Against the backdrop of Kentucky in the 1970s—and against all odds—a black woman and a white man find a love that transcends race, class, and condemnation. J. Marie Darden's magnificent love story is set in 1971—a time of war not just in Vietnam or the streets of Washington, but also in Bourbon County, Kentucky. When the Mandarenes, a wealthy white family, move into the deserted mansion across the field behind her house, Sister takes a job with them. She soon finds herself in the middle of a drama that will change the racial balance of her town by falling in love with Evian, the youngest son in the Mandarene family. In haunting prose and beautiful images, Enemy Fields is a moving story full of insight into human hearts caught in the crossfire of one of the most volatile and violent periods of American history.

A memoir of fathers and sons, baseball, a world at war, and second chances. “I loved [it]. You will, too” (Jim Morris, author of The Oldest Rookie). Gene Moore was a small-town Illinois farm boy whose passion for “America’s Pastime” made him a local legend. It wasn’t long before word spread, and the Brooklyn Dodgers came calling on the teenage phenom who could hit a ball a country mile. Headed for stardom, and his dream within reach, Gene’s future in the majors was cut short by World War II. In 1944, after joining the US Navy, Gene found himself on a top-secret mission: guarding German sailors captured from U-505, a submarine carrying one of the infamous Enigma decoders. Stuck with guard duty, he decided to bide the time by doing what he loved. Gene taught the POWs how to play baseball. It was a decision that would change Gene’s life forever. The story of a remarkable man told by his inspired son, “Gene’s journey from promise to despair and back again, set against a long war and an even longer post-war recovery . . . [is] a 20th-century epic that demonstrates how, sometimes, letting go of a dream is the only way to discover one’s great fortune” (Publishers Weekly, starred review).

As Russia wages a twenty-first-century war against the very existence of a Ukrainian state and nation, reanimating Soviet-era propaganda that portrayed Ukrainians as Nazi collaborators and fascists, the experiences of the Ukrainian nationalist underground before, during, and after the Second World War gain new significance. While engaged in a decades-long struggle against the Ukrainian nationalist movement and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), and lasting into the mid-1950s, Soviet counterinsurgency forces accumulated a comprehensive and extensive archive of documents captured from the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists and the UPA. Volodymyr Viatrovych and Lubomyr Luciuk have curated and carefully annotated a selection of these documents in Enemy Archives, providing primary sources the Soviet authorities collected and deemed useful for better understanding their opponents and so securing their destruction, a campaign that ultimately failed. The documents seized from the insurgents and Soviet analyses of them shed light on a wide range of experiences in the underground: how the movement struggled to maintain discipline and morale, how it dealt with suspected informers, and how it resisted the ruthless Soviet state, laying the foundations for the continuing Ukrainian struggle against foreign domination.

Winner of the 2021 William A. Douglass Prize: A new perspective on the concept of international jihad and its connection to the 1990s Balkans crisis. No contemporary figure is more demonized than the Islamist foreign fighter who wages jihad around the world. Spreading violence, disregarding national borders, and rejecting secular norms, so-called jihadists seem opposed to universalism itself. In a radical departure from conventional wisdom on the topic, The Universal Enemy argues that transnational jihadists are engaged in their own form of universalism: These fighters struggle to realize an Islamist vision directed at all of humanity, transcending racial and cultural difference. Anthropologist and attorney Darryl Li reconceptualizes jihad as armed transnational solidarity under conditions of American empire, revisiting a pivotal moment after the Cold War when ethnic cleansing in the Balkans dominated global headlines. Muslim volunteers came from distant lands to fight in Bosnia-Herzegovina alongside their co-religionists, offering themselves as an alternative to the US-led international community. Li highlights the parallels and overlaps between transnational jihads and other universalisms such as the War on Terror, United Nations peacekeeping, and socialist Non-Alignment. Developed from more than a decade of research with former fighters in a half-dozen countries, The Universal Enemy explores the relationship between jihad and American empire to shed critical light on both. “[Li] effectively confronts the demonization of jihadists in the aftermath of 9/11, particularly in the US. . . . The author’s linguistic skills and the depth of the interviews are impressive, and the case selection is intriguing. Recommended.” —Choice “This important book offers many insights for scholars and students of political thought, anthropology, and law. Li’s breadth and acumen in navigating these different fields of study is impressive.” —Political Theory

Pam Crooks’s release, The Spyglass Project, is the first book of the Secret Six series set in the Prohibition era of 1920s Chicago. The book features Major Michael Malone as an alcoholic ex-military intelligence officer who infiltrates the city’s underground to expose a crime lord funding the rise of Adolf Hitler. The story opens with a Prologue set eight years earlier in a prisoner-of-war camp in Wittenberg, Germany, during World War 1. In the Enemy’s Shadow begins where the Prologue in The Spyglass Project ends and is a behind-the-scenes look at the life of double-agent, Hedda Klein, leader of a secret dissident group and working as a spy for the United States government under the code name of Agent Delilah. After she witnesses the murder of a troubled friend and comrade, she must flee to save her own life, only to encounter revenge and betrayal from a woman she trusts most.