Leisure Reading: Non-fiction

Blending historical analysis with sharp cultural criticism, trans historian and activist Kit Heyam offers a new, radically inclusive trans history, chronicling expressions of trans experience that are often overlooked, like gender-nonconforming fashion and wartime stage performance. Before We Were Trans transports us from Renaissance Venice to seventeenth-century Angola, from Edo Japan to early America, and looks to the past to uncover new horizons for possible trans futures.

Women have committed some of the most disturbing serial killings ever seen in the United States. Yet scientific inquiry, criminal profiling, and public interest have focused more on their better-known male counterparts. As a result, female serial killers have been misunderstood, overlooked, and underestimated. In this riveting account, Dr. Marissa A. Harrison draws on original scientific research, various psychological perspectives, and richly detailed case studies to illuminate the stark differences between female and male serial killers' backgrounds, motives, and crimes. She also emphasizes the countless victims of this grisly phenomenon to capture the complexity and tragedy of serial murder.

Based on years of observing, interviewing, and analyzing elite coaches and playmakers, such as Bill Belichick, Peyton Manning, Michael Phelps, and more, Jenkins reveals the seven principles behind success: Conditioning, practice, discipline, candor, culture, resilience, and intention. Discover how you can apply these same principles to your life and become your own champion. Colorful, inspirational, and accessible, The Right Call is the one stop shop for anyone wanting to learn how to effectively elevate themselves to greatness.

Existing political and economic systems are not enough to bring the change that the world needs. In this book, Rainn Wilson explores the possibility and hope for a spiritual revolution, a "Soul Boom," to find a healing transformation on both a personal and global level For Wilson, this is a serious and essential pursuit, but he brings great humor and his own unique perspective to the conversation. He feels that, culturally, we've discounted spirituality--faith and the sacred--and we need profound healing and a unifying understanding of the world that the great spiritual traditions provide. Wilson's approach to spirituality--the non-physical, eternal aspects of ourselves--is relatable and applies to people of all beliefs, even the skeptics.

In The Storm Is Upon Us, he takes readers from the background conspiracies and cults that fed the Q phenomenon, to its embrace by right-wing media and Donald Trump, through the rending of families as loved ones became addicted to Q's increasingly violent rhetoric, to the storming of the Capitol, and on.   And as the phenomenon shows no sign of calming despite Trump's loss of the presidency--with everyone from Baby Boomers to Millennial moms proving susceptible to its messaging--and politicians starting to openly espouse its ideology, Rothschild makes a compelling case that mocking the seeming madness of QAnon will get us nowhere. Rather, his impassioned reportage makes clear it's time to figure out what QAnon really is -- because QAnon and its relentlessly dark theory of everything isn't done yet.

Rather than blaming users, the book shatters the illusion that we autonomously choose how to spend our time online. It shifts the moral responsibility and accountability for solutions to corporations. Drawing lessons from the tobacco and food industries, the book demonstrates why government regulation is necessary to curb technology addiction. It describes a grassroots movement already in action across courts and legislative halls. Groundbreaking and urgent, Unwired provides a blueprint to develop this movement for change, to one that will allow us to finally gain control.

One of the most influential disability rights activists in US history tells her personal story of fighting for the right to receive an education, have a job, and just be human. A story of fighting to belong in a world that wasn't built for all of us and of one woman's activism--from the streets of Brooklyn and San Francisco to inside the halls of Washington--Being Heumann recounts Judy Heumann's lifelong battle to achieve respect, acceptance, and inclusion in society.

After growing up in a conservative middle-class Republican household and working several years as a left-wing journalist, Dorothy Day converted to Catholicism and became an anomaly in American life for the next fifty years. She was critical of capitalism and US foreign policy, and as skeptical of modern liberalism as political conservatism. An biography of a dedicated modern-day pacifist, an outspoken advocate for the poor, and a lifelong anarchist.

Vividly written and exhaustively researched, Jonathan Eig's King: A Life is the first major biography in decades of the civil rights icon Martin Luther King Jr.--and the first to include recently declassified FBI files. In this revelatory new portrait of the preacher and activist who shook the world, the bestselling biographer gives us an intimate view of the courageous and often emotionally troubled human being who demanded peaceful protest for his movement but was rarely at peace with himself.

Megan Rapinoe, Olympic gold medallist and two-time Women's World Cup champion, has become a galvanizing force for social change; here, she urges all of us to take up the mantle, with actions big and small, to continue the fight for justice and equality. Using anecdotes from her own life and career, from suing the United States Soccer Federation alongside her teammates over gender discrimination to her widely publicized refusal to visit the White House, Rapinoe discusses the obligation we all have to speak up, and reveals the impact each of us can have on our communities.

Sister Helen Prejean's work as an activist nun, campaigning to educate Americans about the inhumanity of the death penalty, is known to millions worldwide. Less widely known is the evolution of her spiritual journey from praying for God to solve the world's problems to engaging full-tilt in working to transform societal injustices... River of Fire is a book for anyone interested in journeys of faith and spirituality, doubt and belief, and "catching on fire" to purpose and passion. It is a book, written in accessible, luminous prose, about how to live a spiritual life that is wide awake to the sufferings and creative opportunities of our world.