Böcker utgivna av W. W. Norton & Company

"How do I love thee? Let me count the ways." With these words, Elizabeth Barrett Browning has come down to us as a romantic heroine, a recluse controlled by a domineering father and often overshadowed by her husband, Robert Browning. But behind the melodrama lies a thoroughly modern figure whose extraordinary life is an electrifying study in self-invention.Born in 1806, Barrett Browning lived in an age when women could not attend a university, own property after marriage, or vote. And yet she seized control of her private income, defied chronic illness and disability, became an advocate for the revolutionary Italy to which she eloped, and changed the course of cultural history. Her late-in-life verse novel masterpiece, Aurora Leigh, reveals both the brilliance and originality of her mind, as well as the challenges of being a woman writer in the Victorian era. A feminist icon, high-profile activist for the abolition of slavery, and international literary superstar, Barrett Browning inspired writers as diverse as Emily Dickinson, George Eliot, Rudyard Kipling, Oscar Wilde, and Virginia Woolf.Two-Way Mirror is the first biography of Barrett Browning in more than three decades. With unique access to the poet's abundant correspondence, "astute, thoughtful, and wide-ranging guide" (Times [UK]) Fiona Sampson holds up a mirror to the woman, her art, and the art of biography itself.

Seven minutes past midnight on March 10, 1945, nearly 300 American B-29s thundered into the skies over Tokyo. Their payloads of incendiaries ignited a firestorm that reached up to 2,800 degrees, liquefying asphalt and vaporising thousands; sixteen square miles of the city were flattened and more than 100,000 men, women, and children were killed. Black Snow is the story of this devastating operation, orchestrated by Major General Curtis LeMay, who famously remarked: "If we lose the war, we'll be tried as war criminals".James M. Scott reconstructs in granular detail that horrific night, and describes the development of the B-29, the capture of the Marianas for use as airfields, and the change in strategy from high-altitude daylight "precision" bombing to low-altitude nighttime incendiary bombing. Most importantly, the raid represented a significant moral shift for America, marking the first time commanders deliberately targeted civilians which helped pave the way for the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki five months later.Drawing on first-person interviews with American pilots and bombardiers and Japanese survivors, air force archives and oral histories never before published in English, Scott delivers a harrowing and gripping account, and his most important and compelling work to date.

Meriel Schindler spent her adult life trying to keep her father, Kurt, at bay. But when he died in 2017, he left behind piles of Nazi-era documents related to her family's fate in Innsbruck, Austria, and a treasure trove of family albums reaching back to before World War I. Meriel was forced to confront not only their fractured relationship, but also the truth behind their family history.The Lost Café Schindler re-creates the journey of an extraordinary family, whose relatives included the Jewish doctor who treated Hitler's mother when she was dying of breast cancer; the Kafka family; and Alma Schindler, the wife of Gustav Mahler. The narrative centers around the Café Schindler, the social hub of Innsbruck. Famous for its pastries, home-distilled liquors, live entertainment, and hospitality, the restaurant attracted Austrians from all walks of life. But as conditions became untenable for Jews in Austria during the Nazi era, the Schindlers were forced to leave, and their café was expropriated.Meriel reconstructs the color and vibrancy of life in prewar Innsbruck against the majestic backdrop of the Austrian Alps, as well as the creeping menace and, finally, terror of the Nazi occupation. Ultimately, The Lost Café Schindler is a story of tragic loss-several relatives disappeared in Terezín and Auschwitz-but also one of reclamation and reconciliation. Beautifully written, it is an unforgettable portrait of an era and a testament to the pull of family history on future generations.

From facial recognition-capable of checking people into flights or identifying undocumented residents-to automated decision systems that inform who gets loans and who receives bail, each of us moves through a world determined by data-empowered algorithms. But these technologies didn't just appear: they are part of a history that goes back centuries, from the census enshrined in the US Constitution to the birth of eugenics in Victorian Britain to the development of Google search.Expanding on the popular course they created at Columbia University, Chris Wiggins and Matthew L. Jones illuminate the ways in which data has long been used as a tool and a weapon in arguing for what is true, as well as a means of rearranging or defending power. They explore how data was created and curated, as well as how new mathematical and computational techniques developed to contend with that data serve to shape people, ideas, society, military operations and economies. Although technology and mathematics are at its heart, the story of data ultimately concerns an unstable game among states, corporations and people. How were new technical and scientific capabilities developed; who supported, advanced or funded these capabilities or transitions; and how did they change who could do what, from what and to whom?Wiggins and Jones focus on these questions as they trace data's historical arc and look to the future. By understanding the trajectory of data-where it has been and where it might yet go-Wiggins and Jones argue that we can understand how to bend it to ends that we collectively choose, with intentionality and purpose.

A hack is any means of subverting a system's rules in unintended ways. The tax code isn't computer code, but a series of complex formulas. It has vulnerabilities; we call them "loopholes." We call exploits "tax avoidance strategies." And there is an entire industry of "black hat" hackers intent on finding exploitable loopholes in the tax code. We call them accountants and tax attorneys. In A Hacker's Mind, Bruce Schneier takes hacking out of the world of computing and uses it to analyse the systems that underpin our society: from tax laws to financial markets to politics. He reveals an array of powerful actors whose hacks bend our economic, political and legal systems to their advantage, at the expense of everyone else.Once you learn how to notice hacks, you'll start seeing them everywhere-and you'll never look at the world the same way again. Almost all systems have loopholes and this is by design. Because if you can take advantage of them, the rules no longer apply to you. Unchecked, these hacks threaten to upend our financial markets, weaken our democracy and even affect the way we think. And when artificial intelligence starts thinking like a hacker-at inhuman speed and scale-the results could be catastrophic.But for those who would don the "white hat", we can understand the hacking mindset and rebuild our economic, political and legal systems to counter those who would exploit our society. And we can harness artificial intelligence to improve existing systems, predict and defend against hacks and realise a more equitable world.

In The Sea We Swim In, Frank Rose leads us to a new understanding of stories and their role in our lives. For decades, experts from many fields-psychologists, economists, advertising and marketing executives-failed to register the power of narrative. Scientists thought stories were frivolous. Economists were knee-deep in theory. Marketers just wanted to cut to the sales pitch. Yet stories, not reasoning, are the key to persuasion.Whether we're aware of it or not, stories determine how we view the world and our place in it. That means the tools of professional storytellers-character, world, detail, voice-can unlock a way of thinking that's ideal for an age in which we don't passively consume media but actively participate in it. Building on insights from cognitive psychology and neuroscience, Rose shows us how to see the world in narrative terms, not as a thesis to be argued or a pitch to be made but as a story to be told.Leading brands and top entertainment professionals already understand the vast potential of storytelling. From Warby Parker to Mailchimp to The Walking Dead, Rose explains how they use stories to establish their identity and turn ordinary people into fans-and how you can do the same.

Nominally Christian churches glorify materialism, a gluttony of the soul, while others celebrate an ecstatic indulgence in hate, citing Scripture whilst preparing for civil war. Lonely men gather to rage against women. There, too, in the undertow, the forty-fifth president of the United States, a vessel of conspiratorial fears and fantasies, continues to rise to sainthood, and the insurrectionist Ashli Babbitt, killed on 6 January at the US Capitol, is beatified as a martyr of white womanhood.Both political inquiry and meditation, as poetic as it is profound and disturbing, The Undertow captures a decade of growing division in the US: roughly 2011-2021. Jeff Sharlet examines currents of gender, faith and money that brought us to the "Trumpocene", and finally, explores a geography of grief and uncertainty in the midst of plague and rising fascism. Beginning and closing with freedom songs of the past whose critique of American failures are nonetheless a vision of American possibility.

Koalas regularly appeared in Australian biologist Danielle Clode's backyard, but it was only when a bushfire threatened that she truly paid them attention. She soon realized how much she had to learn about these complex and mysterious animals.In vivid, descriptive prose, Clode embarks on a delightful and surprising journey through evolutionary biology, natural history and ecology to understand where these enigmatic animals came from and what their future may hold. She begins her search with the fossils of ancient giant koalas, delving into why the modern koala has become the lone survivor of a once-diverse family of uniquely Australian marsupials.Koala investigates the remarkable physiology of these charismatic creatures. Born the size of tiny "jellybeans," joeys face an uphill battle, from crawling into their mother's pouch to being weaned onto a toxic diet of gum-tree leaves, the koalas' single source of food.Clode explores the complex relationship and unexpected connections between this endearing species and humans. She explains how koalas are simultaneously threatened with extinction in some areas due to disease, climate change and increasing wildfires, while overpopulating forests in other parts of the country.Deeply researched and filled with wonder, Koala is both a tender and inquisitive paean to a species unlike any other and a call to ensure its survival.

On a sunny Friday morning in August 1945, a handful of people raised a homemade cotton flag and, on behalf of 68 million compatriots, announced the birth of a new nation. With the fourth largest population in the world, inhabiting islands that span an eighth of the globe, Indonesia became the first country to rid itself of colonial rule after World War II.In this vivid history, renowned scholar and celebrated author of Congo David Van Reybrouck captures a period of extraordinary tumult and chaos to tell the story of Indonesia's momentous revolution, known as the "Revolusi." Encompassing several hundred years of history, he details the formation of the Dutch East Indies, the Japanese invasion that followed, and the young rebels who engaged in armed resistance once the occupation ended. British and Dutch troops were sent to restore order and keep peace, but instead ignited the first modern war of decolonization. America, too, became embroiled with the Indonesians' fierce struggle for freedom. That struggle inspired independence movements in Asia, Africa, and the Arab world, especially in the wake of Indonesia's monumental 1955 Bandung Conference, the first global conference without the West. The whole world had become involved in Revolusi, and the whole world was changed by it.Drawing on hundreds of interviews and eyewitness testimonies, David Van Reybrouck turns this vast and complex story into an utterly gripping narrative, written with remarkable historical clarity and filled with tragedy and passion. A landmark history, Revolusi cements Indonesia's struggle for independence as one of the defining dramas of the twentieth century and entirely reframes our understanding of post-colonialism.

Veteran home educator Susan Wise Bauer outlines the classical pattern of education called the trivium, which organises learning around the maturing capacity of the child's mind and comprises three stages: the elementary school "grammar stage", the middle school "logic stage", and the high school "rhetoric stage". Using this theory as your model, you'll be able to instruct your child-whether full-time or as a supplement to classroom education-regardless of your own aptitude in any subjects. Thousands of parents and teachers have already used the detailed book lists and methods described in The Well-Trained Mind to create a truly superior education for the children in their care. This new revised edition contains an updated chapter on applying to colleges and links to a new set of online resources. You do have control over what and how your child learns. The Well-Trained Mind will give you the tools you'll need to teach your child with confidence and success.

First published in 1974, Black Majority marked a breakthrough in our understanding of early American history. Today, Wood's insightful study remains more relevant and enlightening than ever. This landmark book chronicles the crucial formative years of North America's wealthiest and most tormented British colony. It explores how West African familiarity with rice determined the Lowcountry economy and how a skilled but enslaved labor force formed its own distinctive language and culture. While African American history often focuses on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Black Majority underscores the significant role early African arrivals played in shaping the direction of American history.This revised and updated fiftieth anniversary edition challenges a fresh generation with provocative history and features a new epilogue by the author.

"I never thought I'd see you here," Sarah says. Then she adds, "But I never thought I'd see you anywhere."Sarah and Warren's college love story ended in a single moment. Decades later, when a chance meeting brings them together, a passion ignites threatening the foundations of their lives. Since they parted in college, each has married, raised a family, and made a career. When they meet again, Sarah is divorced and living outside New York, while Warren is still married and living in Boston.Seeing Warren sparks an awakening in Sarah, who feels emotionally alive for the first time in decades. Still, she hesitates to reclaim a chance at love after her painful divorce and years of framing her life around her children and her work. Warren has no such reservations: he wants to leave his marriage but fears how his wife and daughter will react. As their affair intensifies, Sarah and Warren must confront the moral responsibilities of their love for their families and each other.An engrossing exploration of the vows we make to one another, the tensile relationships between parents and their children, and what we owe to others and ourselves, "Leaving is a tour de force-unfailingly clear-eyed, and its final impact shatters." (Washington Post)

Europeans of the Middle Ages were the first to use travel guides to orient their wanderings, as they moved through a world punctuated with miraculous wonders and beguiling encounters. In this vivid and alluring history, medievalist Anthony Bale invites readers on an odyssey across the medieval world, recounting the advice that circulated among those venturing to the road for pilgrimage, trade, diplomacy, and war.Journeying alongside scholars, spies, and saints, from Western Europe to the Far East, the Antipodes and the ends of the earth, Bale provides indispensable information on the exchange rate between Bohemian ducats and Venetian groats, medieval cures for seasickness, and how to avoid extortionist tour guides and singing sirens. He takes us from the streets of Rome, more ruin than tourist spot, and tours of the Khan's court in Beijing to Mamluk-controlled Jerusalem, where we ride asses across the holy terrain, and bustling bazaars of Tabriz.We also learn of rumored fantastical places, like ones where lambs grow on trees and giant canes grow fruit made of gems. And we are offered a glimpse of what non-European travelers thought of the West on their own travels.Using previously untranslated contemporaneous documents from a colorful range of travelers, and from as far and wide as Turkey, Iceland, North Africa, and Russia, A Travel Guide to the Middle Ages is a witty and unforgettable exploration of how Europeans understood-and often misunderstood-the larger world.

Narrative therapy has the potential to help clients understand their challenges as separate from their selves, shifting the focus to their inner strengths when managing a problem. Narrative Practices and Emotions provides a fresh perspective for new and experienced practitioners alike on how to combine classic narrative therapy with the latest scholarship on the mind-body connection.Authors Marie-Nathalie Beaudoin and Gerald Monk tap into cutting edge discoveries on mindfulness, interpersonal neurobiology and positive psychology. Each chapter offers a wealth of clinical questions and embodied exercises, while "conversation maps"-which provide important guideposts to practitioners-are illustrated with engaging transcripts of therapeutic work. These compelling case studies elegantly demonstrate how skillful conversations can invigorate hope and support personal development. Readers will discover a wide variety of ways to assist clients of all ages in reengaging with a meaningful life and sustaining well-being.

It's the summer of 1984 in Swaffham, Massachusetts, when Mel (short for Melanie) meets Sylvia, a tough-as-nails trans woman whose shameless swagger inspires Mel's dawning self-awareness. But Sylvia's presence sparks fury among her neighbors and throws Mel into conflict with her mother and best friend. Decades later, in 2019, Max (formerly Mel) is on probation from his teaching job for, ironically, defying speech codes around trans identity. Back in Swaffham, he must navigate life as part of a fractured family and face his own role in the disasters of the past.Populated by a cast of unforgettable characters, Some Strange Music Draws Me In is a propulsive page turner about multiple electrifying relationships-between a working-class mother and her queer child, between a trans man and his right-wing sister, and between a teenager and her troubled best friend. Griffin Hansbury, in elegant, arresting, and fearless prose, dares to explore taboos around gender and class as he offers a deeply moving portrait of friendship, family, and a girlhood lived sideways. A timely and captivating narrative of self-realization amid the everyday violence of small-town intolerance, Some Strange Music Draws Me In builds to an explosive conclusion, illuminating the unexpected ways that difference can provide a ticket to liberation.

Now that her brilliant botanist daughter is off at college, buttoned-up Maeve Cosgrove loves her job at a quiet Maine public library more than anything. But when a teenager accuses Maeve-Maeve!-of spying on her romantic escapades in the mezzanine bathroom, she winds up laid off and humiliated. Stuck at home in a tailspin, Maeve cares for the mysterious plants in her daughter's greenhouse while obsessing over the clearly troubled girl at the source of the rumor. She hopes to have a powerful ally in her attempts to clear her name: her favorite author, Harrison Riddles, who has finally responded to her adoring letters and accepted an invitation to speak at the library.Riddles, meanwhile, arrives in town with his own agenda. He announces a plan to write a novel about another young library patron, Sudanese refugee Willie, and enlists Maeve's help in convincing him to participate. Maeve wants to look out for Willie, but Riddles's charisma and the sheen of literary glory he promises are difficult to resist. A scheme to get her job back draws Maeve further into Riddles's universe-where shocking questions about sex, morality, and the purpose of literature threaten to upend her orderly life.A writer of "savage compassion" (Salvatore Scibona, author of The Volunteer), Sarah Braunstein constructs a shrewd, page-turning caper that explores one woman's search for agency and ultimate reckoning with the kind of animal she is.

With the number and variety of mental health issues affecting kids on the rise, and as more clinicians and counsellors are pushed to the front lines of defence, there is an acute need for a comprehensive, practical resource that guides professionals through the complexities of child and adolescent mental health. This comprehensive book-now in its third edition-answers that call.Fully revised and updated, Child & Adolescent Mental Health now includes chapters addressing mental health during a pandemic and gender dysphoria. Child and adolescent psychiatry expert Jess P. Shatkin distills three decades of clinical experience, research and teaching into an effective guide that providers and trainees have kept within arm's reach for the past fifteen years.

There is a robotics revolution underway. A record 3.1 million robots are working in factories right now, doing everything from assembling computers to packing goods and monitoring air quality and performance. A far greater number of smart machines impact our lives in countless other ways-improving the precision of surgeons, cleaning our homes, extending our reach to distant worlds-and we're on the cusp of even more exciting opportunities.In The Heart and the Chip, roboticist Daniela Rus and science writer Gregory Mone provide an overview of the interconnected fields of robotics, artificial intelligence, and machine learning, and reframe the way we think about intelligent machines while weighing the moral and ethical consequences of their role in society. Robots aren't going to steal our jobs: they're going to make us more capable, productive, and precise.At once optimistic and realistic, Rus and Mone envision a world in which these technologies augment and enhance our skills and talents, both as individuals and as a species-a world in which the proliferation of robots allows us all to be more human.

Dyadic Developmental Psychotherapy (DDP) is an attachment-focused treatment for children and adolescents who have experienced abuse and neglect and are now living in stable foster and adoptive families. Here, Daniel Hughes and Kim S. Golding provide a practical accompaniment to their highly successful DDP book coauthored with Julie Hudson, Healing Relational Trauma with Attachment-Focused Interventions (2019).In this workbook, practitioners are invited to reflect on their experience of implementing the DDP model through discussion, examples and reflection prompts. Readers are encouraged to consider the diversity of both practitioners and those receiving DDP interventions, and how each unique individual's identity can be embraced within the application of DDP interventions. DDP can be practised as a therapy, a parenting approach, and as a practice approach for those working within healthcare, social care or education, and this workbook is an invaluable resource for readers who fall into any one of these roles.

Every day at 3:55 a.m., members of Team Movement clock in for their shift at big-box store Town Square in a small upstate New York town. Under the eyes of a self-absorbed and barely competent boss, they empty the day's truck of merchandise, stock the shelves, and scatter before the store opens and customers arrive. Their lives follow a familiar if grueling routine, but their real problem is that Town Square doesn't schedule them for enough hours-most of them are barely getting by, even while working second or third jobs. When store manager Big Will announces he is leaving, the members of Movement spot an opportunity. If they play their cards right, one of them just might land a management job, with all the stability and possibility for advancement that that implies. The members of Team Movement-including a comedy-obsessed oddball who acts half his age, a young woman clinging on to her "cool kid" status from high school, and a college football hopeful trying to find a new path-band together to set a just-so-crazy-it-might-work plot in motion.Adelle Waldman's debut novel was a breakout sensation, lauded by the Los Angeles Times as an "exacting character study" with "excellent and witty prose" and described as "incisive and very funny" by the Economist and "brilliant" by both NPR's Fresh Air and the Washington Post. In her long-awaited follow-up, Waldman brings her unparalleled wit and astute social observation to the world of modern, low-wage work. A humane and darkly comic workplace caper that shines a light on the odds low-wage workers are up against in today's economy, Help Wanted is a funny, moving tale of ordinary people trying to make a living.

Whether in front of the camera or behind it, Candice Vadala understood herself as both an artist and an entrepreneur. As Candida Royalle (1950-2015)-underground actress, porn star, producer of adult movies, and staunch feminist-she made a business of pleasure. She helped crystalize the broader hedonistic turn in American life in the second half of the twentieth century: a period when the rules of sex were rewritten; when the white-hot "sex wars" cleaved feminism and realigned American politics; when Big Freud, Big Drugs, and Big Porn all came into looming focus; when the sex industry of the 1970s and '80s radically upended conventional understandings of law, technology, culture, love, and human desire.The sexual revolution was Royalle's war-even when other avowed feminists exited the field or became her opponents-and pornography emerged as the arena in which she would wage it. With the founding of her adult film company, Femme Productions, in 1984, Royalle became an owner of the means of pornographic production, infusing her sets with the ideals of labor feminism. On-screen and off-, she was, by turns, exuberant and thoughtful, self-possessed and gleefully shameless. A trailblazer who lived along the cultural fault lines of her generation, she danced at Woodstock, marched for women's liberation, survived the AIDS crisis, and became a talk show regular, interviewed by Phil Donahue, Dr. Ruth Westheimer, Morton Downey Jr., Jane Pauley, and many others. As a performer, director, producer, and writer, she moved the needle of her industry. But she never transcended the politics of pleasure.With full access to Royalle's remarkable archive, historian Jane Kamensky has spent years examining the intersection of Royalle's life with the clashes that have defined her era-and ours. Deeply informed by these never-before-studied materials, Kamensky explodes the conventions of biography, with its assumptions about who makes history and how. Written with cinematic verve, Candida Royalle and the Sexual Revolution evokes Royalle's times in their broadest contours as Kamensky traces the rise of an improbable heroine who broke the mold and was herself broken in turn.

Stephen Bright emerged on the scene as a cause lawyer in the early decades of mass incarceration, when inflammatory politics and harsh changes to criminal justice policy were crashing down on the most vulnerable members of society. He dedicated his career to unleashing social change by representing clients that society had long ago discarded, and advocated for all to receive a fair trial.In Demand the Impossible, Robert L. Tsai traces Bright's remarkable career to explore the legal ideas that were central to his relentless pursuit of equal justice. For nearly forty years, Bright led the Southern Center for Human Rights, a nonprofit that provided legal aid to incarcerated people and worked to improve conditions within the justice system. He argued four capital cases before the US Supreme Court-and won each one, despite facing an increasingly hostile bench. With each victory, he brought to light how the law itself had become corrupted by the country's thirst for severe punishment, exposing prosecutorial misconduct, continuing racial inequality, inadequate safeguards for people with intellectual disabilities, and the shameful quality of legal representation for the poor.Organized around these four major Supreme Court cases, each narrated in vivid and dramatic detail, Tsai's essential account explores the racism built into the criminal justice system and the incredible advancements one lawyer and his committed allies made for equal rights. An electrifying work of legal history, Demand the Impossible reveals how change can be won in even the most challenging times and how seemingly small victories can go on to have outsized effects.

A storm of illiberalism, building in the United States for years, unleashed its destructive force in the Capitol insurrection of 6 January 2021. The attack on American democracy and images of mob violence led many to recoil, thinking "That's not us". But Steven Hahn shows in his startling new history that illiberalism has deep roots in America's past. To those who believe that the ideals announced in the Declaration of Independence set the United States apart as a nation, Hahn shows that Americans have long been animated by competing values, equally deep-seated, in which the illiberal will of the community overrides individual rights and often protects itself by excluding perceived threats, whether on grounds of race, religion, gender, economic status or ideology.Driven by popular movements and implemented through courts and legislation, illiberalism is part of the American bedrock. The United States was born a republic of loosely connected states and localities that demanded control of their domestic institutions, including slavery. As white settlement expanded west and immigration exploded in eastern cities, the democracy of the 1830s fuelled expulsions of Blacks, Native Americans, Catholics, Mormons and abolitionists. After the Civil War, southern states denied new constitutional guarantees of civil rights and enforced racial exclusions in everyday life. Illiberalism was modernised during the Progressive movement through advocates of eugenics who aimed to reduce the numbers of racial and ethnic minorities as well as the poor. The turmoil of the 1960s enabled George Wallace to tap local fears of unrest and build support outside the South, a politics adopted by Richard Nixon in 1968. Today, with illiberalism shaping elections and policy debates over guns, education and abortion, it is urgent to understand its long history and how that history bears on the present crisis.

What could possibly go wrong in a wealthy matriarch's country home when her dilettante son, his restless wife, and his widowed brother live there together? Strong Passions, rooted in the beguiling times of Edith Wharton's "old New York," recounts the true story of a tumultuous marriage. In 1862, Mary Strong stunned her husband, Peter, by confessing to a two-year affair with his brother. Peter sued Mary for divorce for adultery-the only grounds in New York-but not before she accused him of forcing her into an abortion and having his own affair with the abortionist. She then kidnapped their young daughter and disappeared.The divorce trial Strong v. Strong riveted the nation during the final throes and aftermath of the Civil War, offering a shocking glimpse into the private world of New York's powerful and privileged elite. Barbara Weisberg presents the chaotic courtroom and panoply of witnesses-governess, housekeeper, private detective, sisters-in-law, and many others-who provided contradictory and often salacious testimony. She then asks us to be the jury, deciding each spouse's guilt and the possibility of a just resolution.Social history at its most intimate, Strong Passions charts a trial's twists and turns to portray a family and country in turmoil as they faced conflicts over women's changing roles, male custody of children, and men's power-financial and otherwise-over wives.

From Neolithic Orkney, Viking Shetland, and Druidical Anglesey to the joys and strangeness of modern Thanet, The Britannias explores the farthest reaches of Britain's island topography, once known by the collective term "Britanniae" (the Britains). This expansive journey demonstrates how the smaller islands have wielded disproportionate influence on the mainland, becoming the fertile ground of political, cultural, and technological innovations that shaped history throughout the archipelago.In an act of feminist inquiry, personal adventure, and literary quest, Alice Albinia embarks on a series of journeys that traverse Britain and reach beyond its contemporary borders-from Europe to the Caribbean, Ireland to Scandinavia. She walks the coastlines of Lindisfarne, sails through the Hebrides archipelago, and bikes into Westminster at dawn. As she takes us across extravagantly varied island topographies and surveys centuries of history, Albinia ranges between languages and genres, and through disparate island cultures. She talks to stubbornly independent islanders and searches for archaeological and linguistic traces of island identities, discovering distinct traditions and resistance to mainland control.Trespassing into the past to understand the present, The Britannias uncovers an enduring and subversive mythology of islands ruled by women. Albinia finds female independence woven through Roman colonial reports and Welsh medieval poetry, Restoration utopias and island folk songs. These neglected epics offer fierce feminist countercurrents to mainstream narratives of British identity and shed new light on women's status in the body politic today.Vivid, perceptive, and disruptive, The Britannias boldly upturns established truths about Britain while revealing its suppressed and forgotten beauty.

Formally restless and relentlessly instructive, How to Communicate is a dynamic journey through language, community, and the unfolding of an identity. Poet John Lee Clark pivots from inventive forms inspired by the Braille slate to sensuous prose poems to incisive erasures that find new narratives in nineteenth-century poetry. Calling out the limitations of the literary canon, Clark includes pathbreaking translations from American Sign Language and Protactile, a language built on touch.How to Communicate embraces new linguistic possibilities that emanate from Clark's unique perspective and his connection to an expanding, inclusive activist community. Amid the astonishing task of constructing a new canon, the poet reveals a radically commonplace life. He explores grief and the vagaries of family, celebrates the small delights of knitting and visiting a museum, and, once, encounters a ghost in a gas station. Counteracting the assumptions of the sighted and hearing world with humor and grace, Clark finds beauty in the revelations of communicating through touch: "All things living and dead cry out to me / when I touch them."A rare work of transformation and necessary discovery, How to Communicate is a brilliant debut that insists on the power of poetry.

Control is a book about eugenics, what geneticist Adam Rutherford calls "a defining idea of the twentieth century." Inspired by Darwin's ideas about evolution, eugenics arose in Victorian England as a theory for improving the British population, and quickly spread to America, where it was embraced by presidents, funded by Gilded Age monopolists, and enshrined into racist American laws that became the ideological cornerstone of the Third Reich. Despite this horrific legacy, eugenics looms large today as the advances in genetics in the last thirty years-from the sequencing of the human genome to modern gene editing techniques-have brought the idea of population purification back into the mainstream.Eugenics has "a short history, but a long past," Rutherford writes. The first half of Control is the history of an idea, from its roots in key philosophical texts of the classical world all the way into their genocidal enactment in the twentieth century. The second part of the book explores how eugenics operates today, as part of our language and culture, as part of current political and racial discussions, and as an eternal temptation to powerful people who wish to improve society through reproductive control.With disarming wit and scientific precision, Rutherford explains why eugenics still figures prominently in the twenty-first century, despite its genocidal past. And he confronts insidious recurring questions-did eugenics work in Nazi Germany? And could it work today?-revealing the intellectual bankruptcy of the idea, and the scientific impossibility of its realization.

From the cubit to the kilogram, the humble inch to the speed of light, measurement is a powerful tool that humans invented to make sense of the world. In this revelatory work of science and social history, James Vincent dives into its hidden world, taking readers from ancient Egypt, where measuring the annual depth of the Nile was an essential task, to the intellectual origins of the metric system in the French Revolution, and from the surprisingly animated rivalry between metric and imperial, to our current age of the "quantified self." At every turn, Vincent is keenly attuned to the political consequences of measurement, exploring how it has also been used as a tool for oppression and control.Beyond Measure reveals how measurement is not only deeply entwined with our experience of the world, but also how its history encompasses and shapes the human quest for knowledge.

In late-1940s Long Branch, a historic but run-down Jersey Shore resort town, in a neighbourhood of Italian, Black and Jewish families, Robert Pinsky began his unlikely journey to becoming a poet. Descended from a bootlegger grandfather, an athletic father, and a rebellious tomboy mother, Pinsky was an unruly but articulate student whose obsession with the rhythms and melodies of speech inspired him to write.Pinsky traces the roots of his poetry, with its wide and fearless range, back to the voices of his neighbourhood, to music and a distinctly American tradition of improvisation, with influences including Mark Twain and Ray Charles, Marianne Moore and Mel Brooks, Emily Dickinson and Sid Caesar, Dante Alighieri and the Orthodox Jewish liturgy. He reflects on how writing poetry helped him make sense of life's challenges, such as his mother's traumatic brain injury, and on his notable public presence, including an unprecedented three terms as United States poet laureate.Candid, engaging and wry, Jersey Breaks offers an intimate self-portrait and a unique poetic understanding of American culture.

Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, T.S. Eliot was considered the greatest English-language poet of his generation. His poems The Waste Land and Four Quartets are classics of the modernist canon, while his essays influenced a school of literary criticism. Raised in St. Louis, shaped by his youth in Boston, he reinvented himself as an Englishman after converting to the Anglican Church. Like the authoritative yet restrained voice in his prose, he was the epitome of reserve. But there was another side to Eliot, as acclaimed biographer Lyndall Gordon reveals in her new biography, The Hyacinth Girl. While married twice, Eliot had an almost lifelong love for Emily Hale, an American drama teacher to whom he wrote extensive, illuminating, deeply personal letters. She was the source of "memory and desire" in The Waste Land. She was his hidden muse.That correspondence-some 1,131 letters-released by Princeton University's Firestone Library only in 2020-shows us in exquisite detail the hidden Eliot. Gordon plumbs the archive to recast Hale's role as the first and foremost woman of the poet's life, tracing the ways in which their ardor and his idealization of her figured in his art. For Eliot's relationships, as Gordon explains, were inextricable from his poetry, and Emily Hale was not the sole woman who entered his work. Gordon sheds new light on Eliot's first marriage to the flamboyant Vivienne; re-creates his relationship with Mary Trevelyan, a wartime woman of action; and finally, explores his marriage to the young Valerie Fletcher, whose devotion to Eliot and whose physical ease transformed him into a man "made for love." This stunning portrait of Eliot will compel not only a reassessment of the man-judgmental, duplicitous, intensely conflicted, and indubitably brilliant-but of the role of the choice women in his life and his writings. And at the center was Emily Hale in a love drama that Eliot conceived and the inspiration for the poetry he wrote that would last beyond their time. She was his "Hyacinth Girl."