The collected memoirs of a 1913 San Francisco sex worker, their effect on society at the time, and where they fit in today's world.In 1913 the San Francisco Bulletin published a serialized, ghostwritten memoir of a prostitute who went by Alice Smith. "A Voice from the Underworld" detailed Alice's humble Midwestern upbringing and her struggle to find aboveboard work, and candidly related the harrowing events she endured after entering "the life."Whi...

"An exciting and beautiful story." —Ottessa MoshfeghThe collected memoirs of a 1913 San Francisco sex worker, their effect on society at the time, and where they fit in today's world.Winner of the 2015 California Historical Society Book AwardIn 1913 the San Francisco Bulletin published a serialized, ghostwritten memoir of a prostitute who went by the moniker Alice Smith. "A Voice from the Underworld" detail...

The collected memoirs of a 1913 San Francisco sex worker, their effect on society at the time, and where they fit in today’s worldIn 1913 the San Francisco Bulletin published a serialized, ghostwritten memoir of a prostitute who went by Alice Smith. “A Voice from the Underworld” detailed Alice’s humble Midwestern upbringing and her struggle to find aboveboard work, and candidly related the harrowing events she endured after entering “the life.”Whil...

The moment Angelique arrives in Paris, she is taken prisoner by the SS. In a lonely little room, she is put in a chair with leather straps and a bloodstained seat and ordered to tell her captors everything she knows about the resistance. But Angelique knows nothing. She cares only for Martin, the boy who has been unable to speak since the bombs first fell during the Blitzkrieg. He has a secret-and she will protect it until her dying breath. Though Angelique loves him like her own, Martin i...

In 2002, Sam Faddis was named to head a CIA team that would enter Iraq to facilitate the deployment of follow-on conventional military forces numbering over 40,000 American soldiers. This force, built around the 4th Infantry Division, would, in partnership with Kurdish forces and with the assistance of Turkey, engage Saddam's army in the North as part of a coming invasion. Faddis expected to be on the ground in Iraq within weeks, the entire campaign likely to be over by summer.The ...

Iris Chang, bestselling author of The Rape of Nanking and tireless human rights activist, symbolized strength to many in the literary and social justice worlds. Her fearlessness made it all the more shocking when she committed suicide in 2004 at age thirty-six.Longtime friend and confidante Paula Kamen, author of the critically acclaimed All in My Head, reveals for the first time the private woman behind the bold international celebrity. She offers a tribute to th...

A damning confrontation between the American dream and the reality of undocumented children seeking a new life in the US.Structured around the forty questions Luiselli translates and asks undocumented Latin American children facing deportation, Tell Me How It Ends (an expansion of her 2016 Freeman's essay of the same name) humanizes these young migrants and highlights the contradiction between the idea of America as a fiction for immigrants and the reality...

As seen on the Today Show: This true story of an unforgettable mother, her devoted daughter, and their life in the Detroit numbers of the 1960s and 1970s highlights "the outstanding humanity of black America" (James McBride).In 1958, the very same year that an unknown songwriter named Berry Gordy borrowed $800 to found Motown Records, a pretty young mother from Nashville, Tennessee, borrowed $100 from her brother to run a numbers racket out of her home. Th...

"Lee is Trapped, and Must be Taken": Eleven Fateful Days after Gettysburg: July 4 to July 14, 1863 focuses on the immediate aftermath of the battle of Gettysburg and addresses how Maj. Gen. George G. Meade organized and motivated his Army of the Potomac in response to President Abraham Lincoln's mandate to bring about the "literal or substantial destruction" of Gen. Robert E. Lee's retreating Army of Northern Virginia.The eleven-day period after Gettysburg was a battle of ...

A generation before Brown v. Board of Education struck down America’s “separate but equal” doctrine, one Chinese family and an eccentric Mississippi lawyer fought for desegregation in one of the greatest legal battles never toldOn September 15, 1924, Martha Lum and her older sister Berda were barred from attending middle school in Rosedale, Mississippi. The girls were Chinese American and considered by the school to be “colored”; the school was for whites....

Praised for its "impressive even-handedness", From the Folks Who Brought You the Weekend has set the standard for viewing American history through the prism of working people (Publishers Weekly, starred review). From indentured servants and slaves in seventeenth-century Chesapeake to high-tech workers in contemporary Silicon Valley, the book "[puts] a human face on the people, places, events, and social conditions that have shaped the evolution of organized labor", enlive...

A lively and controversial overview by the nation’s most celebrated First Amendment lawyer of the unique protections for freedom of speech in AmericaThe right of Americans to voice their beliefs without government approval or oversight is protected under what may well be the most honored and least understood addendum to the US Constitution—the First Amendment. Floyd Abrams, a noted lawyer and award-winning legal scholar specializing in First Amendment issues, exami...