On September 16, 1893, over 100,000 people converged on the edges of six million acres just south of the Kansas border, a parcel officially designated the Cherokee Outlet but more commonly called the Cherokee Strip. This was the largest of the rushes, where officials threw open whole parcels of land at one time. The opening of the outlet drew people with a wide mix of motivations. Those who arrived that stifling September found heat, dust, wretched conditions, high prices--and hope. Among them was William Prettyman, whose photographs remain the most stirring record of the event. When the starting gun went off at noon, the blurred images of people and animals racing across the dusty terrain became part of the memory of a whole region.

"Here is the perpetual variety of small town Oklahoma characters, incidents, changes; the self-confidence of an American boyhood; in honest, winning revelation."–Kirkus Reviews

A Nobel laureate reveals the often surprising rules that govern a vast array of activities -- both mundane and life-changing -- in which money may play little or no role. If you've ever sought a job or hired someone, applied to college or guided your child into a good kindergarten, asked someone out on a date or been asked out, you've participated in a kind of market. Most of the study of economics deals with commodity markets, where the price of a good connects sellers and buyers. But what about other kinds of "goods," like a spot in the Yale freshman class or a position at Google? This is the territory of matching markets, where "sellers" and "buyers" must choose each other, and price isn't the only factor determining who gets what. Alvin E. Roth is one of the world's leading experts on matching markets. He has even designed several of them, including the exchange that places medical students in residencies and the system that increases the number of kidney transplants by better matching donors to patients. In Who Gets What -- And Why, Roth reveals the matching markets hidden around us and shows how to recognize a good match and make smarter, more confident decisions.

A brilliant, kaleidoscopic narrative of Oklahoma City—a great American story of civics, basketball, and destiny, from award-winning journalist Sam Anderson NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The New York Times Book Review • NPR • Chicago Tribune • San Francisco Chronicle • The Economist • Deadspin Oklahoma City was born from chaos. It was founded in a bizarre but momentous “Land Run” in 1889, when thousands of people lined up along the borders of Oklahoma Territory and rushed in at noon to stake their claims. Since then, it has been a city torn between the wild energy that drives its outsized ambitions, and the forces of order that seek sustainable progress. Nowhere was this dynamic better realized than in the drama of the Oklahoma City Thunder basketball team’s 2012-13 season, when the Thunder’s brilliant general manager, Sam Presti, ignited a firestorm by trading future superstar James Harden just days before the first game. Presti’s all-in gamble on “the Process”—the patient, methodical management style that dictated the trade as the team’s best hope for long-term greatness—kicked off a pivotal year in the city’s history, one that would include pitched battles over urban planning, a series of cataclysmic tornadoes, and the frenzied hope that an NBA championship might finally deliver the glory of which the city had always dreamed. Boom Town announces the arrival of an exciting literary voice. Sam Anderson, former book critic for New York magazine and now a staff writer at the New York Times magazine, unfolds an idiosyncratic mix of American history, sports reporting, urban studies, gonzo memoir, and much more to tell the strange but compelling story of an American city whose unique mix of geography and history make it a fascinating microcosm of the democratic experiment. Filled with characters ranging from NBA superstars Kevin Durant and Russell Westbrook; to Flaming Lips oddball frontman Wayne Coyne; to legendary Great Plains meteorologist Gary England; to Stanley Draper, Oklahoma City's would-be Robert Moses; to civil rights activist Clara Luper; to the citizens and public servants who survived the notorious 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah federal building, Boom Town offers a remarkable look at the urban tapestry woven from control and chaos, sports and civics.

Choctaw are the largest tribe belonging to the branch of the Muskogean family that includes the Chickasaw, Creek (Muscogee), and Seminole. According to oral history, the tribe originated from Nanih Waya, a sacred hill near present-day Noxapater, Mississippi. Nanih Waya means "productive or fruitful hill, or mountain." During one of their migrations, they carried a tree that would lean, and every day the people would travel in the direction the tree was leaning. They traveled east and south for sometime until the tree quit leaning, and the people stopped to make their home at this location, in present-day Mississippi. The people have made difficult transitions throughout their history. In 1830, the Choctaw who were removed by the United States from their southeastern U.S. homeland to Indian Territory became known as the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma.