The New Press: 370 books

“Excellent” poetry and prose about physicians and their patients, by Raymond Carver, Kay Redfield Jamison, Rachel Naomi Remen, and more (Library Journal). A Life in Medicine collects stories, poems, and essays by and for those in the healing profession, who are struggling to keep up with...

In February of 2008, amid the looming global financial crisis, President Nicolas Sarkozy of France asked Nobel Prize–winning economists Joseph Stiglitz and Amartya Sen, along with the distinguished French economist Jean Paul Fitoussi, to establish a commission of leading economists to study whether...

“The first essential text of a new and remarkably dynamic era of social activism that has already brought profound change to the world.” —Bob Herbert Something was in the air in 2011, as protest movements swept through the world—from the Arab Spring, to Spain’s Indignados, to the...

"Do not underestimate the power of the book you are holding in your hands." -Michelle Alexander More than 2 million people are now imprisoned in the United States, producing the highest rate of incarceration in the world. How did this happen? As the director of The Sentencing Project,...

The sociologist and political scientist Frances Fox Piven and her late husband Richard Cloward have been famously credited by Glenn Beck with devising the “Cloward/Piven Strategy,” a world view responsible, according to Beck, for everything from creating a “culture of poverty” and fomenting...

Same-sex marriage, #BlackLivesMatter, the DREAM Act, the People’s Climate March, End the New Jim Crow, Occupy Wall Street, the fight for a $15 minimum wage-these are just a few of the remarkable movements that have blossomed in the past decade, a most fertile and productive era of activism. Now,...

The threats to privacy are well known: the National Security Agency tracks our phone calls; Google records where we go online and how we set our thermostats; Facebook changes our privacy settings when it wishes; Target gets hacked and loses control of our credit card information; our medical records...

Matthew Yeomans begins his investigation into the role of oil in America by trying to spend a day without oil—only to stumble before exiting the bathroom (petroleum products play a role in shampoo, shaving cream, deodorant, and contact lenses). When Oil was published in cloth last year, it was quickly...

Expert essays provide the first comprehensive analysis of the long-term health and environmental consequences of the Fukushima nuclear accident. On the second anniversary of the Fukushima disaster, an international panel of leading medical and biological scientists, nuclear engineers, and policy...

The Citizen Machine is the untold political history of television’s formative era. Historian Anna McCarthy goes behind the scenes of early television programming, revealing that long before the age of PBS, leaders from business, philanthropy, and social reform movements as well as public intellectuals...

An “absorbing” account of the CIA’s 1953 coup in Iran—essential reading for anyone concerned about Iran’s role in the world today (Harper’s Magazine). In August 1953, the Central Intelligence Agency orchestrated the swift overthrow of Iran’s democratically elected leader and installed...

When protesters in Egypt began to fill Cairo’s Tahrir Square on January 25th—and refused to leave until their demand that Hosni Mubarak step down was met—the politics of the region changed overnight. And the United States’ long friendship with the man who had ruled under Emergency Law for...

A college degree has never been more important-or more expensive. If you're not made of money, where can you get an amazing liberal arts education without your parents having to remortgage the house or cash in their retirement fund? Which degrees will allow you to fulfill your dreams and earn a decent...

Awarded “Special Recognition” by the 2018 Robert F. Kennedy Book & Journalism Awards Finalist for the American Bar Association’s 2018 Silver Gavel Book Award Named one of the “10 books to read after you've read Evicted” by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel “Essential...