New on the Shelves at Albert Wisner Public Library: Non-Fiction & Biography

Communication professor and CNN Opinion contributor Kara Alaimo reveals how social media is affecting every aspect of the lives of women and girls - from our relationships and our parenting to our physical and mental well-being. Alaimo shows why you're likely to get fewer followers if you're a woman. She explains how fake news is crafted to prey on women's vulnerabilities. She reveals why so much of the content we find in our feeds is specifically designed to hold us back. And she explains how social media has made the offline world an uglier place for women. But we can change this. Alaimo offers up brilliant advice for how to get over the influence - how to handle our daughters' use of social media, use dating apps to find the partners we're looking for, use social networks to bolster our careers, and protect ourselves from sextortionists, catfishers, and trolls. She also explains what we need to demand from lawmakers and tech companies. “Over the Influence” calls on women to recognize and call out the subtle (and not-so-subtle) sexism and misogyny we find online, reject misinformation that is targeted to us because of our gender, and use our platforms to empower ourselves and other women.

At present, Latinos comprise 20 percent of the US population, a number that is growing. By 2050, census reports project that one in every three Americans will claim Latino heritage. But Latinos are not a monolith. They do not represent a single group. The largest numbers are Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, Dominicans, Salvadorans, and Cubans - each has a different cultural and political background. As “LatinoLand” demonstrates, Latinos were some of the earliest immigrants to what is now the US - some of them arriving in the 1500’s. They are racially diverse - a random fusion of White, Black, Indigenous and Asian. They range from domestic workers and day laborers to successful artists, corporate CEO’s, and US senators. Formerly solidly Democratic, they now vote Republican in growing numbers. They are as varied culturally as any immigrants from Europe or Asia. Marie Arana draws on her own experience as the daughter of an American mother and Peruvian father who came to the US at age nine, straddling two worlds, as many Latinos do. “LatinoLand“ unabashedly celebrates Latino resilience and character and shows us why we must understand the fastest-growing minority in America.

Rex Chapman is considered by many the greatest basketball player ever produced by the hoops-crazy state of Kentucky. In two years at the University of Kentucky, he scored over 1,000 points, led the Wildcats to a Sweet Sixteen appearance and was nicknamed "King Rex." The first player ever drafted by the Charlotte Hornets, he spent 12 seasons in the NBA - but by the end of his career, Chapman was harboring a destructive secret. He developed a dependency on Vicodin and Oxycontin, ultimately ingesting 50 painkillers a day. In addition, he developed a severe gambling addiction, once nearly losing $400,000 at a Las Vegas blackjack table. All this would cost him his family as well as most of the $40 million fortune he'd made in basketball, leaving him to live in his car and shoplift to support his addictions. Only when he was arrested and his mugshot made national news, did he finally commit to getting clean. In his memoir, Chapman tells the story of his addiction and recovery in unflinching detail. With equal frankness, he describes his history with depression; the racism he witnessed growing up and how that shaped his outspokenness on matters of social justice; and his complex and volatile relationship with his father, also a former professional basketball player.

Algorithmic recommendations dictate our experiences and choices, and over the last decade, this network of mathematically determined decisions has taken over, almost unnoticed. This ever-tightening web woven by algorithms is called "Filterworld." Kyle Chayka shows us how online and offline spaces alike have been engineered for seamless consumption, becoming a source of pervasive anxiety in the process. Chayka’s book traces this creeping, machine-guided curation as it infiltrates the furthest reaches of our digital, physical, and psychological spaces. With algorithms increasingly influencing not just what culture we consume, but what culture is produced, urgent questions arise: What happens when shareability supersedes messiness, innovation and creativity - the qualities that make us human? What does it mean to make a choice when the options have been so carefully arranged for us? Is personal freedom possible on the Internet? To the last question, Filterworld argues yes - but to escape Filterworld, and even transcend it, we must first understand it.

“Cloistered” takes the reader deep into the hidden world of a traditional Carmelite monastery and tells the story of an intense personal journey into and out of an enclosed life of poverty, chastity and obedience. Finding an apparently perfect world at Akenside Priory, in Northumberland, Catherine trusts herself to a group of twenty silent women, believing she is trusting herself to God. As the beauty and mystery of an ancient way of life enfold her, she surrenders herself wholly to its power, quite unaware of the complexity and dangers that lie ahead. Cut off from the wider world for decades, the community has managed to evade accountability to any authority beyond itself. When Sister Catherine realizes that a mesmerizing cult of the personality has replaced the ancient ideal of religious obedience, she is faced with a dilemma. Will she submit to this, or will she be forced to speak out? An exploration of the limits of trust, “Cloistered” shows us how far youthful idealism can take us along the road of self-surrender, and of how much harm is done when institutional flaws go unacknowledged. Catherine's honest account of her time in the monastery - and her dramatic flight from it - is both a love song to a lost community and an exploration of what is most compelling, yet most potentially destructive when closed human groups become laws unto themselves.

On September 27, 2018, Christine Blasey Ford testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee which was considering the nomination of Judge Brett Kavanaugh to the United States Supreme Court. She described an alleged sexual assault by the Supreme Court nominee that took place at a high school party in the 1980’s. Her words and courage on that day provided some of the most credible and unforgettable testimony our country has ever witnessed. In “One Way Back,” Ford recounts the months she spent trying to get information into the right hands without exposing herself and her family to dangerous backlash. Drawing parallels to her life as a surfer, she explains the process of paddling out into unknown waters despite the risks and fears, knowing there is only one way back to shore. The book reveals riveting new details about the leadup to her testimony and its overwhelming aftermath and describes how she continues to navigate her way out of the storm. This is the real story behind the headlines and the soundbites, a complex, page-turning memoir of a scientist, a surfer, a mother, a patriot and an unlikely whistleblower.

From its debut in 1962, Edward Albee's “Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” was a wild success and a cultural lightning rod. It scandalized critics but magnetized audiences. Across 644 sold-out Broadway performances, the drama demolished the wall between what could and couldn't be said on the American stage and marked a definitive end to the “I Love Lucy” 1950’s. Then, Hollywood took a colossal gamble on Albee's sophisticated play - and won. Costarring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, the sensational 1966 film minted first-time director Mike Nichols as industry royalty and won five Oscars. How this scorching play became a movie classic - surviving censorship attempts, its director's inexperience and its stars' own tumultuous marriage - is one of the most riveting stories in all of cinema. Now, acclaimed author Philip Gefter tells that story in full for the first time, tracing Woolf from its hushed origins in Greenwich Village's bohemian enclave, through its tormented production process, to its explosion onto screens across America and a permanent place in the canon of cinematic marriages.

Abraham Lincoln grappled with the greatest crisis of democracy that has ever confronted the United States. Allen C. Guelzo, one of America's foremost experts on Lincoln, captures the president's firmly held belief that democracy was the greatest political achievement in human history. He shows how Lincoln's deep commitment to the balance between majority and minority rule enabled him to stand firm against secession while also committing the Union to reconciliation rather than recrimination in the aftermath of war. In bringing his subject to life as a rigorous and visionary thinker, Guelzo assesses Lincoln's actions on civil liberties and his views on race, and explains why his vision for the role of government would have made him a pivotal president even if there had been no Civil War. “Our Ancient Faith” gives us a deeper understanding of this endlessly fascinating man and shows how his ideas are still sharp and relevant more than 150 years later.

A humanist manifesto for the age of AI: Artificial intelligence may be the most transformative technology of our time. As AI's power grows, so does the need to figure out what - and who - this technology is really for. “AI Needs You” argues that it is critical for society to take the lead in answering this urgent question and ensuring that AI fulfills its promise. Verity Harding draws inspiring lessons from the histories of three 20th century tech revolutions - the space race, in vitro fertilization, and the internet - to empower each of us to join the conversation about AI and its possible futures. Sharing her perspective as a leading insider in technology and politics, she rejects the dominant narrative, which often likens AI's advent to that of the atomic bomb. History points the way to an achievable future in which democratically determined values guide AI to be peaceful in its intent; to embrace limitations; to serve purpose, not profit; and to be firmly rooted in societal trust. AI will permeate our lives in unforeseeable ways, but it is clear that the shape of AI's future - and of our own - cannot be left only to those building it. It is up to us to guide this technology away from our worst fears and toward a future that we can trust and believe in.

1742: the famous dome atop Saint Peter's Basilica, designed by Michelangelo, is fractured and threatened with collapse. The dome is the pride of Italy and the largest of its kind anywhere in the world. And no one knows how to fix it. This engaging and colorful narrative tells the overlooked story of how Michelangelo's Dome was saved from disaster by three mathematicians and Pope Benedict XIV, who had asked them for help. It is a gripping story of decisive leadership, crisis management, and scientific innovation and the resistance that was faced when sailing into the headwinds of conventional thought. In “Saving Michelangelo's Dome,” Stanford-trained engineer Wayne Kalayjian illustrates how new ideas in science and mathematics established an entirely new way of looking at the world - as well as solving its complex problems. In the end, readers will appreciate that in saving Michelangelo's Dome from collapse, these three mathematicians and one determined pope unknowingly invented the profession of engineering as we practice it today. With it, they transformed the architectural world and ushered in generations of future buildings and structures that, otherwise, would never have been built.

Susan Lieu has long been searching for answers. About her family's past and about her own future. Refugees from the Vietnam War, Susan's family escaped to California in the 1980’s after five failed attempts. Upon arrival, Susan's mother was their savvy, charismatic North Star, setting up two successful nail salons and orchestrating every success - until Susan was eleven. That year, her mother died from a botched tummy tuck. After the funeral, no one was ever allowed to talk about her or what had happened. For the next twenty years, Susan navigated a series of cascading questions alone - why did the most perfect person in her life want to change her body? Why would no one tell her about her mother's life in Vietnam? And how did this surgeon, who preyed on Vietnamese immigrants, go on operating after her mother's death? Sifting through depositions, tracking down the surgeon's family, and enlisting the help of spirit channelers, Susan uncovers the painful truth of her mother, herself, and the impossible ideal of beauty. “The Manicurist's Daughter” is much more than a memoir about grief, trauma, and body image. It is a story of fierce determination, strength in shared culture, and finding your place in the world.

As a long-time book critic and columnist in Washington, Carlos Lozada dissects all manner of texts: commission reports, political reporting, Supreme Court decisions, and congressional inquiries to understand the controversies animating life in the capital. He also reads copious books by politicians and top officials: tell-all accounts by administration insiders, campaign biographies by candidates longing for high office, revisionist memoirs by those leaving those offices behind. With this provocative essay collection, Lozada argues that no matter how carefully political figures sanitize their experiences, positions, and records, no matter how diligently they present themselves in the best and safest and most electable light, they almost always let slip the truth. They show us their faults and blind spots, their ambitions and compromises, their underlying motives and insecurities. Whether they mean to or not, they tell us who they really are. “The Washington Book” is the perfect guide to the state of our politics, and then men and women who dominate the terrain. It explores the construction of personal identity, the delusions of leadership, and that mix of subservience and ambition that can define a life in politics. The more we read the stories of Washington, Lozada contends, the clearer our understanding of the competing visions of our country.

A moving, original memoir of a young woman reckoning with her parents' absence, the virus that took them, and what it means to search for meaning in a hyperconnected world. In the early 1990’s, Heather McCalden lost both her parents to AIDS. She was seven when her father died, ten when she lost her mother. Raised by her grandmother, Nivia, she grew up in Los Angeles, also known as ground zero for the virus and its destruction. Years later, she begins researching online the history of HIV as a way to deal with her loss, which leads her to the unexpected realization that the AIDS crisis and the internet developed on parallel timelines. By accumulating whatever fragments she could about both phenomena - images, anecdotes and scientific entries - alongside her own personal history, McCalden forms a synaptic journey of what happened to her family, one that leads to an equally unexpected discovery about who her parents might have been. Entwining this personal search with a wider cultural narrative of what the virus and virality mean in our times - interrogating what it means to "go viral" in an era of explosive biochemical and virtual contagion. “The Observable Universe” is at once a history of our viral culture and a prismatic account of grief in the internet age.

Jonna Hiestand Mendez began her CIA career as a "contract wife" performing secretarial duties for the CIA as a convenience to her husband, a young officer stationed in Europe. She needed his permission to open a bank account or shut off the gas to their apartment. Yet Mendez had a talent for espionage, too, and she soon took on bigger and more significant roles at the Agency. She parlayed her interest in photography into an operational role overseas, an unlikely area for a woman in the CIA. Often underestimated, occasionally undermined, she lived under cover and served tours of duty all over the globe, rising first to become an international spy and ultimately to Chief of Disguise at CIA's Office of Technical Service. “In True Face” recounts not only the drama of Mendez's high-stakes work - how this savvy operator parlayed her "everywoman" appeal into incredible subterfuge - but also the grit and good fortune it took for her to navigate a misogynistic world. This is the story of an incredible spy career and what it took to achieve it.

Every day across the US, 66 million poor white people pay the price for failing whiteness. In this sweeping debut, activist and chaplain Cedar Monroe writes indelibly about and for poor white people: about unlearning the American dream, untangling from white supremacy, and working for liberation alongside other poor folks. From visits to jails, flophouses, tent cities, and on trips to hospitals and funeral homes, we see leaders forging connections between their people and the global movement to end poverty. With trenchant insight born of liberation theology, radical politics, and an even more radical hope, Monroe introduces us to people hammering out survival strategies and hope in the abandoned zones of empire. Capitalism and colonialism have stolen land from Indigenous people, forced workers into dangerous jobs, and then left them to die when their labor was no longer needed. But what would happen if poor white folks rejected the empty promises of white supremacy and embraced solidarity with other poor people? What if they joined the resistance to the system that is, slowly or quickly, killing us all? “Trash” asks us to see anew the peril in which poor white people live and the choices we all must make.

Award-winning author and critic Emily Raboteau crafts a powerfully moving meditation on race, climate, environmental justice - and what it takes to find shelter. “Lessons for Survival” is a probing series of pilgrimages from the perspective of a mother struggling to raise her children to thrive without coming undone in an era of turbulent intersecting crises. With camera in hand, Raboteau goes in search of birds, fluttering in the air or painted on buildings, and city parks where her children may safely play while avoiding pollution, pandemics and the police. She ventures abroad to learn from Indigenous peoples, and in her own family and community, she discovers the most intimate examples of resilience. Raboteau bears witness to the inner life of Black womanhood, motherhood, the brutalities and possibilities of cities, while celebrating the beauty and fragility of nature. This innovative work of reportage and autobiography stitches together multiple stories of protection, offering a profound sense of hope.

In September of 2019, Luis Alberto Quiñonez - known as Sito - was shot to death as he sat in his car in the Mission District of San Francisco. He was nineteen. His killer, Julius Williams, was seventeen. It was the second time the teens had encountered one another. The first, five years before, also ended in tragedy, when Julius watched as his brother was stabbed to death by an acquaintance of Sito's. The two murders merited a few local news stories, and then the rest of the world moved on. But for the families of the slain teenagers, it was impossible to move on. And for Laurence Ralph, the stepfather of Sito's half-brother who had dedicated much of his academic career to studying gang-affiliated youth, Sito's murder forced him to revisit a subject of scholarly inquiry in a profoundly different, deeply personal way. Written from Ralph's perspective as both a person enmeshed in Sito's family and as an Ivy League professor and expert on the entanglement of class and violence, “SITO” is an intimate story with an message about the lived experience of urban danger - and about anger, fear, grief, vengeance and ultimately grace.

The incredible story of the most decorated chaplain in US military history and his path to sainthood in the Roman Catholic Church. Father Emil Kapaun, a humble priest, went far beyond the call of duty during World War II and the Korean War. Often found with the combat medics on the front lines, unarmed, ministering to the wounded, and known for his intense devotion to the soldiers whom he called "my boys," Kapaun became the most decorated chaplain in US military history, awarded a Medal of Honor, the Distinguished Service Cross and the Legion of Merit. But Father Kapaun's leadership, bravery and selflessness don't end there. When the story of human history is over, evil, death, darkness - they don't get the final word. It was Father Kapaun's love for God that gave him the courage to lay down his life for his friends and for his country. Writer John Stansifer has spent years interviewing veterans and ex-POWs. Coupled with other interviews or self-published war experiences, as well as material from the National Archives and rare access to thousands of unseen documents,”No Bullet Got Me Yet” unveils the compelling history of the life of Father Kapaun as related by his friends, family and fellow soldiers, as well as in his own words from the numerous letters he wrote from the 1930’s all the way to the battlefields of the Korean War.

The siren song of Cerro Gordo, a desolate ghost town perched high above Death Valley, has seduced thousands since the 1800’s, but few fell harder for it than Brent Underwood, who moved there in March of 2020, only to be immediately snowed in and trapped for weeks. It had once been the largest silver mine in California. Over $500 million worth of ore was pulled from the miles of tunnels below the town. Butch Cassidy, Mark Twain and other infamous characters of the American West were rumored to have stayed there. Newspapers reported a murder a week. But that was over 150 years ago. Underwood bet his life savings - and his life - on this majestic, hardscrabble town. What followed were fires, floods, earthquakes and perhaps strangest, fame. “Ghost Town Living” tells the story of a man against the elements, a forgotten historic place against the modern world, and a dream against all odds - one that has captured millions of followers around the world. He came looking for a challenge different from the traditional 9-5 job but discovered something much more fulfilling - an undertaking that would call on all of himself and push him beyond what he knew he was capable of.