, loyalty, and legacy. A striking mix of the haunting and the heartwarming, The Last Spirits of Manhattan is an unputdownable novel about a family reunion unlike any other, set against the bewitching backdrop of 1950s New York City.

Visit John A. McDermott's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Surviving Revolution"

New from Cornell University Press: Surviving Revolution: Bourgeois Lives and Letters by Denise Z. Davidson.

About the book, from the publisher:

Surviving Revolution explores how two wealthy and well-connected families with roots in Lyon responded to the French Revolution and the resulting transformations. In building a new political system based on liberty, equality, and fraternity, the French Revolution encouraged both individuals and families to recognize their power to shape the world through political action, rethink their strategies in negotiating intimate relations and family life, and assess both terrifying new risks and enticing opportunities for advancement.

Denise Z. Davidson traces two families' trajectories and weaves together the strategies they employed to survive and hopefully thrive in the decades that followed the Revolution. Their private correspondence shows that affect and interest, intimacy and property, are mutually constitutive, and cannot be "thought" separately. Her analysis reveals what it meant to be bourgeois, how gender played a role in the formation of class identities, and how family and emotional life overlapped with other arenas. These social and cultural themes are woven into the narrative through the stories told in the families' letters.

By viewing dramatic historical events through the eyes of people who lived through them, Surviving Revolution illuminates how the practices of everyday life shaped emerging notions of bourgeois identity.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Death on a Scottish Train"

New from Crooked Lane Books: Death on a Scottish Train: A Scottish Isle Mystery by Lucy Connelly.

About the book, from the publisher:

Dr. Emilia McRoy, an American in Scotland, has a killer in sight in the fourth installment of the Scottish Isle mystery series, perfect for fans of Paige Shelton and Connie Berry.

Summer is coming to a close on beautiful Sea Isle in Scotland, and Dr. Emilia McRoy is celebrating one year since her big move. With a weeklong festival to end the season, the town gathers for a magical ride on the newly refurbished Storyteller’s Train, but the launch’s success is dampened by an unexpected death.

What appears to be a case of deadly allergies is soon revealed as murder. As Emilia, her assistant Abigail, and the local constable Ewan McGregor unravel the mystery, the killer sets their murderous intentions on them.

If they want to survive, they will need the help of all of their friends—before they become the latest victims.

Visit Lucy Connelly's website.

The Page 69 Test: Death at a Scottish Wedding.

Q&A with Lucy Connelly.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Summers Off?"

New from Rutgers University Press: Summers Off?: A History of U.S. Teachers' Other Three Months by Christine A. Ogren.

About the book, from the publisher:

Since the nine-month school year became common in the United States during the 1880s, schoolteachers have never really had summers off. Administrators instructed them to rest, as well as to study and travel, in the interest of creating a compliant workforce. Teachers, however, adapted administrators’ directives to pursue their own version of professionalization and to ensure their financial well-being. Summers Off explores teachers’ summer experiences between the 1880s and 1930s in institutes and association meetings; sessions at teachers colleges, Black colleges, and prestigious universities; work for wages or their family; tourism in the U.S. and Europe; and activities intended to be restful. This heretofore untold history reveals how teachers utilized the geographical and psychological distance from the classroom that summer provided, to enhance not only their teaching skills but also their professional and intellectual independence, their membership in the middle class, and, in the cases of women and Black teachers, their defiance of gender and race hierarchies.

--Mashal Zeringue

"Bog Queen"

New from Bloomsbury USA: Bog Queen by Anna North.

About the book, from the publisher:

The latest from New York Times bestselling novelist Anna North-a monumental discovery sets off a clash of worlds, past and present, over the fate of the land that holds us.

When a body is found in a bog in northwest England, Agnes, an American forensic anthropologist, is called to investigate. But this body is not like any she's ever seen. Though its bones prove it was buried more than two thousand years ago, it is almost completely preserved.

Soon Agnes is drawn into a mystery from the distant past, called to understand and avenge the death of an Iron Age woman more like her than she knows. Along the way, she must contend with peat-cutters who want to profit from the bog and activists who demand that the land be left undisturbed. Then there's the moss itself: a complex repository of artifacts and remains, with its own dark stories to tell.

As Agnes faces the deep history of what she has unearthed, she's also forced to question what she thought she knew about her talent, her self-reliance, and her place in the world. Flashing between the uncertainty of post-Brexit England and the druidic order of Celtic Europe at the dawn of the Roman era, Bog Queen brims with contemporary urgency and ancient wisdom as it connects across time two gifted, farsighted young women learning to harness their strange strengths in a landscape more mysterious and complex than either can imagine.

Visit Anna North's website.

The Page 69 Test: The Life and Death of Sophie Stark.

The Page 69 Test: Outlawed.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Ancient Wisdom for Polarized Times"

New from Yale University Press: Ancient Wisdom for Polarized Times: Why Humanity Needs Herodotus, the Man Who Invented History by Emily Katz Anhalt.

About the book, from the publisher:

How the wisdom of Herodotus can fortify us against political falsehoods and violent extremism

Nearly 2,500 years ago, the Greek writer Herodotus introduced the concept of objective truth derived from factual investigation and empirical deduction. Writing just before the start of the catastrophic Peloponnesian War (431–404 BCE), Herodotus addressed an increasingly polarized Greek world. His Histories demonstrates that the capacity for humane moral action depends on the ability to resist unthinking allegiance to authoritative fictions. Herodotus offers an indispensable, nonpartisan approach for countering poisonous ideologies and violent conflict emanating from all extremes of the political kaleidoscope.

Interpreting some of Herodotus’s most compelling stories, Emily Katz Anhalt illuminates this ancient writer’s vital insights concerning sexual violence, deception, foreign ways, political equality, and more. The Histories urges us to value reality, restrain destructive passions, and acknowledge the essential humanity of every human being—crucial guidance for navigating our own divisive and volatile political climate. Inviting us to take responsibility for our own choices and their consequences, Herodotus exposes autocratic leadership and abuses of power as self-defeating. Herodotus guides readers in assembling and assessing information, distinguishing fact from fiction, and making compassionate moral evaluations. The ancient Greeks never achieved an egalitarian, just society. Herodotus equips us to do better.

The Page 99 Test: Enraged.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Kill the Beast"

New from Tor Books: Kill the Beast by Serra Swift.

About the book, from the publisher:

The Witcher meets Howl’s Moving Castle in this debut original faerie tale of revenge, redemption, and friendship—for fans of T. Kingfisher, Naomi Novik, and cozy fantasy with a dash of gritty adventure.

The night Lyssa Cadogan's brother was murdered by a faerie-made monster known as the Beast, she made him a promise: she would find a way to destroy the immortal creature and avenge his death. For thirteen years, she has been hunting faeries and the abominations they created. But in all that time, the one Beast she is most desperate to find has never resurfaced.

Until she meets Alderic Casimir de Laurent, a melodramatic dandy with a coin purse bigger than his brain. Somehow, he has found the monster’s lair, and—even more surprising—retrieved one of its claws. A claw Lyssa needs in order to forge a sword that can kill the Beast.

Alderic is ill-equipped for a hunt and almost guaranteed to get himself killed. But as the two of them search for the rest of the materials that will be the Beast's undoing, Alderic reveals hidden depths: dark secrets that he guards as carefully as Lyssa guards hers. Before long, and against Lyssa's better judgment, an unlikely friendship begins to bloom—one that will either lead to the culmination of Lyssa's quest for vengeance, or spell doom for them both.

Visit Serra Swift's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Extracting the Future"

New from the University of California Press: Extracting the Future: Lithium in an Era of Energy Transition by Mark Goodale.

About the book, from the publisher:

Bolivia's troubled efforts to develop a commercial lithium industry.

Bolivia's lithium accounts for a significant percentage of the world's known reserve. Drawing on extensive ethnographic research, Mark Goodale traces the development of Bolivia's closely guarded lithium project through the perspectives of a wide array of people and institutions, including workers at the Salar de Uyuni, the world's largest salt flat; the state lithium company in La Paz; Latin America's first electric vehicle company; and energy entrepreneurs in Bolivia, the United States, and Germany. He points to a fundamental contradiction: a so-called green energy transition dependent on the ever-greater extraction of yet another nonrenewable resource.

But without access to Bolivia's lithium, and at megaindustrial scales that far outstrip current production, there won't be sufficient lithium supply to make the batteries needed for a truly global EV revolution. Extracting the Future shows how the lithium economy is deeply embedded in a global capitalist system that continues to rely on resource extraction, unsustainable economic growth, and geopolitical violence.

Visit Mark Goodale's website.

The Page 99 Test: Surrendering to Utopia.

The Page 99 Test: Reinventing Human Rights.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Hitchhikers"

New from St. Martin's Press: The Hitchhikers: A Novel by Chevy Stevens.

About the book, from the publisher:

The open road beckons.
A chance for them to reconnect.
Then they make a fatal mistake.

It’s the summer of 1976 and Alice and Tom set out on the remote Canadian highways in their new RV, hoping to heal their broken hearts after a devastating tragedy.

They’ve planned the trip perfectly, taken care of every detail. Then they meet two young hitchhikers down on their luck and offer them a ride. But Simon and Jenny aren’t what they seem. They’ve left a trail of blood, destruction, and madness behind them.

Now Alice and Tom are trapped, prisoners in a deadly game, with nowhere to turn. As the tension builds, the lines blur, and the question becomes, In whose heart does evil truly lie? What secrets are Jenny and Simon hiding? And who will live another day?

A chilling, twist-laden ride to the final page, THE HITCHHIKERS is that rare novel that will break your heart as well as hold you in suspense. The author of the classic thrillers STILL MISSING and THOSE GIRLS has delivered her next breathtaking novel.

Visit the official Chevy Stevens website.

My Book, The Movie: Still Missing.

The Page 69 Test: That Night.

My Book, The Movie: That Night.

The Page 69 Test: Never Let You Go.

Writers Read: Chevy Stevens (March 2017).

My Book, The Movie: Never Let You Go.

--Marshal Zeringue