For too long the Religious Right has masqueraded as a social movement preoccupied with a number of cultural issues, such as abortion and same-sex marriage. In her deeply reported investigation, Katherine Stewart reveals a disturbing truth: this is a political movement that seeks to gain power and to impose its vision on all of society. America’s religious nationalists aren’t just fighting a culture war, they are waging a political war on the norms and institutions of American democracy. Stewart pulls back the curtain on the inner workings and leading personalities of a movement that has turned religion into a tool for domination. She exposes a dense network of think tanks, advocacy groups, and pastoral organizations embedded in a rapidly expanding community of international alliances and united not by any central command but by a shared, anti-democratic vision and a common will to power. She follows the money that fuels this movement, tracing much of it to a cadre of super-wealthy, ultraconservative donors and family foundations. She shows that today’s Christian nationalism is the fruit of a longstanding antidemocratic, reactionary strain of American thought that draws on some of the most troubling episodes in America’s past. It forms common cause with a globe-spanning movement that seeks to destroy liberal democracy and replace it with nationalist, theocratic and autocratic forms of government around the world. Religious nationalism is far more organized and better funded than most people realize. It seeks to control all aspects of government and society. Its successes have been stunning, and its influence now extends to every aspect of American life, from the White House to state capitols, from our schools to our hospitals.
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The Sum of the People: how the census has shaped nations, from the ancient world to the modern age
In April 2020, the United States will embark on what has been called “the largest peacetime mobilization in American history”: the decennial population census. It is part of a long, if uneven, tradition of counting people that extends back at least three millennia. Tracing the remarkable history of the census from ancient China, through the Roman Empire, revolutionary America, and Nazi-occupied Europe, right up to today’s Supreme Court battles, The Sum of the People shows how the impulse to count ourselves is universal, how the census has evolved with time, and how it has always profoundly shaped the societies we have built.
As data scientist Andrew Whitby reveals, the earliest censuses in ancient China and the Fertile Crescent had purely extractive aims: taxation and conscription. Later, as Enlightenment-era governments began to answer to citizens, the census was reinvented to support political representation and to delimit the boundaries of new nation-states. As the role of government grew through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, censuses became more complex and scientific. Census bureaus spun out dozens of other surveys, which formed the statistical foundation of modern, technocratic, data-driven government. For the first time, counting every person on the planet became a real possibility-and debates about who was counted, who was not, and what questions they were asked became the subject of intense political controversy in places from Australia to South Africa to the United States. The census at its best is a marvel of democracy, but it has at times been an instrument of exclusion, and, as in the case of Nazi Germany, a tool of tyranny and genocide.
Today, governments and businesses alike now routinely collect “big data” that would have been unimaginable just a few decades ago, prompting fears similar to those the census once provoked and leading to some to suggest that traditional censuses will soon be obsolete. The Sum of the People closes by making the case that, for all its past faults, the census can be an alternative and an antidote to a future of constant, invasive surveillance.
See You on Sunday: a cookbook for family & friends
From the New York Times food editor and former restaurant critic Sam Sifton comes a cookbook to help us rediscover the art of Sunday supper and the joy of gathering with friends and family. It is a guide to preparing meals for groups larger than the average American family (though everything here can be scaled down, or up). The 200 recipes are mostly simple and inexpensive, and they derive from decades spent cooking for family and groups ranging from six to sixty.
Dead Presidents: an American adventure into the strange deaths and surprising afterlives of our nation’s leaders
An exploration of the death stories of American presidents, and the wild ways that have been chosen to memorialize them, shares the surprising origins of landmark monuments and what they reveal about American history and culture.
Warburg in Rome
David Warburg, newly minted director of the U.S. War Refugee Board, arrives in Rome at war’s end, determined to bring aid to the destitute European Jews streaming into the city. Marguerite d’Erasmo, a French-Italian Red Cross worker with a shadowed past, is initially Warburg’s guide to a complicated Rome; while a charismatic young American Catholic priest, Monsignor Kevin Deane, seems equally committed to aiding Italian Jews. But the city is a labyrinth of desperate fugitives, runaway Nazis, Jewish resisters, and criminal Church figures. Marguerite, caught between justice and revenge, is forced to play a double game. At the center of the maze, Warburg discovers one of history’s great scandals–the Vatican ratline, a clandestine escape route maintained by Church officials and providing scores of Nazi war criminals with secret passage to Argentina. Warburg’s disillusionment is complete when, turning to American intelligence officials, he learns that the dark secret is not so secret, and that even those he trusts may betray him.
James Carroll delivers an authoritative, stirring novel that reckons powerfully with the postwar complexities of good and evil in the Eternal City.
The Mirror & the Light
Series:
General Note:
Sequel to Wolf hall (2009) and Bring up the bodies (2012).
Abstract:
“If you cannot speak truth at a beheading, when can you speak it?” England, May 1536. Anne Boleyn is dead, decapitated in the space of a heartbeat by a hired French executioner. As her remains are bundled into oblivion, Thomas Cromwell breakfasts with the victors. The blacksmith’s son from Putney emerges from the spring’s bloodbath to continue his climb to power and wealth, while his formidable master, Henry VIII, settles to short-lived happiness with his third queen before Jane dies giving birth to the male heir he most craves. Cromwell is a man with only his wits to rely on; he has no great family to back him, no private army. Despite rebellion at home, traitors plotting abroad and the threat of invasion testing Henry’s regime to the breaking point, Cromwell’s robust imagination sees a new country in the mirror of the future. But can a nation, or a person, shed the past like a skin? Do the dead continually unbury themselves? What will you do, the Spanish ambassador asks Cromwell, when the king turns on you, as sooner or later he turns on everyone close to him? With The Mirror & the Light, Hilary Mantel brings to a triumphant close the trilogy she began with Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies. She traces the final years of Thomas Cromwell, the boy from nowhere who climbs to the heights of power, offering a defining portrait of predator and prey, of a ferocious contest between present and past, between royal will and a common man’s vision: of a modern nation making itself through conflict, passion, and courage.