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Board lander photo
Board lander photo caption

front row (sitting) left to right: E. Ramshaw, N. Brown, T. Shelby, M. Miller; back row left to right: C. Lozada, N. Barnes, V. T. Nguyen, K. Lytle Hernández, A. Applebaum, J. Cobb (on screen; attending virtually), K. Merida, N. Carroll, S. Chan, D. Remnick (slightly behind S. Chan), G. Escobar, G. Thompson (slightly behind G. Escobar) and E. Alexander (absent: M. Shafik). (Photo by Jose R. Lopez)

Board Lander Sub Title
Neil Brown and Tommie Shelby, co-chairs; Marjorie Miller, administrator

Ilyon Woo

Citation
A rich narrative of the Crafts, an enslaved couple who escaped from Georgia in 1848, with light-skinned Ellen disguised as a disabled white gentleman and William as her manservant, exploiting assumptions about race, class and disability to hide in public on their journey to the North, where they became famous abolitionists while evading bounty hunters.
Tags: 2024
Categories: Biography
Publisher
Simon & Schuster
Publication
Master Slave Husband Wife: An Epic Journey from Slavery to Freedom

Jonathan Eig

Citation
A revelatory portrait of Martin Luther King, Jr. that draws on new sources to enrich our understanding of each stage of the civil rights leader’s life, exploring his strengths and weaknesses, including the self-questioning and depression that accompanied his determination.
Tags: 2024
Categories: Biography
Publisher
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication
King: A Life

Tracy Daugherty

Publication
Larry McMurtry: A Life
Citation
An insightful literary biography of the celebrated author written with brio and humor that evokes the Depression-era Texas of his youth and the myth of the American West that he dedicated himself to exposing.
Publisher
St. Martin’s Press
Tags: 2024
Categories: Biography

Michael Willrich

Publication
American Anarchy: The Epic Struggle between Immigrant Radicals and the US Government at the Dawn of the Twentieth Century
Citation
A riveting and beautifully written story of how anarchists and their lawyers remade American law, with profound implications for modern jurisprudence, and prompting serious reflection on the meaning and limits of democracy.
Publisher
Basic Books
Tags: 2024
Categories: History

Elliott West

Publication
Continental Reckoning: The American West in the Age of Expansion
Citation
A masterly crafted and comprehensive narrative of how our nation’s history unfolded across the American West and how the West, no less than the Civil War, profoundly shaped the rise of modern America.
Publisher
University of Nebraska Press
Tags: 2024
Categories: History

Jacqueline Jones

Citation
A breathtakingly original reconstruction of free Black life in Boston that profoundly reshapes our understanding of the city’s abolitionist legacy and the challenging reality for its Black residents.
Tags: 2024
Categories: History
Publisher
Basic Books
Publication
No Right to an Honest Living: The Struggles of Boston’s Black Workers in the Civil War Era

Ed Park

Publication
Same Bed Different Dreams
Citation
An inventive postmodern novel that moves from the brutal Japanese occupation of the Korean Peninsula to a lonely Korean American boy’s passion for the Buffalo Sabres, interlinked narratives that jump historical and imaginary time zones with humor, sorrow and irreverence.
Publisher
Random House
Tags: 2024
Categories: Fiction

Jayne Anne Phillips

Citation
A beautifully rendered novel set in West Virginia’s Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum in the aftermath of the Civil War where a severely wounded Union veteran, a 12-year-old girl and her mother, long abused by a Confederate soldier, struggle to heal.
Tags: 2024
Categories: Fiction
Publisher
Knopf
Publication
Night Watch

Yiyun Li

Publication
Wednesday’s Child
Citation
An affecting volume of thematically and stylistically connected stories that are set around tasks carried out by caretakers of the infirm and mothers struggling to carry on after the death of a child, work that mixes grief with gentle humor.
Publisher
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Tags: 2024
Categories: Fiction
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