Category Archives: Current Topics

My Seven Black Fathers

Picador
Paperback
240 pages • $18.00
ISBN: 9781250867186

A Memoir of Race, Family, and the Mentors Who Made Me Whole

Will Jawando

“A manifesto on the importance of intergenerational mentorship in the Black community.”

—Manuel Betancourt, The New York Times

As a boy growing up outside DC, Will, who went by his Nigerian name, Yemi, was shunted from school to school, never quite fitting in. He was a Black kid with a divorced white mother, a frayed relationship with his biological father, and teachers who scolded him for being disruptive. Eventually, he became close to Kalfani, a kid he looked up to on the basketball court. Years after he got the call telling him that Kalfani was dead, another victim of gun violence, Will looks back on the relationships he had with a series of extraordinary mentors who enabled him to thrive. Among them were Mr. Williams, the rare Black male grade school teacher, who found a way to bolster Will’s self-esteem; Deen Sanwoola, the businessman who helped him bridge the gap between his American upbringing and his Nigerian heritage, eventually leading to a dramatic reconciliation with his biological father; and President Barack Obama, who made Will his associate director of public engagement at the White House. Without the influence of these men, Will knows he would not be who he is today: a civil rights and education policy attorney, a civic leader, a husband, and a father. Drawing on Will’s inspiring personal story, My Seven Black Fathers offers a transformative way for Black men to shape the next generation.

Will Jawando is an attorney, an activist, a community leader, and a councilmember in Montgomery County, Maryland, a diverse community of more than one million residents. Called “the progressive leader we need” by the late congressman John Lewis, Jawando has worked with Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Senator Sherrod Brown, and President Barack Obama. His writing has appeared in The Washington Post and The Root and on BET.com, and his work has been featured in The New York Times and New York magazine and on NPR, NBC News, and MTV. He regularly appears on CNN, MSNBC, and other media outlets.

How to Navigate Life

St. Martin’s Press
Hardcover
320 pages • $29.99
ISBN: 9781250273147

The New Science of Finding Your Way in School, Career, and Beyond

Belle Liang, Ph.D., and Timothy Klein, LCSW

Today’s college-bound kids are stressed, anxious, and navigating demands in their lives unimaginable to a previous generation. They’re performance machines, hitting the benchmarks they’re “supposed” to in order to reach the next tier of a relentless ladder. Then, their mental and physical exhaustion carries over right into first jobs. What have traditionally been considered the best years of life have become the beaten-down years of life. Belle Liang and Timothy Klein devote their careers both to counseling individual students and to cutting through the daily pressures to show a better way, a framework, and set of questions to find kids’ “true north”: what really turns them on in life, and how to harness the core qualities that reveal, allowing them to choose a course of study, a college, and a career. Even the gentlest parents and teachers tend to play into pervasive societal pressure for students to PERFORM. And when we take the foot off the gas, we beg the kids to just figure out what their PASSION is. Neither is a recipe for mental or physical health, or, ironically, for performance or passion. How to Navigate Life shows that successful human beings instead tap into their PURPOSE—the why behind the what and how. Best of all, purpose is a completely translatable quality to every aspect of life, from first jobs to last jobs and everything in between.

Belle Liang, Ph.D. is a professor of counseling, developmental, and educational psychology at Boston College, a licensed clinical psychologist, and an expert in positive youth development.

Timothy Klein, LCSW is an award-winning urban educator, clinical therapist, and school counselor, who was previously a teaching fellow at Harvard University.

Thinking 101

Flatiron Books
Paperback
288 pages • $18.99
ISBN: 9781250805973

How to Reason Better to Live Better

Woo-kyoung Ahn

“Thinking 101 provides evidence-based advice that has real potential to improve lives.”

—Science

Psychologist Woo-kyoung Ahn devised a course at Yale called “Thinking” to help students examine the biases that cause so many problems in their daily lives. It quickly became one of the university’s most popular courses. Now, for the first time, Ahn presents key insights from her years of teaching and research in a book for everyone. She shows how “thinking problems” stand behind a wide range of challenges, from common, self-inflicted daily aggravations to our most pressing societal issues and inequities. Throughout, Ahn draws on decades of research from other cognitive psychologists, as well as from her own groundbreaking studies. And she presents it all in a compellingly readable style that uses fun examples from pop culture, anecdotes from her own life, and illuminating stories from history and the headlines. Thinking 101 is a book that goes far beyond other books on thinking, showing how we can improve not just our own daily lives through better awareness of our biases but also the lives of everyone around us. It is, quite simply, required reading for everyone who wants to think—and live—better.

Woo-kyoung Ahn is is the John Hay Whitney Professor of Psychology at Yale University. After receiving her Ph.D. in psychology from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, she was assistant professor at Yale University and associate professor at Vanderbilt University. In 2022, she received Yale’s Lex Hixon Prize for Teaching Excellence in the Social Sciences. Her research on thinking biases has been funded by the National Institutes of Health, and she is a fellow of the American Psychological Association and the Association for Psychological Science.

Study Break

Square Fish
Paperback
288 pages • $13.99
ISBN: 9781250848031

11 College Tales from Orientation to Graduation

Aashna Avachat

College . . . the best time, the worst time, and something in between. What do you do when orientation isn’t going according to your (sister’s) detailed plans? Where do you go when you’re searching for community in faith? How do you figure out what it means that you’re suddenly attracted to your RA? What happens when your partner for your last film project is also your crush and graduation is quickly approaching? Told over the course of one academic year, this collection of stories set on the same fictional campus features students from different cultures, genders, and interests learning more about who they are and who they want to be. From new careers to community to (almost) missed connections—and more—these interconnected tales explore the ways university life can be stressful and confusing and exciting and fulfilling. Gen Z contributors include Jake Maia Arlow, Arushi Avachat, Boon Carmen, Ananya Devarajan, Camryn Garrett, Christina Li, Racquel Marie, Oyin, Laila Sabreen, Michael Waters, and Joelle Wellington.

Aashna Avachat is a YA author and editorial assistant with a love for hope-filled stories. She graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, in spring 2020 with a BA in English and is currently a 1L at Harvard Law School. She is passionate about amplifying marginalized voices in publishing and increasing space for readers to see themselves in book pages. Study Break is her first book. When she’s not writing, she’s probably reading on a sunny patch of grass, going on long walks to grocery stores, or being cozy with one of her many foster kittens.

Accountable

Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Hardcover
496 pages • $20.99
ISBN: 9780374314347

The True Story of a Racist Social Media Account and the Teenagers Whose Lives It Changed

Dashka Slater

“This is a compelling and contemporary cautionary tale that should be required reading for any teen before they create, comment, or even like a media post.”

—Booklist, starred review

When a high school student started a private Instagram account that used racist and sexist memes to make his friends laugh, he thought of it as “edgy” humor. Over time, the edge got sharper. Then a few other kids found out about the account. Pretty soon, everyone knew. Ultimately no one in the small town of Albany, California, was safe from the repercussions of the account’s discovery. Not the girls targeted by the posts. Not the boy who created the account. Not the group of kids who followed it. Not the adults—educators and parents—whose attempts to fix things too often made them worse. In the end, no one was laughing. And everyone was left asking: Where does accountability end for online speech that harms? And what does accountability even mean? Award-winning and New York Times–bestselling author Dashka Slater has written a must-read book for our era that explores the real-world consequences of online choices.

Dashka Slater is an Award-winning journalist, she has written for such publications as The New York Times Magazine, Newsweek, Salon, and Mother Jones. Her New York Times-bestselling young-adult true crime narrative, The 57 Bus, has received numerous accolades, including the Stonewall Book Award, the California Book Award, and a Boston Globe-Horn Book Honor. It was a YALSA Excellence in Nonfiction Award Finalist and an LA Times Book Award Finalist, in addition to receiving four starred reviews and being named to more than 20 separate lists of the year’s best books, including ones compiled by The Washington Post, the New York Public Library, and School Library Journal. In 2021, The 57 Bus was named to TIME magazine’s list of the 100 Best Young Adult Books of All Time. The author of fifteen books of fiction and nonfiction for children and adults, Dashka teaches in Hamline University’s MFA in Creative Writing for Children and Young Adults program. She lives and writes in Oakland, California.

Factfulness

Flatiron Books
Paperback
352 pages • $17.99
ISBN: 9781250123824

Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About the World—and Why Things Are Better Than You Think

Hans Rosling
with Ola Rosling and Anna Rosling Rönnlund

“This magnificent book ends with a plea for a factual world view. Rosling was optimistic that this outlook will spread, because it is a useful navigational tool in a complex world,
and a genuine antidote to negativity and hopelessness.”

—Nature

When asked simple questions about global trends—what percentage of the world’s population live in poverty; why the world’s population is increasing; how many girls finish school—we systematically get the answers wrong. So wrong that a chimpanzee choosing answers at random will consistently outguess teachers, journalists, Nobel laureates, and investment bankers. In Factfulness, Hans Rosling, together with his two long-time collaborators, Anna and Ola, offers a radical new explanation of why this happens. They reveal the ten instincts that distort our perspective—from our tendency to divide the world into two camps (usually some version of us and them) to the way we consume media (where fear rules) to how we perceive progress (believing that most things are getting worse). Our problem is that we don’t know what we don’t know, and even our guesses are informed by unconscious and predictable biases. It turns out that the world, for all its imperfections, is in a much better state than we might think. That doesn’t mean there aren’t real concerns. But when we worry about everything all the time instead of embracing a worldview based on facts, we can lose our ability to focus on the things that threaten us most. Factfulness is an urgent and essential book that will change the way you see the world and empower you to respond to the crises and opportunities of the future.

Hans Rosling was a medical doctor, professor of international health and renowned public educator. He was an adviser to the World Health Organization and UNICEF, and co-founded Médecins sans Frontières in Sweden and the Gapminder Foundation. His TED talks have been viewed more than 35 million times, and he was listed as one of Time Magazine’s 100 most influential people in the world. Hans died in 2017.

Ola Rosling and Anna Rosling Rönnlund, Hans’s son and daughter-in-law, are co-founders of the Gapminder Foundation. They have both received international awards for their work.

Factfulness has been adopted for 13 First-Year Experience programs:

Bellarmine University (KY); Elon University (NC); Fresno State University (CA); James Madison University’s Honors College (VA); North Central Texas College; Otterbein University (OH); Pennsylvania State University – New Kensington; Saddleback College (CA); Skidmore College (NY); Stockton University (NJ); the University of California at Riverside; the University of South Carolina; the University of Texas at Tyler

The Viral Underclass

Celadon Books
Paperback
384 pages • $19.99
ISBN: 9781250796646

The Human Toll When Inequality and Disease Collide

Steven W. Thrasher

“The pandemic brought America’s health inequities into stark relief, but The Viral Underclass illustrates that the problem isn’t new, and that it is embedded more deeply than many of us realize . . . Thrasher, a gay Black man, brings figures from the viral underclass to life in this engaging, enraging read.”

—Jennifer Latson, The Boston Globe

Having spent a groundbreaking career studying the racialization, policing, and criminalization of HIV, Dr. Steven W. Thrasher has come to understand a deeper truth at the heart of our society: there are vast inequalities in who is able to survive viruses and the ways in which viruses spread, kill, and take their toll are much more dependent on social structures than they are on biology alone. Told through the heartrending stories of friends, activists, and teachers navigating the novel coronavirus, HIV, and other viruses, Dr. Thrasher brings the reader with him as he delves into the viral underclass and lays bare its inner workings. In the tradition of Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste and Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow, The Viral Underclass helps us understand the world more deeply by showing the fraught relationship between privilege and survival.

Steven W. Thrasher, Ph.D., is the inaugural Daniel H. Renberg chair at Northwestern University’s Medill School, the first journalism professorship in the world created to focus on LGBTQ research. He is also a faculty member of Northwestern University’s Institute for Sexual and Gender Minority Health and Wellbeing. His writing has been widely published by The New York Times, The Guardian, The Atlantic, The Journal of American History, BuzzFeed News, The Village Voice, and Scientific American. A recipient of grants from the Ford and Sloan foundations, Dr. Thrasher was named one of the hundred most influential and impactful people of 2019 by Out magazine for his research on HIV/AIDS.

Live to See the Day

Metropolitan Books
Hardcover
240 pages • $29.99
ISBN: 9781250850065

Coming of Age in American Poverty

Nikhil Goyal

In Kensington, Philadelphia, eighteenth birthdays are not rites of passage but statistical miracles. Distinguished only by its poverty, Kensington is home to Ryan, Giancarlos, and Emmanuel, three Puerto Rican children who live among the most marginalized families in the United States. This is the story of their coming-of-age, which is beset by violence—the violence of homelessness, hunger, incarceration, stray bullets, sexual and physical assault, the hypermasculine logic of the streets, and the drug trade. One mistake drives Ryan out of middle school and into the juvenile justice pipeline. For Emmanuel, his queerness means his mother’s rejection and sleeping in shelters. School closures and budget cuts inspire Giancarlos to lead student walkouts, which get him kicked out of the education system. Although all three are high school dropouts, they are on a quest to defy their fate and their neighborhood and get diplomas. In a triumph of empathy and drawing on nearly a decade of reporting, sociologist and policymaker Nikhil Goyal follows Ryan, Giancarlos, and Emmanuel on their mission, plunging deep into their lives as they strive to resist their designated place in the social hierarchy. In the process, Live to See the Day confronts a new age of American poverty, after the end of “welfare as we know it,” after “zero tolerance” in schools criminalized a generation of students, when the odds of making it out are ever slighter.

Nikhil Goyal is a sociologist and policymaker who served as senior policy advisor on education and children for Chairman Senator Bernie Sanders on the U.S. Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions and the Committee on the Budget. He developed education, child care, and child tax credit federal legislation as well as a tuition-free college program for incarcerated people and correctional workers in Vermont. He has appeared on CNN, Fox, and MSNBC and has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Time, The Nation, and other publications. Goyal earned his B.A. at Goddard College and his M.Phil. and Ph.D. at the University of Cambridge. He lives in Vermont.

Starry Messenger

Henry Holt & Co.
Paperback
288 pages • $18.99
ISBN: 9781250861511

Paperback available in Fall 2022

Cosmic Perspectives on Civilization

Neil deGrasse Tyson

“[Tyson| meditates on what a life studying the majesty of the stars and the planets can teach us about how to deal with all the messy social and political conflicts bedeviling us here on Earth . . . He is lucidly down-to-earth and charmingly enthusiastic in describing the rigors of the scientific method, explaining the elegance of classic equations such as Newton’s second law of motion and Einstein’s theory of relativity, and cataloguing all the neat technology we fast-tracked by sending people into space.”

—Mark Whitaker, The Washington Post

In a time when our political and cultural views feel more polarized than ever, Neil deGrasse Tyson provides a much-needed antidote to so much of what divides us, while making a passionate case for the twin chariots of enlightenment—a cosmic perspective and the rationality of science. After thinking deeply about how science sees the world and about Earth as a planet, the human brain has the capacity to reset and recalibrate life’s priorities, shaping the actions we might take. No outlook on culture, society, or civilization remains untouched. With crystalline prose, Starry Messenger walks us through the scientific palette that sees and paints the world differently. From insights on resolving global conflict to reminders of how precious it is to be alive, Tyson reveals, with warmth and eloquence, an array of brilliant and beautiful truths that apply to us all, informed and enlightened by knowledge of our place in the universe.

Neil deGrasse Tyson is an astrophysicist and the author of the #1 bestselling Astrophysics for People in a Hurry, among other books. He is the Director of the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History as well as the host and cofounder of the Emmy-nominated podcast StarTalk and its spinoff StarTalk Sports Edition. He lives in New York City.

Rising Class

Farrar, Straus and Giroux BYR
Hardcover
352 pages • $19.99
ISBN: 9780374313579

How Three First-Generation College Students Conquered Their First Year

Jennifer Miller

As the low-income daughter of immigrants, Briani knows she’ll face imposter syndrome at her Ivy League college. But the biggest challenges of freshman year are the ones she never saw coming. Conner grew up shouldering extra responsibility and can’t wait for more independence. But 1,200 miles away from his mom, brother, and girlfriend, he feels more tied to them than ever. Jacklynn decided to attend community college and live at home. Soon, though, she’s balancing school with a stressful job and lifealtering family events. Rising Class follows Briani, Conner, Jacklynn, and their friends as they experience not only their first year of college but the COVID-19 pandemic, which turned the world upside down. Eye-opening and poignant, Jennifer Miller writes a heartening true story that speaks to new beginnings, coming of age, and perseverance in the face of unparalleled challenges.

Jennifer Miller is the author of four critically acclaimed books, Inheriting the Holy Land, The Year of the Gadfly, The Heart You Carry Home, and Mr. Nice Guy. Today Miller is a regular contributor to The New York Times and The Washington Post. She has reported extensively on teenagers and campus life and, more broadly, on disenfranchised communities, including military veterans, formerly incarcerated individuals, and the rural working class. She has taught undergraduate writing courses at Columbia and has been a thesis advisor at both the Columbia School of the Arts and the Columbia Journalism School. Please visit byjennifermiller.com for more information.