Looking ahead to the books we can’t wait to publish this spring
Our spring 2024 catalog features the cover art from Robert Baker’s Making Modern Medical Ethics, a book that traces the history of modern medical ethics and its bioethical turn to the moral insurrections incited by unsung dissenters and whistleblowers: African American civil rights leaders, Jewish Americans harboring Holocaust memories, feminists, women, and Anglo-American physicians and health care professionals who were veterans of the World Wars, the Cold War, and the Vietnam War.
It’s a theme that emerges across our spring list. This season we’re proud to be publishing works that expose systemic racial injustices in the American prosecutorial system, provide practical guidelines for inclusion, reveal photography’s fraught relationship to global antiblackness, and more.
We invite you to browse these and a few other highlights from the list below, or download the entire catalog and browse all our new books and journals. And we thank you, as ever, for supporting our work and mission.
Get Off My Neck: Black Lives, White Justice, and a Former Prosecutor’s Quest for Reform by Debbie Hines
In Get Off My Neck, Debbie Hines draws on her unique perspective as a trial lawyer, former Baltimore prosecutor, and assistant attorney general for the State of Maryland to argue that US prosecutors, as the most powerful players in the criminal justice system, systematically target and criminalize Black people. Hines describes her disillusionment as a young Black woman who initially entered the profession with the goal of helping victims of crimes, only to discover herself aiding and abetting a system that prizes plea bargaining, speedy conviction, and excessive punishment above all else. In this book, she offers concrete, specific, and hopeful solutions for just how we can come together in a common purpose for criminal justice and racial justice reform.
The Curie Society: Eris Eternal by Heather Einhorn, Adam Staffaroni and Anne Toole
Our heroic teen science prodigies are back for a new mission with the Curie Society, an elite secret organization where brilliant women can pursue the furthest reaches of their intellect, and this time they face a threat more serious and more sinister than anything they’ve encountered before. Maya, Taj, and Simone are supposed to be spending their summer broadening their horizons, but their plans take a strange and puzzling turn when the Curie Society’s original chapter at the Sorbonne in Paris calls on them for help. Along with new friends from the Paris chapter of the Curie Society, the team is thrown into a globe-spanning quest and a dangerous game of cat and mouse with a shadowy villain intent on controlling the world’s wealth through advanced biotech. The Curie Society will need all their specialized science skills to stop this scheme before it’s too late!
From Intention to Impact: A Practical Guide to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion by Malia C. Lazu
In the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder, corporate America has doubled down on its public intentions to be more inclusive and equitable. Yet beyond the pledges it is difficult to see which system changes make a real difference. In From Intention to Impact, Malia Lazu draws on her background as a community organizer, her corporate career as a bank president, and now her experience as a leading DEI consultant to explain what has been holding organizations back and what they need to do better. First and foremost, she recognizes that truly moving from intention to impact means targeting and changing the traditions and culture that normalize whiteness.
Mortevivum: Photography and the Politics of the Visual by Kimberly Juanita Brown
Since photography’s invention, black life has been presented as fraught, short, agonizingly filled with violence, and indifferent to intervention: living death—mortevivum—in a series of still frames that refuse a complex humanity. In Mortevivum, Kimberly Juanita Brown shows us how the visual logic of documentary photography and the cultural legacy of empire have come together to produce the understanding that blackness and suffering—and death—are inextricable. Brown traces this idea from the earliest images of the enslaved to the latest newspaper photographs of black bodies, from the United States and South Africa to Haiti and Rwanda, documenting the enduring, pernicious connection between photography and a global history of antiblackness.
The Biology of Kindness: Six Daily Choices for Health, Well-Being, and Longevity by Immaculata De Vivo and Daniel Lumera
The science is in: being good is actually good for you. In this bracingly original book, The Biology of Kindness—the first in a trilogy on the topic of daily wellness—the science of mindfulness and the findings of biology come together to show how kindness and optimism improve overall well-being in profound, organic, and demonstrable ways. Daniel Lumera, an expert in meditation and mindfulness, and Immaculata De Vivo, a preeminent researcher in molecular epidemiology, outline a revolutionary approach to health, longevity, and quality of life—and explain the scientific evidence that supports their work.
Decisionscape: How Thinking Like an Artist Can Improve Our Decision-Making by Elspeth Kirkman
Why are so many of our decisions regrettable, and what can we do about it? Decisionscape maps the surprising ways that our decisions are influenced and how thinking like an artist can help us deliberately arrange our perspective to make better choices. Introducing the concept of a “decisionscape,” Elspeth Kirkman blends art and science with insights from moral philosophy, sports, geopolitics, and elsewhere to explore decision making in a refreshingly original way. A broadly appealing and relatable book, Decisionscape asks us to confront the prejudices, blind spots, and hypocrisy in our day-to-day thinking.