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Politics and Prose is a large, independent bookstore uniquely situated in the nation’s capital and serving a broad array of Washington readers, writers, thinkers, teachers, and policy-makers. In addition to our incredible selection of titles, Politics and Prose offers more than 500 public events each year, bringing leading authors across all genres to venues in Washington, DC. Visit us online at www.politics-prose.com.

  1. 4H AGO

    Thomas Zeitzoff — No Option But Sabotage: The Radical Environmental Movement and the Climate Crisis -with JJ Green

    An authoritative history of the radical environmental movement in the United States, No Option But Sabotage explores how far activists are willing to go to defend the planet in the face of repression and the escalating climate crisis.After 9/11, the radical environmental movement was considered the number one domestic terror threat by the U.S. government. But by the end of the decade the movement had largely gone silent. What happened? And given the threat from climate, why haven't more radical tactics re-emerged?In No Option But Sabotage, Thomas Zeitzoff traces the origins, rise, fall, and potential rise again of the movement. Using in-depth interviews with past and current activists, as well as experts, Zeitzoff covers the main factions and actors. These include: Earth First! and its early advocacy for "monkeywrenching;" the "Unabomber" Ted Kaczynski and his years-long anti-technology bombing campaign; the connections between animal liberation, punk, and the emergence of the Earth Liberation Front and its arson campaign; and more recent climate activists and their use of disruptive tactics. Along with providing a comprehensive overview of the movement and its various sub-movements that emerged over time, Zeitzoff also asks the bigger question-given the scope and threat from climate change why haven't activists escalated their tactics? Property destruction, sabotage, and even arson were once regular features of the movement in the 1990s and early 2000s--will activists use them again, or will they stick to non-violence? Will the threat of increasing state repression scare activists, or radicalize them?Not just a history of a major extremist movement, this book tells the story of radical environmentalism and highlights how activists are confronting the dual threats of climate change and repression, and asking themselves how far they are willing to go to protect the planet. Thomas Zeitzoff is a professor in the School of Public Affairs at American University. His research focuses on political violence, social media, and political psychology. His work has appeared in Science Advances, American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, International Organization, Political Psychology, among other journals and he is the author of Nasty Politics: The Logic of Insults, Threats, and Incitement. Zeitzoff is in conversation with JJ Green, who is the National Security Correspondent at WTOP radio in Washington, DC. He reports daily on international security, intelligence, foreign policy, terrorism, and cyber developments and provides regular on-air analysis on both radio and TV. He is also the author of The Noise War: How to Fight Disinformation and Find the Truth When Everything Is Lying to You. He hosts Global with JJ Green on YouTube, and the weekly WTOP podcast Target USA, which examines the threats facing the US. He has been embedded with the US military three times in war zones. He’s travelled extensively across Europe, the Middle East, Central Asia, South America, and Africa. He’s the recipient of more than 50 local, regional, and national journalism awards, including the 2017 Gerald R. Ford Presidential Foundation Award for Distinguished Reporting on National Defense for his series “Anatomy of a Russian Attack.” He also received a National Edward R. Murrow Award in 2009 for his reporting aboard a Los Angeles-class nuclear-powered submarine. In 2023, he was awarded an honorary doctorate by Champlain College in Vermont for his international security reporting, writing, and analysis. PURCHASE: https://politics-prose.com/product/no-option-sabotage-radical-environmental-movement-and-climate-crisis-thomas-zeitzoff?v=2099995&ic_referral=2Z4mPfXpbJnTCnL4gchdYXtF4YqOvCu2ndeYBBmbF-gwM-lZPxVqYlvBaGwtEW8Ku4pDCFh_n8twdJ8Hb-X4LwFGhY6p-JKQkHQAZ76M_XWd1LJ2Q41UWQWmdmVFbeMPuiCWmqM

    51 min

  2. 1D AGO

    J. Lester Feder — The Queer Face of War: Portraits and Stories from Ukraine - with Chris Geidner

    Award-winning photographer and journalist J. Lester Feder shows us The Queer Face of War in this first-ever visual and oral history of a queer community in war. This remarkable collection of stunning portraits and moving profiles captures the many ways queer people can be vulnerable in armed conflict—and the many ways they feel especially called to fight.In its siege of Ukraine, Russia forged a strategy that has since been adopted by authoritarian leaders around the world: attacking queer people to undermine fundamental principles of democracy and human rights. Vladimir Putin justified his war in part as a crusade to protect “traditional values” from the LGBTQ+ movement. Queer Ukrainians have been fighting back, demanding equal rights while defending their country. Queer Ukrainians have come out in unprecedented ways—as soldiers, humanitarian volunteers, refugees, and survivors of war crimes—speaking out and taking up arms to defend democracy. For LGBTQ+ people, visibility is power. The portraits and profiles in this book are rare because recent wars have been fought in places where it is unsafe to come out. At a moment when LGBTQ+ people are under attack worldwide, The Queer Face of War is a crucial record of queer history—and a powerful testament to resistance and resilience. J. Lester Feder is an American journalist of Ukrainian descent who has been reporting in and around Ukraine for more than a decade. Originally from the Washington area, he was the senior world correspondent covering LGBTQ+ rights for BuzzFeed News from 2013-2020, and he has been a senior fellow at the global LGBTQ+ human rights organization Outright International and the Human Rights and Gender Justice Clinic of the City University of New York. His honors include a Journalist of the Year Award from the Association of LGBTQ+ Journalists, a GLAAD Media Award, and a Feature Shoot Emerging Photography Award. His photos and writing have appeared in numerous other outlets including The New Yorker, Rolling Stone, and Vanity Fair. Feder is in conversation with Chris Geidner, an award-winning journalist who covers the Supreme Court, law and politics at Law Dork. His more than two decades in journalism includes widely recognized coverage of the courts, LGBTQ issues, the criminal legal system, and other complex legal and political questions. He previously worked as the Supreme Court correspondent and legal editor at BuzzFeed News and has written for The New York Times, MSNBC, Bolts, Grid, The Appeal, Metro Weekly and elsewhere. PURCHASE: https://politics-prose.com/book/9783987411991?ic_referral=CPMBZK_ZpumDh-kBZmMXTb6WVfm9TchdFPTe8DVkG2swMyOg-LDAGfWYSWmT9IAFfJf7TD1O7SZr8DhzxizX5oMs0t8-DvJtPVv6lhCQUwkcsp0YCjlMOnDABSyyFXdPqCfLBNc

    54 min

  3. 1D AGO

    Eric L. Lewis — Leaving Guantanamo: How One Country Brought Its Men Home from the Forever Prison -with David Remnick

    This multilayered work follows a group of Guantanamo detainees from a single Middle Eastern country, Kuwait, portraying their lives before their capture, to their experience at Guantanamo, to their ultimate release and the lives they have been challenged in remaking after returning home. It is an intimate look at real men held for years without charge and without hope. Eric L. Lewis has represented Guantanamo detainees for more than twenty years and he conducted the hearings that gained the release of the last two Kuwaiti 'forever prisoners.' As part of a committed team, he spent time with these men and their families, fighting to gain access to courts and navigating the politics and diplomacy of the Global War on Terror. As well as telling the story of his time with the Guantanamo detainees, Lewis also analyzes how Guantanamo has changed American law and culture, and how its legacy continues today. Eric Lewis is a human rights lawyer, Chair of the law firm Lewis Baach Kaufmann Middlemiss, and President of Reprieve US. Mr. Lewis, along with Reprieve, has represented over seventy Guantanamo detainees, and oversees the Life After Guantanamo project for returned detainees. He holds degrees from Princeton, Yale and Cambridge. Lewis is in conversation with David Remnick, he has been the editor of The New Yorker since 1998 and before that was a staff writer for the magazine for six years. He was previously The Washington Post’s correspondent in the Soviet Union. He is the author of several books, including Holding the Note and King of the World, a biography of Muhammad Ali, named the top nonfiction book of the year by Time magazine in 1998, and Lenin’s Tomb, winner of the Pulitzer Prize. PURCHASE: https://politics-prose.com/book/9781009681377?ic_referral=qYepgsGtE2Utdczoc5XDnIkAZlVWzUaB6JhH1tSpew0wM2p4XMycfUqy56RMsyT6QeIi5-lPLyEiHIN42031ijNRLhY5wRGXbM_eaOTz_5RHY06zG0YRoFrp4_6Q1r9zFFsL4HY

    49 min

  4. 2D AGO

    C. Riley Snorton and Darius Bost — A Black Queer History of the United States (ReVisioning History)

    The first-ever Black history to center queer voices, this landmark study traces the lives of LGBTQ+ Black Americans from slavery to present dayGender and sexual expression have always been part of the Black freedom struggleIn this latest book in Beacon’s award-winning ReVisioning History series, Professors C. Riley Snorton and Darius Bost unearth the often overlooked history of the Black queer community in the United States.Arguing that both gender and sexual expression have been an intimate and intricate part of Black freedom struggle, Snorton and Bost present historical contributions of Black queer, trans, and gender non-conforming Americans from slavery to the present day to highlight how the fight against racial injustice has always been linked to that of sexual and gender justice.Interweaving stories of queer and trans figures such as: Private William Cathay/Cathay Williams, born female but enlisted in the Army as a man in the mid-1860sJosephine Baker, internationally known dancer and entertainer of the early 20th century who was also openly bisexualBayard Rustin, prominent Civil Rights activist whose well known homosexuality was viewed as a potential threat to the movementAmanda Milan, a black trans woman whose murder in 2000 unified the trans people of color community,This book includes a deep dive into the marginalization, unjust criminalization, and government legislation of Black queer and trans existence. It also shows how Black Americans have played an integral role in the modern LGBTQ rights movement, countering narratives that have predominantly focused on white Americans.Through storytelling and other narratives, Snorton and Bost show how the Black queer community has always existed, regardless of the attempts to stamp it out, and how those in it continue to fight for their rightful place in the world. C. Riley Snorton is professor of English Language and Comparative Literature at Columbia University and the author of Nobody Is Supposed to Know: Black Sexuality on the Down Low and Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity, which won numerous awards, including the Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Nonfiction, the Sylvia Rivera Award in Transgender Studies from the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies, and an honorable mention from the American Library Association Stonewall Book Award Committee. Darius Bost is associate professor of Black Studies and Gender & Women’s Studies at the University of Illinois-Chicago. Bost is the author of the award-winning book, Evidence of Being: The Black Gay Cultural Renaissance and The Politics of Violence (University of Chicago Press, 2019). PURCHASE: https://politics-prose.com/book/9780807008553?ic_referral=OTPmFtrQRGYrq4k_idzY9nY5DmvublKisA40UtuIMHgwMyaTE_lHxO1uSrOW0ScCydzJUogOnKA7NdU8fzQnbIWxSdE3QgZ2XSCYp_bHH0mK7CSQmyAJbSm-CD0lWFkiJfcVC3I

    1h 3m

  5. 3D AGO

    Lachi — I Identify as Blind: A Brazen Celebration of Disability Culture, Identity, and Power - with Maria Town

    With style and straight talk, musician and changemaker Lachi flips disability and neurodivergence into an empowering identity, a cultural movement, and an innovation engineWhat if the most taboo parts of our identity—the parts we’re taught to mask—are exactly the ones that hold our greatest power? Lachi is an award-winning singer and leader who awakens the world to this truth: Disability has long shaped our culture and is an identity worth brazenly reclaiming. In this book, Lachi reveals why dropping the stigma is the ultimate glow-up, and inspires readers to celebrate the boldest parts of themselves.I Identify as Blind pulses with energy. Through magnetic storytelling and pop-culture deep dives, Lachi challenges mainstream views on disability and neurodivergence with humor and heart. Because visionaries with disabilities have always driven progress. The book features trailblazing figures like Senator Tammy Duckworth, Breaking Bad star RJ Mitte, Microsoft executive Jenny Lay-Flurrie, and so many more. Lachi even takes readers behind the scenes at Coldplay concerts, since after Chris Martin developed tinnitus, he transformed his concerts into some of the most accessible in the world. Each story reframes disability not as a deficit but as a wellspring of collective strength. And inventions created for people with disabilities benefit everyone—from audiobooks to curb cuts to the internet. (Vint Cerf helped develop the first commercial email service, because he had trouble communicating by phone.)With punchy humor and radical honesty, Lachi dismantles stereotypes and builds a new narrative of Disability identity. I Identify as Blind is just what the world needs right now: an invitation to a cultural movement that celebrates disabilities as a source of power and pride.Come for the laughs, stay for the mic drops. Lachi is an award-winning recording artist, producer of a Grammy-nominated album, public speaker, and the first openly disabled National Trustee of the Recording Academy. She is the CEO of RAMPD (Recording Artists and Music Professionals with Disabilities), which has partnered with Netflix and Live Nation. Named a USA Today Woman of the Year and a “dedicated foot soldier for disability pride” by Forbes, Lachi hosted the PBS American Masters series Renegades, has appeared on Good Morning America, and she has spoken at The White House. She lives in New York City. Lachi is in conversation with Maria Town, the President and CEO of the American Association of People with Disabilities. In this role, she works to increase the political and economic power of people with disabilities. Town previously served as Director of the City of Houston Mayor’s Office for People with Disabilities, advocating for citizens with disabilities. Town also was the Senior Associate Director in the Obama White House Office of Public Engagement, managing disability community engagement and coordinating federal engagement. Town has expertise in areas of youth development, leadership, and promoting college and career readiness. PURCHASE: https://politics-prose.com/book/9780593851579?ic_referral=STCzzES-CDTWN0KXgg5sVNPUZZ_8nwMDpQS11lKusJQwMx7rn-M7N_cr6pJJyNmush4U-xDeCh5BHA4-8zhVPLMkrfwf3V5GTHIC6_8iTCQFe_pIp1ItqXGTAMVjsvAz37verL0

    53 min

  6. 6D AGO

    Eugene Robinson — Freedom Lost, Freedom Won: A Personal History of America

    Pulitzer Prize–winning former Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson tells our nation’s torturous racial history through his own family’s story, starting with his great-grandfather’s freedom from slavery and threading his way to his own narrative and reaching today’s Black Lives Matter movement, asking whether this time will be different.On March 27, 1829, a wealthy white planter and entrepreneur named Richard Fordham purchased four enslaved African Americans from a woman named Isabella Perman. One of them was journalist Eugene Robinson’s great-great-grandfather, a boy called Harry.Starting from this transaction, which took place in Charleston, South Carolina, Freedom Lost, Freedom Won brings to life 200 years of our nation’s history through the eyes of the remarkable family that Harry founded. Assigned a formal name—Henry Fordham—and put to work as a blacksmith, he achieved his own freedom a decade before the Civil War. He was there when victorious Union troops marched into Charleston in 1865, ending slavery and guaranteeing liberty for Black people—only on paper, though, and only for a time.Robinson traces the arc of his familial lineage through the repeated cycles in which African Americans have fought their way upward toward freedom and opportunity, been forced back down again, and renewed their determined climb.From his great-great-grandfather’s achievement in becoming a “free person of color” before emancipation to his great-grandfather’s Reconstruction-era success, from his father’s odyssey of the Great Migration to his own coming-of-age during the civil rights movement, Robinson delves into a rich archive of Black narratives, arguing that we still have a long way to go before it is possible to speak of a “post-racial America.”Setting his extensive research within the larger historical context, Robinson provides both an indictment of structural racism and an illustration of how it has been fought and, at times, courageously overcome. Freedom Lost, Freedom Won tells our country’s tortuous racial history through Robinson’s family’s story of struggle and survival, pushing us to consider how far the nation has come—willingly or not—and how far it still has to go. Eugene Robinson is a Pulitzer Prize–winning American journalist, former columnist, and associate editor of The Washington Post, author, and political analyst. His prior positions included foreign editor, London correspondent, and South American correspondent. Born in Orangeburg, South Carolina, he graduated from the University of Michigan and worked at the San Francisco Chronicle before joining The Washington Post. PURCHASE: https://politics-prose.com/book/9781982176716?ic_referral=CnxLnhEfqJQ1PQweggc8p7zcxsRBx3gZi4hdVcjQ78UwMyCJwgxfzBHAzQYi19N1dkDxyAWA7f1CdZ-UfTq2b2Q757fF6eH5xLL0_1PzJecY2wKxhNCfEitwsE3U7x8BU8zoC8c

    1h 2m

  7. FEB 12

    Brooke N. Newman — The Crown's Silence: The Hidden History of the British Monarchy and Slavery in the Americas - with Cassandra Good

    For readers of Annette Gordon-Reed and Nikole Hannah-Jones, the shocking untold story of the British royal family’s centuries-long investment in slavery and continued profiting off its legacy—from Elizabeth I to the present—and the monarchy’s culpability in the racial injustice that gave birth to the United States.   For centuries, Britain has told itself and the world that it is an abolitionist nation, one that, unlike the United States, rejected human bondage and dismantled its Atlantic slave empire without tearing itself apart in violence. An abolitionist nation headed by a just, humane monarch who liberated enslaved Africans and recognized their descendants as free and equal subjects of the British Crown. As Prince William put it recently, “We’re very much not a racist family.” When slaveholding nations write their collective history, the enslavers hold the pen. Now, acclaimed historian Brooke Newman reveals the true story: the enslavers were supported by members of the royal family. From the 1560s to 1807, the British monarchy invested in the transatlantic slave trade and built a slave empire in colonial America and the Caribbean, with the labor of millions of enslaved Africans who would see none of its riches. It profited from African slave trading and hereditary bondage, setting the stage for other colonial powers to develop brutal slave systems that remained legal long after full emancipation in the British Empire in 1838. The scars of this history remain visible the world over, from economic inequality and educational and health disparities to racial discrimination and prejudice. Still, Crown officials continue to insist the legacies of slavery “belong to the past.”  Newman focuses not on portraits of British monarchs but on their actions and investments that led to the rise and fall of the transatlantic slave trade and colonial slavery, and on some of the people whose lives it took, placing the struggles and sacrifices of innumerable individuals of African origin and ancestry at the center of Britain’s story. Brooke N. Newman is an award-winning historian at Virginia Commonwealth University and a fellow of the Royal Historical Society. Her previous book, A Dark Inheritance: Blood, Race, and Sex in Colonial Jamaica, was a finalist for the Frederick Douglass Book Prize. She has received fellowships from MacDowell, the American Philosophical Society, the Eccles Centre at the British Library, the Gilder Lehrman Center, and many others. Her essays have appeared in Slate, The Washington Post, The Guardian, and others, and her research has been featured in such outlets as the BBC, NPR, Vox, and Smithsonian Magazine. She lives in Richmond, Virginia. Newman is in conversation with Cassandra Good, the author of First Family: George Washington's Heirs and the Making of America. The book was a finalist for the George Washington Prize and the Library of Virginia Reader's Choice Award. She is also the author of Founding Friendships: Friendships Between Men and Women in the Early American Republic, and author and narrator of two Audible/The Great Courses programs, America's Founding Women and Early American Sex Scandals. Good teaches at Marymount University in Arlington, VA. PURCHASE : https://politics-prose.com/book/9780063290976?ic_referral=ofCoF4Vc9nnqGrGmkDzyGJHTDUIB13n1kDWXMgd4M80wM9e6DqLGvQZe8JmGfPzZkLT0fapUq0E2iMgtZ7Tbd8_lJkz9JPZvNisgwA2quUcI5My4yLd7qnQs44LtIYM7HmnONaU

    1h 5m

  8. FEB 11

    Lily Meyer — The End of Romance: A Novel - with Hillary Kelly

    A big-hearted, wise, unceasingly buoyant novel about a woman who, after escaping a bruising marriage, theorizes that happiness is possible solely with the eradication of all romance--only to find a love that could change her life foreverSylvie Broder was taught early to embrace joy. The granddaughter of Holocaust survivors whose greatest priority was enjoying the life they'd snatched back from Hitler, Sylvie believes in the tenacious pursuit of pleasure—yet, somehow, finds herself trapped in a suffocating, emotionally abusive marriage. With enormous fortitude, Sylvie frees herself and turns to graduate school, where she develops a new philosophy: Straight women will find true liberation and happiness only once romance is eradicated.Now, Sylvie prides herself in separating sex from tenderness—having fun with men, but never committing to one. Then she meets Robbie and Abie, and finds her philosophy sorely tested. A warm and gentle man, Robbie treats Sylvie with patience and enormous kindness, offering her comfort she hasn't had since childhood. Abie is passionate and dynamic, a man who challenges Sylvie, and with whom she finds herself constantly disarmed. With both men, she feels a deep desire that looks, worryingly, a lot like love.Cleverly constructed, delightfully funny, and beautifully written, The End of Romance is an anti-romance romance novel that charts its fallible heroine's tumultuous journey to love and happiness with erudition and deep feeling—a story for anyone who, despite their very best efforts, has fallen in love, and wondered why. Lily Meyer is a translator, a critic, and the author of the novel Short War. She is also a contributing writer at The Atlantic. Her stories and translations can be found in The Dial, The Drift, The Sewanee Review, The Southern Review, and many other journals, and her essays and criticism appear in outlets including Bookforum, The New Yorker, and The New York Times Book Review. Meyer is in conversation will Hillary Kelly, literary critic and essayist.  PURCHASE: https://politics-prose.com/book/9780593835142?ic_referral=Zw54v2jZhGeRClo4c7RPClsB6sN274OGZj7a6LJx-mQwM282yw4Q7-e4haHp8VutlCJgN_gfFEoZdCBFQRyVaU27cttKeh-GHU96LBqdEh4f0sIi_o3vHVlPq5jq_b_ZISdN5-s

    49 min
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About

Politics and Prose is a large, independent bookstore uniquely situated in the nation’s capital and serving a broad array of Washington readers, writers, thinkers, teachers, and policy-makers. In addition to our incredible selection of titles, Politics and Prose offers more than 500 public events each year, bringing leading authors across all genres to venues in Washington, DC. Visit us online at www.politics-prose.com.

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