-
Apr 23, 2024 | 
bookbrowse.com | Stephen Puleo
CHAPTER 1 "WE ARE BECOMING ABOLITIONISTS … FAST"Charles Sumner was saddened, though not overly sympathetic, when he saw his first slaves in 1834 at the age of twenty-three.
-
Feb 28, 2024 | 
publishersweekly.com | David Masciotra |Stephen Puleo |Shannon Vallor |Shefali Luthra
Ben Wynne. Louisiana State Univ, $29.95 (184p) ISBN 978-0-8071-8114-0Music historian Wynne (Something in the Water) scrupulously documents how Elvis’s 1956 hit song “Hound Dog” helped catapult rock ’n’ roll “into the American cultural mainstream.” Written for and performed by “blues belter” Willie Mae “Big Mama” Thorton in 1953, the song was covered by multiple artists before Elvis saw Freddie Bell and the Bellboys perform a sanitized and comedic rendition in Las Vegas in 1956.
-
Feb 27, 2024 | 
publishersweekly.com | David Masciotra |Stephen Puleo |Shannon Vallor |Shefali Luthra
Chris Stein. St. Martin’s, $30 (304p) ISBN 978-1-250-28672-7Blondie guitarist Stein (Point of View) chronicles in this knockabout personal history the colorful scenesters, grueling gigs, and desperate scrounging for drugs that have marked his musical career.
-
Feb 27, 2024 | 
publishersweekly.com | David Masciotra |Stephen Puleo |Shannon Vallor |Shefali Luthra
Glenn Kenny. Hanover Square, $32 (320p) ISBN 978-1-335-44962-7This raucous study from film critic Kenny (Made Men) examines the making and enduring cultural significance of Brian De Palma’s 1983 film, Scarface. Kenny describes how Al Pacino, impressed after watching Howard Hawks’s 1932 mobster flick of the same name, approached producer Marty Bregman about shooting a remake.
-
Feb 26, 2024 | 
publishersweekly.com | Hanif Abdurraqib |David Masciotra |Stephen Puleo |Shannon Vallor
Hanif Abdurraqib. Random House, $28 (352p) ISBN 978-0-593-44879-3Cultural critic Abdurraqib (A Little Devil in America) returns with a triumphant meditation on basketball and belonging. Serving as a love letter to Abdurraqib’s hometown of Columbus, Ohio, and the state more broadly, the book is structured like a basketball game, divided into four “quarters” with game clock time stamps demarcating section breaks.
-
Feb 22, 2024 | 
publishersweekly.com | David Masciotra |Stephen Puleo |Shannon Vallor |Shefali Luthra
Zachary Small. Knopf, $32 (368p) ISBN 978-0-593-53675-9“The contemporary art market has served as an economic laboratory for the rich to develop a shadow banking system of alternative assets and hedged liquidity,” according to this trenchant debut investigation. New York Times reporter Small argues that non-fungible tokens, or NFTs, are “financial tools branded as digital art” and traces the rise and fall of the NFT market through vivid profiles of artists swept up in it.
-
Feb 22, 2024 | 
publishersweekly.com | Sly Stone |David Masciotra |Stephen Puleo |Shannon Vallor
Roots drummer Questlove (Music Is History) lays down a kaleidoscopic chronicle of hip-hop’s 50-year history of “diversity and vision... flummery and flaws,” beginning with the 1973 Bronx party during which DJ Kool Herc began isolating and repeating songs’ beats on turntables.
-
Feb 20, 2024 | 
publishersweekly.com | David Masciotra |Stephen Puleo |Shannon Vallor |Shefali Luthra
David Ponton. Univ. of Texas, $45 (290p) ISBN 978-1-477-32847-7Historian Ponton debuts with a deeply researched and illuminating exploration of mid-century civil rights history in Houston.
-
Feb 20, 2024 | 
publishersweekly.com | Stephen Puleo |Becca Rothfeld |Sheryl Kaskowitz |Norman Ohler
The Great Abolitionist: Charles Sumner and the Fight for a More Perfect UnionMassachusetts senator Charles Sumner’s lifelong devotion to equal rights was akin to “digging a deep well with nothing more than a spoon... yet he never stopped digging,” according to this rousing biography from historian Puleo (Voyage of Mercy). As a young lawyer in 1849, Sumner coined the phrase “equality before the law,” a concept that rapidly propelled universal suffrage to the forefront of abolitionism.
-
Dec 6, 2023 | 
publishersweekly.com | David Masciotra |Stephen Puleo |Shannon Vallor |Shefali Luthra
Robert P. Kolker and Nathan Abrams. Pegasus, $35 (640p) ISBN 978-1-63936-624-8Kolker and Abrams—film professors at the University of Maryland, College Park and Bangor University, respectively—follow up Eyes Wide Shut, their deep dive into Stanley Kubrick’s final film, with an authoritative portrait of the director, who died in 1999.
