Books

WINNER OF THE 2016 DRUE HEINZ LITERATURE PRIZE Winner of the 2017 California Book Awards, first fiction category

Melissa Yancy’s personal experience in the milieus of hospitals, medicine, and family services infuse her narratives with a rare texture and gravity. Keenly observant, offering both sharp humor and humanity, these stories explore the ties that bind—both genetic and otherwise—and the fine line between the mundane and the maudlin. Whether the men or women that populate these pages are contending with illness, death, or parenthood, the real focus is on time and our inability to slow its progression, reminding us to revel in those moments we can control.

Books Are Weapons shows how the independent press, rooted in the long Polish tradition of well-organized resistance to foreign occupation, reshaped this tradition to embrace non-violent civil resistance while creating a network which evolved from a small group of dissidents into a broad opposition movement with cross-national ties and millions of sympathizers. It was the galvanizing force in the resistance to communism and the rebuilding of Poland’s democratic society in the 1980s.

Winner of the 2016 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize

The poems in Let’s All Die Happy explore apostasy, concerned with what happens after the beliefs and institutions which promised fulfillment leave us empty instead. Darkly humorous, the collection examines a patriarchal culture in which women are defined through their relationship to others.

Polish journalist Pawel Pieniazek was among the first journalists to enter the war-torn region of eastern Ukraine and spent over two years there. Greetings from Novorossiya is his vivid firsthand account of the conflict. His fluency in both Ukrainian and Russian granted him access and the ability to move among all sides in the conflict. He was the first reporter to reach the scene when Russian troops in Ukraine accidentally shot down a civilian airliner, killing all 298 people aboard. With powerful color photos, telling interviews from the local population, and brilliant reportage, Pieniazek’s account documents these dramatic events as they transpired. Originally published in Polish, this unique view of history in the making brings to life the tragedy of Ukraine for a Western audience.

The Standard Oil Company emerged out of obscurity in the 1860s to capture 90 percent of the petroleum refining industry in the United States during the Gilded Age. Economic success masked the dark side of efficiency as Standard Oil dumped oil waste into public waterways, filled the urban atmosphere with acrid smoke, and created a consumer safety crisis by selling kerosene below Congressional standards. Organized around the four classical elements at the core of Standard Oil’s success (earth, air, fire, and water), Refining Nature provides an ecological context for the rise of one of the most important corporations in American history.

A journalist, diplomat, and writer, William Christian Bullitt was a member of the American delegation to the Paris Peace Conference (1919), the first Ambassador to the Soviet Union (1933-1936) and France (1936-1940), and the Special Representative of the President of the United States in the Middle East (1940). He played a huge role in the establishment of US-USSR relations on the eve of World War II. Based on Bullitt’s unpublished papers and diplomatic documents from the Russian archives, this new biography presents Bullitt as a truly cosmopolitan American, one of the first politicians of the global era.

Winner of the 2019 CCCC Outstanding Book Award.

Lorimer Leonard shows how multilingual migrant women both succeed and struggle in their writing contexts. Based on a qualitative study of everyday multilingual writers in the United States, she shows how migrants’ literacies are revalued because they move with writers among their different languages and around the world. The book details the complicated reality of multilingual literacy, which is lived at the nexus of prejudice, prestige, and power.

How did the brewing of beer become a scientific process? James Sumner explores this question by charting the theory and practice of the trade in Britain and Ireland during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

This is a collection of conversations with more than thirty Latina/o authors of literature for young people. Aldama provides an introduction and serves as the interviewer for each author. The conversations revolve around the idea of Latina/o identity and what that means for authors of books for children and young adults. They also talk extensively about their experiences within the publishing industry and about their audiences. There is not a lot of scholarship in the volume, but it allows Latina/o writers of children’s and young adult literature to speak for themselves.

An innovative and original socio-cultural study of the history of electricity during the late Victorian and Edward periods.

In 1963, nineteen Americans embarked on the first expedition that would combine high-altitude climbing with scientific research. The primary objective was to study how severe stress at high altitudes affected human behavior. The expedition promised to resurrect American heroism, in a show of physical strength and skill that, when combined with scientific expertise, would dominate international rivals on the frontiers of territorial exploration. They faced hostile conditions that challenged and ultimately compromised standard research protocols, yielding results that were too exceptional to be generalized to other environments. Clements offers an exploration of the impact of extremity on the production of scientific knowledge and the role of masculinity and nationalism in scientific inquiry.

Finalist for the 2019 Griffin Poetry Prize

Lake Michigan, a series of 19 lyric poems, imagines a prison camp located on the beaches of a Chicago that is privatized, racially segregated, and overrun by a brutal police force.

Waters explores the confluences of the sensual and the spiritual, and renders their mysteries with precision and clarity. The title evokes the rigorous consciousness that prods the artist to deepen into his craft. Line by line, Waters delivers the passionate eloquence and intensity that distinguish his poems.

Strategic Frames analyzes minority policies in Estonia and Latvia following their independence from the Soviet Union. It weighs the powerful influence of both Europe and Russia on their policy choices, and how this intersected with the costs and benefits of policy changes for the politicians in each state.

In the Victorian era, James Watt became an iconic engineer, but in his own time he was also an influential chemist. David Philip Miller examines Watt’s illustrious engineering career in light of his parallel interest in chemistry, arguing that Watt’s conception of steam engineering relied upon chemical understandings.