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In Dead Presidents, NPR host Brady Carlson takes listeners to presidential gravesites, monuments, and memorials to tell the death stories of our greatest leaders. Mixing biography and travelogue, Carlson explores whether William Henry Harrison really died of a cold, why Zachary Taylor's remains were exhumed 140 years after his death, and how what killed James A. Garfield wasn't an assassin's bullet.

An Atria Book. Atria Books has a great book for every listener.

In the 70s and 80s, thousands of Hmong families made the journey from the war-torn jungles of Laos to the overcrowded refugee camps of Thailand and onward to the United States, all in search of a new place to call home. Decades later, their experiences remain largely unknown. Kao Kalia Yang was driven to tell her own family's story after her grandmother’s death. The Latehomecomer is a tribute to that grandmother, a remarkable woman whose spirit held her family together.

Over the past three decades, citizens of democracies who claim to value freedom, tolerance, and the rule of law have increasingly embraced illiberal politicians and platforms. Democracy is in trouble - but who is really to blame? In Our Own Worst Enemy, Tom Nichols challenges the current depictions of the rise of illiberal and antidemocratic movements in the United States and elsewhere as the result of the deprivations of globalization or the malign decisions of elites. Rather, he places the blame for the rise of illiberalism on the people themselves.

In the popular imagination, lethal injection is a slight pinch and a swift nodding off to forever-sleep. It is performed by well-qualified medical professionals. It is regulated and carefully conducted. And it usually provides a "humane" death. In reality, however, not one of those things is true. Secrets of the Killing State pulls back the curtain on this clandestine punishment practice, presenting a view of lethal injection that states have worked hard to hide. Botched executions are a part of this story, but they are just the tip of the iceberg.

Saidiya Hartman has been praised as "one of our most brilliant contemporary thinkers" (Claudia Rankine, New York Times Book Review). In Scenes of Subjection—Hartman's first book, now revised and expanded—her singular talents and analytical framework turn away from the "terrible spectacle" and toward the forms of routine terror and quotidian violence characteristic of slavery, illuminating the intertwining of injury, subjugation, and selfhood even in abolitionist depictions of enslavement.

As lives offline and online merge, it's easy to forget how we got here. Rise of the Machines reclaims the story of cybernetics, a control theory of man and machine. Thomas Rid delivers a portrait of our technology-enraptured era. Springing from mathematician Norbert Wiener amid the devastation of World War II, the cybernetic vision underpinned a host of myths about the future of machines. This vision radically transformed the postwar world, ushering in sweeping cultural change.

As American politics descends into a battle of anger and hostility between two groups called "left" and "right," people increasingly ask: What is the essential difference between these two ideological groups? In The Myth of Left and Right, Hyrum Lewis and Verlan Lewis provide the surprising answer: nothing. As the authors argue, there is no enduring philosophy, disposition, or essence uniting the various positions associated with the liberal and conservative ideologies of today.

In unforgettable tales of innocence lost under African skies, we follow Godwin's awakening to the often savage struggle between Whites and Blacks, his horror when he is forced to fight in a civil war he detests, and his experiences as a journalist covering the country's violent transition to Black rule as Rhodesia's colonial era comes to an end and the new state of Zimbabwe is born from its bloody ashes. Mukiwa is a poignant, compelling memoir and an invaluable addition to the literature of southern Africa.

This volume opens with Mohandas Gandhi's arrival in Bombay in January 1915 and takes us through his epic struggles over the next three decades. In reconstructing Gandhi's life and work, author Ramachandra Guha has drawn on 60 different archival collections. Using this wealth of material, Guha creates a portrait of Gandhi and of those closest to him that illuminates the complexity inside his thinking, his motives, his actions, and their outcomes as he engaged with every important aspect of social and public life in the India of his time.

In the heart of America, a metropolis is quietly destroying itself. Detroit, once the richest city in the nation, is now its poorest. Once the vanguard of America’s machine age - mass production, automobiles, and blue-collar jobs - Detroit is now America’s capital for unemployment, illiteracy, foreclosure, and dropouts. With the steel-eyed reportage that has become his trademark and the righteous indignation that only a native son can possess, journalist Charlie LeDuff sets out to uncover what has brought low this once-vibrant city, his city.

Wonder Woman is an Amazon Warrior and Princess. She has never left her home on Paradise Island. But she wants to be a superhero - the very best superhero she can be. In order to train at the most elite school in the galaxy, she has to juggle acing her classes, forging new friendships, trying to make the team for the Super Hero Super Triathlon, and her insane suitemate sharing her every embarrassing moment on social media. Not to mention, Wonder Woman has never seen a boy before.

Can octopuses feel pain and pleasure? What about crabs, shrimps, insects, or spiders? How do we tell whether a person unresponsive after severe brain injury might be suffering? When does a fetus in the womb start to have conscious experiences? Could there even be rudimentary feelings in miniature models of the human brain, grown from human stem cells? And what about AI? These are questions about the edge of sentience, and they are subject to enormous, disorienting uncertainty. We desperately want certainty, but it is out of reach.

In 2014, Chessy Prout was a freshman at St. Paul's School, a prestigious boarding school in New Hampshire, when a senior boy sexually assaulted her as part of a ritualized game of conquest. Chessy bravely reported her assault to the police and testified against her attacker in court. Then, in the face of unexpected backlash from her once-trusted school community, she shed her anonymity to help other survivors find their voice.

In 2016, Dr. Angela Mailis, a world-renowned expert on chronic pain management, was brought face-to-face with domestic violence, when an accomplished colleague was murdered by her equally accomplished husband. It was familiar territory for Dr. Mailis, who herself had been involved in an emotionally abusive relationship for 27 years.

In the winter of 1969, from big cities to small towns, young women across the country sent in applications to Yale University for the first time. The Ivy League institution dedicated to graduating "1,000 male leaders" each year had finally decided to open its doors to the nation's top female students. The landmark decision was a huge step forward for women's equality in education. Or was it?

Kaeleigh and Raeanne are 16-year-old identical twins, the daughters of a district court judge father and politician mother running for U.S. Congress. Everything on the surface seems fine, but underneath run very deep and damaging secrets. When the girls were nine, Daddy turned to his beloved Kaeleigh in ways a father never should. Raeanne needs to numb the pain of not being Daddy's favorite; Kaeleigh wants to do everything she can to feel something normal, even if it means cutting herself and vomiting after every binge.

Can the president launch a nuclear attack without congressional approval? Is it ever a crime to criticize the president? Can states legally resist a president's executive order? Corey Brettschneider takes us on a deep dive into the US Constitution to answer questions that, in our tumultuous era, Americans are asking more than ever before. From the document itself and from history's pivotal court cases, we learn why certain powers were granted to the presidency, how the Bill of Rights limits those powers, and what "we the people" can do.

Every age and social strata has its bad eggs, rule-breakers, and nose-thumbers. As acclaimed popular historian and author of How to Be a Victorian Ruth Goodman reveals in her madcap chronicle, Elizabethan England was particularly rank with troublemakers, from snooty needlers who took aim with a cutting "thee" to lowbrow drunkards with revolting table manners. Goodman draws on advice manuals, court cases, and sermons to offer this colorfully crude portrait of offenses most foul.

Burning fossil fuels will cause catastrophic global warming: this is what top American oil executives were told by scientists in 1959. But they ignored that warning. Instead, they developed one of the biggest, most polluting oil sources in the world—the oil sands in Alberta, Canada. As investigative journalist Geoff Dembicki reveals in this explosive book, the decades-long conspiracy to keep the oil sands flowing into the US would turn out to be one of the biggest reasons for the world's failure to stop the climate crisis.