To find these selections and many other new titles, see the NMC library catalog.
New Non-Fiction
Suspended Education by Aaron Kupchik
Every year, millions of public school students are suspended. This overused punishment removes students from the classroom, but it does not improve their behavior. Instead, suspension disrupts their education, harming the students, their families, and their schools. Black students suffer most within this broken system, experiencing a far greater risk of school punishment and the significant harms that accompany it. Many activists and scholars have considered how school punishment increases racial inequity, but few have thought to ask why. Why do we punish students the way we do, and why have we allowed this harmful practice to impact the lives of our nation’s children? In this book, Aaron Kupchik takes readers to the root of the issue. Suspensions were not intended as a behavior management tool. Instead, they were designed to remove unwanted students from the classroom.
The Genome Odyssey by Euan Angus Ashley
Since the Human Genome Project was completed in 2003, the price of genome sequencing has dropped at a staggering rate. Through breakthroughs made by Dr. Ashley’s team at Stanford and other dedicated groups around the world, analyzing the human genome has decreased from a heroic multibillion dollar effort to a single clinical test costing less than $1,000. For the first time we have within our grasp the ability to predict our genetic future, to diagnose and prevent disease before it begins, and to decode what it really means to be human. In this book, Dr. Ashley details the medicine behind genome sequencing with clarity and accessibility. More than that, with passion for his subject and compassion for his patients, he introduces readers to the dynamic group of researchers and doctor detectives who hunt for answers, and to the pioneering patients who open up their lives to the medical community during their search for diagnoses and cures.
Turtle Island by Sean Sherman
Uncover the stories behind the foods that have linked the natural environments, traditions, and histories of Indigenous peoples across North America for millennia through more than 150 ancestral and modern recipes from three-time James Beard Award–winning Oglala Lakota chef Sean Sherman. Growing up on South Dakota’s Pine Ridge Reservation, Sherman understood that his people’s food was rich in flavor, heritage, and connection to the land. It was in the midst of a successful restaurant career mainly cooking European cuisines that he realized the lack of understanding about Native American foodways—a revelation that sent him on a journey to learn more about how Indigenous communities have preserved and evolved their cuisines through the centuries. Now a leading figure in the Indigenous food movement, he shares in this book the unique and diverse Native foodways of North America through both traditional and modern recipes made with ingredients that have nourished Indigenous peoples physically, spiritually, and culturally for generations.
Radical Cartography by William Rankin
Maps in the data age are ubiquitous. In an instant, places, social networks, even the human genome can be drawn up in exacting detail. Yet the ease and speed with which we can graph data perpetuates the same problem that has been around for centuries: over-simplified maps that are used as tools for top-down control. Cartographer and historian William Rankin argues that it’s time to reimagine what a map can be and how it can be used. It’s important to recognize that rather than being objective visualizations of facts, maps are innately political, defining what is worth noticing, drawing borders, and crafting conclusions about the ground they cover. And the consequences are enormous. The visual argument of a map can change how cities are designed and how rivers flow, how wars are fought and how land claims are settled, how children learn about race and how colonialism becomes a habit of mind.
The Hotel by Sophie Calle
In 1981 Sophie Calle took a job as a chambermaid for the Hotel C in Venice, Italy. Stashing her camera and tape recorder in her mop bucket, she not only cleans and tidies, but sorts through the evidence of the hotel guests’ lives. Assigned 12 rooms on the fourth floor, she surveys the state of the guests’ bedding, their books, newspapers and postcards, perfumes and cologne, traveling clothes and costumes for Carnival. She methodically photographs the contents of closets and suitcases, examining the detritus in the rubbish bin and the toiletries arranged on the washbasin. She discovers their birth dates and blood types, diary entries, letters from and photographs of lovers and family. She retrieves a pair of shoes from the wastebasket and takes two chocolates from a neglected box of sweets, while leaving behind stashes of money, pills and jewelry. Her thievery is the eye of the camera, observing the details that were not meant for her, or us, to see.
New Fiction
The Girls Who Grew Big by Leila Mottley
Adela Woods is sixteen years old and pregnant. Her parents banish her from her comfortable upbringing in Indiana to her grandmother’s home in the small town of Padua Beach, Florida. When she arrives, Adela meets Emory, who brings her newborn to high school, determined to graduate despite the odds; Simone, mother of four-year-old twins, who weighs her options when she finds herself pregnant again; and the rest of the Girls, a group of outcast young moms who raise their growing brood in the back of Simone’s red truck. The town thinks the Girls have lost their way, but really they are finding it: looking for love, making and breaking friendships, and navigating the miracle of motherhood and the paradox of girlhood.
Kin by Tayari Jones
Vernice and Annie, two motherless daughters raised in Honeysuckle, Louisiana, have been best friends and neighbors since earliest childhood but are fated to live starkly different lives. Raised by a fierce aunt determined to give her a stable home in the wake of her mother’s death, Vernice leaves Honeysuckle at eighteen for Spelman College, where she joins a sisterhood of powerfully connected Black women and discovers a world of affluence, manners, aspiration, and inequality. Annie, abandoned by her mother as a child and fixated on the idea of finding her and filling the bottomless hole left by her absence, sets off on a journey that will take her into a world of peril and adversity, as well as love and adventure, culminating in a battle for her life. A story about mothers and daughters, friendship and sisterhood, and the complexities of being a woman in the American South, this novel is an exuberant, emotionally rich, unforgettable work from one of the brightest and most irresistible voices in contemporary fiction.
Skylark by Paula McLain
1664: Alouette Voland is the daughter of a master dyer at the famed Gobelin Tapestry Works, who secretly dreams of escaping her circumstances and creating her own masterpiece. When her father is unjustly imprisoned, Alouette’s efforts to save him lead to her own confinement in the notorious Salpêtrière asylum, where thousands of women are held captive and cruelly treated. But within its grim walls, she discovers a small group of brave allies, and the possibility of a life bigger than she ever imagined. 1939: Kristof Larson is a medical student beginning his psychiatric residency in Paris, whose neighbors on the Rue de Gobelins are a Jewish family who have fled Poland. When Nazi forces descend on the city, Kristof becomes their only hope for survival, even as his work as a doctor is jeopardized. A spellbinding and transportive look at a side of Paris known to very few—the underground city that is a mirror reflection of the glories above—Paula McLain’s unforgettable novel chronicles two parallel journeys of defiance and rescue that connect in ways both surprising and deeply moving.
Dungeon Crawler Carl by Matt Dinniman
In a flash, every human-erected construction on Earth – from Buckingham Palace to the tiniest of sheds – collapses in a heap, sinking into the ground. The buildings and all the people inside have all been atomized and transformed into the dungeon: an 18-level labyrinth filled with traps, monsters, and loot. A dungeon so enormous, it circles the entire globe. Only a few dare venture inside. But once you’re in, you can’t get out. And what’s worse, each level has a time limit. You have but days to find a staircase to the next level down, or it’s game over. In this game, it’s not about your strength or your dexterity. It’s about your followers, your views. It’s about building an audience and killing those goblins with style. You can’t just survive here. You gotta survive big. You gotta make them stand up and cheer. And if you do have that “it” factor, you may just find yourself with a following. That’s the only way to truly survive in this game – with the help of the loot boxes dropped upon you by the generous benefactors watching from across the galaxy. They call it Dungeon Crawler World. But for Carl, it’s anything but a game.
This Is Not About Us by Allegra Goodman
Was this just a brief skirmish, or the beginning of a thirty-year feud? In the Rubenstein family, it could go either way. When their beloved older sister passes away, Sylvia and Helen Rubinstein are unmoored. A misunderstanding about apple cake turns into decades of stubborn silence. Busy with their own lives-divorces, dating, career setbacks, college applications, bat mitzvahs and ballet recitals-their children do not want to get involved. As for their grandchildren? Impossible. With this novel, master storyteller Allegra Goodman returns to the form and subject that endeared her to legions of readers. Sharply observed and laced with humor, this is a story of growing up and growing old, the weight of parental expectations, and the complex connection between sisters.
Summaries and images adapted from publishers.