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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. EllisPulitzer 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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| Dead and Alive: Essays by Zadie SmithZadie Smith's wide-ranging and witty latest collects 30 essays and talks penned during the last ten years, offering the author's reflections on pop culture, politics, loss, aging, and more. For fans of: Like Love: Essays and Conversations by Maggie Nelson. |
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38 Londres Street: On Impunity, Pinochet in England, and a Nazi in Patagonia
by Philippe Sands
THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW EDITORS' CHOICE - A KIRKUS BEST NONFICTION BOOK OF THE YEAR - In this intimate legal and historical detective story, the world-renowned lawyer and acclaimed author of East West Street traces the footsteps of two of the twentieth century's most merciless criminals--accused of genocide and crimes against humanity--testing the limits of immunity and impunity after Nuremberg. Though nearly a decade in the making, this book could not arrive at a better time, because its subject is one of the most pressing themes of our era: impunity. . . . Sands has created an indelible and enthralling work of moral witness.--Patrick Radden Keefe, author of Say Nothing On the evening of October 16, 1998, Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet was arrested at a medical clinic in London. After a brutal, seventeen-year reign marked by assassinations, disappearances, and torture--frequently tied to the infamous detention center at the heart of Santiago, Londres 38--Pinochet was being indicted for international crimes and extradition to Spain, opening the door to criminal charges that would follow him to the grave, in 2006. Three decades earlier, on the evening of December 3, 1962, SS-Commander Walter Rauff was arrested in his home in Punta Arenas, at the southern tip of Chile. As the overseer of the development and use of gas vans in World War II, he was indicted for the mass murder of tens of thousands of Jews and faced extradition to West Germany. Would these uncommon criminals be held accountable? Were their stories connected? The Nuremberg Trials--where Rauff's crimes had first been read into the record, in 1945--opened the door to universal jurisdiction, and Pinochet's case would be the first effort to ensnare a former head of state. In this unique blend of memoir, courtroom drama, and travelogue, Philippe Sands gives us a front row seat to the Pinochet trial--where he acted as a barrister for Human Rights Watch--and teases out the dictator's unexpected connection to a leading Nazi who ended up managing a king crab cannery in Patagonia. A decade-long journey exposes the chilling truth behind the lives of two men and their intertwined destinies on 38 Londres Street.
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| On My Honor: The Secret History of the Boy Scouts of America by Kim ChristensenPulitzer Prize-winning journalist Kim Christensen's posthumous exposé unflinchingly examines decades of sexual abuse in the Boy Scouts of America, whose known victims number 82,000 and counting. Further reading: Scout Camp: Sex, Death, and Secret Societies Inside the Boy Scouts of America by James Renner. |
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| Before Gender: Lost Stories from Trans History, 1850-1950 by Eli ErlickIn 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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Contact your librarian for more great books!
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