A beautiful
story of
family,
survival,
and hope.
capstonepub.com
6 STARRED REVIEWS:
Í “A must-read for our times”
— Kirkus
Í “;e air of a documentary”
— PW
Í “A ;rst purchase for
all libraries” — SLJ
Í “Powerfully understated
picture book”
— Horn Book
Í “Wistful, beautifully
illustrated story”
— Booklist
Í “Playing o; the writing’s
grace is ;i Bui’s art”
— Shelf Awareness
TOP10 BOO KS
Ants Among Elephants: An Untouchable Family and the
Making of Modern India
Sujatha Gidla (FSG)
Gidla’s spectacular memoir opens a window onto a world unfamiliar
to most Westerners: that of India’s untouchable caste. As her relatives
make their way through 20th-century India, Gidla reveals how caste
intersects with class, gender, religion, and more. It’s a rare feat when
personal stories are so clearly able to elucidate hotly contested political
battles. Gidla’s deep generosity of spirit is evident on every page.
The Apparitionists: A Tale of Phantoms, Fraud,
Photography, and the Man Who Captured Lincoln’s Ghost
Peter Manseau (HMH)
A rare work of historical nonfiction that is both studious and just
plain entertaining, Manseau’s book focuses on the 1869 trial for fraud
of William H. Mumler, a spirit photographer whose portraits of ghostly
loved ones hovering near mortal sitters captivated a nation still recov-
ering from the Civil War and obsessed with intimations of the afterlife.
The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our
Government Segregated America
Richard Rothstein (Liveright)
Making the case that the de facto segregation found throughout the
U.S. is in fact de jure, Rothstein maps out, in encyclopedic detail, government actions at the federal, state, and local levels throughout the 20th
century that denied housing opportunities to African-Americans. His
authoritative history puts forth a transformative picture of racial
inequality in modern-day America and offers a compassionate remedy
for these persistent divisions.
Extreme Cities: The Perils and Promise of Urban Life in
the Age of Climate Change
Ashley Dawson (Verso)
Books on climate change are a dime a dozen now, but few, if any, truly
reckon with the potential scale of the disasters that await. Dawson
reveals the inadequacies of current plans to deal with the problems that
cities around the world will face. Forget such buzzwords as “green cities,”
“resilience,” and “sustainable development”—the age of “disaster communism” is here.
Fear City: New York’s Fiscal Crisis and the Rise of
Austerity Politics
Kim Phillips-Fein (Metropolitan)
The neoliberal transformation of the U.S. began, in Phillips-Fein’s
view, with the piecemeal dismantling of New York City’s vibrant experiment in social democracy during the fiscal crisis of the 1970s. Municipal
bonds aren’t a sexy subject, and neither is the gutting of public services
that sustain a city and protect its most vulnerable, but Phillips-Fein turns
what could be a dry history into a riveting exposé of power.
