Just Published

The Battle for Gotham

New York in the Shadow of Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs

By Roberta Brandes Gratz

The week of May 10, Roberta Brandes Gratz answered questions from readers about Robert Moses, Jane Jacobs, their legacies, and what the future holds for urban planning in New York City. Read her answers on The New York Times' City Room blog here.

Murder City

Ciudad Juárez and the Global Economy's New Killing Fields

By Charles Bowden

Ciudad Juárez lies just across the Rio Grande from El Paso, Texas. A once-thriving border city, it now resembles a failed state—in 2008 alone, 1,607 people were murdered. In Murder City, award-winning author Charles Bowden has written an extraordinary account of what happens when a city collapses into violence.

Watch Bowden on Democracy Now! and listen to his interview on NPR's Morning Edition.

Halliburton's Army (paperback)

How a Well-Connected Texas Oil Company Revolutionized the Way America Makes War

By Pratap Chatterjee

"A sordid tale of politics and profiteering... A report that deserves many readers, about matters that deserve many indictments."
—Kirkus

Beware of Small States

Lebanon, Battleground of the Middle East

By David Hirst

In this magisterial history of Lebanon, from the end of the Ottoman rule to the Hizbullah and Hamas wars of today, David Hirst, the acclaimed and fiercely independent Middle East journalist and historian, charts with extraordinary skill and lucidity the intricate interplay between Lebanon and its geopolitical environment. This is also a history of the whole Middle East and above all, of the Arab-Israeli conflict.

"A brilliant analytical mind."
—Robert Fisk

Newsweek reviewed Hirst's book in the "We Read it so You Don't Have to" section of their magazine.

Mohamed's Ghosts

An American Story of Love and Fear in the Homeland

By Stephan Salisbury

Mohamed Ghorab had no hint one late spring morning that when he dropped his daughter off at school, his life would change forever. Federal agents and police surrounded him, eventually deporting him. This was a fearful time in the life of America following 9/11; exploring these events, Salisbury was constantly reminded of similar incidents in his own past—the paranoia and police activity that surrounded his political involvement in the 1960s and the surveillance and informing that dogged his father, a well-known New York Times reporter and editor, for half a century. Salisbury weaves these strands together into a personal portrait of an America fracturing under the intense pressure of the war on terror—the homeland in the time of Osama.

Listen to Salisbury discuss his book on July 29, 2010 at NYPL's Mid-Manhattan location at 6.30 p.m.

Soccer Against the Enemy (updated)

How the World's Most Popular Sport Starts and Fuels Revolutions and Keeps Dictators in Power

By Simon Kuper

Winner of the William Hill Sports Book of the Year Award, voted the best book on soccer by Four Four Two magazine, and as one of the top 25 books on sport by the London Observer, an updated Soccer Against the Enemy has been re-issued, with a new preface on the rise of the global fan. In it, Simon Kuper travels to 22 countries to discover the sometimes bizarre effect soccer can have on politics and culture. At the same time, he tries to discover what makes different countries play such a simple game differently.

"The best [book] from the last few years."
—Nick Hornby, author of Fever Pitch and About A Boy

Radical

A Portrait of Saul Alinsky

By Nicholas von Hoffman

"[Von Hoffman] cautions that some of the quoted material represents his best memory of 'things said a very long time ago." The result is literature, a charmingly picaresque, if over-indulgent, tale of a man whose job description was first, last and always Disturber of the Peace. The book's chief delights are its sense of place—Chicago from the 1930s through the 1960s—and the cast of characters who share the stage with the main player as he struts and frets so colorfully."
—The Wall Street Journal

Republican Gomorrah (Paperback)

Inside the Movement That Shattered the Party

By Max Blumenthal

An explosive bestseller, Max Blumenthal's Republican Gomorrah is a bestiary of dysfunction, scandal, and crime from the movement that runs the Republican Party. A hard-hitting look at the people and beliefs behind the fringe wing of the Right in America, Republican Gomorrah finds that a culture of personal crisis and trauma has united conservatives—many of whom will stop at nothing to delegitimize the Obama presidency and radicalize the nation. With a new introduction and original reporting on the Tea Party, Sarah Palin, and the midterm elections.

"An irresistible combination of anthropology and psychopathology that exerts the queasy fascination of (let's face it) something very like pornography."
—Hendrik Hertzberg, senior editor, The New Yorker