As you start planning your holiday travel, we’ve got your plane, train, or car reading covered. Check out the books below to find fascinating reads to help your travels fly by, or fill the downtime between holiday festivities. Now through the end of December, get any of these eBooks for just $1.99!
Wherever you’re headed (or whether you’re enjoying time at home), we hope you have a wonderful holiday season!
Click on any of the covers to find the eBook for your device available for order online for $1.99*
*offer good through 12/31/2019, only available through US retailers
A Rich Brew
How Cafés Created Modern Jewish Culture
By Shachar M. Pinsker
“[H]ugely entertaining and intimidatingly well researched, with scarcely a café in which a Jewish writer raised a cup of coffee from Warsaw to New York left undocumented.” —Adam Gopnik, The New Yorker
“Pinsker . . . believes that cafés in six cities created modern Jewish culture. Its the kind of claim that sounds as if it might be a game-changer, and there are enough grounds and gossip in A Rich Brew to keep this customer engrossed from cup to cup.” —Wall Street Journal
“A captivating tale of Jewish intellectual life, fueled by caffeine and good company in cities across the world.” —Metropole
Cecil Dreeme
A Novel
By Theodore Winthrop
Introduction by Peter Coviello
Eight Stories
Tale of War and Loss
By Erich Maria Remarque
German-American novelist Erich Maria Remarque captured the emotional anguish of a generation in his World War I masterpiece, All Quiet on the Western Front, as well as in an impressive selection of novels, plays, and short stories. This exquisite collection revives Remarque’s unforgettable voice, presenting a series of short stories that have long ago faded from public memory. In this collection, we follow the trials of naïve war widow Annette Stoll, reflect on the power of small acts of kindness toward a dying soldier, and join Johann Bartok, a weary prisoner of war, in his struggle to reunite with his wife.
“The world has a great writer in Erich Maria Remarque. He is a craftsman of unquestionably first rank, a man who can bend language to his will. Whether he writes of men or of inanimate nature, his touch is sensitive, firm, and sure.” —The New York Times Book Review
Water
Abundance, Scarcity, and Security in the Age of Humanity
By Jeremy J. Schmidt
“Jeremy Schmidt’s Water examines how these water worlds are conceived by anthropological theory. A bold and remarkable book, it offers a profound reassessment of central tenets within the anthropology of water… The book is an intellectual history, but it hews closer to science and technology studies than history of science in its philosophical concerns and theoretical ambition. It is required reading for anthropologists of water, as well as geographers, conservationists, and others interested in the management of water resources.” —PoLar Online
“I heartily recommend this book to anyone who is interested in the nexus between ideas and water, writ large. It is an impressive and incisive look into the minds of those who control a substance that is essential to all forms of life.” —American Historical Review
Habitats
Private Lives in the Big City
By Constance Rosenblum
“Rosenblum writes evocatively about a city where ‘neighborhoods, streets, even individual buildings are saturated with memory.’ Reading these pieces is like walking down a street at dusk and glancing into people’s illuminated living rooms…From these fragments of lives she weaves an intimate portrait of a city and its inhabitants.” —The Guardian
“A book rich with poignant, colorful, and endearing portraits of the common New Yorker.” —Lauren Palmer, Urban Omnibus
“Rosenblum’s nimble portraits are written from the perspective of a sharp outsider, and personal details bleed between the individuals she interviews and the spaces they inhabit until you realize that there isn’t any border between them.” —The New Republic
A Body, Undone
Living On After Great Pain
By Christina Crosby
“[S]harp and transformative A Body, Undone is about a calamitous accident, yes, but its also about the accident of all our lives, and the inevitable mortality that informs every one of our days.” —Los Angeles Review of Books
“Most memoirs about life with a disability ‘almost always move toward a satisfying conclusion of lessons learned, Crosby writes. But Crosby knows that there are no satisfying conclusions when one lives ‘a life beyond reason’–and that bit of wisdom alone is cause to read this elegant and harrowing book.” —The Washington Post
“[I]nher surgically incisive descriptions of how it feels to live in her ravaged body and to redefine herself within extreme new limits, Crosby resists both self-pity and the too-easy narrative of hardship overcome. Instead, she asks readers to recognize how messy, precarious, and queer, in every sense of the word, life in a body can be.” —The New Yorker
The Life and Death of Latisha King
A Critical Phenomenology of Transphobia
By Gayle Salamon
Why Jury Duty Matters
A Citizen’s Guide to Constitutional Action
By Andrew Guthrie Ferguson
“Ferguson, a veteran lawyer and law professor, outlines the importance of the jury in the legal system, how the right to trial by jury helped push the American Revolution forward, and how civil rights advances that created a more balanced jury pool have resulted in fairer trials for all…the dedicated and wonk-minded will learn a great deal about our legal system.” —Publishers Weekly
“Ferguson is an artful booster for community involvement and social connection and an advocate for the ability to challenge any perceived infringement of rights; a copy of the Constitution is always ready at his hand. This is a book that makes you feel good about a system that requires this type of participation, in which we must reflect with clarity on the guilt or innocence of an individual. A genuine encouragement that speaks to the role juries play in our constitutional structure.” —Kirkus Reviews
Must We Defend Nazis?
Why the First Amendment Should Not Protect Hate Speech and White Supremacy
By Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic
“Delgado and Stefancic are leading figures in the ‘critical race theory’ movement, a legal approach that sees law through the prism of race. They are, of course, correct in pointing to racial inequality in all areas of American life and to the abuse some minority students suffer at the hands of some insensitive white students.” —The Washington Post
“Delgado and Stefancic have written a deeply insightful book about the regulation of hate speech. It is filled with penetrating insights and understandings that come from two scholar steeped in the literature. No doubt I’ll turn to it often. The careful analysis of free speech, race, and equality should influence a generation of scholars and students.” —Alexander Tsesis, author of Destructive Messages: How Hate Speech Paves the Way for Harmful Social Movements
Click on any of the covers to find the eBook for your device available for order online for $1.99*
*offer good through 12/31/2019, only available through US retailers
Feature photo by Johannes Hofmann on Unsplash
