The Arthur G. Dozier Boys School was a well-guarded secret in Florida for over a century, until reports of cruelty, abuse, and “mysterious” deaths shut the institution down in 2011. Established in 1900, the juvenile reform school accepted children as young as six years of age for crimes as harmless as truancy or trespassing. The boys sent there, many of whom were Black, were subject to brutal abuse, routinely hired out to local farmers by the school’s management as indentured labor, and died either at the school or attempting to escape its brutal conditions.

Beyond preserving the firsthand testimonies of participants and witnesses, individuals and societies must continually take responsibility for learning the painful lessons of the past in order to offer hope for the future. Survivor Café offers a clear-eyed sense of the enormity of our 21st-century human inheritance - not only among direct descendants of the Holocaust, but also in the shape of our collective responsibility to learn from tragedy.

In this deeply personal book, the celebrated Haitian-American writer Edwidge Danticat reflects on art and exile. Inspired by Albert Camus and adapted from her own lectures for Princeton University’s Toni Morrison Lecture Series, here Danticat tells stories of artists who create despite (or because of) the horrors that drove them from their homelands. Combining memoir and essay, these moving and eloquent pieces examine what it means to be an artist from a country in crisis.

The Gulag was a monstrous network of labor camps that held and killed millions of prisoners from the 1930s to the 1950s. More than half a century after the end of Stalinist terror, the geography of the Gulag has been barely sketched and the number of its victims remains unknown. Has the Gulag been forgotten? Writer Masha Gessen and photographer Misha Friedman set out across Russia in search of the memory of the Gulag.

National Book Award winner Jesmyn Ward takes James Baldwin's 1963 examination of race in America, The Fire Next Time, as a jumping-off point for this groundbreaking collection of essays and poems about race from the most important voices of her generation and our time.

An urgent, no-holds-barred tale of gang life, guerrilla warfare, intergenerational trauma, and interconnected violence between the United States and El Salvador, Roberto Lovato’s memoir excavates family history and reveals the intimate stories beneath headlines about gang violence and mass Central American migration, one of the most important, yet least-understood humanitarian crises of our time - and one in which the perspectives of Central Americans in the United States have been silenced and forgotten.

The Skeleton Crew provides an entree into the gritty and tumultuous world of Sherlock Holmes-wannabes who race to beat out law enforcement-and one another - at matching missing persons with unidentified remains. In America today, upwards of forty thousand people are dead and unaccounted for. These murder, suicide, and accident victims, separated from their names, are being adopted by the bizarre online world of amateur sleuths.

A deathbed promise leads a daughter on an incredible journey to write about her grandfather who was a famous war hero. But this journey had a terrible destination: the discovery that he was a Nazi war criminal.

Doing for Syria what Imperial Life in the Emerald City did for the war in Iraq, The Morning They Came for Us bears witness to one of the most brutal, internecine conflicts in recent history. Drawing from years of experience covering Syria for Vanity Fair, Newsweek, and the front pages of the New York Times, award-winning journalist Janine di Giovanni gives us a tour de force of war reportage, all told through the perspective of ordinary people.

On August 9, 1945, three days after the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, the United States dropped a second atomic bomb on Nagasaki, a small port city on Japan's southernmost island. An estimated 74,000 people died within the first five months, and another 75,000 were injured. Published on the 70th anniversary of the bombing, Nagasaki takes listeners from the morning of the bombing to the city today, telling the firsthand experiences of five survivors, all of whom were teenagers at the time of the devastation.

Once a close associate of Mao Zedong and the nation’s most celebrated poet, Ai Weiwei’s father, Ai Qing, was branded a rightist during the Cultural Revolution, and he and his family were banished to a desolate place known as “Little Siberia,” where Ai Qing was sentenced to hard labor cleaning public toilets. Ai Weiwei recounts his childhood in exile, and his difficult decision to leave his family to study art in America, where he befriended Allen Ginsberg and was inspired by Andy Warhol and the artworks of Marcel Duchamp.

In this new book, Kidder gives us the superb story of a hero for our time. Strength in What Remains is a wonderfully written, inspiring account of one man’s remarkable American journey and of the ordinary people who helped him–a brilliant testament to the power of will and of second chances.

This beautiful and devastating book - part tribal history, part lyric and intimate memoir - should be required for anyone seeking to learn about California Indian history, past and present. Deborah A. Miranda tells stories of her Ohlone Costanoan Esselen family as well as the experience of California Indians as a whole through oral histories, newspaper clippings, anthropological recordings, personal reflections, and poems. The result is a work of literary art that is wise, angry, and playful all at once, a compilation that will break your heart and teach you to see the world anew.

In a story spanning seven decades, Citizen 865 chronicles the harrowing wartime journeys of two Jewish orphans from occupied Poland who outran the men of Trawniki and settled in the United States, only to learn that some of their one-time captors had followed. A tenacious team of prosecutors and historians pursued these men and, up against the forces of time and political opposition, battled to the present day to remove them from US soil.

The untold story of an Israeli spy’s epic journey to bring the notorious Butcher of Latvia to justice - a case that altered the fates of all ex-Nazis.

“Books can connect people across time zones and zip codes, across cultures, national boundaries, and historical eras”, Kakutani writes in her introduction to Ex Libris. Here listeners will discover novels and memoirs by some of the most gifted writers working today; favorite classics worth listening or relistening; and nonfiction works, both old and new, that illuminate our social and political landscape and some of today’s most pressing issues, from climate change to medicine to the consequences of digital innovation.

Professor Farah Karim-Cooper has dedicated her career to the Bard, which is why she wants to take the playwright down from his pedestal to unveil a Shakespeare for the twenty-first century. If we persist in reading Shakespeare as representative of only one group, as the very pinnacle of the white Western canon, then he will truly be in peril.

How to Disappear is a unique and exhilarating accomplishment, overturning the dangerous modern assumption that somehow fame and visibility equate to success and happiness. Busch presents a field guide to invisibility, reacquainting us with the merits of remaining inconspicuousness, and finding genuine alternatives to a life of perpetual exposure. Accessing timeless truths in order to speak to our most urgent contemporary problems, she inspires us to develop a deeper appreciation for personal privacy in a vast and intrusive world.

In 1785, when the great German poet Friedrich Schiller penned his immortal “Ode to Joy,” he crystallized the deepest hopes and dreams of the European Enlightenment for a new era of peace and freedom, a time when millions would be embraced as equals. Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony then gave wing to Schiller’s words, but barely a century later these same words were claimed by Nazi propagandists and twisted by a barbarism so complete that it ruptured, as one philosopher put it, “the deep layer of solidarity among all who wear a human face.”

As Mira is nearing the end of her life, her daughter Rachelle wants to find out how her mother had lived through four concentration camps, including Auschwitz, and a Death March. There was a mystery to her survival, it seemed—which perhaps had something to do with the strange things that always happened around her. And, incredibly, when giving testimony later in life, she says that it was during this time—despite witnessing the depths of man’s cruelty—that she learned about “the goodness of people.”

Malcolm Macarthur was a well-known Dublin socialite. Suave and urbane, he passed his days mingling with artists and aristocrats, reading philosophy, living a life of the mind. But by 1982, his inheritance had dwindled to almost nothing, a desperate threat to his lifestyle. Macarthur hastily conceived a plan: He would commit bank robbery, of the kind that had become frightfully common in Dublin at the time. But his plan spun swiftly out of control, and he needlessly killed two innocent civilians.

The Asking takes its title from the closing line of one of its newly appearing poems: “don’t despair of this falling world, not yet didn’t it give you the asking.” In its substantial opening section of new work, Jane Hirshfield continues her signature affirmation of the central contradictions, uncertainties, and harvests of astonishment that shape our human lives. A forefront spokesperson for the biosphere and the alliance of science and imagination, Hirshfield offers, as indispensable compass, the choice to embrace what comes. I

In the fall of 1909, a pair of bitter contests captured the world’s attention. The American explorers Robert Peary and Frederick Cook both claimed to have discovered the North Pole, sparking a vicious feud that was unprecedented in international scientific and geographic circles. At the same time, the rivalry between two powerful New York City newspapers—the storied Herald and the ascendant Times—fanned the flames of the so-called polar controversy, as each paper financially and reputationally committed itself to an opposing explorer and fought desperately to defend him.

Journalist and self-proclaimed “crappy gardener” Tamar Haspel is on a mission: to show us that raising or gathering our own food is not as hard as it’s often made out to be. When she and her husband move from Manhattan to two acres on Cape Cod, they decide to adopt a more active approach to their diet: raising chickens, growing tomatoes, even foraging for mushrooms and hunting their own meat. They have more ambition than practical know-how, but that’s not about to stop them from trying…even if sometimes their reach exceeds their (often muddy) grasp.

In Revelations in Air, Jude Stewart takes us on a fascinating journey into the weird and wonderful world of smell. Beginning with lessons on the incredible biology and history of how our noses work, Stewart teaches us how to use our noses like experts. Once we're properly equipped and ready to sniff, Stewart explores a range of smells - from lavender, cut grass, and hot chocolate to cannabis and old books - using smell as a lens into art, history, science, and more.

The Trump administration’s “Peace to Prosperity” vision for the Middle East was unveiled on January 28, 2020. What followed over the next eleven months was one of the most fascinating and consequential periods of US foreign policy in a generation, leading to five normalization agreements between Israel and Muslim states. The Abraham Accords achieved what had seemed impossible for decades and set the Middle East on a trajectory toward a broad regional peace.

Adrienne Rich's influential and landmark investigation concerns both the experience and the institution of motherhood. The experience is her own - as a woman, a poet, a feminist, and a mother - but it is an experience determined by the institution, imposed on all women everywhere. She draws on personal materials, history, research, and literature to create a document of universal importance.

Daraya is a town outside Damascus, the very spot where the Syrian Civil War began. Long a site of peaceful resistance to the Assad regimes, Daraya fell under siege in 2012. For four years, no one entered or left, and aid was blocked. Every single day, bombs fell on this place - a place of homes and families. And then a group searching for survivors stumbled upon a cache of books in the rubble. In a week, they had 6,000 volumes; in a month, 15,000. A sanctuary was born: a library where people could escape the blockade, a paper fortress to protect their humanity.

Women were there. For centuries, discussions of early Christianity have focused on male leaders in the church. But there is ample evidence right in the New Testament that women were actively involved in ministry, at the frontier of the gospel mission, and as respected leaders. Nijay Gupta calls us to bring these women out of the shadows by shining light on their many inspiring contributions to the planting, growth, and health of the first Christian churches.

Fearfully and Wonderfully Made takes listeners through their own bodies, delving into the molecular and even the quantum, and tells the story of our magnificent sensorium and what it means for the next wave of human potential. From the laboratories to the ordinary homes where these breakthroughs are taking place, the book explores our current sensory Renaissance and shows listeners how they, themselves, can heighten their own senses and experience the miraculous.