This book documents the devastation of the Cumberland Mountains by strip mining operations. The author tells "how bulldozers have destroyed whole mountains since early TVA days, and mountain men and women, quite literally fighting to save their land from the bulldozers of powerful mining (and oil) interests, formed the Appalachian Group to Save the Land and People."

In this gripping and provocative “ethnography of death,” anthropologist and MacArthur "Genius" Fellow Jason De León sheds light on one of the most pressing political issues of our time—the human consequences of US immigration and border policy. The Land of Open Graves reveals the suffering and deaths that occur daily in the Sonoran Desert of Arizona as thousands of undocumented migrants attempt to cross the border from Mexico into the United States. Drawing on the four major fields of anthropology, De León uses an innovative combination of ethnography, archaeology, linguistics, and forensic science to produce a scathing critique of “Prevention through Deterrence,” the federal border enforcement policy that encourages migrants to cross in areas characterized by extreme environmental conditions and high risk of death. For two decades, systematic violence has failed to deter border crossers while successfully turning the rugged terrain of southern Arizona into a killing field. Featuring stark photography by Michael Wells, this book examines the weaponization of natural terrain as a border wall: first-person stories from survivors underscore this fundamental threat to human rights, and the very lives, of non-citizens as they are subjected to the most insidious and intangible form of American policing as institutional violence. In harrowing detail, De León chronicles the journeys of people who have made dozens of attempts to cross the border and uncovers the stories of the objects and bodies left behind in the desert. The Land of Open Graves will spark debate and controversy.

* 2022 Young Lions Fiction Award, Winner. * A BookBrowse "20 Best Books of 2022" * VCU Cabell First Novelist Award, Longlist. * An ABA "Indie Next List" pick for November 2021. * "A Best Book of 2021" —New York Public Library, Cosmopolitan, Independent Book Review * "October 2021 Must-Reads" —Debutiful, The Chicago Review of Books, The Millions In 1913, a Russian ballet incited a riot in Paris at the new Théâtre de Champs-Elysées. “Only a Russian could do that," says Aleksandr Ivanovich. “Only a Russian could make the whole world go mad.” A century later, in November 2013, thousands of Ukrainian citizens gathered at Independence Square in Kyiv to protest then-President Yanukovych’s failure to sign a referendum with the European Union, opting instead to forge a closer alliance with President Vladimir Putin and Russia. The peaceful protests turned violent when military police shot live ammunition into the crowd, killing over a hundred civilians. I Will Die in a Foreign Land follows four individuals over the course of a volatile Ukrainian winter, as their lives are forever changed by the Euromaidan protests. Katya is an Ukrainian-American doctor stationed at a makeshift medical clinic in St. Michael’s Monastery; Misha is an engineer originally from Pripyat, who has lived in Kyiv since his wife’s death; Slava is a fiery young activist whose past hardships steel her determination in the face of persecution; and Aleksandr Ivanovich, a former KGB agent, who climbs atop a burned-out police bus at Independence Square and plays the piano. As Katya, Misha, Slava, and Aleksandr’s lives become intertwined, they each seek their own solace during an especially tumultuous and violent period. The story is also told by a chorus of voices that incorporates folklore and narrates a turbulent Slavic history. While unfolding an especially moving story of quiet beauty and love in a time of terror, I Will Die in a Foreign Land is an ambitious, intimate, and haunting portrait of human perseverance and empathy. "Kalani Pickhart's timely debut novel, I Will Die In a Foreign Land, is about the 2014 Ukrainian revolution which provided a pretense for Russia to annex Crimea. The story follows the experiences of several characters whose lives intersect as the country's political situation deteriorates. There's a Ukrainian-American doctor, an old KGB spy, a former mine worker, and others, and these episodes are interspersed with folk songs, news reports and historical notes. The effect—kaleidoscopic but never confusing—provides an intimate sense of a country convulsing, mourning, and somehow surviving." —CBS News, "The Book Report: Recommendations from Washington Post critic Ron Charles" (Watch the full video on CBS News, February 6, 2022).

"The public lands of the western United States comprise some 450 million acres of grassland, steppe land, canyons, forests, and mountains. It's an American commons, and it is under assault as never before. Journalist Christopher Ketcham has been documenting the confluence of commercial exploitation and governmental misconduct in this region for over a decade. His revelatory book takes the reader on a journey across these last wild places, to see how capitalism is killing our great commons. Ketcham begins in Utah, revealing the environmental destruction caused by unregulated public lands livestock grazing, and exposing rampant malfeasance in the federal land management agencies, who have been compromised by the profit-driven livestock and energy interests they are supposed to regulate. He then turns to the broad effects of those corrupt politics on wildlife. He tracks the Department of Interior's failure to implement and enforce the Endangered Species Act--including its stark betrayal of protections for the grizzly bear and the sage grouse--and investigates the destructive behavior of U.S. Wildlife Services in their shocking mass slaughter of animals that threaten the livestock industry. Along the way, Ketcham talks with ecologists, biologists, botanists, former government employees, whistleblowers, grassroots environmentalists and other citizens who are fighting to protect the public domain for future generations. This Land is a colorful muckraking journey--part Edward Abbey, part Upton Sinclair--exposing the rot in American politics that is rapidly leading to the sell-out of our national heritage"--

Milton Murayama’s long-awaited Dying in a Strange Land brings to a close the saga of the Oyama family. Familiar faces from All I Asking For Is My Body, Five Years on a Rock, and Plantation Boy return to advance the story from the years immediately following World War II to the 1980s. After her husband sinks them deep in debt, strong-willed and pragmatic Sawa takes charge of the family. The war ends and her children leave the plantation camp for Honolulu and the Mainland, but Sawa has little time for loneliness or regret. When asked by her neighbors if she misses them, she replies, "They must look for what they want." However, Tosh, the eldest—who has long been saddled with the burden of his family’s failures in addition to his own—is wise to his mother’s "sob stories": "She going hold you to your samurai’s word," he warns his brothers. Even after he becomes an architect, Tosh is quick to blame his problems on "oya-koh-koh" (filial piety). Living on the East Coast and unable to make ends meet as a writer, Kiyo, the third son, takes any job that doesn’t leave him too word-weary or emotionally exhausted to write in his spare time. Chronic fatigue turns him into a minimalist. At 52 he finally finds acclaim when he publishes a novel about issei and nisei in rural Hawai‘i. Not much is expected of Miwa, the fifth child and second daughter. Pregnant at sixteen and forced to leave school, she is rejected by her family and bullied by her in-laws until she finds work as a maid at one of the new hotels in West Maui. A surprise promotion brings Miwa self-esteem and a good income—and respect from her relatives. Just as each generation of the Oyama family struggles to find a way to survive the diaspora from Japan to Hawaii and beyond, so must Sawa, Tosh, Kiyo, and Miwa deal individually with the collision between Japanese and American values, between duty to family and personal freedom.

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A stunning novel that tells the powerful story of Ora, an Israli mother, and her extraordinary love for her son, Ofer, in a haunting meditation on war and family. “One of the few novels that feel as though they have made a difference to the world.” —The New York Times Book Review Just before his release from service in the Israeli army, Ora’s son Ofer is sent back to the front for a major offensive. In a fit of preemptive grief and magical thinking, so that no bad news can reach her, Ora sets out on an epic hike in the Galilee. She is joined by an unlikely companion—Avram, a former friend and lover with a troubled past—and as they sleep out in the hills, Ora begins to conjure her son. Ofer’s story, as told by Ora, becomes a surprising balm both for her and for Avram.

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST • An "extraordinary ... profoundly moving" history (The New York Times Book Review) of the American Civil War that reveals the ways that death on such a scale changed not only individual lives but the life of the nation. An estiated 750,000 soldiers lost their lives in the American Civil War. An equivalent proportion of today's population would be seven and a half million. In This Republic of Suffering, Drew Gilpin Faust describes how the survivors managed on a practical level and how a deeply religious culture struggled to reconcile the unprecedented carnage with its belief in a benevolent God. Throughout, the voices of soldiers and their families, of statesmen, generals, preachers, poets, surgeons, nurses, northerners and southerners come together to give us a vivid understanding of the Civil War's most fundamental and widely shared reality. With a new introduction by the author, and a new foreword by Mike Mullen, 17th Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.