The Perfect Summer chronicles a glorious English summer a century ago when the world was on the cusp of irrevocable change. That summer of 1911 a new king was crowned and the aristocracy was at play, bounding from one house party to the next. But perfection was not for all. Cracks in the social fabric were showing. The country was brought to a standstill by industrial strikes. Temperatures rose steadily to more than 100 degrees; by August deaths from...

"Inspired by generations of her family's unwavering belief in the power of education, Pashtana Durrani recognized her calling early in life: to educate Afghanistan's girls and young women, raised in a society where learning is forbidden. In a country devastated by war and violence, heeding that call seemed both impossible and dangerous. Pashtana founded the nonprofit LEARN and developed a program for getting educational materials directly into the...

"There's a war against truth... and if we don't win it, intellectual freedom will be a casualty. The West's commitment to freedom, reason, and true liberalism has never been more seriously threatened than it is today by the stifling forces of political correctness. Dr. Gad Saad, the host of the enormously popular YouTube show THE SAAD TRUTH, exposes the bad ideas--what he calls "idea pathogens"--that are killing common sense and rational debate. Incubated...

"In American Panic, New York Times bestselling author Mark Stein traces the history and consequences of American political panics through the years. Virtually every American, on one level or another, falls victim to the hype, intensity, and propaganda that accompanies political panic, regardless of their own personal affiliations. By highlighting the similarities between American political panics from the Salem witch hunt to present-day vehemence...

"This book discusses the long history of the deleterious effects of racial segregation on health in the United States. Author Brown puts Baltimore under a microscope because Baltimore was the first city in America to enact segregationist legislation and because it remains hypersegregated to this day. "Black butterfly" describes the shape of a demographic map that plots Baltimore's population by race: a white central axis with black wings east and...

At the moment when the Sudan, the continent's biggest country, is being divided into two nations, an old civilizing pathology re-emerges: that of colonialism, clash of empires, and yet new episodes of bloody (and holy) wars over land and resources. The director Hubert Sauper flies a plane into South Sudan, interviewing residents, Chinese oil workers, UN peacekeepers, warlords and American evangelists.

"A collection of compelling, hard-hitting first-person essays, poems, and photos that expose what our punitive social systems do to so many Americans. Going for Broke, edited by Alissa Quart, Executive Director of the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, and David Wallis, former Managing Director of EHRP, gives voice to a range of gifted writers for whom "economic precarity" is more than just another assignment. All illustrate what the late Barbara...

"It was the street your mother warned you about--even if you lived in San Francisco. Long associated with skid row, saloons, freak shows, violence, and vice, the Bowery often showed the worst New York City had to offer. Yet there were times when it showed its best as well. The Bowery is New York's oldest street and Manhattan's broadest boulevard. Like the city itself, it has continually reinvented itself over the centuries. Named for the Dutch farms,...