New Year, new books! Below I’m highlighting some nonfiction books coming out in January. 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
“Miracle Children: Race, Education, and a True Story of False Promises” by Katie Benner & Erica L. Green (Jan 13)
T.M. Landry College Prep, a small private school in Breaux Bridge, Louisiana, boasted a 100% college acceptance rate, placing students at nearly every Ivy League university in the country. The spectacle of Landry students opening their acceptance letters to Harvard and Yale was broadcast on television and even celebrated by Michelle Obama. It became a national ritual to watch the miraculous success of these youngsters — miraculous because Breaux Bridge is one of the poorest counties in the country, ranked close to the bottom for test scores and high school graduation rates. T.M. Landry was said to be “minting prodigies,” and the prodigies were often black. How did the school do it? It didn’t: It was a scam, pulled off with fake transcripts and personal essays telling fake stories of triumph over adversity. Worse, Landry’s success concealed a nightmare of alleged abuse and coercion. In a years-long investigation, Katie Benner and Erica L. Green explored the lives of the students, the school, the town, and Ivy League admissions to understand why black teens were pressured to trade in racial stereotypes of hardship for opportunity. Gripping and illuminating, “Miracle Children” argues that the lesson of T.M. Landry is not that the school gamed the system but that it played by the rules — that its deceptions and abuses were the outcome of segregated schools, inequitable education, and the belief that elite colleges are the nation’s last path to life-changing economic opportunity.
“The Elements of Power: A Story of War, Technology, and the Dirtiest Supply Chain on Earth” by Nicolas Niarchos (Jan 20)
Congo is rich. Swaths of the war-torn African country lack basic infrastructure, and, after many decades of colonial occupation, its people are officially among the poorest in the world. But hidden beneath the soil are vast quantities of cobalt, lithium, copper, tin, tantalum, tungsten, and other treasures. Recently, this veritable periodic table of resources has become extremely valuable because these metals are essential for the global “energy transition” — the plan for wealthy nations to wean themselves off fossil fuels by shifting to sustainable forms of energy, such as solar and wind. The race to electrify the world’s economy has begun, and China has a considerable head start. From Indonesia to South America to Central Africa, Beijing has invested in mines and infrastructure for decades. But the U.S. has begun fighting back with massive investments of its own, as well as sanctions and disruptive tariffs. In this rush for green energy, the world has become utterly reliant on resources unearthed far away and willfully blind to the terrible political, environmental, and social consequences of their extraction. If the Democratic Republic of the Congo possesses such riches, why are its children routinely descending deep into treacherous mines to dig with the most rudimentary of tools, or in some cases their bare hands? Why are Indonesia’s seas and skies being polluted in a rush for battery metals? Why is the Western Sahara, a source for phosphates, still being treated like a colony? Who must pay the price for progress? With unparalleled, original reporting, Nicolas Niarchos reveals how the scramble to control these metals and their production is overturning the world order, just as the global race to drill for oil shaped the twentieth century. Exploring the advent of the lithium-ion battery and tracing the supply chain for its production, Niarchos tells the story both of the people driving these tectonic changes and those whose lives are being upended. He reveals the true, devastating consequences of our best intentions and helps us prepare for an uncertain future. If you have ever used a smartphone or driven an electric vehicle, you are implicated.
“Neptune’s Fortune: The Billion-Dollar Shipwreck and the Ghosts of the Spanish Empire” by Julian Sancton (Jan 27)
Roger Dooley wasn’t looking for the San José. But an accidental discovery in the dusty stacks of a Spanish archive led him to the story of a lifetime, the tale of a great 18th-century treasure ship loaded with riches from the New World and destined for Spain. But that ship, the galleon San José, met a darker fate. It was drawn into a pitched battle with British ships of war off the coast of Cartagena, and when the smoke cleared, the San José and its bounty had disappeared into the ocean, its coordinates lost to time. Though a diver at heart, Dooley was an unlikely candidate to find the San José. He had little in the way of serious credentials, yet his tenacity and single-minded devotion to finding and excavating the ship powered him across four decades, even as he became a man in exile from the country of his birth. As Dooley jousted with famous treasure hunters and well-funded competitors, he slowly homed in on a patch of sea that might contain a 300-year-old shipwreck — or nothing at all. “Neptune’s Fortune” is a thrilling adventure, taking readers from great naval battles on the high seas to the sun-soaked shores that nurtured history’s most notorious treasure hunters, to the archives that held the secret keys to lost fortune on the ocean floor.
More Notable Releases for January
- “Humor Me: How Laughing More Can Make You Present, Creative, Connected, and Happy” by Chris Duffy (Jan 6)
- “The Great Shadow: A History of How Sickness Shapes What We Do, Think, Believe, and Buy” by Susan Wise Bauer (Jan 27)
- “Firestorm: The Great Los Angeles Fires and America’s New Age of Disaster” by Jacob Soboroff (Jan 6)
- “How to Be a Rich Old Lady: Your Guide to Easy Investing, Building Wealth, and Creating the Wild, Beautiful Life You Want” by Amanda Holden (Jan 13)
