This book traces the careers of the men and women who bred the most outstanding Thoroughbreds of the 20th century.

Winner of the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award National Book Foundation Science + Literature Selection Finalist for New American Voices Award and Lammy Award for Bisexual Nonfiction A TIME, NPR, Chicago Public Library, Science for the People, WYNC, WBUR Radio Boston, and The Stacks Podcast Best Book of the Year Longlisted for the PEN Open Book Award As heard on Fresh Air Growing up in a New Jersey factory town in the 1980s, Daisy Hernández believed that her aunt had become deathly ill from eating an apple. No one in her family, in either the United States or Colombia, spoke of infectious diseases. Even into her thirties, she only knew that her aunt had died of Chagas, a rare and devastating illness that affects the heart and digestive system. But as Hernández dug deeper, she discovered that Chagas?or the kissing bug disease?is more prevalent in the United States than the Zika virus. After her aunt’s death, Hernández began searching for answers. Crisscrossing the country, she interviewed patients, doctors, epidemiologists, and even veterinarians with the Department of Defense. She learned that in the United States more than three hundred thousand people in the Latinx community have Chagas, and that outside of Latin America, this is the only country with the native insects?the “kissing bugs”?that carry the Chagas parasite. Through unsparing, gripping, and humane portraits, Hernández chronicles a story vast in scope and urgent in its implications, exposing how poverty, racism, and public policies have conspired to keep this disease hidden. A riveting and nuanced investigation into racial politics and for-profit healthcare in the United States, The Kissing Bug reveals the intimate history of a marginalized disease and connects us to the lives at the center of it all.

In the late 19th century Ohio was reeling from a wave of lynchings and other acts of racially motivated mob violence. Many of these acts were attributed to well-known and respected men and women yet few of them were ever prosecuted--some were even lauded for taking the law into their own hands. In 1892, Ohio-born Benjamin Harrison was the first U.S. President to call for anti-lynching legislation. Four years later, his home state responded with the Smith Act "for the Suppression of Mob Violence." One of the most severe anti-lynching laws in the country, it was a major step forward, though it did little to address the underlying causes of racial intolerance and distrust of law enforcement. Chronicling hundreds of acts of mob violence in Ohio, this book explores the acts themselves, their motivations and the law's response to them.