"The Crimes of Others"

New from Oxford University Press: The Crimes of Others: Criminal Records, Publicity, and Crimes of Abuse by Katerina Hadjimatheou.

About the book, from the publisher:

Do we have a right to know about each other's criminal past? And if so, just how publicly accessible should criminal records be? Does publicity serve an important purpose in fulfilling the public's right to know about who amongst their fellow citizens is dangerous or has violated collective moral norms? Does it provide transparency in criminal justice, the just punishment of the guilty, and the protection of the vulnerable from serial perpetrators? Or does it stigmatize people as dangerous or untrustworthy for life, so that those who have made mistakes in the past are still paying for them long after they have served their time? How should we design our laws and policies to reconcile or balance these apparently competing demands of (criminal) justice?

The Crimes of Others: Criminal Records, Publicity, and Abuse draws on philosophical and legal theory as well as new empirical evidence about the impacts of criminal records to address these questions. Katerina Hadjimatheou argues that there is no general right of citizens to know about each other's criminal records; instead, there are limited rights to know, which differ according to the status or role of the person claiming such a right, the nature of the crime in question, and the purpose for which the right is asserted. Notably, the book asserts that disclosures of criminal records to prevent harm are often justified when the risk relates to predatory crimes and crimes of abuse. The reasons relate to the distinctive features of such crimes, in particular their serial nature, the widespread impunity with which they are committed, and the special role of secrecy, lies, and silencing in their perpetration.

The Crimes of Others offers the first rigorous and systematic analysis of the normative aspects of public access to criminal records, providing a coherent set of criteria for the disclosure of criminal records that can be drawn upon to answer the question: when, to whom, and on what grounds should different kinds of information about the criminality of others be available? In doing so, it lays the groundwork for fairer and more effective policies and practices for a digital age.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Difference Place Makes"

New from Stanford University Press: The Difference Place Makes: Peacebuilding and Bosnia’s Arizona Market by Adam Moore.

About the book, from the publisher:

How do places shape peacebuilding interventions? Put simply, they are eventful. Geographers have long argued that places are constituted by relations with the wider world, relations that are always in flux. In this theoretically and empirically innovative book Adam Moore argues that the inverse is also true: places are generative of relations. People and institutions are constituted by their relations with places, relations that extend beyond a particular place in question itself. Drawing on relational and processual perspectives across the social sciences, Moore analyzes the effects that an infamous black market in postwar Bosnia―the Arizona market―had on peacebuilding projects and actors, and sociopolitical relations across the country more generally. Through encounters with, and narratives about, the market, the relations and politics of various actors in Bosnia at the time―from the UN to ordinary citizens―were transformed. Arizona's effects also radiated across time and space, even after it was dismantled, influencing political and social relations in Bosnia and further afield up to the present day. Bringing together scholarship in geography and peace and conflict studies, this book is a must-read for both fields and beyond.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Shoe Workers in Hannibal, Missouri"

New from LSU Press: Shoe Workers in Hannibal, Missouri: The Rise and Fall of Manufacturing in America’s Hometown, 1890–1970 by Gregg Andrews.

About the book, from the publisher:

In Shoe Workers in Hannibal, Missouri, Gregg Andrews examines the history of factory laborers in a celebrated Mississippi River town. In the late 1890s, shoe manufacturing transformed Mark Twain’s boyhood home from a steamboat village to a factory town. By the mid-1920s, the St. Louis–based International Shoe Company, the world’s largest shoe manufacturer at the time, controlled all shoe production in Hannibal and continued to do so until it shut down production lines in the 1960s. The company kept a tight grip on the town as it battled to keep out unions and maintain labor at a low cost and in a malleable state. When Hannibal’s shoe workers claimed their right to organize under the New Deal during the Great Depression, the shoe corporation was defiant. The company’s stance sparked mob violence against outside union organizers, nurtured a company union, pitted unionists against company loyalists, and badly divided Hannibal. At the same time, the town was engaged in yearlong festivities to celebrate the centennial of Mark Twain’s birth and the opening of a museum named in his honor.

Andrews’s study of shoe manufacturing and its production workers is thick in detail and rich with the human stories of those whose lives were shaped by the rise and fall of the shoe industry in Hannibal. Andrews captures the shoe workers―white and Black, men and women―in their own words as they describe their jobs, family struggles, and battles to unionize.

Andrews examines the prevailing conditions that led the company to close its production facilities in Hannibal, leaving shoe workers and the town to confront the early shock waves of deindustrialization. His study of an industry that has virtually disappeared in the United States leaves a record for the families of thousands of American shoe workers and the citizens of Hannibal to better understand their history and the role shoe manufacturing played in it.

Visit Gregg Andrews's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Environmental Republic"

New from Princeton University Press: The Environmental Republic: Why Citizens Will Save the World by Giulio Boccaletti.

About the book, from the publisher:

A bold new conception of the republic for a planet in crisis

Republicanism is arguably the most powerful political idea in history, an extraordinary feat of human imagination that balances individual liberty with collective responsibility. The Environmental Republic reclaims this idea as the path to sustaining our life together on a changing planet, reframing our relationship to the environment not as a constraint on liberty but as its republican foundation.

Giulio Boccaletti argues that we must renew our commitment to freedom and civic responsibility through popular sovereignty. He presents the environmental republic as a necessary alternative to blind faith in technocratic management, the shallow moralizing and apocalyptic rhetoric of some activists, and the disingenuous skepticism of vested interests. Our environmental challenges are not simply about “agreeing on the facts” or living within technical limitations—they reflect a deeper failure of political institutions. Drawing on the history of ideas and real-world examples, Boccaletti presents a political framework that places our relationship to our surroundings at the heart of how we exercise our voice, coordinate collective action, and define development itself.

Offering hope in an anxious age of rising authoritarianism and widespread pessimism, The Environmental Republic challenges the false choice between environmental protection and human freedom, showing how place-based institutions can deliver both sustainability and human development through true self-governance.

Visit Giulio Boccaletti's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Treachery and Diplomacy"

New from Columbia University Press: Treachery and Diplomacy: The Shadow Politics of US-Africa Relations by Sobukwe Odinga.

About the book, from the publisher:

The African allies of the United States are often depicted as mere pawns or clients seeking aid. Yet African leaders have deftly capitalized on security partnerships with the United States in ways that have been widely overlooked. Through skillful negotiating, hosting US military operations, and deploying their soldiers to support Washington’s strategic aims, they have advanced their own interests―sometimes at the expense of their citizens.

Treachery and Diplomacy shines a light on US-Africa security partnerships, revealing their simmering internal tensions, hidden racial politics, and consequences for peace and democracy. Sobukwe Odinga explores the contentious relations between the US and key African allies―Liberia, Ethiopia, Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo), and Uganda―from the Cold War to the War on Terror. He brings to life the diplomatic gambits of leaders such as William Tubman, Mobutu Sese Seko, and Yoweri Museveni, documenting how they prodded Washington to back them in regional conflicts, increase aid, and temper criticisms of their domestic policies. Odinga also considers the African American political elites who denounced and championed US-Africa security partnerships―in some moments undercutting the influence of African leaders, in others abetting their authoritarianism. Connecting American racial thought, Pan-Africanism, and Black transnationalism to US security policy toward Africa, Treachery and Diplomacy offers new insight into how African governments have pursued their own agendas.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Making Babies Count"

New from Cambridge University Press: Making Babies Count: The Sheppard-Towner Act and Building the Modern Administrative State by Michelle Bezark.

About the book, from the publisher:

This book is the first comprehensive account of the triumphs and follies of the Sheppard-Towner Act of 1921-the first federal policy aimed at improving health outcomes for mothers and babies. Michelle Bezark insightfully weaves together the experiences of advocates and federal agents maneuvering around Congress to pass the law; state-level administrators' accounts of implementing its programs at the local level; and individual mothers' and children's experiences of the programs on the ground. This approach reveals the political, technical, and legal challenges of passing and administering early federal social welfare policy, and what this policy provided for-and required of-citizens. In reconstructing the full lifecycle of the law, Bezark tells the untold history of an important federal policy and provides a critical case study for how one group of reformers built out administrative capacity at every level of governance from scratch.

--Marshal Zeringue

"White, Black, Brown"

New from The University of North Carolina Press: White, Black, Brown: Becoming Puerto Rican in Chicago by Michael Staudenmaier.

About the book, from the publisher:

Facing persistent exploitation, discrimination, and marginalization in the second half of the twentieth century, generations of Puerto Rican organizers and activists drew on multiple competing versions of nationalism to challenge the racial order in Chicago, one of America’s most segregated cities. Initially, both supporters and opponents of Puerto Rican independence promoted the assimilation of fellow migrants as white citizens. The three-night-long Division Street Riots marked a fundamental pivot point in 1966, ending the pursuit of whiteness and opening the door to waves of nationalist militancy during the 1970s. By the 1980s and 1990s, Puerto Rican nationalists in Chicago had entered electoral politics, building a broader notion of Latinidad even as they softened its radical edges.

Drawing on an extraordinary array of archival material, much of it previously inaccessible, Michael Staudenmaier highlights cultural and political projects profoundly informed by nationalist sentiments, from beauty pageants and parades to protests and bombings to elections and legal battles. Revealing how nationalism became a key site of racial formation for Puerto Ricans in Chicago, White, Black, Brown shows how they understood themselves and demanded to be seen by their neighbors and the world.

Visit Michael Staudenmaier's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The First Emancipation"

New from Princeton University Press: The First Emancipation: The Forgotten History of Abolition in Revolutionary France by Jeremy D. Popkin.

About the book, from the publisher:

A new history of slavery and the French Revolution

The First Emancipation is a dramatic account of how slavery and race profoundly influenced the course of the French Revolution and had a central impact on the lives of key leaders, including Mirabeau, Robespierre, Toussaint Louverture, and Napoleon. Acclaimed historian Jeremy D. Popkin brings this often-forgotten story to life, highlighting the arguments put forward by French abolitionists and their opponents and the profound repercussions of the first abolition of slavery in a Western empire.

When the French revolutionaries passed the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen in 1789, they immediately faced a burning question: did that document’s first article—“Men are born and remain free and equal in rights”—apply to the 800,000 enslaved Black people in the country’s colonies? Over the next dozen years, revolutionary leaders fought over this question. The First Emancipation tells how French lawmakers initially protected slavery in their constitution but reversed themselves in 1794, making France the first western country to abolish slavery throughout its empire. Yet only eight years later, in 1802, Napoleon tried to force the emancipated Black populations of the colonies back into slavery. His decision led to his first major military defeat and to the proclamation of the independence of the Black nation of Haiti, but also to the reestablishment of slavery in other French colonies, where it would not finally be abolished until 1848.

The story of how France emancipated its enslaved people and declared them full citizens only to return many of them to bondage, The First Emancipation reveals that the course of abolition in the modern world was more winding and halting than is often remembered.

The Page 99 Test: A New World Begins.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Politics of the Table"

New from Johns Hopkins University Press: The Politics of the Table: Nutrition and the Body in Modern Germany by Kristen Ann Ehrenberger.

About the book, from the publisher:

How nutrition and the body became matters of national importance in modern Germany.

What does it mean to eat well, and why should it matter to the nation? In The Politics of the Table, historian Kristen Ann Ehrenberger uncovers how food became a matter of political concern in modern Germany, tracing the evolution of nutritional science from the laboratory bench to the family dinner table between 1890 and 1935.

This compelling study reveals how everyday meals became sites of public policy, scientific authority, and cultural identity. Germans were encouraged to see their bodies not only as private entities but also as integral parts of a larger social organism in matters ranging from calories and vitamins to ration cards and state-sponsored hygiene exhibitions. Ehrenberger introduces the concept of the "scalar body" to explain how individuals were imagined as connected to one another through the acts of eating, drinking, and digesting. Using a wide array of sources including cookbooks, popular magazines, medical texts, trade journals, and government archives, the book charts how nutrition was promoted as a means to build healthier citizens and a stronger nation. Whether in kitchens or clinics, during wartime shortages or peacetime reforms, food was imbued with moral, medical, and economic significance. The dining table emerged as a focal point where gender roles, social expectations, and state interests converged.

The Politics of the Table illuminates the intimate links between bodily health and national politics in an era of profound social transformation. It challenges readers to reconsider how private habits like eating have long been shaped by public values, and how the politics of food and nutrition continue to resonate today.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Reality in Ruins"

New from HarperOne: Reality in Ruins: How Conspiracy Theory Became an American Evangelical Crisis by Jared Stacy.

About the book, from the publisher:

For anyone who has ever said, “It feels like we’re living in different realities,” an unforgettable read and definitive explainer of the strange history of evangelical conspiracy theory.

Conspiracy theories are at the root of the most pressing political problems of our time, yet their influence cuts just as personal. Suspicion has fractured families, communities, churches, and our very social fabric, as one person’s fact is another’s fake news.

In Reality in Ruins, Dr. Jared Stacy braves the untold history of conspiracism in American evangelicalism and the anxiety at the heart of this radioactive movement that affects us all. In a new age of what he calls “Disreality,” many are left reeling in the ruins of what was once a common world, now splintered by warring ideologies, religious and political extremism, and cults of certainty. Dr. Stacy reports from the inside as someone raised and even ordained in one of the nation’s most conservative denominations. Now, as a historian and post-evangelical theologian, Dr. Stacy traces the currents of pain, panic, and power that have thrust the evangelical church into a theological crisis with consequence for everyone.

For concerned citizens, Christians who are sounding the alarm on Christian Nationalism, and anyone grieving the relationships paranoia has ruptured, Reality in Ruins profiles the problem, validates your pain, prepares you for good resistance, and empowers you to become the truth-tellers a common world deserves.

Visit Jared Stacy's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Death or Victory"

New from LSU Press: Death or Victory: The Louisiana Native Guards and the Black Military’s Significance in the Civil War by A.J. Cade.

About the book, from the publisher:

A. J. Cade’s Death or Victory offers the first in-depth history of the Louisiana Native Guards, pioneering African American regiments within the Union army. Originating as a division of the New Orleans Home Guards in May 1861, the Native Guards consisted of free Black and Creole men who leveraged the city’s established military customs to gain entry into the Home Guards. Although not officially part of the Confederate forces, their involvement compelled the federal government to contemplate forming a similar regiment, setting the stage for their transition to the Union army the following year.

Cade’s research highlights the Native Guards’ crucial role as a testing ground for Black participation in the Civil War. Abraham Lincoln, the War Department, and the entire nation regarded these early regiments as an experiment in understanding the implications of Black service. The Native Guards exceeded expectations, engaging in significant battles and sieges. Their achievements paved the way for broader Black involvement in Louisiana and eventually throughout the Union army. Prominent figures such as Frederick Douglass cited the Native Guards as evidence of Black Americans’ entitlement to full citizenship and postwar freedom, an opinion later echoed by Lincoln. Cade’s work challenges existing Civil War narratives by shedding light on the overlooked contributions of the Louisiana Native Guards, rectifying misconceptions, and highlighting Black and Creole individuals who fought for their nation.

In addition to revising Civil War historiography, Cade’s study also contributes to a more nuanced understanding of race and class in nineteenth-century New Orleans. Cade shows how the Native Guards reflected the unique racial dynamics of the city, where free Black and Creole men of color had long enjoyed a degree of social and economic autonomy. These men were often educated, property owning, and deeply invested in the city’s civic life. Their service in the Native Guards was not just about fighting for the Union; it was also about asserting their rights as citizens and challenging the racial hierarchies that sought to deny them full participation in American society. By examining the motivations and experiences of these men, Cade provides a compelling portrait of a community that defied easy categorization and played a pivotal role in shaping the course of the Civil War.

Visit A. J. Cade's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Cold War Comrades"

New from Cambridge University Press: Cold War Comrades: An Emotional History of the Sino-North Korean Alliance by Gregg A. Brazinsky.

About the book, from the publisher:

In this major new interpretation of Sino-North Korean relations, Gregg A. Brazinsky argues that neither the PRC nor the DPRK would have survived as socialist states without the ideal of Sino-North Korean friendship. Chinese and North Korean leaders encouraged mutual empathy and sentimental attachments between their citizens and then used these emotions to strengthen popular commitment to socialist state building. Drawing on an array of previously unexamined Chinese and North Korean sources, Brazinsky shows how mutual empathy helped to shape political, military, and cultural interactions between the two socialist allies. He explains why the unique relationship that Beijing and Pyongyang forged during the Korean War remained important throughout the Cold War and how it continues to influence the international relations of East Asia today.

The Page 99 Test: Winning the Third World.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Citizens of the Earth"

New from Oxford University Press: Citizens of the Earth: Pagans and Their Gods in Augustine's North Africa by Mattias P. Gassman.

About the book, from the publisher:

Citizens of the Earth presents the first comprehensive account of Augustine's engagement with traditional Roman religion. A multifaceted case-study in the Christianization of the Roman Empire, it anchors Augustine's works in their intellectual and social context, narrating political and intellectual renegotiation of the public cults of North Africa from the 390s until after Augustine's death in 430. At the same time, it tests modern conceptions of the role of religious conviction and religious difference in late antique society against the ideas of one of the most influential late Roman thinkers.

Approaching Augustine simultaneously as thinker, practical preacher, and observer of his North African world, Citizens of the Earth synthesizes Augustine's ideas about religion from sermons and treatises, describes how his polemical approach to the Roman gods developed across his career, and reconstructs competing ideas developed by his interlocutors. It emphasizes pagan conviction and lay religiosity, argues that we should see Augustine's polemics as attempts at practical outreach and persuasion, and stresses the importance of conversion for understanding the pagan-Christian boundary.

The book closes with both historical and theoretical conclusions. After proposing that the Vandalic conquest of Carthage (439) marked a final ending point for traditional, public religiosity in North Africa, it considers how Augustine's contributions can still inform modern approaches to late antique religion.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Making Catholicism Chinese"

New from Oxford University Press: Making Catholicism Chinese: The Catholic Church in a Modernizing China by Stephanie M. Wong.

About the book, from the publisher:

Making Catholicism Chinese examines a little-known chapter of Catholic life in China, when a coalition of foreign-born and Chinese Catholics strove to make the Church indigenously "Chinese." This book demonstrates how the indigenization movement, begun as a bid to render Catholicism a Chinese religion, came to support Chinese state-building instead.

In the first half of the 20th century, China transformed from a faltering and semi-colonized empire to a tentatively pluralistic republic to an increasingly militarized one-party state. Religious communities were driven to "modernize" for the sake of the new nation. In the case of Catholicism, the Belgian-born Lazarist Vincent Lebbe most publicly advocated for a Chinese Church, though the wider movement was guided by an array of Chinese clergy, newspaper magnates, scholar-politicians, artists, and army medics and combatants striving in various ways to be both faithful Catholics and patriotic citizens. Their indigenization project coincided with a national embrace of modernity as an ideal, leading Catholics to take up a variety of causes: promoting Chinese clergy as bishops in opposition to French dominance in the missions, experimenting with new forms of education and mass media, and ultimately joining the right-leaning Nationalist regime's war effort against Japan. Stephanie Wong thoroughly documents this history and definitively shows that the movement failed to establish the local Church as a distinct Chinese religion

--Marshal Zeringue

"Kings and Pawns"

New from Mariner Books: Kings and Pawns: Jackie Robinson and Paul Robeson in America by Howard Bryant.

About the book, from the publisher:

A path-breaking work of biography of two American giants, Jackie Robinson and Paul Robeson, whose lives would forever be altered by the Cold War, and would explosively intersect before its most notorious weapon, the House Un-American Activities Committee — from one of the best sports and culture writers working today.

Kings and Pawns is the untold story of sports and fame, Black America and the promise of integration through the Cold War lens of two transformative events. The first occurred July 18, 1949 in Washington, D.C., when a reluctant Jackie Robinson, the Brooklyn Dodgers baseball star who integrated the game and at the time was the most famous Black man in America, appeared before the House Un-American Activities Committee to discredit Paul Robeson, the legendary athlete, baritone, and actor — himself once the most famous Black man in America. The testimony would be a defining moment in Robinson’s life and contribute heavily to the destruction of Robeson’s iconic reputation in the eyes of America.

The second occurred June 12, 1956, in the midst of the last, demagogic roar of McCarthyism, when a battered, defiant Robeson – prohibited from leaving the United States – faced off in a final showdown with HUAC in the same setting Robinson appeared in seven years earlier. These two moments would epitomize the ongoing Black American conflict between patriotism and protest. On the cusp of a nascent civil rights movement, Robinson and Robeson would represent two poles of a people pitted against itself by forces that demanded loyalty without equality in return – one man testifying in conflicted service to and the other in ferocious critique of a country that would ultimately and decisively wound both.

In a time of great division, with America in the midst of a new era of retrenchment and Black athletes again chilled into silence advocating for civil rights, the story of these two titans reverberates today within and beyond Black America. From the revival of government overreach to curb civil liberties to the Cold War-era rhetoric of “the enemy within” levied against fellow citizens, Kings and Pawns is a story of a moment that remains hauntingly present.

Visit Howard Bryant's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Enduring Erasures"

New from Columbia University Press: Enduring Erasures: Afterlives of the Armenian Genocide by Hakem Amer Al-Rustom.

About the book, from the publisher:

During World War I, the Ottoman Armenian population was subjected to genocidal violence. The survivors largely fled Anatolia, forming diasporic communities around the world. Some Armenians, however, remained in what became the Republic of Turkey, and descendants of survivors still live there today as citizens of the state that once sought their annihilation. Despite their continued presence, Armenians in Turkey face ongoing exclusion and erasure from public life and collective memory.

Enduring Erasures is a historical ethnography of survival in the aftermath of catastrophe, examining how the specter of genocide still looms over the lives of the survivors’ descendants and the social fabric of Turkey. Drawing on fieldwork conducted in Istanbul and Paris, Hakem Amer Al-Rustom offers a nuanced account of the daily existence of Armenians in Turkey and the broader Armenian experience in the diaspora. He develops the concept of “denativization” to analyze how Armenians were rendered into foreigners in their ancestral lands before, during, and after the genocide, showing how the erasure of Armenian presence and identity continues to this day both in Turkey and among the diaspora in France. Interdisciplinary and meticulously researched, Enduring Erasures challenges deeply ingrained nationalist histories and provides a powerful testament to the indelible mark that dispossession has left on Armenian lives. Emphasizing the human stories and personal narratives that anchor its historical analysis, this book is an essential read for those interested in the intersections of memory, identity, and political violence.

--Marshal Zeringue

"A Republic of Producers"

New from Yale University Press: A Republic of Producers: Completing Our Jeffersonian Economy with Hamiltonian Finance by Robert C. Hockett.

About the book, from the publisher:

A radically original solution to our most intractable economic problems: wage stagnation, productive atrophy, and wealth inequality

This sweeping and ambitious book locates the source of American economic and social decline in a simple but profound observation: the nation’s forms of citizen ownership have not kept up with its sources of wealth. In the early republic, the Jeffersonian ideal of an agrarian citizenry, whose productive assets lay primarily in land ownership and their own education, more or less matched the productive sources of wealth in the nation as a whole. But as we grew from an agrarian nation to an industrial one, the forms of citizen ownership did not change with the economy: instead, efforts toward land ownership were transferred to ownership in unproductive real estate—that is, homes. It is the effort to draw wealth from limited and relatively unproductive sources that makes the average American citizen fall farther and farther behind in income, and also caused the artificial inflation of real estate that led to the 2008 crash.

Advancing a theory of “income-compositional symmetry,” Robert C. Hockett argues that in order to remedy wage stagnation, productive atrophy, and extreme wealth inequality, industrial, financial, and commercial forms of ownership need to be as universally accessible to citizens as land and education. Hockett presents a unique, financially engineered program for doing so, showing how it coheres with our political and legal traditions as well as what he calls our “endowment psychologies.”

--Marshal Zeringue

"Lost Lambs"

New from Farrar, Straus and Giroux: Lost Lambs: A Novel by Madeline Cash.

About the book, from the publisher:

Rippling with humor, warmth, and style, Lost Lambs is a new vision of the charms and pitfalls of family dysfunction.

The Flynn family is coming undone. Catherine and Bud's open marriage has reached its breaking point as their daughters spiral in their own chaotic orbits: Abigail, the eldest, is dating a man in his twenties nicknamed War Crime Wes; Louise, the middle child, maintains a secret correspondence with an online terrorist; the brilliant youngest, Harper, is being sent to wilderness reform camp due to her insistence that someone—or something—is monitoring the town’s citizens.

Casting a shadow across their lives, and their small coastal town, is Paul Alabaster, a billionaire shipping magnate. Rumors of corruption circulate, but no one dares dig too deep. No one except Harper, whose obsession with a mysterious shipping container sends the family hurtling into a criminal conspiracy—one that may just bring them closer together.

Irreverent and addictive, pinging between the voices of the Flynn family and those of the panorama of characters around them, Madeline Cash’s Lost Lambs is a debut novel of quick-witted observation and surprising tenderness. With it, Cash has crafted a family saga for the twenty-first century, all held together with crazy glue.

Visit Madeline Cash's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Reactionary Politics in South Korea"

New from Cambridge University Press: Reactionary Politics in South Korea: Historical Legacies, Far-Right Intellectuals, and Political Mobilization by Myungji Yang.

About the book, from the publisher:

In December 2024, South Korean president Yoon Seok-yeol stunned the world by declaring martial law. More puzzling was that Yoon's insurrection unexpectedly gained substantial support from the ruling right-wing party and many citizens. Why do ordinary citizens support authoritarian leaders and martial law in a democratic country? What draws them to extreme actions and ideas? With the rise of illiberal, far-right politics across the globe, Reactionary Politics in South Korea provides an in-depth account of the ideas and practices of far-right groups and organizations threatening democratic systems. Drawing on eighteen months of field research and rich qualitative data, Myungji Yang helps explain the roots of current democratic regression. Yang provides vivid details of on-the-ground internal dynamics of far-right actors and their communities and worldviews, uncovering the organizational and popular foundations of far-right politics and movements.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Daughter of Genoa"

New from Harper Perennial: Daughter of Genoa: A Novel by Kat Devereaux.

About the book, from the publisher:

The author of Escape to Florence returns with a thrilling adventure set in the war-torn 1940s and inspired by true events, about a young woman who risks everything to help Jewish Italians flee the fascists, and falls in love with the brave aviator behind a daring secret rescue operation.

Anna's family fled to America years ago, to escape the Fascist regime, but Anna had stayed behind. Alone and terrified of discovery, Anna meets Father Vittorio, a Jesuit priest who takes her to shopkeepers Bernardo and Silvia, an older couple who offer shelter and safety without question. But when Anna discovers that this kind, quiet couple is part of a network of ordinary people daring to help Father Vittorio smuggle Jewish citizens, stripped of their status and rights, out of Italy, she is determined to help.

Anna offers skills essential to the cause: she has a deft hand at ledgers and forgery, talents she learned at the high-powered job she held before the Racial Laws were passed—a past she conceals. Working in secrecy, not knowing others’ real names or sharing her own, Anna begins producing fake identity cards and soon meets another member of the operation: a man known as Mr. X., whom she recognizes instantly as the wealthy aviator Massimo Teglio. And suddenly, without warning—despite the threat of imprisonment, torture, and death—Anna finds herself taking the most dangerous of risk of all: falling in love. And she's not the only one.

Based on the true story of the DELASEM—the Delegation for the Assistance of Jewish Emigrants, an organization of brave volunteers working tirelessly to save innocent lives from the concentration camps—Daughter of Genoa is a poignant look at those who loved and lost yet continued to risk everything to create a better world.

Visit Kat Devereaux's website.

--Marshal Zeringue