To find these selections and many other new titles, see the NMC library catalog.
New Non-Fiction
The Occasional Human Sacrifice: Medical Experimentation and the Price of Saying No by Carl Elliott
Shocking cases of abusive medical research and the whistleblowers who spoke out against them, sometimes at the expense of their careers. The Occasional Human Sacrifice is an intellectual inquiry into the moral struggle that whistleblowers face, and why it is not the kind of struggle that most people imagine. Beginning with the public health worker who exposed the Tuskegee Syphilis Study and ending with the four physicians who in 2016 blew the whistle on lethal synthetic trachea transplants at the Karolinska Institute, bioethicist Carl Elliott tells the extraordinary stories of insiders who spoke out against such abuses, and often paid a terrible price for doing the right thing.
A Great Disorder: National Myth and the Battle for America by Richard Slotkin
The culture wars are pitting us against each other with a vitriol that is fueling outright violence. Slotkin looks to the foundational myths that have shaped American identity-the Frontier, the Founding, the Civil War (Emancipation and Lost Cause), and Good War-and reveals how and why they are bringing the United States to the brink of an existential crisis.
Brave New Words: How AI Will Revolutionize Education (and Why That’s a Good Thing) by Salman Khan
From the founder of Khan Academy, the first book written for general audiences on the AI revolution in education, its implications for parenting, and how we can best harness its power for good. Whether we like it or not, the AI revolution is coming to education. In “Brave New Words,” Salman Khan, the visionary behind Khan Academy, explores how artificial intelligence and GPT technology will transform learning, and offers a road map for teachers, parents, and students to navigate this exciting (and sometimes intimidating) new world.
Midwestern Food: A Chef’s Guide to the Surprising History of a Great American Cuisine, with More than 100 Tasty Recipes by Paul Fehribach
Acclaimed Chicago chef Paul Fehribach surveys the tremendous diversity of localist food practices across the Midwest. Fehribach focuses not only on present trends but on a cultural migration from the Ohio River Valley north- and westward. The book will feature many remarkable recipes-e.g., bacon fat-fried Turkey Red Wheat pancakes; delicata squash stuffed with hominy, dried blueberries, and chilies; roast duck with whiskey sauce, sour red cabbage, and turnips; strawberry pretzel gelatin salad; and many more-as well as profiles and descriptions of some of the chefs, purveyors, and farmers who make up the food networks of the greater Chicago region.
Urban Informatics: Using Big Data to Understand and Serve Communities by Daniel T. O’Brien
This book is an onramp to the study of urban informatics, intended for advanced undergraduate and graduate level methods courses that want to maintain a linkage with substantive themes relevant to communities (and individual learners with similar goals). It is developed from O’Brien’s experience as Director of Masters of Science in Urban Informatics at Northeastern University and the primary instructor for the introductory course, “Big Data for Cities” since 2014. Importantly, it is ostensibly a methods textbook that introduces the reader to the tools of data management, analysis, and manipulation using R statistical software, but it also has a pervasive conceptual curriculum.
The Coming Wave: Technology, Power, and the Twenty-first Century’s Greatest Dilemma by Mustafa Suleyman with Michael Bhaskar
A stark and urgent warning on the unprecedented risks that a wave of fast-developing technologies poses to global order, and how we might contain them while we have the chance – from a cofounder of the pioneering AI company DeepMind. In this groundbreaking book from the ultimate AI insider, Suleyman firmly establishes “the containment problem”– or the challenge of maintaining human control over dangerous technologies – as the essential dilemma of our age, showing that radical steps must be taken if we are to live alongside technology of once unimaginable power.
Action Research in Education: A Practical Guide by Sara Efrat Efron, Ruth Ravid
Acclaimed as a text and professional development tool, this user-friendly resource has now been revised and updated, and offers expanded coverage of collaborative action research (CAR) and participatory action research (PAR). Preservice and inservice educators get crucial step-by-step guidance for conducting classroom- and school-based studies to improve their instructional practices. Organized to mirror the full cycle of action research, the book provides balanced coverage of qualitative, quantitative, and mixed methods approaches.
New Fiction
The Rich People Have Gone Away by Regina Porter
Brooklyn, 2020. Theo Harper and his pregnant wife, Darla, head upstate to their summer cottage to wait out the lockdown. Not everyone has this privilege: not Xavier, the teenager in the Cardi B t-shirt in their building, nor Darla’s best friend Ruby and her partner Katsumi, who are trying to save their Michelin-starred fusion restaurant. Upstate, while hiking on the aptly named Devil’s Path, Theo divulges a long-held secret about his heritage–and when Darla disappears after the ensuing argument, Theo becomes the prime suspect. As Darla and Theo’s families and friends come together to search for her, with Ruby and Katsumi often trying to broker the peace, past and present collide with startling consequences. For many brought back into the fold by Darla’s disappearance–even those glimpsed fleetingly in the building lobby–it is a chance to renew connections or to review distances–what brings them together, and what sets them apart.
The Cliffs by J. Courtney Sullivan
The crumbling Victorian had been abandoned long before Jane ever discovered it as a child. It was painted a sweet violet color, and the gingerbread trim was blue and green, but inside was shambles–broken glass, a dollhouse ravaged by mice, bedsheets twisted as though someone had left in a hurry. Still, the house became a hideaway whenever Jane needed to escape her volatile mother. Twenty years later, now a Harvard archivist, she returns home to Maine following the dissolution of her marriage and is horrified to find the Victorian is barely recognizable. A rich lady from Beacon Hill has gutted it, and in its place stands a glossy white mansion straight out of a shelter magazine. But the home’s new owner is unhappy. Her young son claims to have been speaking to the ghost of a child, and she keeps finding marbles on the floor. Troubled that she might have done something to anger the spirit world, a concept Jane dismisses as daffy, the wealthy woman hires her to research the land. The story Jane uncovers–of husbands lost at sea, wives mourning along the cliffs, historical artifacts stolen and sold, lovers secreted away, and, at the center of it all, a tale of colonialism–is as old as Maine itself.
Paper Cage by Tom Baragwanath
How far would you go to keep your family safe? Lorraine Henry is generally content to keep her head down and get on with her work as a records clerk at the Masterton police station. But when children start going missing in her small town, Lo can’t help but pay attention. After all, she has Bradley, her young nephew, to worry about, and the cops don’t seem to be putting much effort into finding the kids. And then the unthinkable happens: Bradley disappears. Distraught but determined, Lorraine vows to bring him home no matter what. And, together with a detective from Wellington, she embarks on a dangerous mission, one that will illuminate all the good and all the bad in Masterton.
The Life Impossible by Matt Haig
“What looks like magic is simply a part of life we don’t understand yet…” When retired math teacher Grace Winters is left a run-down house on a Mediterranean island by a long-lost friend, curiosity gets the better of her. She arrives in Ibiza with a one-way ticket, no guidebook and no plan. Among the rugged hills and golden beaches of the island, Grace searches for answers about her friend’s life, and how it ended. What she uncovers is stranger than she could have dreamed. But to dive into this impossible truth, Grace must first come to terms with her past. Filled with wonder and wild adventure, this is a story of hope and the life-changing power of a new beginning.
The Mighty Red by Louise Erdrich
In this stunning novel, Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award-winning author Louise Erdrich tells a story of love, natural forces and the tragic impact of big business. It is about on-the-job pains and immeasurable satisfactions, a turbulent landscape, and eating the native weeds growing in your backyard. It is about ordinary people who dream, grow up, fall in love, struggle, endure tragedy, carry bitter secrets; men and women both complicated and contradictory, flawed and decent, lonely and hopeful. It is about a starkly beautiful prairie community whose members must cope with devastating consequences as powerful forces upend them.
Someone Like Us by Dinaw Mengestu
After abandoning his once-promising career as a journalist in search of a new life in Paris, Mamush meets Hannah—a photographer whose way of seeing the world shows him the possibility of finding not only love but family. Now, five years later, with his marriage to Hannah on the verge of collapse, he returns to the close-knit immigrant Ethiopian community of Washington, DC, that defined his childhood. At its center is Mamush’s stoic, implacable mother, and Samuel, the larger-than-life father figure whose ceaseless charm and humor have always served as a cover for a harder, more troubling truth. But on the same day that Mamush arrives home in Washington, Samuel is found dead in his garage.
Summaries and images adapted from publishers.