Every year, 650,000 Americans, most of them black, are released from prison. Upon returning home, they find that their lives are constrained in hundreds of ways, by laws and regulations that determine what they can and can’t do and who they can and can’t live with or communicate with. Their ability to earn a living, rent a home, and reunite with loved ones continues to be determined by the system that incarcerated them. They may be out of prison, their lives are no less supervised.

In Halfway Home: Race, Punishment, and the Afterlife of Mass Incarceration, Reuben Jonathan Miller looks at an aspect of the crisis in criminal justice that hasn’t gotten enough attention. As he makes clear, it is essential that we recognize the scope of this social shift and its implications.

As a chaplain at the Cook County Jail in Chicago and then as a sociologist studying mass incarceration, Reuben spent years embedded with prisoners, ex-prisoners, and their families and friends. Halfway Home captures their stories, focusing in particular on seven men and four women as they try to make their way in a new world. It immerses readers in the supervised society, offering an intimate examination that might serve as the starting point for meaningful change.

Halfway Home is a poignant and alarming call to understand what the afterlife of punishment looks like. We have excluded thousands from the rights of citizenship, and the costs have been enormous, changing black life in America and altering the ways that Americans relate to one another.

On the night of March 5, 1770 five men were shot to death in Boston by British soldiers. Well known to schoolchildren and readers of American history, the Boston Massacre would be memorably captured in Paul Revere’s famous print, “The Bloody Massacre perpetrated in King Street.” That rendering, while long on propaganda and short on accuracy, has formed much of what we know about that event.

Revere’s engraving, and the conventional account of the Boston Massacre as a story of guns, politics, and men, obscures what was really taking place on the ground in Boston. By putting families, friendships, commerce, and community back in the picture, The Boston Massacre: A Family History offers a provocative look at the era and at the events that would lead to the American Revolution.

When hundreds of Britons arrived in Boston during the years between the Stamp Act and the Boston Tea Party, many of them were women and children. The British troops were integrated into the life of the then-small town, and as colonists and the military were brought together, their lives overlapped and intersected, willingly or not. Families were created and children were born, rendering the impact of the Massacre much more personal than political.

This deeply human perspective casts a different light on the rupture that was the American Revolution and The Boston Massacre allows us to reconsider events that we think we know well. By retelling the conflict as a clash of neighbors, it uncovers a world that has been largely hidden, and enriches and deepens our understanding of the very origins of the country.

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A lively gem of a book that expands our view of early-modern military life, pre-revolutionary Boston, and, in turn, the American Revolution.
—Washington Post

At the National Museum of African American History, there is a brief mention of the slave traders Isaac Franklin, John Armfield, and Rice Ballard, who in the 1830s came to dominate the domestic slave trade in the United States. Yet little has been written about slave traders. But as dark as the account of men who traded in human lives may be, we cannot fully understand our history without coming to terms with how slave traders insinuated themselves into a central place in American society and commerce, and into the formation of the nation.

That is the complicated and troubling history that Joshua Rothman examines in The Ledger and the Chain. In this brilliant and original book, he examines the lives and the motivations of three men who chose to dedicate their lives to a brutal business. By following the paths that Franklin, Armfield, and Ballard pursued, he shows how fully they were integrated into the social and commercial life of their time, even though history has pointedly attempted to ignore them.

Among the most devastating observations is that, monstrous though their work was, society readily tolerated them and enabled their enterprise. By letting their financial interests prevail over any sense of decency, Americans allowed slave traders like Franklin, Armfield, and Ballard to flourish, to amass vast wealth, and to became essential to the functioning of capitalism in this country. As The Ledger and the Chain makes plain, slave traders were essential actors in the economy of the 19th century and the implications can still be felt. Getting to know who they were is part of getting to know ourselves.

Americans have been in motion for centuries, and with all the movement, many of them have gotten lost. The experience of getting lost has changed – as travel has morphed into transportation and as the amount of information about where we are and where we are going has increased. The changing nature of getting, and staying, lost says much about who we are.

In Nature Shock: Getting Lost in America, environmental historian Jon Coleman looks at how people, animals, and things have managed to go missing, in spite of the vast amounts of energy and information that have been dedicated to keeping them on track. Getting lost produced a range of responses, and provoked people to grapple with big ideas and essential truths. After getting lost, Americans revised their thoughts about nature, God, and humanity. It’s a story that will make readers think anew about how they move through the world today.

In the end, Jon argues that getting lost is good for you, though not for the reasons most often given today. Getting lost does not move us closer to nature or bring us to our authentic selves. It offers no escape from the onslaught of information or the speed of modernity. Rather, getting lost dumps us into the unfinished projects of centuries of North Americans who altered the world to match the spaces in their heads. It dumps us into history, where nature and imagination created each other, and it teaches us that despite our smartphones, our Fitbits, and our ADHD we are both very different, and not so different at all, from the generations that wandered before us.

Difficult problems attract a host of different possible solutions – many of them turn out to be terrible, some are bit better, a few may be really good, and occasionally the process of creativity will produce something superb. But whether the goal is to create a molecule of carbon, an efficient shell shape, or a complex work of art, there is a deep structure to the process by which the best solutions to these problems are reached.

As Andreas Wagner explains in his new book, Life Finds a Way: What Evolution Teaches Us About Creativity, we can learn a lot by thinking of the process in visual terms, as if the array of possible solutions formed a rugged mountain landscape. Poor solutions are resigned to low foothills, and the best solutions form the highest peaks. Understanding how paths to the evolutionary peaks are charted offers surprising insights into creative processes from chemistry to culture.

These maps, which have been known to biologists since the early part of the 20 th century, are called adaptive landscapes. But while they have been widely applied in biology, they are now proving to be very applicable to other areas as algorithms have become more powerful. In Life Finds a Way, Andreas draws on his own research and the work of many other scientists to explain the universal principles of creative achievement that unify all of nature, from the beginnings of the universe to today’s human world. These principles are so fundamental that they apply wherever creation takes place and the implications are far-reaching for education, business, and society.