As a historian, I'm always delighted to read a book that shifts my perspective on history and that deeply changes what I thought I knew. This book details the ways the US had -- and made invisible -- an empire, both in the traditional sense of extracting resources from its territories and, after WW2, by establishing essentially a post-colonial empire through trade, technology, military bases, and language. There were wonderful, if sometimes sickening, vignettes here, as well as new insights into the relationship between US empire and the Beatles!
Named one of the ten best books of the year by the Chicago Tribune A Publishers Weekly best book of 2019 | A 2019 NPR Staff Pick
A pathbreaking history of the United States’ overseas possessions and the true meaning of its empire
We are familiar with maps that outline all fifty states. And we are also familiar with the idea that the United States is an “empire,” exercising power around the world. But what about the actual territories―the islands, atolls, and archipelagos―this country has governed and inhabited?
In How to Hide an Empire, Daniel Immerwahr tells the fascinating story…
This short novel moves seamlessly between the global (a massive earthquake in Portland) and the quintessentially personal (a pregnant woman trying to survive it.) It is beautifully written, frightening, inspiring, infuriating, and deeply moving. I am not generally drawn to stories where people talk to their fetuses, but this book grabbed me from the start. I (tentatively with with a warning) recommended it to a friend who has not had or wanted babies, and she declared it a "perfect novel" in its intensity, scale, and structure.
Annie is 37 weeks pregnant, standing in IKEA, finally about to take home the crib she should have bought months ago. That's when it happens - the long-anticipated Cascadia Earthquake,…
Samantha Harvey's Orbital won the Booker Prize, and so is likely familiar to most Shepherd Books readers. I have virtually no interest in outer space but I found this story smart, moving, and complex. Like Tilt, it takes place over one day, and it took stretches between the awesomely huge (the galaxy) and the small concerns and histories of ordinary people who somehow, against many odds, became astronauts and got to experience circling the earth they love.
Winner of the 2024 Hawthornden Prize Shortlisted for the 2024 Orwell Prize for Political Fiction Shortlisted for the 2024 Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction
A singular new novel from Betty Trask Prize-winner Samantha Harvey, Orbital is an eloquent meditation on space and life on our planet through the eyes of six astronauts circling the earth in 24 hours
"Ravishingly beautiful." — Joshua Ferris, New York Times
A slender novel of epic power, Orbital deftly snapshots one day in the lives of six women and men traveling through space. Selected for one of…
In 1830, Richard Walpole Cogdell, a husband, father, and bank clerk in Charleston, South Carolina, purchased a fifteen-year-old enslaved girl, Sarah Martha Sanders. Before her death in 1850, she bore nine of his children, five of whom reached adulthood. In 1857, Cogdell and his enslaved children moved to Philadelphia, where he bought them a house and where they became, virtually overnight, part of the African American middle class.
An ambitious historical narrative about the Sanders family, Tangled Journeys tells a multigenerational, multiracial story that is both traumatic and prosaic while forcing us to confront what was unseen, unheard, and undocumented in the archives, and thereby inviting us into the process of American history-making itself.
