Below I’m highlighting some nonfiction books coming out in August. All of the mentioned titles are available to put on hold in our catalog and will also be made available via the library’s OverDrive website on the day of publication in eBook and downloadable audiobook format (as available). For a more extensive list of new nonfiction books coming out this month, check our online catalog.
Top Picks
“Empire of Ashes: Truman, Hirohito, and the Descent into Total War” by James M. Scott (Aug 4)
At 9:15 a.m. on August 6, 1945, an American bomber pierced the skies over the Japanese city of Hiroshima. The single bomb it dropped unleashed an atomic hurricane that toppled homes, vaporized birds in flight and carbonized humans. Three days later, a second bomb flattened the port city of Nagasaki. In the span of a mere 75 hours, the United States — a nation once morally opposed to the bombing of civilians — killed 120,000 men, women and children, dooming tens of thousands more to agonizing death in the weeks and months ahead. “Empire of Ashes” explores the final brutal months of the war in the Pacific, featuring the voices of never-before-heard victims of the atomic bombs. Through interviews with survivors and accounts gleaned from Japanese sources, author James M. Scott combines the attacks’ heart-wrenching details with their causes and consequences, from debates within the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos, Oakridge, and Hanford to the fallout that would alter decades of life in Japan. Scott also delves into the political maneuvering in Washington and Tokyo between two seemingly unlikely leaders — President Harry S. Truman and Emperor Hirohito — that led to unprecedented violence and, eventually, surrender. Scott grapples with questions that still haunt the detonation of the atomic bomb to this day: What justified the first and only use of nuclear weapons in armed conflict? And how does a nation reconcile the pride of liberating millions, with its own unprecedented violence? With startling immediacy, “Empire of Ashes” illuminates the moral dilemma at the center of America’s decision to inflict total war upon Japan.
“The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State” by Jill Lapore (Aug 25)
“Much in history is headlong but few grand transformations have been more precipitate or more heedless than the rise of… the Artificial State,” writes Jill Lepore in this passionate account of how rule by machine has ravaged the world. Inspired by Hannah Arendt’s “The Origins of Totalitarianism,” which argued in 1951 that the machinery of modern life was reshaping the very fundamentals of human existence, Lepore, profoundly disturbed by the technology revolution and by the soulless inundation of artificial intelligence, unfurls a new history for our own twenty-first century. Building on an essay in The New Yorker in 2024, Lepore’s clarion call traces our increasing dependence on and strangulation by data. Political campaigns, awash in an avalanche of fake bots, have been reduced to attention-mining algorithms, while multinational media corporations dictate public discourse, and the era of the liberal nation-state seems to be coming to a rapid end, replaced by billionaire technocrats reliant on autocracy and the tools of AI. With Orwellian overtones, “The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State” demonstrates how technology has corroded global democracy, leading to the destruction of both human community and capacity for self-government, creating a new form of AI government, a digital citizen’s assembly, where AI will recommend the course of action to humans in place of human-run legislatures. Especially sobering with this proliferation of “dizzying, ever-changing schemes, prophesies, and predictions” is that the Artificial State has come at the expense of the natural world, leading to catastrophic loss of wildlife habitat and biodiversity. Deliberately alarming, “The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State,” despite its abundance of dire facts, is not a funeral dirge; rather, it’s an inspiring wake-up call, written in Lepore’s typically elegiac prose, which demonstrates that nothing about the Artificial State was inevitable, for it is a “government without consent, even government without humans.” It can, Lepore asserts, be dismantled. Other heinous systems, like feudalism, fascism, and slavery, have also been dismantled, but disassembly requires identifying the parts, tracing the sources. It requires telling a new history.
“The Everest Mystery: Sandy Irvine, George Mallory, and the Truth Still Buried on Everest” by Julie Summers and Jochen Hemmleb (Aug 25)
There is no mystery more compelling in the history of mountaineering than the disappearance of George Mallory and Sandy Irvine close to the summit of Mount Everest on June 8, 1924. Over 100 years after they were last seen ‘going strong for the top,’ the question of exactly what happened to them on that fateful day has not been answered. George Mallory’s frozen remains were discovered in 1999. But in September 2024, a climber found an old boot lying out in the open on the Central Rongbuk Glacier on Mount Everest, several miles from where Mallory lay. The boot contained a foot, and a sock bearing a nametape spelled out in red: A.C. IRVINE. Did Mallory and Irvine reach the summit — becoming the first to do so — or did they perish while ascending? What happened to the camera that Irvine may have carried, which would have documented their climb? Written by Julie Summers, Sandy Irvine’s great-niece, and Jochen Hemmleb, the world’s leading authority on the Mallory and Irvine Everest expedition, “The Everest Mystery” explores the life of Sandy Irvine, his relationship with George Mallory, and the many theories about what happened to them so close to the summit of Mount Everest. Above all, it restores Sandy Irvine to his rightful place in the great mystery of Everest 1924.
More Notable Releases in August
- “The Story of Your Life: How Social Media Shapes the Way We Experience Everything” by Kathryn Jezer-Morton (Aug 4)
- “The People’s Historian: The Outsized Life of Howard Zinn” by Dave Zirin (Aug 4)
- “Are They Dead Yet?: The Art of the Obit” by Sam Roberts (Aug 11)
- “The Nerd Reich: Silicon Valley Fascism and The War On Democracy” by Gil Durán (Aug 18)
