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New Nonfiction August 2025 |
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Threads of empire : a history of the world in twelve carpets
by Dorothy Armstrong
Traces the history of the world through the stories of twelve carpets, examining how these textiles symbolized power, spirituality, and status, while also revealing the lives of their poor, often anonymous weavers and their connection to global events across time and geography.
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More everything forever : AI overlords, space empires, and Silicon Valley's crusade to control the fate of humanity
by Adam Becker
Tech billionaires have decided that they should determine our futures for us. According to Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Sam Altman, and more, the only good future for humanity is one powered by technology: trillions of humans living in space, functionally immortal, served by super intelligent AIs. In More Everything Forever, science writer Adam Becker investigates these wildly implausible and often profoundly immoral visions of tomorrow--and shows why, in reality, there is no good evidence that they will, or should, come to pass. Nevertheless, these obsessions fuel fears that overwhelm reason--for example, that a rogue AI will exterminate humanity--at the expense of essential work on solving crucial problems like climate change. What's more, these futuristic visions cloak a hunger for power under dreams of space colonies and digital immortality. The giants of Silicon Valley claim that their ideas are based on science, but the reality is darker: they come from a jumbled mix of shallow futurism and racist pseudoscience. More Everything Forever exposes the powerful and sinister ideas that dominate Silicon Valley, challenging us to see how foolish, and dangerous, these visions of the future are.
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Angelica : For Love and Country in a Time of Revolution
by Molly Beer
Few women of the American Revolution have come through 250 years of US history with such clarity and color as Angelica Schuyler Church. She was Alexander Hamilton’s “saucy” sister-in-law, and the heart of Thomas Jefferson’s “charming coterie” of artists and salonnières in Paris. Her transatlantic network of important friends spanned the political spectrum of her time and place, and her astute eye and brilliant letters kept them well informed. In this enthralling and revealing woman’s-eye view of a revolutionary era, Molly Beer breathes vibrant new life into a period usually dominated by masculine themes and often dulled by familiarity. In telling Angelica’s story, she illuminates how American women have always plied influence and networks for political ends, including the making of a new nation.
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Fatal abstraction : why the managerial class loses control of software
by Darryl Campbell
Software was supposed to radically improve society. Outdated mechanical systems would be easily replaced; programs like PowerPoint would make information flow more freely; social media platforms like Facebook would bring people together; and generative AI would solve the world's greatest ills. Yet in practice, few of the systems we looked to with such high hopes have lived up to their fundamental mandate. In fact, in too many cases they've made things worse, exposing us to immense risk at the societal and the individual levels. How did we get to this point? In Fatal Abstraction, Darryl Campbell shows that the problem is 'managerial software': programs created and overseen not by engineers but by professional managers with only the most superficial knowledge of technology itself.
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Unshrunk : a story of psychiatric treatment resistance
by Laura Delano
A memoir of navigating psychiatric diagnoses and medications, chronicling the author's thirteen-year struggle within the mental health system, her decision to reject prescribed treatments, and her journey to redefine herself while questioning the influence of psychiatry and pharmaceuticals on human identity.
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The neck : a natural and cultural history
by Kent D. Dunlap
A 300-million-year tour of the prominent role of the neck in animal evolution and human culture. Humans give a lot of attention to the neck. We decorate it with jewelry and ties, kiss it passionately, and use it to express ourselves in word and song. Yet, at the neck, people have also shackled their prisoners, executed their opponents, and slain their victims. Beyond the drama of human culture, animals have evolved their necks into a staggering variety of shapes and uses vital to their lifestyles. The Neck delves into evolutionary time to solve a living paradox--why is our neck so central to our survival and culture, but so vulnerable to injury and disease? Biologist Kent Dunlap shows how the neck's vulnerability is not simply an unfortunate quirk of evolution. Its weaknesses are intimately connected to the vessels, pipes, and glands that make it so vital to existence. Fun and far-reaching, The Neck explores the diversity of forms and functions of the neck in humans and other animals and shows how this small anatomical transition zone has been a locus of incredible evolutionary and cultural creativity.
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Midnight on the Potomac : the last year of the Civil War, the Lincoln assassination, and the rebirth of America
by Scott Ellsworth
From the author of the National Book Award longlisted title The Ground Breaking, a riveting new look at the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, replete with evidence pointing to a much larger Confederate conspiracy. Told with a page-turning pace and eye-opening cast of characters, Ellsworth sets out to correct a pivotal moment of American history that we have gotten completely wrong--until now. Jam-packed with fresh, revelatory evidence, Ellsworth's research strongly infers that by the time that the houselights dimmed inside of Ford's Theatre on the evening of April 14th, 1865, Booth had been working alongside, if not in direct concert with, the Confederate Secret Service for nearly a year. Historians have long ignored that during the last ten months of the Civil War, the Confederacy launched a desperate, audacious war of terror against the north. In the North, Rebels attempted to derail trains, set buildings on fire, spread smallpox, and undermined public support for the Union army. Instead, history books and schools teach that John Wilkes Booth acted alone, was admired by neither side, and was a second-rate actor. This couldn't have been further from the truth: Booth was charming, a world-famous performer, and--most importantly--an ardent supporter of the Confederacy. In the sweltering summer heat of 1864, President Abraham Lincoln had a front-row view of the Civil War, as he dodged firing bullets from the approaching Confederate army at Fort Stevens. It was the first time in American history that a sitting president would come under enemy fire, but the history books would put a far greater focus on his assassination just eight months later. In Midnight on the Potomac, Scott Ellsworth rewrites history, arguing that the two events were in fact connected and that Lincolns' assassination was likely ordered by leaders of the Confederate Army.
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The CIA Book Club : The Secret Mission to Win the Cold War With Forbidden Literature
by Charlie English
Charlie English narrates this tale of Cold War spycraft, smuggling, and secret printing operations for the first time, highlighting the work of a handful of extraordinary people who fought for intellectual freedom—people like Mirosław Chojecki, who suffered beatings, imprisonment, and exile in pursuit of his clandestine mission. The CIA Book Club is a story about the power of the printed word as a means of resistance and liberation. Books, it shows, can set you free.
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Bad company : private equity and the death of the American dream
by Megan Greenwell
Private equity executives, meanwhile, are not only among the wealthiest people in American society, but have grown to become modern-day barons with outsized influence on our politics and legislation. CEOs of firms like Blackstone, Carlyle, KKR, and Apollo are rewarded with seats in the Senate and on the boards of the country's most august institutions; meanwhile, entire communities are hollowed out as a result of their buyouts. Workers lose their jobs. Communities lose their institutions. Only private equity wins.
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Slither : how nature's most maligned creatures illuminate our world
by Stephen S. Hall
For millennia, depictions of snakes as alternatively beautiful and menacing creatures have appeared in religious texts, mythology, poetry, and beyond. From the foundational deities of ancient Egypt to the reactions of squeamish schoolchildren today, it is a historically commonplace belief that snakes are devious, dangerous, and even evil. But where there is hatred and fear, there is also fascination and reverence. How is it that creatures so despised and sinister, so foreign of movement and ostensibly devoid of sociality and emotion, have fired the imaginations of poets, prophets, and painters across time and cultures? In SLITHER, science writer Stephen S. Hall presents a naturalistic, cultural, ecological, and scientific meditation on these loathed yet magnetic creatures. In each chapter, he explores a biological aspect of The Snake, such as their cold blooded metabolism and venomous nature, alongside their mythology, artistic depictions, and cultural veneration. In doing so, he explores not only what neurologically triggers our wary fascination with these limbless creatures, but also how the current generation of snake scientists is using cutting-edge technologies to discover new truths about these evolutionarily ancient creatures--truths that may ultimately affect and enhance human health.
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Dinner With King Tut : How Rogue Archaeologists Are Re-creating the Sights, Sounds, Smells, and Tastes of Lost Civilizations
by Sam Kean
Beloved author Sam Kean joins these experimental archaeologists on their adventures across the globe, from the Andes to the South Seas. He fires medieval catapults, tries his hand at ancient surgery and tattooing, builds Roman-style roads—and, in novelistic interludes, spins gripping tales about the lives of our ancestors with vivid imagination and his signature meticulous research. Lively, offbeat, and filled with stunning revelations about our past, Dinner with King Tut sheds light on days long gone and the intrepid experts resurrecting them today, with startling, lifelike detail and more than a few laughs along the way.
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Dimming the Sun : The Urgent Case for Geoengineering
by Thomas Ramge
Earth stands at a tipping point. As we fail to curtail emissions fast enough, our planet stares down a cascade of imminent, catastrophic, and irreversible disaster triggered by climate change. Yet a potent technology already exists to buy us more time: solar geoengineering. Through methods such as atmospheric aerosols, human-generated cirrus clouds, and solar sails, we humans can at least in the short term slow the Earth's warming. Should we? Ramge shows us how the science works, what the risks are--both geophysical and political--and how the international community might come together to agree on and regulate a safe and effective plan for geoengineering. And while he identifies the unknowns about the technology that remain, he believes this very uncertainty demands our full attention.
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In praise of floods : the untamed river and the life it brings
by James C. Scott
It is the annual flood pulse—the brief time when the river occupies the floodplain—that gives a river its vitality, but it is human engineering that kills it, suppressing the flood pulse with dams, irrigation, siltation, dikes, and levees. In demonstrating these threats to the riverine world, award-winning author James C. Scott examines the life history of a particular river, the Ayeyarwady (Irrawaddy) of Burma, the heartland and superhighway of Burman culture.
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The aviator and the showman : Amelia Earhart, George Putnam, and the marriage that made an American icon
by Laurie Gwen Shapiro
The riveting and cinematic story of a partnership that would change the world forever In 1928, a young social worker and hobby pilot named Amelia Earhart arrived in the office of George Putnam, heir to the Putnam & Sons throne and hitmaker, on the hunt for the right woman for a secret flying mission across the Atlantic. A partnership-professional and soon otherwise-was born. The Aviator and the Showman unveils the untold story of Amelia's decade-long marriage to George Putnam, offering an intimate exploration of their relationship and the pivotal role it played in her enduring legacy. Despite her outwardly modest and humble image, Amelia was fiercely driven and impossibly brave, a lifelong feminist and trailblazer in her personal and professional life. Putnam, the so-called "PT Barnum of publishing" was a bookselling visionary-but often pushed his authors to extreme lengths in the name of publicity, and no one bore that weight more than Amelia. Their ahead-of-its time partnership supported her grand ambitions-but also pressed her into more and more treacherous stunts to promote her books, influencing a certain recklessness up to and including her final flight. Earhart is a captivating figure to many, but the truth about her life is often overshadowed by myth and legend. In this cinematic new account, Laurie Gwen Shapiro emphasizes Earhart's human side, her struggles, and her authentic aspirations, the truths behind her brave pursuits and the compromises she made to fit into societal expectations. With a trove of new sources including undiscovered audio interviews from those closest to Amelia, Amelia and George presents her as a multifaceted woman-complete with flaws, desires, and competitive drive. It is a gripping and passionate tale of adventure, colorful characters, hubris, and a complex and a vivid portrait of a marriage that shaped the trajectory of an iconic life.
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Their accomplices wore robes : how the Supreme Court chained black America to the bottom of a racial caste system
by Brando Simeo Starkey
Their Accomplices Wore Robes takes readers from the Civil War era to the present and describes how the Supreme Court-even more than the presidency or Congress-aligned with the enemies of Black progress to undermine the promise of the Constitution's Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments. The Reconstruction Amendments-which sought to abolish slavery, establish equal protection under the law, and protect voting rights-converted the Constitution into a potent anti-caste document. But in the years since, the Supreme Court has refused to allow the amendments to fulfill that promise. Time and again, when petitioned to make the nation's founding conceit-that all men are created equal-real for Black Americans, the nine black robes have chosen white supremacy over racial fairness. Their Accomplices Wore Robes brings to life dozens of cases and their rich casts of characters-petitioners, attorneys, justices-to explain how America arrived at this point and how society might arrive somewhere better, even as today's federal courts lurch rightward. In this groundbreaking grand history, Brando Simeo Starkey reveals a troubling and dark aspect of American history.
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It rhymes with Takei
by George Takei
In a moving, emotional graphic memoir, the Star Trek actor, activist and social media star shares his personal journey from a closeted youth in the 1950s to coming out at 68, revealing how love, fear and activism shaped his identity.
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JFK : public, private, secret
by J. Randy Taraborrelli
From the New York Times bestselling Kennedy historian and author of Jackie: Public, Private, Secret comes the other side of the story-her husband's: JFK: Public, Private, Secret. In this deeply researched presidential biography, J. Randy Taraborrelli tells John F. Kennedy's story in a provocative new way by revealing how public moments in his life were so influenced by private relationships with not only his family, but also Jackie's. But it's the secret life that also surprises. As Congressman, Senatorand finally President, JFK was a magnet for women. With exclusive interviews and meticulous research, Taraborrelli reveals not only the man's many affairs but also the strength and resolve his wife showed in coping with them. JFK's women include: ¨ Jackie Kennedy, and her rules of engagement for Jack's infidelity: "Show me some respect and don't rub it in my face" ¨ Inga Arvad. JFK's first love and how it ended over fears she was a Nazi spy. ¨ Marilyn Monroe. Why Jackie insisted JFK end it with her: "This one's different, Jack. This one's trouble!" ¨ Finally - the truth about of JFK's relationship with Marilyn exclusively from Marilyn's closest friend... and how it wasn't what people believed. ¨ Joan Hitchcock. The mysterious brunette who comforted Jack after Jackie threatened to file for divorce. Other great stories: ¨ How JFK's grief over his infant son caused him to make rash decisions that pulled the USA into Vietnam for the first time. ¨ The real truth, once and for all, about the Mafia's involvement in JFK's election. ¨ The startling drug abuse that clouded the President's decisions during the disastrous Bay of Pigs... ¨ ... and how Jackie managed to wean him from those drugs in time for the nearly cataclysmic Cuban Missile Crisis. ¨ The Kennedys' secret plans to renew their wedding vows, made just before JFK's assassination. The JFK presented in Taraborrelli's definitive biography is a complex and endlessly fascinating historical figure, despite-and maybe even because of-his many flaws.
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Supermassive : black holes at the beginning and end of the universe
by James Trefil
Explores the history, development, and mysteries of black holes, from Einstein's early theories to modern research on their visibility, cosmic effects, and connection to galaxies, while also delving into popular theories, scientific breakthroughs, and the enduring intrigue surrounding these enigmatic phenomena.
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Toni at Random : the iconic writer's legendary editorship
by Dana A. Williams
An insightful exploration unveils the lesser-known dimensions of this legendary writer and her legacy, revealing the cultural icon's profound impact as a visionary editor who helped define an important period in American publishing and literature.
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Morton Grove Public Library
6140 Lincoln Ave
Morton Grove, Illinois 60053
(847) 965-4220www.mgpl.org |
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