American Places

December 1862 drove the United States toward a breaking point. The Battle of Fredericksburg shattered Union forces and Northern confidence. As Abraham Lincoln's government threatened to fracture, this critical moment also tested five extraordinary individuals whose lives reflect the soul of a nation. The changes they underwent led to profound repercussions in the country's law, literature, politics, and popular mythology. Taken together, their stories offer a striking restatement of what it means to be American.

Cops can make mistakes, even when they're not rookies. Deeply traumatized by a shooting incident, Cass Raines resigned from the Chicago PD, leaving one less female African-American on the force. Now she's the head of a one-woman private investigation agency. She also plays chess with the only father figure she's ever known, Father Ray Heaton. When Father Ray asks Cass to look into a recent spate of vandalism at his church, she readily agrees to handle the case. But only hours later she's horrified to discover his murdered body in the church confessional, a dead gangbanger sprawled out nearby.

Considered by many to be a founder of Afrofuturism, Sun Ra - a.k.a. Herman Blount - was a composer, keyboardist, bandleader, philosopher, entrepreneur, poet, and self-proclaimed extraterrestrial from Saturn. He recorded over 200 albums with his Arkestra, which, dressed in Egypto-space costumes, played everything from boogie-woogie and swing to fusion and free jazz.

Dating back to slavery, Edgefield County, South Carolina - a place "easy to pass by on the way somewhere else" - has been home to generations of Lanhams. In The Home Place, listeners meet these extraordinary people, including Drew himself, who over the course of the 1970s falls in love with the natural world around him. As his passion takes flight, however, he begins to ask what it means to be "the rare bird, the oddity".

The memory of the Battle of Antietam was so haunting that when, nine months later, Major Rufus Dawes learned another Antietam battle might be on the horizon, he wrote, "I hope not, I dread the thought of the place." In this definitive account, historian D. Scott Hartwig chronicles the single bloodiest day in American history, which resulted in 23,000 casualties.

Most of us use the term sense of place often and rather carelessly when we think of nature or home or literature. Our senses of place, however, come not only from our individual experiences but also from our cultures. Wisdom Sits in Places, the first sustained study of places and place explores place, places, and what they mean to a particular group of people, the Western Apache in Arizona. For more than 30 years, Keith Basso has been doing fieldwork among the Western Apache, and now he shares with us what he has learned of Apache place-names.

Random House presents the audiobook edition of A Place for Us by Fatima Farheen Mirza, read by Deepti Gupta and Sunil Malhotra. A Place for Us catches an Indian Muslim family as they prepare for their eldest daughter’s wedding. But as Hadia’s marriage - one chosen of love, not tradition - gathers the family back together, there is only one thing on their minds: can Amar, the estranged younger brother of the bride, be trusted to behave himself after three years away?

Lily is a photojournalist in search of the “animal people” who supposedly haunt the city’s darkest slums. Hank is a slumdweller who knows the bad streets all too well. One night, in a brutal incident, their two lives collide - uptown Lily and downtown Hank, each with a quest and a role to play in the secret drama of the city’s oldest inhabitants. For the animal people walk among us. Native Americans call them the First People, but they have never left, and they claim the city for their own.

Black Faces in White Places is about "the game" - that is, the competitive world in which we all live and work. The audiobook offers 10 revolutionary strategies for playing, mastering, and changing the game for the current generation, while undertaking a wholesale redefinition of the rules for those who will follow. It is not only about shattering the old "glass ceiling" but also about examining the four dimensions of the contemporary black experience: identity, society, meritocracy, and opportunity.

Growing up in rural Oregon, Brandon Wolf grappled with the devastating loss of his supportive mother and with the embedded racism and homophobia of a community that made him feel like an unwelcome stranger. After the lack of connection and role models led him down a spiral of risky behavior, Wolf escaped to survive. In Orlando, he found what he’d been searching for: belonging—in a community that was a safe space with people he’d come to call his chosen family.

What does it mean to call a place home? Who is allowed to become a member of a community? When can we say that we truly belong? These are some of the questions of place and belonging that renowned cultural critic Bell Hooks examines in Belonging: A Culture of Place. Traversing past and present, Belonging charts a cyclical journey in which Hooks moves from place to place, only to end where she began—her old Kentucky home.

In News for the Rich, White, and Blue, Nikki Usher recasts the challenges facing journalism in terms of place, power, and inequality. Drawing on more than a decade of field research, she illuminates how journalists decide what becomes news and how news organizations strategize about the future. Usher shows how newsrooms remain places of power, largely white institutions growing more elite as journalists confront a shrinking job market.

Twenty-nine-year-old Abraham Lincoln has spent his entire adult life running from his past - from the poverty of the dirt-floor log cabin where he was raised, from the dominion of his uneducated father, and from a failed early courtship. But now, Lincoln's past is racing back to haunt him. It is the summer of 1838, and Springfield is embroiled in a tumultuous, violent political season. All of Springfield's elite have gathered at a grand party to celebrate the Fourth of July. Spirits are high - until a prominent local politician is assassinated in the midst of fireworks.

In The Last Empty Places, bestselling author Peter Stark takes the listener to four of the most remote, wild, and unpopulated areas of the United States outside of Alaska, and mainly not part of protected wilderness: the rivers and forests of Northern Maine; the rugged, unpopulated region of Western Pennsylvania, that lies only a short distance from the East's big cities; the haunting canyons of Central New Mexico; and the vast, arid basins of Southeast Oregon.

When Veronica Levy bought her dream house on the Outer Cape, she imagined a place where generations of her family would gather for years to come. Now, 40 years later, with her children barely speaking to each other, or to her, Veronica has decided, reluctantly, to put the place on the market. She'll invite the family to gather one last time (and insist on their good behavior) at her granddaughter Celia's wedding. She'll spend one last summer by the beach, with her daughter Sarah, her son Sam and whichever grandchildren can be coaxed into making the trip.

Nothing can mend a broken heart quite like family. Sherry has struggled all her life to understand who she is, where she comes from, and, most important, why her mother slapped her cheek one summer afternoon. The incident has haunted Sherry, and it causes her to dig into her family's past. Like many family histories, it is fractured and stubbornly reluctant to reveal its secrets. But Sherry is determined to know the full story. In a few days' time, her extended family will gather for a reunion, and Sherry sets off across the country with her mother, Dumpling, to join them.

This pathbreaking book pinpoints forces behind the rise of the "rural voter"—a new political identity that combines a deeply felt sense of place with an increasingly nationalized set of concerns. Nicholas F. Jacobs and Daniel M. Shea uncover how this overwhelmingly crucial voting bloc emerged and how it has roiled American politics. They show how perceptions of economic and social change, racial anxieties, and a traditional way of life under assault have converged into a belief in rural uniqueness and separateness.

In 2014, Steve Case launched Revolution’s Rise of the Rest, an initiative to accelerate the growth of tech startups across the country. Rise of the Rest is based on a simple idea: cities can be renewed and rise again if they develop a vibrant startup culture. A visionary entrepreneur himself, Case believes that great entrepreneurs can be found anywhere, and can thrive with the proper support and investment. In fact, they’re key to the American DNA. After all, America itself was a startup. It struggled to get going and almost didn’t make it. Today it’s the leader of the free world, in part because it has the world’s largest economy—a testament to several generations of pioneering entrepreneurs.

Balancing direct language with a suggestive “aslantness,” Nye probes the fragile connection between language and meaning. She never shies from the challenge of trying to name the mysterious logic of childhood or speak truth to power in the face of the horrors of war.

Told in a series of essays that balance memoir with fieldwork, Heaven Is a Place on Earth is an idiosyncratic study of American utopian experiments—from the Shakers to the radical faerie communes of Short Mountain to the Bronx rebuilding movement—through the lens of one woman’s quest to create a more communal life in a time of unending economic and social precarity.