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

A startling new portrait of George Eliot, the beloved novelist and a rare philosophical mind who explored the complexities of marriage.; In her mid-thirties, Marian Evans transformed herself into George Eliot, an author celebrated for her genius as soon as she published her debut novel. During those years she also found her life partner, George Lewes (writer, philosopher and married father of three). After "eloping" to Berlin in 1854, they lived together for twenty-four years: Eliot asked people to call her "Mrs. Lewes" and dedicated each novel to her "Husband." Though they could not legally marry, she felt herself initiated into the great experience of marriage - "this double life, which helps me to feel and think with double strength." The relationship scandalized her contemporaries yet she grew immeasurably within it. Living at once inside and outside marriage, Eliot could experience this form of life, so familiar yet also so perplexing from both sides. Author Clare Carlisle reveals Eliot to be not only a great artist but also a brilliant philosopher who probes the tensions and complexities of a shared life.

In this last of three volumes on emptiness, the Dalai Lama takes us through the Sautrantika, Yogacara, and Svatantrika views on the ultimate nature of reality and the Prasangikas' thorough responses to these, so that we gain the correct view of emptiness--the selflessness of both persons and phenomena. This view entails negating inherent existence while also being able to establish conventional existence: emptiness does not mean nothingness. We then learn how to meditate on the correct view by cultivating pristine wisdom that is the union of serenity and insight as taught in the Pali, Chinese, and Tibetan traditions. Such meditation, when combined with the altruistic intention of bodhicitta, leads to the complete eradication of all defilements that obscure our minds. This volume also introduces us to the “tathagatagarbha,”the buddha essence, and how it is understood in both Tibet and China. Is it permanent? Does everyone have it? In addition, the discussion of sudden and gradual awakening in Zen (Chan) Buddhism and in Tibetan Buddhism is fascinating.

We are currently experiencing the largest and fastest religious shift in US history. It is greater than the First and Second Great Awakening and every revival in our country combined but in the opposite direction. Yet precious little rigorous study has been done on the broad phenomenon of dechurching in America. Jim Davis and Michael Graham have commissioned the largest and most comprehensive study of dechurching in America by renowned sociologists Dr. Ryan Burge and Dr. Paul Djupe. “The Great Dechurching” takes the insights gleaned from this study to drill down on how exactly people are dechurching with respect to beliefs, behavior, and belonging. The book gives the church in America its first ever deep dive into the dechurched phenomenon. Readers will learn about the dechurched through a detailed sketch of demographics, size, core concerns, church off-ramps, historical roots, and the gravity of what is at stake. Then they will explore what can be done to slow the bleed, engage the pertinent issues winsomely and wisely, and hopefully re-church some of the dechurched.

Prachi Gupta's family embodied the American Dream: a doctor father and a nurturing mother who raised two high-achieving children with one foot in the Indian American community, the other in Pennsylvania's white suburbia. But their belonging was predicated on a powerful myth: that Asian Americans have perfected the alchemy of middle-class life, raising tight-knit, ambitious families that are immune to hardship. Molding oneself to fit this perfect image often comes at a steep but hidden cost. In “They Called Us Exceptional,” Gupta articulates the dissonance, shame, and isolation of being upheld as an American success story while privately navigating traumas invisible to the outside world. Gupta addresses her mother throughout the book, weaving a deeply vulnerable personal narrative with history, postcolonial theory, and research on mental health, to show how she slowly made sense of her reality and freed herself emotionally and physically from the pervasive, reductive myth that had once defined her. But, tragically, the act that liberated Gupta was also the act that distanced her from those she loved most. By charting her family's slow unraveling and her determination to break the cycle, Gupta shows how traditional notions of success keep us disconnected from ourselves and one another, and passionately argues why we must orient ourselves toward compassion over belonging.

Spanning time, styles, and traditions, a dazzling collection of essential works from 140 Latine writers, scholars, and activists from across the world--from warrior poet Audre Lorde to novelist Edwidge Danticat and performer and author Elizabeth Acevedo and artist/poet Cecilia Vicuña - gathered in one magnificent volume. “Daughters of Latin America” collects the intergenerational voices of Latine women across time and space, capturing the power, strength, and creativity of these visionary writers, leaders, scholars, and activists, including 24 Indigenous voices. Several authors featured are translated into English for the first time. Grammy, National Book Award, Cervantes, and Pulitzer Prize winners as well as a Nobel Laureate and the next generation of literary voices are among the stars of this essential collection, women whose work inspires and transforms us. An eclectic and inclusive time capsule spanning centuries, genres, and geographical and linguistic diversity.

Bestselling author Lara Love Hardin recounts her slide from soccer mom to opioid addict to jailhouse shot-caller and her unlikely comeback as a highly successful ghostwriter in this harrowing, hilarious, no-holds-barred memoir. No one expects the police to knock on the million-dollar home of the perfect housewife. But soccer mom Lara has been hiding a shady secret: she is funding her heroin addiction by stealing her neighbors' credit cards, is convicted of 32 felonies and becomes inmate S32179. Lara learns that jail is a class system with a power structure that is somewhere between an adolescent sleepover party and Lord of the Flies. Furniture is made from tampon boxes and Snickers bars are currency. But Lara quickly finds the rules and brings love and healing to her fellow inmates as she climbs the social ladder to become the "shot caller," showing that jailhouse politics aren't that different from the PTA meetings she used to attend. When she's released, she reinvents herself as a ghostwriter. Now, she's legally co-opting other people's identities and getting to meet Oprah, meditate with The Dalai Lama, and have dinner with Archbishop Desmond Tutu. But the shadow of her past follows her. Shame is a poison worse than heroin, and there is no way to detox. Lara must learn how to forgive herself and others, navigate life as a felon on probation, prove to herself that she is more good than bad.

August Wilson wrote a series of ten plays celebrating African American life in the 20th century, one play for each decade. No other American playwright has completed such an ambitious oeuvre. Two of the plays became successful films (“Fences” and “Ma Rainey's Black Bottom”). “Fences” and “The Piano Lesson” won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama; “Fences” also won the Tony Award for Best Play. Through his brilliant use of vernacular speech, Wilson developed unforgettable characters who epitomized the trials and triumphs of the African American experience. He said that he didn't research his plays but wrote from "the blood's memory," a sense of racial history that he believed African Americans shared. Author and theater critic Patti Hartigan traced his ancestry back to slavery, and his plays echo with uncanny similarities to the history of his ancestors. She interviewed Wilson many times before his death and traces his life from his childhood in Pittsburgh (where nine of the plays take place) to Broadway. She also interviewed scores of friends, theater colleagues and family members, and conducted extensive research to tell the story of a writer who left an indelible imprint on American theater and opened the door for future playwrights of color.

A deeply affecting memoir of a father's descent into dementia, and a revelatory inquiry into why the human brain degenerates with age and what we can do about it. Almost six million Americans (about one in every ten people over the age of sixty-five) have Alzheimer's disease or a related dementia, and this number is projected to more than double by 2050. What is it like to live with and amid this increasingly prevalent condition, an affliction that some fear more than death? In “My Father's Brain,” the distinguished physician and author Sandeep Jauhar sets his father's struggle with Alzheimer's alongside his own journey toward understanding this disease and how it might best be coped with, if not cured. In an intimate memoir, Jauhar relates how his immigrant father and extended family felt, quarreled, and found their way through the dissolution of a cherished life. Along the way, he lucidly exposes what happens in the brain as we age and our memory falters, and explores everything from ancient conceptions to the most cutting-edge neurological and bioethical research. Jauhar also confronts the moral and psychological concerns that arise in families. The result is a work of essential insight into dementia, and into how scientists, caregivers, and all of us in an aging society are reckoning with the fallout.

An unforgettable memoir by an award-winning poet about being kidnapped from his Black father and raised by his white supremacist grandparents; When Shane McCrae was three years old, his grandparents kidnapped him and took him to suburban Texas. His mom was white and his dad was Black, and to hide his Blackness from him, his maternal grandparents stole him from his father. In the years that followed, they manipulated and controlled him, refusing to acknowledge his heritage--all the while believing they were doing what was best for him. For their own safety and to ensure the kidnapping remained a success, Shane's grandparents had to make sure that he never knew the full story, so he was raised to participate in his own disappearance. But despite elaborate fabrications and unreliable memories, Shane begins to reconstruct his own story and to forge his own identity. Gradually, the truth unveils itself, and with the truth, comes a path to reuniting with his father and finding his own place in the world - a revelatory account of a singularly American childhood that hauntingly echoes the larger story of race in our country.

Global humanitarian Eddie Ndopu was born with spinal muscular atrophy, a rare degenerative motor neuron disease affecting his mobility. He was told that he wouldn't live beyond age five and yet, Ndopu thrived and flourished academically. He was accepted on a full scholarship at Oxford University. But he soon learns that it's not just the medical community he must thwart - it's the educational one too. In “Sipping Dom Pérignon Through a Straw,” we follow Ndopu, sporting his oversized, bejewelled sunglasses, as he scales the mountain of success, only to find exclusion, discrimination, and neglect waiting for him on the other side. Like every other student, Ndopu tries to keep up appearances--dashing to and from his public policy lectures before meeting for cocktails with his squad, all while campaigning to become student body president. Privately, however, Ndopu faces obstacles that are all too familiar to people with disabilities, yet remain unnoticed by most people. With the revolving door of care aides, hefty bills, and a lack of support from the university, Ndopu feels alienated by his environment. As he soars professionally, sipping champagne with world leaders, he continues to feel the loneliness and pressure of being the only one in the room. Determined to carve out his place in the world, he must challenge bias at the highest echelons of power and prestige. But as the pressure mounts, Ndopu must find his stride or collapse under the crushing weight of ableism.

No one can make the mysteries of the universe more comprehensible and fun than Neil deGrasse Tyson. Drawing on mythology, history, and literature-alongside his trademark wit and charm - Tyson and StarTalk senior producer Lindsey Nyx Walker bring planetary science down to Earth and principles of astrophysics within reach. In this entertaining book, illustrated with vivid photographs and art, readers travel with him through space and time, starting with the Big Bang and voyaging to the far reaches of the universe and beyond. Along the way, science greets pop culture as Tyson explains the triumphs - and bloopers - in Hollywood's blockbusters - all part of an entertaining ride through the cosmos. The book begins as we leave Earth, encountering new truths about our planet's atmosphere, the nature of sunlight, and the many missions that have demystified our galactic neighbors. But the farther out we travel, the weirder things get. What's a void and what's a vacuum? How can light be a wave and a particle at the same time? When we finally arrive in the blackness of outer space, Tyson takes on the spookiest phenomena of the cosmos- parallel worlds, black holes, time travel, and more.