The Brilliant Inventor Who Made Two of History's Biggest Mistakes
Thomas Midgley Jr. from Columbus invented both leaded gasoline and Freon. There may be no other single person in history who did as much damage to human health and the planet, all with the best of intentions.
Wright's autobiographical account of learning to survive in the Jim Crow South — a catalog of humiliations and adaptations that constitutes a primer in what systemic racism actually feels like from the inside.
A luminous, elegiac evocation of a Tennessee summer evening in childhood — the sounds, smells, and textures of a world both intensely present and already irrevocably lost.
Writing in the shadow of the atomic bomb, Porter meditates on the strange relationship between technology, catastrophe, and the human capacity — or incapacity — for foresight.
A train conversation with an anti-Semitic army colonel becomes a sharp examination of American liberalism — and McCarthy's own complicity in a society that produces such men.
Baldwin's searing account of his father's death, the Harlem riot, and what it means to be Black in America — one of the defining essays of the twentieth century.
Hall's elegy for his New Hampshire grandfather, who saved every piece of hardware from demolition — a portrait of Yankee thrift that is also a meditation on what we keep and why.
Written in the margins of a newspaper from a Birmingham jail cell, King's letter to eight white clergymen is an argument for nonviolent direct action that has never been surpassed for moral clarity.
Momaday retraces the Kiowa people's journey from the Montana headwaters to the Oklahoma plains — an interweaving of personal memory, tribal history, and the sacred geography of the American Southwest.
Written in the days after King's assassination, Hardwick's account of the Washington funeral procession meditates on martyrdom, grief, and what America does with its prophets.
Herr's hallucinatory Vietnam dispatches — a new kind of war writing that took the interior weather of combat seriously, capturing not just what happened but what it felt like to be inside the American war machine.
Angelou's account of growing up Black in Stamps, Arkansas — a portrait of childhood shaped by racism, silence, violence, and an eventual, hard-won sense of self.
Kingston reconstructs the story of her aunt, who drowned herself in the family well after giving birth to an illegitimate child — meditating on female transgression, family silence, and the cost of forgetting.
We tell ourselves stories in order to live. Didion's fractured account of the late 1960s — the Manson trial, rock bands, personal breakdown — as a portrait of a narrative that refused to cohere.
Manchester returns in memory to the battle of Okinawa, where he was wounded as a young Marine, and asks why he cannot hate the Japanese — and what the Pacific War made of him and his generation.
Gould examines the myth that Abner Doubleday invented baseball in Cooperstown in 1839 — using it as a case study in why nations need origin myths, and why the truth is always messier and more interesting.
