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

Hometown Victory

Flatiron Books
Hardcover
240 pages • $28.99
ISBN: 9781250807632

A Coach’s Story of Football, Fate, and Coming Home

Keanon Lowe with Justin Spizman

The buzz from the stands falls away as Coach Lowe looks around the huddle. In his players’ eyes, he can see two things: this team hasn’t won a single game in twenty-three tries, and now they’re looking to him to change that. Only months before, Coach Lowe was standing on a sideline next to Colin Kaepernick, with a plum NFL coaching job and a burgeoning career. But then his childhood friend and former teammate suddenly died from an opioid overdose. He dropped everything and returned home to a neglected neighborhood on the east side of Portland, Oregon, where he picked up a job coaching football at Parkrose High School. The lessons Coach Lowe brings to the field come from his own life defining experiences: stepping up to be the man of the house at eight years old, finding crucial support and mentorship on a football team, and learning to lead during a sparkling college career. Now, as the underdogs kick off their season, it’s time to see if hard work and tough love pay off. Especially as the school community grapples with an unimaginable shock and tragedy. With the heart of favorite football classics—The Blind Side, Friday Night Lights, Remember the Titans—Coach Lowe’s journey at Parkrose is the true account of a life spent striving forward, even when the odds are stacked against you. Hometown Victory is a story about gratitude, service, and most of all, hope.

© Kevin Cline

Keanon Lowe is a football coach and former Division I football player for the Oregon Ducks. He gained widespread media attention in May 2019 after disarming an active school shooter and embracing him until the police arrived. After playing as a wide receiver for half a decade, Lowe went to work in Philadelphia as an analyst for the Philadelphia Eagles and then as an offensive analyst for the San Francisco 49ers. He was the head coach for both football and track and field at Parkrose High School.

Justin Spizman is an award-winning and bestselling author, ghostwriter, and editor. He has worked on We Rise with Xiuhtezcatl Martinez, Taking Your Team to the Top with Ted Sundquist, and is the coauthor of Don’t Give Up . . . Don’t Ever Give Up: The Inspiration of Jimmy V. Justin lives in Atlanta, Georgia, with his family.

Dirty Work

Picador
Paperback
320 pages • $18.00
ISBN: 9781250849342

Essential Jobs and Hidden Toll of
Inequality in America

Eyal Press

“Dirty Work, a disturbing and necessary new book by Eyal Press, describes with great empathy the lives of workers who do jobs that they themselves find morally horrifying . . . But the book isn’t entirely about those workers. It’s about us. Press’s thesis is that our society confers on these workers an ‘unconscious mandate’ to do jobs that are morally objectionable and at the same time wants those jobs to remain invisible.”

—Tamsin Shaw, The New York Times

Drone pilots who carry out targeted assassinations. Undocumented immigrants who man the “kill floors” of industrial slaughterhouses. Guards who patrol the wards of the United States’ most violent and abusive prisons. The COVID-19 pandemic has drawn unprecedented attention to the health and safety risks to which essential workers are exposed—but Dirty Work examines a less familiar set of occupational hazards: psychological and emotional hardships such as stigma, shame, PTSD, and moral injury. These burdens fall disproportionately on low-income workers, undocumented immigrants, women, and people of color. Illuminating the moving, sometimes harrowing stories of the people doing society’s dirty work, and incisively examining the structures of power and complicity that shape their lives, Eyal Press offers a paradigm-shifting view of the moral landscape of contemporary America through the stories of people who perform society’s most ethically troubling jobs.

© Steven Kane

Eyal Press is an author and a journalist based in New York. The recipient of the James Aronson Award for Social Justice Journalism, an Andrew Carnegie fellowship, a Cullman Center fellowship at the New York Public Library, and a Puffin Foundation fellowship at Type Media Center, he is a contributor to The New Yorker, The New York Times, and numerous other publications. He is the author of Beautiful Souls and Absolute Convictions.

An Abolitionist’s Handbook

St. Martin’s Press
Hardcover
288 pages • $26.99
ISBN: 9781250272973

12 Steps to Changing Yourself and the World

Patrisse Cullors

In An Abolitionist’s Handbook, Patrisse Cullors charts a
framework for how everyday activists can effectively fight for an abolitionist present and future. Filled with relatable pedagogy on the history of abolition, a reimagining of what reparations look like for Black lives, and real-life anecdotes from Cullors, this book offers a bold, innovative, and humanistic approach to how to be a modern-day abolitionist.

© Curtis Moore

Patrisse Cullors is a co-founder and former executive director of the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation. Patrisse is also the Faculty Director of Arizona’s Prescott College Social and Environmental Arts Practice M.F.A. program.

When They Call You a Terrorist

St. Martin’s Griffin
Paperback
288 pages • $16.99
ISBN: 9781250306906

A Black Lives Matter Memoir

Patrisse Khan-Cullors & asha bandele

With a foreword by Angela Davis

“When They Call You a Terrorist is more than just a reflection on the American criminal justice system. It’s a call to action for readers to change a culture that allows for violence against people of color.”

—Time

For Patrisse Khan-Cullors, the most vulnerable people in the country are Black people. Deliberately and ruthlessly targeted by a criminal justice system serving a white privilege agenda, Black people are subjected to unjustifiable racial profiling and police brutality. In 2013, when Trayvon Martin’s killer went free, Patrisse’s outrage led her to co-found Black Lives Matter with Alicia Garza and Opal Tometi. Condemned as terrorists and as a threat to America, these loving women founded a hashtag that birthed the movement to demand accountability from the authorities who continually turn a blind eye to the injustices inflicted upon people of Black and Brown skin. Patrisse is a survivor. She transformed her personal pain into political power, giving voice to a people suffering
inequality and a movement fueled by her strength and love to tell the country—and the world—that Black Lives Matter.

© Curtis Moore

© Michael Hnatov Photography

Patrisse Khan-Cullors is an artist, organizer, and freedom fighter from Los Angeles, California. Co-founder of Black Lives Matter, she is also a performance artist, Fulbright scholar, public speaker, and the 2017 Sydney Peace Prize recipient.

asha bandele is the award-winning author of The Prisoner’s Wife and four other works. Honored for her work in journalism and activism, asha is a mother, a former senior editor at Essence, and a senior director at the Drug Policy Alliance.

When They Call You a Terrorist has been adopted for 11 First-Year Experience programs, including at:

American University (DC); California State University Northridge; Highland Community College (IL); the University of Richmond; Northern Illinois University (two consecutive years); East Los Angeles College (CA) (two consecutive years); Tuskegee University (AL); University of California Santa Barbara; University of Washington Bothell and Cascadia College

The Sixth Extinction (10th Anniversary Edition)

Henry Holt Paperbacks
Paperback
352 pages • $19.99
ISBN: 9781250887313

An Unnatural History

Elizabeth Kolbert

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize
Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize

“In her timely, meticulously researched and well-written book, Kolbert combines scientific analysis and personal narratives to explain it to us. The result is a clear and comprehensive history of earth’s previous mass extinctions—and the species we’ve lost—and an engaging description of the extraordinarily complex nature of life. Most important, Kolbert delivers a compelling call to action.”

—Al Gore, The New York Times Book Review

Over the last half-billion years, there have been five mass extinctions, when the diversity of life on earth suddenly and dramatically contracted. Scientists around the world are currently monitoring the sixth extinction, predicted to be the most devastating extinction event since the asteroid impact that wiped out the dinosaurs. This time around, the cataclysm is us. In prose that is at once frank, entertaining, and deeply informed, New Yorker writer Elizabeth Kolbert tells us why and how human beings have altered life on the planet in a way no species has before. Interweaving research in half a dozen disciplines, descriptions of the fascinating species that have already been lost, and the history of extinction as a concept, Kolbert provides a moving and comprehensive account of the disappearances occurring before our very eyes. She shows that the sixth extinction is likely to be mankind’s most lasting legacy, compelling us to rethink the fundamental question of what it means to be human.

© Barry Goldstein

Elizabeth Kolbert is a staff writer at The New Yorker. She is the author of Field Notes from a Catastrophe. She lives in Williamstown, Massachusetts, with her husband and children.

The Sixth Extinction has been adopted for 21 First-Year Experience programs at:

American University (DC); Colgate University (NY); Lafayette College (PA); Linfield College (OR); Occidental College (CA); Feather River College (CA); Millsaps College (MS); Montclair State University’s Presidential Scholars Program (NJ); Montana State University; NYU-Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development; Piedmont Virginia Community College; Rowan University (NJ); Saint Francis High School (CA); Stanford University (CA);  Stevens Institute of Technology (NJ); Sweet Briar College (PA); University of Michigan – Flint; University of Vermont; Villanova University (PA); Williams College (MA)

We Are the Weather

Picador
Paperback
288 pages • $17.00
ISBN: 9781250757975

Saving the Planet Begins at Breakfast

Jonathan Safran Foer

“Jonathan Safran Foer’s second book of nonfiction is an eye-opening collection of mostly short essays expressing both despair and hope over the climate crisis, especially around individual choice.”

—The New York Times Book Review

Some people reject the fact, overwhelmingly supported by scientists, that our planet is warming because of human activity. But do those of us who accept the reality of human-caused climate change truly believe it? If we did, surely we would be roused to act on what we know. Will future generations distinguish between those who didn’t believe in the science of global warming and those who said they accepted the science but failed to change their lives in response? In We Are the Weather, Jonathan Safran Foer explores the central global dilemma of our time in a surprising, deeply personal, and urgent new way. The task of saving the planet will involve a great reckoning with ourselves—with our all-too-human reluctance to sacrifice immediate comfort for the sake of the future. We have, he reveals, turned our planet into a farm for growing animal products, and the consequences are catastrophic. Only collective action will save our home and way of life. And it all starts with what we eat—and don’t eat—for breakfast.

© Jeff Mermelstein

Jonathan Safran Foer is the author of the novels Everything Is Illuminated, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, and Here I Am, and of the nonfiction book Eating Animals. His work has received numerous awards and has been translated into thirty-six languages. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.

We Are the Weather has been adopted for 5 First-Year Experience programs at:

Arizona State University; Christian Brothers University (TN); Flagler College (FL) Lenoir-Rhyne University (NC); Moravian College (PA)

Somewhere in the Unknown World

Metropolitan Books
Paperback
272 pages • $17.99
ISBN: 9781250296856

A Collective Refugee Memoir

Kao Kalia Yang

“The true stories in Hmong-American memoirist and St. Paul writer Kao Kalia Yang’s collection Somewhere in the Unknown World are haunting and vivid.”

—Christine Brunkhorst, The Star Tribune (Minneapolis)

All over this country, there are refugees. But beyond the headlines, often not much is known about who they are, how they live, or what they have lost. Although Minnesota is not famous for its diversity, the state has welcomed more refugees per capita than any other, coming from Syria, Bosnia, Thailand, Liberia, and many other countries. Now, with nativism on the rise, Kao Kalia Yang—herself a Hmong refugee—has gathered stories of the stateless who today call the Twin Cities home. Here are people who found the strength and courage to rebuild after leaving all they hold dear. Awo and her mother, who escaped from Somalia, reunite with her father on the phone every Saturday, across the span of continents and decades. Tommy, born in Minneapolis to refugees from Cambodia, cannot escape the war that his parents carry inside. As Afghani flees the reach of the Taliban, he seeks at every stop what he calls a “certificate of his humanity.” Mr. Truong brings pho from Vietnam to Frogtown in St. Paul, reviving a crumbling block as well as his own family. In Yang’s exquisite, necessary telling, these fifteen stories of refugee journeys restore history and humanity to America’s strangers and redeem its long tradition of welcome.

© Shee Yang

Kao Kalia Yang is the author of The Song Poet, which received the 2017 Minnesota Book Award and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Chautauqua Prize, the PEN USA Literary Award, and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. Her previous book, The Latehomecomer, also received the Minnesota Book Award, as did her children’s book A Map into the World. Yang lives in St. Paul, Minnesota.

Somewhere in the Unknown World has been adopted for First-Year Experience programs at:

Des Moines Area Community College (IA); South Central College (MN)

The Poisoned City

Picador
Paperback
336 pages • $18.00
ISBN: 9781250181619

Flint’s Water and the American Urban Tragedy

Anna Clark

With a New Afterword
Winner of the Rachel Carson Environmental Book Award
Winner of the Gross Award for Literature
Winner of the Hillman Prize

“An exceptional work of journalism. Clark delivers a thorough account of a still-evolving public health crisis, one with an unmistakable racial subtext . . . Her book is a deeply reported account of catastrophic mismanagement. But it’s also a celebration of civic engagement, a tribute to those who are fighting back against governmental malpractice.”

—San Francisco Chronicle

When the people of Flint, Michigan, turned on their faucets in April 2014, the water pouring out was poisoned with lead and other toxins. Through a series of disastrous decisions, the state government had switched the city’s water supply to a source that corroded Flint’s aging lead pipes. Complaints about the foul-smelling water were dismissed: the residents of Flint, mostly poor and African American, were not seen as credible, even in matters of their own lives. It took eighteen months of activism by city residents and a band of dogged outsiders to force the state to admit that the water was poisonous. By that time, twelve people had died and Flint’s children had suffered irreparable harm. The long battle for accountability and a humane response to this man-made disaster has only just begun. In the first full account of this American tragedy, The Poisoned City recounts the gripping story of Flint’s poisoned water through the people who caused it, suffered from it, and exposed it. It is a chronicle of one town, but could also be about any American city, all made precarious by the neglect of infrastructure and the erosion of democratic decision-making. Places like Flint are set up to fail—and for the people who live and work in them, the consequences can be fatal.

© Philip Dattilo

Anna Clark is a journalist living in Detroit. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Politico, the Columbia Journalism Review, and other publications. Anna edited A Detroit Anthology, a Michigan Notable Book, and she has been a writer-in-residence in Detroit public schools as part of the InsideOut Literary Arts program. She has also been a Fulbright fellow in Nairobi, Kenya and a Knight-Wallace journalism fellow at the University of Michigan.

The Poisoned City has been adopted for the First-Year Experience program at:

Rider University (NJ)

Long Time Coming

St. Martin’s Press
Hardcover
240 pages • $25.99
ISBN: 9781250276759

Reckoning with Race in America

Michael Eric Dyson

“Michael Eric Dyson’s Long Time Coming is a timely, heartfelt book that uses history to slice our nation open and show how racism is a sickness that has shaped our culture and society in a variety of insidious ways.”

—Gabino Iglesias, NPR

The night of May 25, 2020 changed America. George Floyd, a forty-three-year-old Black man, was killed during an arrest in Minneapolis when a white cop suffocated him. The video of that night’s events went viral, sparking the largest protests in the nation’s history and the sort of social unrest we have not seen since the sixties. While Floyd’s death was certainly the catalyst, (heightened by the fact that it occurred during a pandemic whose victims were disproportionately of color) it was in truth the fuse that lit an ever-filling powder keg. Long Time Coming grapples with the cultural and social forces that have shaped our nation in the brutal crucible of race. In five beautifully argued chapters—each addressed to a black martyr from Breonna Taylor to Rev. Clementa Pinckney—Dyson traces the genealogy of anti-blackness from the slave ship to the street corner where Floyd lost his life—and where America gained its will to confront the ugly truth of systemic racism. Ending with a poignant plea for hope, Dyson’s new book points the way to social redemption. Long Time Coming is a necessary guide to help America finally reckon with race.

© KK Ottesen

Michael Eric Dyson is one of America’s premier public intellectuals and the author of more than twenty books, including the New York Times bestsellers JAY-Z, Tears We Cannot Stop, and What Truth Sounds Like. He is a contributing opinion writer for The New York Times and a contributing editor of ESPN’s The Undefeated. Michael Eric Dyson is a winner of two NAACP Image awards and the recipient of the 2020 Langston Hughes Festival Medallion.

Long Time Coming has been adopted for First-Year Experience programs at:

Arizona State University