Town Politics

One early morning on a Norfolk beach in Virginia, a dead body is discovered by a man taking his daily swim—Arman Bajalan, formerly an interpreter in Iraq. After narrowly surviving an assassination attempt that killed his wife and child, Arman has been given lonely sanctuary in the US as a maintenance worker at the Sea Breeze Motel. Now, convinced that the body is connected to his past, he knows he is still not safe.

When a terrorist attack grips the nation, Luke Steele, a military aide to the president of the United States, is reassigned to track down the suspect because the alleged bomber was spotted wearing a state championship ring from Luke’s hometown. Luke has desperately tried to forget his high school years, but he can’t run from them now. Instead, he must face his most formidable assignment yet: leave his post by the president’s side, return to Pine Falls, Virginia, and face every demon from his childhood—including every person and every thought that told him he wasn’t worth anything.

Award-winning journalist Mike Hixenbaugh delivers the immersive and eye-opening story of Southlake, Texas, a district that seemed to offer everything parents would want for their children—small classes, dedicated teachers, financial resources, a track record of academic success, and school spirit in abundance.

Silent Witness begins in 1967, in a small Midwestern town. Seventeen-year-old Tony Lord, Lake City's star athlete, seems destined for great things. His driving ambition is precisely what attracts Alison Taylor, the daughter of the town's leading family, and it is what sets Tony apart from his two closest friends: Sam Robb and Sam's girl, Sue Cash. Suddenly, everything changes. Alison Taylor is brutally murdered, and Tony is the number one suspect. The town turns against him. His friendship with Sam is destroyed. And Tony leaves Lake City, vowing never to return.

In The Company Town, Hardy Green, who has covered American business for over a decade, offers a compelling analysis of the emergence of these communities and their role in shaping the American economy, beginning in the country's earliest years....

For more than four decades, between 1969 and 2010, the remote former mining town of Trinidad, Colorado, was the unlikely crossroads for approximately 6,000 medical pilgrims who came looking for relief from the pain of gender dysphoria. The surgical skill and nonjudgmental compassion of surgeons Stanley Biber and his transgender protege Marci Bowers made the phrase "going to Trinidad" a euphemism for gender confirmation surgery in the worldwide transgender community.

The mother of Matthew Shepard shares her story about her son's death and the choice she made to become an international gay rights activist.

Decades of cuts to local government amidst rising concentrations of poverty have wreaked havoc on communities left behind by the modern economy. Forty years after the anti-tax revolution began protecting wealthy taxpayers and their cities, our high-poverty cities and counties have run out of services to cut, properties to sell, bills to defer, and risky loans to take. In The Fight to Save the Town, urban law expert and author Michelle Wilde Anderson offers unsparing, humanistic portraits of the hardships left behind in four such places.

In April 1938, Swift River Valley residents held a farewell ball to mark the demise of the quintessential New England town of Enfield and its three smaller neighbors, Greenwich, Dana, and Prescott. The Commonwealth of Massachusetts sacrificed these three towns to build the Quabbin, a massive reservoir of drinking water for residents of Boston. Three prominent residents attended the somber occasion.

The Anchor Hocking Glass Company, once the world's largest maker of glass tableware, was the base on which Lancaster's society was built. As Glass House unfolds, bankruptcy looms. With access to the company and its leaders, and Lancaster's citizens, Alexander shows how financial engineering took hold in the 1980s, accelerated in the 21st century, and wrecked the company.

In this riveting account of an area of Appalachia known as the Quiet Zone where cell phones and Wi-Fi are banned, journalist Stephen Kurczy explores the pervasive role of technology in our lives and the innate human need for quiet.

Even the most incorruptible juror can be unwittingly influenced by others' opinions in the digital age, but more sinister forces are at work: Jury tampering has reached all-time highs. Unexpected verdicts are coming down more and more often, indicating that shadowy groups may be blackmailing jurors - and leaving the American justice system in shambles. Is impartiality even possible anymore?

A beloved folk singer presents an impassioned account of the fall and rise of the small American towns she cherishes. Dubbed by the New Yorker as "one of America's very best singer-songwriters", Dar Williams has made her career not in stadiums, but touring America's small towns. She has played their venues, composed in their coffee shops, and drunk in their bars. She has seen these communities struggle, but also seen them thrive in the face of postindustrial identity crises.

A cursed violin, a witch with a shattered past, and the enemy sworn to silence her magic. Isadora Valen hides her power behind sugared pastries and enchantments whispered into the crust. But when forbidden magic flares during the Veil Festival, she’s marked by the realm’s most sacred relic—and by the man ordered to destroy her. Lachlan Daeven is a royal warden bound by duty and scarred by betrayal. Hunting rogue mages is what he does best. But when Isadora’s magic intertwines with his own, a soulbond sparks—violent, undeniable, and impossible to sever. She’s a fugitive with a ...

Hello, Shadowlands takes a deep plunge into crime rings both large and small. It also examines how China’s rise and America’s decline are creating new opportunities for transnational syndicates to thrive. Focusing on human stories on both sides of this crime wave, the acclaimed Bangkok-based broadcaster and journalist Patrick Winn intimately profiles the men and women of the region who are forced to make agonizing choices in the absence of law.

Cue the accordions: Battle Lake, Minnesota, is kicking off October Fest with polka, sausage, and cold suds. The big inaugural event? A debate between two congressional hopefuls. One, stultifyingly sincere. The other, a foot-in-mouth tippler. Reporter Mira James is roped into covering their fighting words…and then a murder, when a relentless pit bull of a blogger is found dead at a motor lodge filled to capacity with fellow pundits, campaign entourages, and tourists—all of whom have just become suspects.

Destructive forces have been eroding the University of Cape Town, Africa’s leading university. This audiobook tells the sad, true tale of what has been transpiring. It is a saga of lunacy, criminality, pandering, and identity politics. The mad and the bad–the deranged, deluded, the depraved–have been granted endless latitude in bullying and abusing others.

In The Other Side of the River, his eagerly awaited new book, Kotlowitz takes us to southern Michigan. Here, separated by the St. Joseph River, are two towns, St. Joseph and Benton Harbor. Geographically close, they are worlds apart, a living metaphor for America's racial divisions: St. Joseph is a prosperous lakeshore community and 95 percent white, while Benton Harbor is impoverished and 92 percent black. When the body of a black teenaged boy from Benton Harbor is found in the river, unhealed wounds and suspicions between the two towns' populations surface as well.

In the summer of 1860, more than 50 years after the United States legally abolished the international slave trade, 110 men, women, and children from Benin and Nigeria were brought ashore in Alabama under cover of night. They were the last recorded group of Africans deported to the United States as slaves. This book reconstructs the lives of the people in West Africa, recounts their capture and passage in the slave pen in Ouidah, and describes their experience of slavery alongside American-born enslaved men and women.

In the fall of 1973, the Greek oil shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis, husband of President John F. Kennedy's widow, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, and arguably the richest man in the world, proposed to build an oil refinery on the New Hampshire coast, in the town of Durham. But three women vehemently opposed the project. Small Town, Big Oil is the story of how the residents of Durham, led by three women, out-organized, out-witted, and out-maneuvered the governor, media, and Onassis cartel to hand the powerful Greek billionaire the most humiliating defeat of his business career.