FROM THE PAGE: An excerpt from Jacob Mikanowski’s Goodbye, Eastern Europe

Goodbye, Eastern Europe is a crucial, elucidative read, a sweeping epic chronicling a thousand years that illuminates the remarkable cultural significance and richness of a place perpetually lost to the margins of history.   Part I Faiths 1 Pagans and Christians A great forest, bristling with dangers and the occasional gleam of treasure: that is

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FROM THE PAGE: An excerpt from Tahir Hamut Izgil’s Waiting to Be Arrested at Night

Waiting to Be Arrested at Night is a poet’s account of one of the world’s most urgent humanitarian crises, and a harrowing tale of a family’s escape from genocide.   One A Phone Call from Beijing I keep returning to the first day of 2013. That evening, I received an unexpected call from Ilham Tohti,

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FROM THE PAGE: An excerpt from Javier Zamora’s Solito

In Solito, a young poet tells the inspiring story of his migration from El Salvador to the United States at the age of nine.   Winner of the Los Angeles Times Christopher Isherwood Prize for Autobiography Winner of the American Library Association Alex Award Longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence and the PEN/Open Book Award Finalist

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FROM THE PAGE: An excerpt from Victor Luckerson’s Built from the Fire

Built from the Fire is a multigenerational saga of a family and a community in Tulsa’s Greenwood district, known as “Black Wall Street,” that in one century survived the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, urban renewal, and gentrification.   Prologue Jim Goodwin remembers the symphony of the old Greenwood well. The blues mingling with smoke as

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FROM THE PAGE: An Excerpt from Bo Seo’s Good Arguments

Two-time world champion debater and former coach of the Harvard debate team, Bo Seo tells the inspiring story of his life in competitive debating and reveals the timeless secrets of effective communication and persuasion. 1. Topic How to find the debate On a Monday morning in January 2007, a couple of months after my graduation from

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FROM THE PAGE: An Excerpt from Clancy Martin’s How Not to Kill Yourself

In How Not to Kill Yourself, Martin chronicles his multiple suicide attempts in an intimate depiction of the mindset of someone obsessed with self-destruction. He argues that, for the vast majority of suicides, an attempt does not just come out of the blue, nor is it merely a violent reaction to a particular crisis or failure but

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FROM THE PAGE: An Excerpt from John Hendrickson’s Life on Delay

In Life on Delay, Hendrickson offers new insight into a disorder that has for decades been mocked, mischaracterized, and misunderstood. Through a layered and unguarded narrative, he takes the reader inside the intricate family dynamics surrounding his stutter, and he explores the history of stuttering treatment, the current search for a “cure,” and the nature of self-acceptance.

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FROM THE PAGE: An Excerpt from Michelle Obama’s The Light We Carry

There may be no tidy solutions or pithy answers to life’s big challenges, but Michelle Obama believes that we can all locate and lean on a set of tools to help us better navigate change and remain steady within flux. In The Light We Carry, she opens a frank and honest dialogue with readers, considering

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FROM THE PAGE: An Excerpt from Luke Mogelson’s The Storm Is Here

After years of living abroad and covering the Global War on Terrorism, Luke Mogelson went home in early 2020 to report on the social discord that the pandemic was bringing to the fore across the US. An assignment that began with right-wing militias in Michigan soon took him to an uprising for racial justice in

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FROM THE PAGE: An Excerpt from Andrea Wulf’s Magnificent Rebels

Magnificent Rebels is a group biography about a brilliant circle of friends the quiet university town of Jena in Germany in in the 1790s, among them playwrights, poets, writers, and philosophers who put the self at center stage in their thinking, their writing, and their lives. This group of young Romantics included the famous poets

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FROM THE PAGE: An Excerpt from Linda Villarosa’s Under the Skin

Under the Skin is a landmark book that tells the full story of racial health disparities in America, revealing the toll racism takes on individuals and the health of the nation. Linda Villarosa lays bare the forces in the American health-care system and in American society that cause Black people to “live sicker and die

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Read Kyle T. Mays’ Author Note for An Afro-Indigenous History of the United States

Beginning with pre-Revolutionary America and moving into the movement for Black lives and contemporary Indigenous activism, Afro-Indigenous historian, Kyle T. Mays argues that the foundations of the US are rooted in antiblackness and settler colonialism, and that these parallel oppressions continue into the present. He explores how Black and Indigenous peoples have always resisted and struggled

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