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History and Current Events December 2025 |
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The Great Contradiction: The Tragic Side of the American Founding
by Joseph J. Ellis
Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Joseph J. Ellis follows up The Cause: The American Revolution and Its Discontents, 1773-1783 with an incisive exploration of how America's Founding Fathers were complicit in slavery and Indigenous dispossession despite their calls for universal freedom. Further reading: Liberty Is Sweet: The Hidden History of the American Revolution by Woody Holton.
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The Traitors Circle: The True Story of a Secret Resistance Network in Nazi Germany--And the Spy Who Betrayed Them
by Jonathan Freedland
When the whole world is lying, someone must tell the truth. Berlin, 1943: A group of high society anti-Nazi dissenters meet for a tea party one late summer's afternoon. They do not know that, sitting around the table, is someone poised to betray them all to the Gestapo. They form a circle of unlikely rebels, drawn from the German elite: two countesses, a diplomat, an intelligence officer, an ambassador's widow and a pioneering head mistress. Undone from within and pursued to near-destruction by one of the Reich's cruelest men, they showed a heroism in the face of the most vengeful regime in history that raises the question: what kind of person does it take to risk everything and stand up to tyranny?--
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Motherland: A Feminist History of Modern Russia, from Revolution to Autocracy
by Julia Ioffe
In 1990, seven-year-old Julia Ioffe and her family fled the Soviet Union. Nearly twenty years later, Ioffe returned to Moscow, only to discover just how much Russian society had changed while she had been living in America. The Soviet women she had known growing up--doctors, engineers, scientists--had seemingly been replaced with women desperate to marry rich and become stay-at-home moms. How had Russia gone from portraying itself as the vanguard of world feminism to the last bastion of conservative Christian values? In Motherland, Ioffe turns modern Russian history on its head, telling it exclusively through the stories of its women.
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Saudi Arabia: A Modern History
by David Commins
A major new history of Saudi Arabia, from its eighteenth-century origins to the present day Saudi Arabia is one of the wealthiest countries in the world, a major player on the international stage and the site of Islam's two holiest cities. It is also one of the world's only absolute monarchies. How did Saudi Arabia get to where it is today? In this comprehensive account, David Commins narrates the full history of Saudi Arabia from oasis emirate to present-day attempts to leap to a post-petroleum economy. Moving through the ages, Commins traces how the Saud dynasty's reliance on sectarianism, foreign expertise, and petroleum to stabilize power has unintentionally spawned secular and religious movements seeking accountability and justice. He incorporates the experiences of activists, women, religious minorities, Bedouin, and expatriate workers as the country transformed from subsistence agrarian life to urban consumer society. This is a perceptive portrait of Saudi Arabia's complex and evolving story--and a country that is all too easily misunderstood.
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Dead and Alive: Essays
by Zadie Smith
Zadie Smith brings her unique skills as an essayist to bear on a range of subjects that have captured her attention in recent years. She takes an exhilaratingly close look at artists Toyin Ojih Odutola, Kara Walker, and Celia Paul. She invites us along to the movies, to see and to think about Tâar, and to New York to reflect on the spontaneous moments that connect us. She takes us on a walk down Kilburn High Road in her beloved North-West London and welcomes us to mourn with her the passing of writers Joan Didion, Martin Amis, Hilary Mantel, Philip Roth, and Toni Morrison. She considers changes of government on both sides of the Atlantic--and the meaning of 'the commons' in all our lives--
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Scarred: A Memoir of a Childhood Stolen and a Life Reclaimed
by Clark Fredericks
A memoir of trauma and transformation by a man who was haunted by childhood abuse but who fought his way back--a journey from vengeance and prison to freedom and redemption. For a boy growing up in the 1970s, rural northern New Jersey was a year-round playground, filled with secret fishing holes, enchanted woods, and private trails to explore with friends. But this childhood idyll was snatched from Clark Fredericks by a man he regarded as a local hero: Dennis Pegg, the town's Boy Scout leader, a law enforcement officer with the Sussex County Sheriff's Department, and, as Fredericks would discover, a serial predator. Through his teenage years and young adulthood, Fredericks kept silent about the horrific abuse he experienced, turning to drugs, alcohol, gambling, and sex addiction to numb the memory. For decades, he remained tormented by shame, unable to share the secrets that were eating away at his psyche--until he violently confronted his abuser. At once heartbreaking and uplifting, Scarred is the story of a man who overcame the destructive aftereffects of violence and abuse that nearly destroyed him. Now an advocate for victims and a prominent voice in support of child abuse law reform, Fredericks powerfully illustrates the healing power of love and trust.
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Before Gender: Lost Stories from Trans History, 1850-1950
by Eli Erlick
In this "essential and eye-opening paradigm shift" (Publishers Weekly), Trans Student Educational Resources founder Eli Erlick profiles 30 trailblazing transgender people whose stories have often been intentionally erased from history. Try this next: Nothing Ever Just Disappears: Seven Hidden Queer Histories by Diarmuid Hester.
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Seeking Shelter: A Working Mother, Her Children, and a Story of Homelessness in America
by Jeff Hobbs
In the tradition of Evicted and Invisible Child, a moving, real-life saga (The New Yorker) that follows a single mother of six in Los Angeles courageously struggling to keep her family together and her children in school amid the devastating housing crisis--from the bestselling author of The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace. In 2018, poverty and domestic violence cast Evelyn and her children into the urban wilderness of Los Angeles, where she avoids the family crisis network that offers no clear pathway for her children to remain together and in a decent school. For the next five years, Evelyn works full time as a waitress--yet remains unable to afford legitimate housing or qualify for government aid. All the while, she delivers her children to school every day and strives to provide them with loving memories and college aspirations. Eventually Evelyn encounters Wendi, a recently trained social worker who, decades earlier, survived her own relationship trauma and housing crisis. Evelyn becomes one of Wendi's first clients, and the relationship transforms them both. Told from the perspectives of Evelyn, Wendi, and Evelyn's teenaged son Orlando, Seeking Shelter is a remarkably vivid and...deeply empathetic (Los Angeles Times) exploration of homelessness, poverty, and education in America--a must-read for anyone interested in understanding not just social inequality and economic disparity in our society but also the power of a mother's love and vision for her kids.
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Girl on Girl: How Pop Culture Turned a Generation of Women Against Themselves
by Sophie Gilbert
What happened to feminism in the twenty-first century? This question feels increasingly urgent in a moment of cultural and legislative backlash, when widespread uncertainty about the movement's power, focus, and currency threatens decades of progress. Sophie Gilbert identifies an inflection point in the late 1990s and early 2000s, when the energy of third-wave and riot grrrl feminism collapsed into a regressive period of hyper-objectification, sexualization, and infantilization. Mining the darker side of nostalgia, Gilbert trains her keen analytic eye on the most revealing cultural objects of the era, across music, film, television, fashion, tabloid journalism, and more. What she recounts is harrowing, from the leering gaze of the paparazzi to the gleeful cruelty of early reality TV and a burgeoning internet culture vicious toward women in the spotlight and damaging for those who weren't. Gilbert tracks many of the period's dominant themes back to the rise of internet porn, which gained widespread influence as it began to pervade our collective consciousness. Amid a collective reconsideration of the way women are treated in public, Girl on Girl is a blistering indictment of the matrix of misogyny that undergirded the cultural production of the early twenty-first century, and continues to shape our world today.
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Ancestors: Identity and DNA in the Levant
by Pierre Zalloua
Population geneticist Pierre Zalloua's "powerful argument against present-day sectarianism and nationalism" (Publishers Weekly) incisively examines the complex genetic and cultural history of the ancient Levant, eschewing oversimplified or interchangeable understandings of heritage and ethnicity gleaned from genetic testing results. Further reading: The Trouble with Ancient DNA: Telling Stories of the Past with Genomic Science by Anna Källén.
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Contact your librarian for more great books!
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