For Kacee, a queer Black girl in middle school, everything feels like a struggle. Her parents take out their personal issues on her, classes are a challenge, her crush is clueless about her feelings, and her two best friends are always at odds. When Kacee fails a class as a result of her stress and ends up in summer school, she starts to wonder why she even bothers trying—and ultimately begins to discover her own power to improve the things in her life she can control, and try to let go of what she can’t. From writer Adam P. Knave (The Once and Future Queen) and artist Valentine Barker, with letters by Frank Cvetkovic (Punch-Up), The Airless Year is a story of self-discovery and empowerment about taking control where you can, and learning to let the rest go.
For Kacee, a queer Black girl in middle school, everything feels like a struggle. Her parents take out their personal issues on her, classes are a challenge, her crush is clueless about her feelings, and her two best friends are always at odds. When Kacee fails a class as a result of her stress and ends up in summer school, she starts to wonder why she even bothers trying—and ultimately begins to discover her own power to improve the things in her life she can control, and try to let go of what she can’t. From writer Adam P. Knave (The Once and Future Queen) and artist Valentine Barker, with letters by Frank Cvetkovic (Punch-Up), The Airless Year is a story of self-discovery and empowerment about taking control where you can, and learning to let the rest go.
"THRILLING. ... Up-end[s] the Apollo narrative entirely." —The Times (London) A "brilliantly observed" (Newsweek) and "endlessly fascinating" (WSJ) rediscovery of the final Apollo moon landings, revealing why these extraordinary yet overshadowed missions—distinguished by the use of the revolutionary lunar roving vehicle—deserve to be celebrated as the pinnacle of human adventure and exploration. One of The Wall Street Journal's 10 Best Books of the Month 8:36 P.M. EST, December 12, 1972: Apollo 17 astronauts Gene Cernan and Jack Schmitt braked to a stop alongside Nansen Crater, keenly aware that they were far, far from home. They had flown nearly a quarter-million miles to the man in the moon’s left eye, landed at its edge, and then driven five miles in to this desolate, boulder-strewn landscape. As they gathered samples, they strode at the outermost edge of mankind’s travels. This place, this moment, marked the extreme of exploration for a species born to wander. A few feet away sat the machine that made the achievement possible: an electric go-cart that folded like a business letter, weighed less than eighty pounds in the moon’s reduced gravity, and muscled its way up mountains, around craters, and over undulating plains on America’s last three ventures to the lunar surface. In the decades since, the exploits of the astronauts on those final expeditions have dimmed in the shadow cast by the first moon landing. But Apollo 11 was but a prelude to what came later: while Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin trod a sliver of flat lunar desert smaller than a football field, Apollos 15, 16, and 17 each commanded a mountainous area the size of Manhattan. All told, their crews traveled fifty-six miles, and brought deep science and a far more swashbuckling style of exploration to the moon. And they triumphed for one very American reason: they drove. In this fast-moving history of the rover and the adventures it ignited, Earl Swift puts the reader alongside the men who dreamed of driving on the moon and designed and built the vehicle, troubleshot its flaws, and drove it on the moon’s surface. Finally shining a deserved spotlight on these overlooked characters and the missions they created, Across the Airless Wilds is a celebration of human genius, perseverance, and daring.
How do otherwise decent people become mesmerized by a doctrine of hate? How can its grip be broken? In seeking answers to these pressing questions for our times, Barbara Leimsner confronts the past to discover how one ordinary man—her adored German papa—became thoroughly indoctrinated with Nazi ideology during the Hitler years. Its hateful tentacles reached into her young life as he filled her head with beliefs about Aryan superiority, racist stereotypes, and conspiracy theories. Leimsner sweeps the reader from immigrant working-class life in 1960s suburban Ontario, back to fascism’s rise in her father’s former Sudeten homeland and into war. As she weaves together the roots of her shameful inheritance, she also discovers deeper truths about herself—and the cure for hate. This thoughtful, compelling story will appeal to anyone concerned about the resurgence of racism, nationalism, and far-right ideologies today, and those interested in the Nazi legacy and Second World War. It will speak to all readers with German ancestry grappling with the past, and those interested in the immigrant experience, issues of inter-generational memory, identity, and trauma.
“[An] exhilarating, intimate study of fate, chance and the wildly meaningful intersections of disparate lives.” —Robert Kolker, New York Times Book Review, Editors’ Choice A Next Big Idea Club Must-Read Book for May 2023 The multigenerational tale of three families whose paths collide one summer night in 1960 with the murder of a police officer. Independence Day weekend, 1960: a young cop is murdered, shocking his close-knit community in Stamford, Connecticut. The killer remains at large, his identity still unknown. But on a beach not far away, a young Army doctor, on vacation from his post at a research lab in a maximum-security prison, faces a chilling realization. He knows who the shooter is. In fact, the man—a prisoner out on parole—had called him only days before. By helping his former charge and trainee, the doctor, a believer in second chances, may have inadvertently helped set the murder into motion. And with that one phone call, may have sealed a policeman’s fate. Alvin Tarlov, David Troy, and Joseph DeSalvo were all born of the Great Depression, all with grandparents who’d left different homelands for the same American Dream. How did one become a doctor, one a cop, and one a convict? In Genealogy of a Murder, journalist Lisa Belkin traces the paths of each of these three men—one of them her stepfather. Her canvas is large, spanning the first half of the 20th century: immigration, the struggles of the working class, prison reform, medical experiments, politics and war, the nature/nurture debate, epigenetics, the infamous Leopold and Loeb case, and the history of motorcycle racing. It is also intimate: a look into the workings of the mind and heart. Following these threads to their tragic outcome in July 1960, and beyond, Belkin examines the coincidences and choices that led to one fateful night. The result is a brilliantly researched, narratively ingenious story, which illuminates how we shape history even as we are shaped by it.
