Politics and Prose Presents

It’s 1915. War rages in Europe while Armenians in the Ottoman Empire find themselves unfairly blamed for a major military defeat. Cooped up at home, fourteen-year-old Arakel tries to ignore rumors of arrests and beatings of Armenians by focusing on the journey with his two best friends, one Turkish and the other Armenian, on the Silk Road to China in two years, after high school, certain war will be over by then. His life is torn apart when Turkish officials order nearly every Armenian into exile in the desert. Tormented by armed guards, Arakel doesn’t grasp what’s happening until they strip his family of food, water, and their meagre possessions and force them across the Euphrates River where bloated corpses float by. He has crossed into the land of the dead. In a desperate attempt to survive, he must reach out to people of different faiths and backgrounds–Bedouins, Kurds, Arab camel drivers, Turks, Germans, and even a wandering dervish, people he considers enemies, but can he trust them? In a barbaric world, he confronts what lies deep within the human heart. With an elegance reaffirming our collective humanity, The Kaleidoscope of Destiny reveals the courage, hope, and ingenuity to survive the darkest of times during an overlooked part of history and will resonate in today’s challenges.Before publishing her debut novel, The Kaleidoscope of Destiny, Sarah Ignatius worked for many years as a human rights lawyer and as a nonprofit executive director. She also taught immigration and asylum law at Boston College Law School for several years and is the co-author of Immigration Law and the Family. Previously, she authored a detailed report on the U.S. asylum system for Harvard Law School’s National Asylum Study Project, and her legal articles have appeared in the Harvard Human Rights Journal, Georgetown Immigration Law Journal, Benders Immigration Bulletin, and Immigration Briefings. She has received recognition from the New England Society of Children’s Books Writers & Illustrators and the National League of American Pen Women as well as Glimmer Train, and was selected as a Somerville Arts Council Literature Artist Fellow. She graduated from Stanford University and Georgetown University Law Center. She is half-Armenian and lives in Massachusetts with her family.Ignatius is joined in conversation with David Ignatius, a prize-winning columnist for the Washington Post and has been covering the Middle East and the CIA for four decades. He has written several New York Times bestsellers. He lives in Washington, DC.PURCHASE:https://politics-prose.com/book/9798897473199?ic_referral=YJQrH61SxWH44YFp5_ZcygzBGeemEkqhwulptQiLrHEwM19-xns3nuZGaVrxIS9ypW_BANf_TJJWP5vVILWoCvmDeh4errMd5D6y3RZhM-ZMibU6FLp8umb-38w0dG9COC31W4w

A passionate and illuminating account of soul, the hard-won wisdom shepherded by Black people throughout generationsHow did enslaved Africans turn America’s infamous failure into the greatest moral occasion of modern Western life? In this book, Christopher Freeburg answers that question with one word: soul. It was soul, Freeburg believes, which drove Black individuals and communities, grappling with horrific strife, to reimagine American life and equality in earnest.Black cultural life contains a central and significant theme—a soul, or form of life—expressed in a variety of musical, religious, and political forms. Through the work and words of figures ranging from the poet Phillis Wheatley to President Barack Obama and musician Nina Simone to disco owner Jewel Thais-Williams, Freeburg shows how Black communities leaned time and again on soul and its four pillars: resonance, revelation, resilience, and transcendence. It is soul, what Freeburg calls a beautiful transaction between individual and community across time and place, that has allowed Black people over generations to transform feelings of defeat and alienation into moral courage and shared belonging.Christopher Freeburg is the Presidential Humanities and Social Sciences Chair in English at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. His most recent book was Counterlife: Slavery after Resistance and Social Death.Freeburg will be in conversation with Tamika Smith, the local host of All Things Considered on WAMU 88.5 and Consider This from WAMU.Tamika joined WAMU in 2014 as a part-time weekend host. She later joined WAMU full-time as a host and reporter for WAMU/DCist. She was named WAMU’s afternoon drive-time host in 2022.Tamika’s prior experience includes producing the nationally acclaimed Russ Parr Morning Show, and launching Question of the Day with Murray and Tamika, an award-winning interactive trivia game on Amazon Alexa.PURCHASE:https://politics-prose.com/book/9780300264159?ic_referral=hlvdHe-UlhrFRqR6nJG0EKR8OOTlrbf4bV7hxotgGiUwM--AVZeXI_2o9TFDwXdlnlVo6n4uTlYfIxQVcmDLur2p05QaOFg1IYQk8ZhBrq0QUc2yxQTIr69b6ndCMKanFoK_RZs

An inspiring account of how the US government built a start-up development program to fight AIDS called PEPFAR, which saved more than twenty-six million lives and created a new blueprint for results-oriented American foreign aid.In 2002, more than two million Africans died of AIDS. Militaries reported HIV infection rates of more than twenty-five percent. Nearly four in ten pregnant women in some countries were infected. But in 2003, to the surprise of the world, President George W. Bush created PEPFAR, the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, which became his signature legacy for doing good in his eight years in office. PEPFAR has saved more than twenty-six million lives, prevented HIV from being transmitted to nearly eight million infants during birth, stabilized governments, and built back economies in Africa. It has been arguably America’s most successful foreign assistance program in history.How did it succeed? Lifeline tells the remarkable fast-paced story of how a small core of Americans and Africans built AIDS treatment programs from scratch in many countries—and how they faced down people who tried to stop them with grit and ingenuity. Based on interviews with more than 200 people—from President Bush and Dr. Anthony Fauci to local physicians and patients in small villages across Africa—Lifeline demonstrates indisputably the essence of American leadership and how America has, and still can, tackle the world’s greatest challenges and be a force for good in the world.wJohn Donnelly spent more than a decade covering the politics of AIDS and America’s response to the pandemic for The Boston Globe. He lived for several years in South Africa and traveled the continent of Africa for The Globe immediately following PEPFAR’s launch. After his career in journalism, he became an adviser to the President of the World Bank and received a Bellagio residency from the Rockefeller Foundation to write this book. He lives in Chevy Chase, Maryland.Donnelly is joined in conversation with Sheryl Gay Stolberg, a Washington Correspondent for The New York Times, covering the intersection of health policy and politics. In nearly 30 years at The Times, she has also been a Congressional Correspondent, a White House Correspondent, a national political features writer, and a National Correspondent covering the mid-Atlantic region. Stolberg has written about HIV/ AIDS since the early 1990s, and covered PEPFAR since its creation.  Stolberg is currently working on a history of public health and politics, to be published by Random House.PURCHASE:https://politics-prose.com/book/9780063483088?ic_referral=VyBS2E93_bxdlCr2mUHFSBF0NXA-Vwf8wh_B3dmMdgQwM6TOJUaWTSWgx13za7zieVEeTR31VKd_ZFbmb9i11sP1FsMATiTjvfb2kSqb_MHWQ_e-5jA-s72cElJx9HrH_oTbkpg

From acclaimed journalist Anand Giridharadas, a groundbreaking feat of reporting on a tragic encounter in a New York subway car that held up a mirror to a troubled and divided nationIn 2023, the lives of two men—Jordan Neely, a homeless man known in better days for his Michael Jackson impersonations, and Daniel Penny, an ex-Marine who had moved to the big city seeking more than Long Island could offer—collided tragically in a New York subway car. In Man in the Mirror, award-winning reporter and bestselling author Anand Giridharadas renders this deadly encounter and its aftermath as a propulsive crime story that opens onto a larger human drama: the search for belonging in an age of estrangement.Inhabiting the perspectives of an unforgettable cast of characters, Giridharadas immerses us in the places where this story plays out, from the corridors of power in City Hall to subway benches where New Yorkers spend the night, from a Marine Corps base to a Harlem church in mourning—and, ultimately, to a courtroom where a riveting battle unfolds. In his painstakingly reported, richly novelistic narrative, these characters’ strivings and struggles—to care for loved ones and strangers, to protect the public, to seek justice—reveal the humanity behind the headlines. Through one character’s eyes and then another’s, Giridharadas presents a chapter of American history too often reduced to divisive clickbait as something far more complex and full of life.At once panoramic in its scope and finely detailed in its emotional immediacy, Man in the Mirror is a tour de force of narrative reporting and an indispensable portrait of an age.Anand Giridharadas is the New York Times bestselling author of The Persuaders, Winners Take All, The True American, and India Calling. A former foreign correspondent and columnist for The New York Times for more than a decade, he has also written for The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and Time, and is the publisher of the newsletter The.Ink. He is an on-air political analyst for MS NOW. He has received the Radcliffe Fellowship, the Porchlight Business Book of the Year Award, Harvard University’s Outstanding Lifetime Achievement Award for Humanism in Culture, and the New York Public Library’s Helen Bernstein Book Award for Excellence in Journalism. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.Giridharadas is joined in conversation with Terry Moran, an award-winning journalist, writer, and broadcaster who spent nearly three decades at ABC News, reporting from around the world and across America. Today, Moran is an independent journalist and the founder of Real Patriotism, where he writes, reports, and hosts conversations about American politics, culture, and civic life. His recent work has taken him back on the road, reporting from communities across the country and listening to Americans far from the political stages and studios of Washington.PURCHASE:https://politics-prose.com/book/9780593802014?ic_referral=aK7xGBBHKFFVQOyQ6DFhs7_83jlGFf7AloFBrquCcNswM32KCjSaCVGp7C9TeDZcIGTb6ef0G0oAHkg95d9M2Deyn22nogqD9MMZoSooXG3KOTXYKdj8dhJ8Y4_x9NYDY20VVmw

“I can’t teach you, but I can show you.” With these words, Kentucky balladeer Doc Hopkins shared his musical knowledge with a willing student, summoning an independent streak deeply embedded in the American character. His words capture the informal creativity and colloquial practice that marks folk tradition as it extends from the countryside to the city and back again.Stephen Wade recounts creators and conservators like Doc Hopkins, many of them born in the closing years of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth. The figures include Sid Harkreader, Kirk McGee, Ola Belle Reed, Jewel Fagan Haynes, Cordell and Olean Kemp, Bill Monroe, Helen Marie Rowe, Virgil and Mabel Anderson, Joe and Odell Thompson, John Jackson, Huddie Ledbetter, Uncle Dave Macon, Dorris Macon, Raeburn Flerlage, David “Honeyboy” Edwards, Jim Schwall, Archie Green, Lloyd Lewis, Thaddeus Willingham, Jack Conroy, and Fleming Brown. As Will Keys, another of the musicians featured here, once told the author about his way of playing, it’s “AWYC, Any Way You Can.” These individuals and their stories demonstrate how folklore offers a way of understanding the world.Thoughtfully written, filled with original research, and abundantly illustrated with both color and black and white photography, Our Common Life illuminates the truth that creative freedom within informal tradition, fundamental to the artists and their processes, speaks to a resourcefulness inscribed in the nation’s founding charter and expressed in its common life.Stephen Wade is musician, author, and a Grammy-nominated recording artist best known for his long running stage performances of Banjo Dancing and On the Way Home. He is the author of the award-winning book The Beautiful Music All Around Us: Field Recordings and the American Experience.Wade is in conversation with Tom Cole, who studied comparative literature at Grinnell College, where he began his radio career at 10-watt KDIC.  He went on to work overnights as a board operator at WAMU-FM while working afternoons at Voice of America, eventually becoming production manager at WAMU. He finally landed at NPR, where he spent 33 years as an editor and producer on the Arts & Culture Desk in the News Division.  For the past 49+ years, he has also hosted the Sunday morning program, G-Strings, for WPFW-FM.PURCHASE BOOK:https://politics-prose.com/book/9780252059865?ic_referral=WsI1qipTwQ23696otcU_4AqtJwpcZuRxhVEaon6LyHgwM3ONmGqvuE1mNg9ah2dRdwgkGE02rj39Pekm4Rk6w6QKvJrrYCpJN4gVHl5C9j10oiE54f_PI9TRrpflsjn02Qdxj74