Where does freedom live? Why does it sometimes feel so good to be told what to do? What on heaven and earth is an apicklypse? The Salt of the Universe raises these and other questions arising from Amy Leach’s experience, including her time playing fiddle and her childhood in the Seventh-day Adventist Church, with its many prohibitions (coffee, dancing) and its emphasis on the apocalypse. The book argues against argument, but most of all against fundamentalisms of all kinds and their limiting effect on our humanity.

McCarthy's latest addresses the political and aesthetic evolution of African American literature and its authors during the Cold War, an era McCarthy calls “the Blue Period.” In McCarthy’s hands, this notion of the Blue Period provides a fresh critical framework that challenges long-held disciplinary and archival assumptions. Black writers in the early Cold War went underground, McCarthy argues, not to depoliticize or liberalize their work, but to make it more radical—keeping alive affective commitments for a future time.

The Gulf of Maine is the world's fastest-warming marine ecosystem, and the Long Island Sound has been the site of conservation battles that predict the fights ahead for the Gulf. Eiren Caffall is the inheritor of a family legacy of two hundred years of genetic kidney disease and raising a child who may inherit that legacy also. The Mourner's Bestiary braids environmental research with a memoir of generational healing and details the work it takes to get there for the human and animal lives caught in tides of loss.

In this riveting account, Atossa Abrahamian exposes a parallel universe exempt from the laws of the land, and how the wealthy and powerful benefit from it. Along the way, we meet the shadowy CEOs, visionary statesmen, eccentric theorists, prize-winning economists, and alarming ideologues who are the masterminds of this parallel order. By mapping the hidden geography that increasingly determines who wins and who loses in the new global order--and how it might be otherwise--The Hidden Globe fascinates, enrages, and inspires.

Trip. My parents started using that word about a year ago—“one day, you’ll take a trip to be with us. Like an adventure.”  

Javier Zamora's adventure is a three-thousand-mile journey from his small town in El Salvador, through Guatemala and Mexico, and across the U.S. border. He will leave behind his beloved aunt and grandparents to reunite with a mother who left four years ago and a father he barely remembers. Traveling alone amid a group of strangers and a "coyote" hired to lead them to safety, Javier expects his trip to last two short weeks.

At nine years old, all Javier can imagine is rushing into his parents' arms, snuggling in bed between them, and living under the same roof again. He cannot foresee the perilous boat trips, relentless desert treks, pointed guns, arrests and deceptions that await him; nor can he know that those two weeks will expand into two life-altering months alongside fellow migrants who will come to encircle him like an unexpected family.

To reveal life’s profound influence on the planet, Jabr transports the reader to such extraordinary places as an observatory halfway between the treetops and clouds, an experimental nature reserve in Siberia, and a former gold mine nearly one mile underground. He shows us how Earth became the world we’ve known, how it is rapidly becoming a very different world, and how we will determine what kind of Earth our descendants inherit for millennia to come.

The Cancer Factory tells the story of the workers who experienced one of the nation's worst, and best-documented, outbreaks of work-related cancer, and the lawyer who has represented the bladder-cancer victims at the plant for more than thirty years, as well as the retired workers who have been diagnosed with the disease and live in constant fear of its recurrence. 

Following the lead of her own ancestors, Kendra Field's epic family history chronicles the westward migration of freedom's first generation in the fifty years after emancipation. Drawing on decades of archival research and family lore within and beyond the United States, Field traces their journey out of the South to Indian Territory, where they participated in the development of black and black Indian towns and settlements.

Far from being a disruptive behavior to be quelled at any cost, migration is an ancient and lifesaving response to environmental change, a biological imperative as necessary as breathing. Climate changes triggered the first human migrations out of Africa. Falling sea levels allowed our passage across the Bering Sea. Unhampered by barbed wire, migration allowed our ancestors to people the planet, catapulting us into the highest reaches of the Himalayan mountains and the most remote islands of the Pacific, creating and disseminating the biological, cultural, and social diversity that ecosystems and societies depend upon. In other words, migration is not the crisis--it is the solution. Conclusively tracking the history of misinformation from the 18th century through today's anti-immigration policies, The Next Great Migration makes the case for a future in which migration is not a source of fear, but of hope.

In Pandemic: Tracking Contagions, from Cholera to Ebola and Beyond, Sonia Shah interweaves history, original reportage, and personal narrative to explore the origins of epidemics, drawing parallels between cholera―one of history’s most deadly and disruptive pandemic-causing pathogens―and the new diseases that stalk humankind today. She tracks each stage of cholera’s dramatic journey, from its emergence in the South Asian hinterlands as a harmless microbe to its rapid dispersal across the nineteenth-century world, all the way to its latest beachhead in Haiti. Along the way she reports on the pathogens now following in cholera’s footsteps, from the MRSA bacterium that besieges her own family to the never-before-seen killers coming out of China’s wet markets, the surgical wards of New Delhi, and the suburban backyards of the East Coast.