In 1925, Barnard student Zora Neale Hurston --- the sole black student at the college --- was living in New York, “desperately striving for a toe-hold on the world.” During this period, she began writing short works that captured the zeitgeist of African American life and transformed her into one of the central figures of the Harlem Renaissance. HITTING A STRAIGHT LICK WITH A CROOKED STICK is an outstanding collection of stories about love and migration, gender and class, racism and sexism that proudly reflect African American folk culture. Brought together for the first time in one volume, they include eight of Hurston’s “lost” Harlem stories, which were found in forgotten periodicals and archives.

Former governor of Alabama and presidential candidate George Wallace was notorious for his hateful rhetoric and political stunts. At the end of his life, he came to renounce his views, although he could never attempt to fully repair the damage he caused. But after her own political awakening, his daughter, Peggy Wallace Kennedy, dedicated her life to spreading the new Wallace message --- one of peace and compassion. In her new memoir, Peggy looks back on the politics of her youth and attempts to reconcile her adored father with the man who coined the phrase “Segregation now. Segregation tomorrow. Segregation forever.”

In 1921, Françoise Frenkel --- a Jewish woman from Poland --- opens La Maison du Livre, Berlin’s first French bookshop. It becomes a haven for intellectual exchange as Nazi ideology begins to poison the culturally rich city. In 1935, the scene continues to darken. First come the new bureaucratic hurdles, followed by frequent police visits and book confiscations. Françoise’s dream finally shatters on Kristallnacht in November 1938, as hundreds of Jewish shops and businesses are destroyed. La Maison du Livre is miraculously spared, but fear of persecution eventually forces Françoise on a desperate, lonely flight to Paris. Secreted away from one safe house to the next, Françoise survives at the heroic hands of strangers risking their lives to protect her.

In a hundred-year period, a handful of men and women changed the way we see the world. Many of them are well known, such as Marx, Freud, Proust, Einstein and Kafka. Others have vanished from collective memory despite their enduring importance in our daily lives. Without Karl Landsteiner, for instance, there would be no blood transfusions or major surgery. Without Rosalind Franklin, genetic science would look very different. Without Fritz Haber, there would not be enough food to sustain life on earth. What do these visionaries have in common? They all had Jewish origins. Norman Lebrecht has devoted half of his life to pondering and researching the mindset of the Jewish intellectuals, writers, scientists and thinkers who turned the tides of history and shaped the world today as we know it.

In August 1974, after his involvement in the Watergate scandal could no longer be denied, Richard Nixon became the first and only president to resign from office in anticipation of certain impeachment. The year preceding that moment was filled with shocking revelations and bizarre events, full of power politics, legal jujitsu and high-stakes showdowns, and with head-shaking surprises every day. As the country’s top reporters worked to discover the truth, the public was overwhelmed by the confusing and almost unbelievable stories about activities in the Oval Office. Tom Brokaw, the young NBC News White House correspondent at the time, gives us a nuanced and thoughtful chronicle, recalling the players, the strategies, and the highs and lows of the scandal that brought down a president.

In MIGHTY JUSTICE, trailblazing African American civil rights attorney Dovey Johnson Roundtree recounts her inspiring life story that speaks movingly and urgently to our racially troubled times. From the streets of Charlotte, North Carolina, to the segregated courtrooms of the nation’s capital; from the male stronghold of the army where she broke gender and color barriers to the pulpits of churches where women had waited for years for the right to minister --- in all these places, Roundtree sought justice. Dovey Roundtree passed away in 2018 at the age of 104. Though her achievements were significant and influential, she remains largely unknown to the American public. This book corrects the historical record.

Jack Callahan is an outsider in his adopted hometown of Raleigh, North Carolina. A successful lawyer, he has spent years trying to move in all the right circles. But with his literary mother in a sanitarium, his society marriage on the rocks, and his biggest client --- Raleigh’s family-owned newspaper the Criterion --- facing a hostile takeover, he’s beginning to wonder if it’s really worth it. Step by step, readers are drawn into the “non-secret secrets” of an elite that wields power founded on intricate manners and unsolved crimes. Wall Street raider Victor Broman, Jack’s former client, is hell-bent to acquire the Criterion for shadowy patrons. Eventually, Jack takes counsel from his friend Lowry, a mysterious Native American mystic, who unveils a different path, away from all the right circles.

Thomas Alva Edison’s invention of the first practical incandescent lamp 140 years ago so dazzled the world --- already reeling from his invention of the phonograph and dozens of other revolutionary devices --- that it cast a shadow over his later achievements. In all, this near-deaf genius patented 1,093 inventions --- not including others, such as the X-ray fluoroscope --- that he left unlicensed for the benefit of medicine. One of the achievements of this biography, the first major life of Edison in more than 20 years, is that it portrays the unknown Edison --- the philosopher, the futurist, the chemist, the botanist, the wartime defense adviser, the founder of nearly 250 companies --- as fully as it deconstructs the Edison of mythological memory.

In DREAMS OF EL DORADO, H. W. Brands tells the thrilling, panoramic story of the settling of the American West. He takes us from John Jacob Astor's fur trading outpost in Oregon to the Texas Revolution, from the California gold rush to the Oklahoma land rush. He shows how the migrants' dreams drove them to feats of courage and perseverance that put their stay-at-home cousins to shame --- and how those same dreams also drove them to outrageous acts of violence against indigenous peoples and one another. The West was where riches would reward the miner's persistence, the cattleman's courage, the railroad man's enterprise. But El Dorado was at least as elusive in the West as it ever was in the East.

Janis Joplin has become a legend known as a brash, impassioned soul doomed by the pain that produced one of the most extraordinary voices in rock history. But in these pages, Holly George-Warren provides a revelatory portrait of a woman who wasn’t all about suffering. Janis was a perfectionist: a passionate, erudite musician who was born with talent but also worked exceptionally hard to develop it. She was a woman who pushed the boundaries of gender and sexuality long before it was socially acceptable. She was a sensitive seeker who wanted to marry and settle down --- but couldn’t, or wouldn’t. She was a Texan who yearned to flee Texas but could never quite get away --- even after becoming a countercultural icon in San Francisco.