Spring 2018

The Square and the Tower/Niall Ferguson

Advice Not Given/Mark Epstein

Winter/Karl Ove Knausgaard

Directorate S/Steve Coll

Feel Free/Zadie Smith

Political Tribes/Amy Chua

Astral Weeks/Ryan H. Walsh

A Tokyo Romance/Ian Buruma

Getting to Us/Seth Davis

Dangerous Mystic/Joel Harrington

Meltdown/Chris Clearfield and András Tilcsik

On Grand Strategy/John Lewis Gaddis

Untitled/Mark Halperin and John Heilemann

Empire of Guns/Priya Satia

Cake/Maira Kalman and Barbara Scott-Goodman

D C-T!/Joana Avillez and Molly Young

Spring 2018

Cover image: © credit tk

T H E SQUA R E A N D T H E TOW E R

N I A L L F E R G U S O N

isbn: 9780735222915price: $30.00

on sale: 1/16/2018

Most history is hierarchical: it’s about emperors, presidents, prime ministers and field marshals. It’s about states, armies and corporations. It’s about orders from on high. Even history “from below” is often about trade unions and workers’ parties. But what if that’s simply because hierarchical institutions create the archives that historians rely on? What if we are missing the informal, less well documented social networks that are the true sources of power and drivers of change?

The 21st century has been hailed as the Age of Networks. However, in The Square and the Tower, Niall Ferguson argues that networks have always been with us, from the structure of the brain to the food chain, from the family tree to freemasonry. Throughout history, hierarchies housed in high towers have claimed to rule, but often real power has resided in the networks in the town square below. For it is networks that tend to innovate. And

it is through networks that revolutionary ideas can contagiously spread. Just because conspiracy theorists like to fantasize about such networks doesn’t mean they are not real.

From the cults of ancient Rome to the dynasties of the Renaissance, from the founding fathers to Facebook, The Square and the Tower tells the story of the rise, fall and rise of networks, and shows how network theory—concepts such as clustering, degrees of separation, weak ties, contagions and phase transitions—can transform our understanding of both the past and the present.

Just as The Ascent of Money put Wall Street into historical perspective, so The Square and the Tower does the same for Silicon Valley. And it offers a bold prediction about which hierarchies will withstand this latest wave of network disruption—and which will be toppled.

A brilliant recasting of the turning points in world history, including the one we’re living through, as a collision between old power

hierarchies and new social networks

N I A L L F E R G U S O N is one of the world’s most renowned historians. He is the author of Paper and Iron, The House of Rothschild, The Pity of War, The Cash Nexus, Empire, Colossus, The War of the World, The Ascent of Money, High Financier, Civilization, The Great Degeneration, and Kissinger, 1923-1968: The Idealist. He is Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and a Visiting Professor at Tsinghua University, Beijing. His many awards include the Benjamin Franklin Prize for Public Service (2010), the Hayek Prize for Lifetime Achievement (2012) and the Ludwig Erhard Prize for Economic Journalism (2013).

T H E SQUA R E A N D T H E TOW E R

N I A L L F E R G U S O N

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A DV IC E NOT GI V E N M A R K E P S T E I N

isbn: 9780399564321price: $26.00

on sale: 1/16/2018

Our ego, and its accompanying sense of nagging self-doubt as we work to be bigger, better, and smarter, is one affliction we all share. And, while our ego claims to have our best interests at heart, in its never-ending pursuit of attention and power, it sabotages the very goals it sets to achieve. In Advice Not Given, Dr. Mark Epstein reveals how Buddhism and Western psychotherapy, two traditions that developed in entirely different times and places and, until recently, had nothing to do with each other, both identify the ego as the limiting factor in our wellbeing, and both come to the same conclusion: When we allow the ego to have free reign, we suffer. But when it learns to let go, we are free.

With great insight, and in a deeply personal style, Epstein presents to readers a how-to guide, rooted in two traditions devoted to maximizing the human potential for living a better life. Using the Eightfold Path, eight levels of self-reflection that Buddhists believe lead to enlightenment, as his scaffolding, Epstein looks back productively

on his own experience, and that of his patients. While the ideas of the Eightfold Path are as old as Buddhism itself, when informed by the sensibility of Western psychotherapy, they become something more: a roadmap for spiritual and psychological growth, a way of dealing with the problem of the ego. Breaking down the wall between East and West, Epstein offers a rethinking of mindfulness, the ability to be with whatever is happening in the moment, and the benefits to be won of teaching people to watch their own minds without necessarily believing everything they think, ideas with strong footholds in Buddhism but now for the first time within the context of psychotherapy.

Our ego is at once our biggest obstacle and our greatest hope. We can be at its mercy or we can learn to mold it. Completely unique and practical, Epstein’s advice can be used by all - each in his or her own way - and will provide wise counsel in a confusing world. After all, as he says, “Our egos can use all the help they can get.”

Renowned psychiatrist and author Dr. Mark Epstein presents a how-to guide that refuses a quick fix, rooted in two

traditions, Buddhism and Western psychotherapy, devoted to maximizing the human potential for living a better life

DR. MARK EPSTEIN is a psychiatrist in private practice in New York City and the author of a number of books about the interface of Buddhism and psychotherapy, including The Trauma of Everyday Life, Thoughts without a Thinker and Going to Pieces without Falling Apart. He received his undergraduate and medical degrees from Harvard University.

A DV IC E NOT GI V E N M A R K E P S T E I N

W I N T E R K A R L O V E K N A U S G A A R D

isbn: 9780399563331price: $27.00

on sale: 1/23/2018

2 December - It is strange that you exist, but that you don’t know anything about what the world looks like. It’s strange that there is a first time to see the sky, a first time to see the sun, a first time to feel the air against one’s skin. It’s strange that there is a first time to see a face, a tree, a lamp, pajamas, a shoe. In my life it almost never happens anymore. But soon it will. In just a few months, I will see you for the first time.

In Winter , we rejoin the great Karl Ove Knausgaard as he waits for the birth of his daughter. In preparation for her arrival, he takes stock of the world, seeing it as if for the first time.

In his inimitably sensitive style, he writes about the moon, water, messiness, owls, birthdays—to name just a handful of his subjects. These oh-so-familiar objects and ideas he fills with new meaning, taking nothing for granted or as given. New life is on the horizon, but the earth is also in hibernation, waiting for the warmer weather to return, and so a contradictory melancholy inflects his gaze.

Startling, compassionate, and exquisitely beautiful, Knausgaard’s writing is like nothing else. Somehow, he shows the world as it really is, at once mundane and sublime.

KARL OVE KNAUSGAARD’s first novel, Out of the World, was the first ever debut novel to win the Norwegian Critics’ Prize and his second, A Time to Every Purpose Under Heaven, was widely acclaimed. A Death in the Family, the first of the My Struggle cycle of novels, was awarded the prestigious Brage Award. The My Struggle cycle has been heralded as a masterpiece wherever it appears.

The second volume in his autobiographical quartet based on the seasons, Winter is an achingly beautiful collection of daily meditations

and letters addressed directly to Knaugsaard’s unborn daughter

W I N T E R K A R L O V E K N A U S G A A R D

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isbn: 9781594204586price: $35.00

on sale: 2/6/2018

DI R EC TOR AT E SS T E V E C O L L

Prior to 9/11, the United States had been carrying out small-scale covert operations in Afghanistan, ostensibly in cooperation, although often in direct opposition, with I.S.I., the Pakistani intelligence agency. While the US was trying to quell extrem-ists, a highly secretive and compartmentalized wing of I.S.I., known as “Directorate S,” was co-vertly training, arming, and seeking to legitimize the Taliban, in order to enlarge Pakistan’s sphere of influence. After 9/11, when fifty-nine countries, led by the U. S., deployed troops or provided aid to Afghanistan in an effort to flush out the Taliban and Al Qaeda, the U.S. was set on an invisible slow-motion collision course with Pakistan.

Today we know that the war in Afghanistan would falter badly because of military hubris at the highest levels of the Pentagon, the drain on resources and provocation in Muslim world caused by the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, and corruption. But more than anything, as Coll makes painfully clear, the war in Afghanistan was doomed because of the failure of the United States to apprehend the motivations and intentions of I.S.I.’s “Directorate

S”. This was a swirling and shadowy struggle of historic proportions, which endured over a decade and across both the Bush and Obama administra-tions, involving multiple secret intelligence agen-cies, a litany of incongruous strategies and tactics, and dozens of players, including some of the most prominent military and political figures. A sprawl-ing American tragedy, the war was an open clash of arms but also a covert melee of ideas, secrets, and subterranean violence.

Coll excavates this grand battle, which took place away from the gaze of the American public. With unsurpassed expertise, original research, and attention to detail, he brings to life a narrative at once vast and intricate, local and global, propulsive and painstaking. This is the definitive explanation of how America came to be so badly ensnared in an elaborate, factional, and seemingly intermi-nable conflict in South Asia. Nothing less than a forensic examination of the personal and political forces that shape world history, Directorate S is a complete masterpiece of both investigative and narrative journalism.

Resuming the narrative of his Pulitzer Prize-winning Ghost Wars, bestselling author Steve Coll tells for the first time the epic and enthralling story of America’s intelligence, military, and diplomatic efforts to defeat

Al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan since 9/11

STEVE COLL is the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Ghost Wars and the dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University, and from 2007 to 2013 was president of the New America Foundation, a public policy institute in Washington, D.C. He is a staff writer for The New Yorker, and previously worked for twenty years at The Washington Post, where he received a Pulitzer Prize for explanatory journalism in 1990. He is the author of seven other books, including his most recent title, Private Empire: ExxonMobil and American Power.

DI R EC TOR AT E SS T E V E C O L L

F E E L F R E EZ A D I E S M I T H

isbn: 9781594206252price: $28.00

on sale: 2/6/2018

Since she burst spectacularly into view with her debut novel almost two decades ago, Zadie Smith has established herself not just as one of the world’s preeminent fiction writers, but also a brilliant and singular essayist. She contributes regularly to The New Yorker and the New York Review of Books on a range of subjects, and each piece of hers is a literary event in its own right.

Arranged into four sections—In the World, In the Audience, On the Bookshelf, and Feel Free—this new collection poses questions we immediately recognize. What is The Social Network—and Facebook itself—really about? “It’s a cruel portrait of us: 500 million sentient people entrapped in the recent careless thoughts of a Harvard sophomore.” Why do we love libraries? “Well-run libraries are filled with people because what a good library offers cannot be easily found elsewhere: an indoor public space in which you do not have to buy anything in order to stay.” What will we tell our granddaughters about our collective failure to

address global warming? “So I might say to her, look: the thing you have to appreciate is that we’d just been through a century of relativism and deconstruction, in which we were informed that most of our fondest-held principles were either uncertain or simple wishful thinking, and in many areas of our lives we had already been asked to accept that nothing is essential and everything changes—and this had taken the fight out of us somewhat.”

Gathering in one place for the first time previously unpublished work, as well as already classic essays, such as, “Joy,” and, “Find Your Beach,” Feel Free offers a survey of important recent events in culture and politics, as well as Smith’s own life. Equally at home in the world of good books and bad politics, Brooklyn-born rappers and the work of Swiss novelists, she is by turns wry, heartfelt, indignant, and incisive—and never any less than perfect company. This is literary journalism at its zenith.

ZADIE SMITH is the author of the novels White Teeth, The Autograph Man, On Beauty, NW, and Swing Time, as well as a collection of essays, Changing My Mind.

From Zadie Smith, one of the most beloved authors of her generation, a new collection of essays

F E E L F R E EZ A D I E S M I T H

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POL I T IC A L T R I BESA MY C H U A

isbn: 9780399562853price: $28.00

on sale: 2/20/2018

We all want—no, are compelled—to be part of the group. Sports teams, churches, companies, nations, races—some groups we belong to voluntarily, others we find ourselves enrolled in at birth. These groups shape our identities. Indeed, in some parts of the world, people kill and die for their group. But where Americans see divisions of ideas—capitalism vs. communism, democracy vs. authoritarianism, the “Free World” vs. the “Axis of Evil”—others see older and deeper group identities, not national or ideological but ethnic, religious, sectarian, and tribal. Time and time again this tendency has undermined American foreign policy. In the Vietnam War, an inability to apprehend the importance of Vietnamese nationalism, and an insistence on seeing the conflict through the lens of the Cold War, brought America to its knees. Several decades later, American leadership badly misapprehended the significance of Pashtun identity and loyalty in Afghanistan. In Iraq, we failed to take stock of the potential for violence between Sunnis and Shias. It’s time to cure ourselves of this myopic one-size-fits-all view of group behavior in our foreign policy.

But just as America has been willfully blind to the significance of group behavior abroad, we have remained intractably in thrall to it at home.

Political leaders and commentators alike refer to the “black vote,” the “Evangelical vote,” the “non-college-educated white male vote,” “the suburban white female vote,” and so on. Despite our constitutional commitments to individual liberty and equality, we have always been intensely group conscious as a nation, from our original sin of slavery to Dred Scott to the Chinese Exclusion Act to Jim Crow. Given how political mobilization is characteristically organized around group-based movements that increasingly reject universalist rhetoric, should we be so surprised by the disturbing recent rise in anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim, and racist rhetoric?

In characteristically persuasive style, Amy Chua explodes this most American of paradoxes: how can we be so group blind abroad and yet so acutely group conscious at home? She argues forcefully that we need to be far more knowledgeable and strategic about ethnic, religious, and tribal identity in our foreign policy, and far more unified at home. Enough false slogans of unity, which are just another form of divisiveness. It is time for a more difficult unity that acknowledges the reality of group differences and fights the deep inequities that divide us.

AMY CHUA is the John M. Duff Professor of Law at Yale Law School. She is a noted expert in the fields of international business, ethnic conflict, and globalization, and the author of the bestselling titles World on Fire: How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability, Day of Empire: How Hyperpowers Rise to Global Dominance-and Why They Fall, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, and her most recent book, The Triple Package: How Three

Unlikely Traits Explain the Rise and Fall of Cultural Groups in America, co-written with Jed Rubenfeld. She lives in New Haven, Connecticut, with her husband and two daughters.

From the bestselling author of Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother and Yale Law School Professor Amy Chua, a bold new look at how

longstanding false assumptions about group behavior have been the undoing of America’s best laid plans, particularly in our foreign policy

POL I T IC A L T R I BESA MY C H U A

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isbn: 9780735221345price: $27.00

on sale: 3/6/2018

A ST R A L W E E K SR YA N H . WA L S H

Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks is an iconic rock album shrouded in legend, a masterpiece that has touched generations of listeners and influenced everyone from Bruce Springsteen to Martin Scorsese. In his first book, acclaimed rock musician and journalist Ryan H. Walsh unearths the album’s fascinating backstory—along with the untold secrets of the time and place that birthed it: Boston 1968.

On the 50th anniversary of that tumultuous year, Walsh’s book follows a criss-crossing cast of musicians and visionaries, artists and “hippie entrepreneurs,” from a young Tufts English professor who walks into a job as a host for TV’s wildest show (one episode required two sets, each tuned to a different channel) to the mystically inclined owner of radio station WBCN, who

believed he was the reincarnation of a scientist from Atlantis. Most penetratingly powerful of all is Mel Lyman, the folk-music star who decided he was God, then controlled the lives of his many followers via acid, astrology, and an underground newspaper called Avatar.

A mesmerizing group of boldface names pops to life in Astral Weeks: James Brown quells tensions the night after Martin Luther King is assassinated; the real-life crimes of the Boston Strangler come to the movie screen via Tony Curtis; Howard Zinn testifies for Avatar in the courtroom. From life-changing concerts and chilling crimes, to acid experiments and hippie entrepreneurs, Astral Weeks is the secret, wild history of a unique time and place.

RYAN H. WALSH is a musician and journalist. His culture writing has appeared in the Boston Globe, Vice, and Boston Magazine. He was a finalist for the Missouri School of Journalism’s City and Regional Magazine Award for his feature on Van Morrison’s year in Boston, from which this book developed. His rock band Hallelujah the Hills has won praise from Rolling Stone and Pitchfork; collaborated on a song with author Jonathan Lethem; and toured the U.S. extensively over their 10-year existence. The band won a Boston Music Award for Best Rock Artist, and Walsh has twice won the award for Best Video Direction. He lives in Boston with his wife, the acclaimed singer-songwriter Marissa Nadler.

A mind-expanding dive into a lost chapter of 1968, featuring the famous and forgotten: Van Morrison, folkie-turned-cult-leader

Mel Lyman, Timothy Leary, James Brown, and many more

A ST R A L W E E K SR YA N H . WA L S H

isbn: 9781101981412price: $26.00

on sale: 3/6/2018

A TOK YO ROM A NC EI A N B U R U M A

When Ian Buruma arrived in Tokyo in 1975, Japan was little more than an idea in his mind, a fantasy of a distant land. A sensitive misfit in the world of his upper middleclass youth, what he longed for wasn’t so much the exotic as the raw, unfiltered humanity he had experienced in Japanese theater performances and films, witnessed in Amsterdam and Paris. One particular theater troupe, directed by a poet of runaways, outsiders, and eccentrics, was especially alluring, more than a little frightening, and completely unforgettable. If Tokyo was anything like his plays, Buruma knew that he had to join the circus as soon as possible.

Tokyo was an astonishment. Callow and unformed, Buruma found a feverish and surreal metropolis where nothing was understated, and everything shouted for attention—neon lights, crimson lanterns, Japanese pop, advertising jingles, cabarets, and PA systems. He encountered a city in the midst of an economic boom where everything seemed new, aside from the isolated temple or shrine that had survived the firestorms and earthquakes that had levelled the city during

the past century. History remained in fragments: the shapes of wounded World War Two veterans in white kimonos, murky old bars that Mishima had cruised in, and the narrow alleys where street girls had once flitted. Buruma’s Tokyo, though, was a city engaged in a radical transformation. And through his adventures in the world of avant garde theater, his encounters with carnival acts, fashion photographers, and moments on-set with Akira Kurosawa, Buruma underwent a radical transformation of his own. For an outsider, unattached to the cultural burdens placed on the Japanese, this was a place to be truly free.

A Tokyo Romance is a portrait of a young artist and the fantastical city that shaped him. With his signature acuity, Ian Buruma brilliantly captures the historical tensions between east and west, the clash of conflicting cultures, and the dilemma of the gaijin in Japanese society, constantly free, yet always on the outside. The result is a timeless story about the desire to transgress boundaries: cultural, artistic, and sexual.

IAN BURUMA is editor of The New York Review of Books. His previous books include Their Promised Land, Year Zero, The China Lover, Murder in Amsterdam, Occidentalism, God’s Dust, Behind the Mask, The Wages of Guilt, Bad Elements, and Taming the Gods.

A classic memoir of self-invention in a strange land: Ian Buruma’s unflinching account of his amazing journey into the heart of Tokyo’s

underground culture as a young man in the 1970’s

A TOK YO ROM A NC EI A N B U R U M A

isbn: 9780735222724 price: $28.00

on sale: 3/6/2018

GET T I NG TO USS E T H DAV I S

What makes a coach great? How do great coaches turn a collection of individuals into a coherent “us”? Seth Davis, one of the keenest minds in sports journalism, has been thinking about that question for twenty-five years. It’s one of the things that drove him to write the definitive biography of college basketball’s greatest coach, John Wooden, Wooden: A Coach’s Life. But John Wooden coached a long time ago. The world has changed, and coaching has too, tremendously. Seth Davis decided to embark on a proper investigation, to get to the root of the answer to the question.

In Getting to Us, Davis probes and prods the best of the best from the landscape of active coaches of football and basketball, college and pro—from Urban Meyer, Dabo Swinney, and Jim Harbaugh to Mike Krzyzewski, Tom Izzo, Jim Boeheim, Brad Stevens, Geno Auriemma, and Doc Rivers—to

get at the fundamental ingredients of greatness in the coaching sphere. There’s no single right way, of course—part of the great value of the book is Seth’s distillation of what he has learned down into types of greatness in coaching, and what sort of leadership thrives in one kind of environment but not others. Some coaches have thrived at the college level but not in the pros. Why? What’s the difference? Some coaches are stern taskmasters, others are warm and cuddly; some are brilliant strategists but less emotionally connected with their players, and with others it’s vice versa. In Getting To Us, we come to feel a deep connection with the most successful and iconic coaches in all of sports—big winners, and big character, whose stories offer much in the way of both fascination and edification.

S E T H DAV I S is the author of the New York Times bestsellers When March Went Mad: The Game That Transformed Basketball and Wooden: A Coach’s Life. In 1995, he joined the staff of Sports Illustrated, where he is currently a senior writer. He is also an on-air studio analyst for CBS Sports and CBS Sports Network during coverage of college basketball and the NCAA tournament, and the host of The Seth Davis Show on Campus Insiders. A graduate of Duke University, he lives with his family in Los Angeles.

From the acclaimed CBS Sports commentator and author of the definitive biography of John Wooden: In Search of Excellence for coaching

GET T I NG TO USS E T H DAV I S

isbn: 9781101981566price: $30.00

on sale: 3/20/2018

DA NGE ROUS M YST ICJ O E L H A R R I N G T O N

Meister Eckhart was a medieval Christian mystic whose wisdom powerfully appeals to seekers seven centuries after his death. In the modern era, Eckhart’s writings have struck a chord with thinkers as diverse as Heidegger, Merton, Sartre, John Paul II, and the current Dalai Lama. He is the inspiration for the bestselling New Age author Eckhart Tolle’s pen name, and his fourteenth-century quotes have become an online sensation. Today a variety of Christians, as well as many Zen Buddhists, Sufi Muslims, Jewish Cabbalists, and various spiritual seekers, all claim Eckhart as their own. Meister Eckhart preached a personal, internal path to God at a time when the Church could not have been more hierarchical and ritualistic. Then and now, Eckhart’s revolutionary method of direct access to ultimate reality offers a profoundly subjective approach that is at once intuitive and pragmatic, philosophical yet non-rational, and, above all, universally accessible. This “dangerous mystic’s” teachings challenge the very nature of religion, yet the man himself never directly challenged the Church.

Eckhart was one of the most learned

theologians of his day, but he was also a man of the world who had worked as an administrator for his religious order and taught for years at the University of Paris. His personal path from conventional friar to professor to lay preacher culminated in a spiritual philosophy that combined the teachings of an array of pagan and Christian writers, as well as Muslim and Jewish philosophers. His revolutionary decision to take his approach to the common people garnered him many enthusiastic followers as well as powerful enemies. After Eckhart’s death and papal censure, many religious women and clerical supporters, known as the Friends of God, kept his legacy alive through the centuries, albeit underground until the master’s dramatic rediscovery by modern Protestants and Catholics.

Dangerous Mystic grounds Meister Eckhart in a world that is simultaneously familiar and alien. In the midst of this medieval society, a few decades before the Black Death, Eckhart boldly preached to captivated crowds a timeless method, a “wayless way,” of directly experiencing the divine.

J O E L F. H A R R I N G TO N is a professor of history at Vanderbilt University. He is the author of The Faithful Executioner, The Unwanted Child, and A Cloud of Witnesses.

Life and times of the 14th century German theologian Meister Eckhart, whose theory of a personal path to the divine inspired thinkers from Jean

Paul Sartre to Thomas Merton, and most recently, Eckhart Tolle.

DA NGE ROUS M YST ICJ O E L H A R R I N G T O N

M E LT DOW NC H R I S C L E A R F I E L D & A N D R Á S T I L C S I K

isbn: 9780735222632price: $28.00

on sale: 3/20/2018

A crash on the Washington, D.C. metro system. An accidental overdose in a state-of-the-art hospital. An overcooked holiday meal. At first glance, these disasters seem to have little in common. But surprising new research shows that all these events—and the myriad failures that dominate headlines every day—share similar causes. By understanding what lies behind these failures, we can design better systems, make our teams more productive, and transform how we make decisions at work and at home.

Weaving together cutting-edge social science with riveting stories that take us from the frontlines of the Volkswagen scandal to backstage at the Oscars, and from deep beneath the Gulf of Mexico to the top of Mount Everest, Chris Clearfield and András Tilcsik explain how the increasing complexity of our systems creates

conditions ripe for failure and why our brains and teams can’t keep up. They highlight the paradox of progress: Though modern systems have given us new capabilities, they’ve become vulnerable to surprising meltdowns —and even to corruption and misconduct.

But Meltdown isn’t just about failure; it’s about solutions—whether you’re managing a team or the chaos of your family’s morning routine. It reveals why ugly designs make us safer, how a five-minute exercise can prevent billion-dollar catastrophes, why teams with fewer experts are better at managing risk, and why diversity is one of our best safeguards against failure. The result is an eye-opening, empowering, and entirely original book—one that will change the way you see our complex world and your own place in it.

C H R I S C L E A R F I E L D is a principal at System Logic, a research and consulting firm that helps organizations manage the risk of catastrophic failure. He has written about catastrophic failure, technology, and finance for The Guardian, Forbes, Project Syndicate, the Harvard Kennedy School Review, Nautilus, the Harvard Business Review blog, and in a memo to the US House of Representatives.

A N D R Á S T I L C S I K is an assistant professor of strategic management at the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto, where he developed and teaches the award-winning MBA course Catastrophic Failure in Organizations. He is also chief sociologist of the Creative Destruction Lab, one of the world’s fastest-growing startup accelerators.

A groundbreaking take on how complexity causes failure in all kinds of modern systems—from social media to air travel—this practical and entertaining book reveals how

we can prevent meltdowns in business and life

M E LT DOW NC H R I S C L E A R F I E L D & A N D R Á S T I L C S I K

isbn: 9781594203510price: $26.00

on sale: 4/3/2018

ON GR A N D ST R AT EGYJ O H N L E W I S G A D D I S

For over 20 years, a select group of Yale undergraduates has been admitted into the year-long “Grand Strategy” seminar team-taught by John Lewis Gaddis and Paul Kennedy. Its purpose: to provide a grounding in strategic decision-making in the face of crisis to prepare future American leaders for important work. Now, John Lewis Gaddis has transposed the experience of

that course into a wonderfully succinct, lucid and inspirational book, a view from the commanding heights of statesmanship across the landscape of world history from the ancient Greeks to Lincoln, and beyond. A thrilling experience for history lovers and a necessary one for anyone serious about the art of leadership, On Grand Strategy is the very definition of a master class.

J O H N L E W I S G A D D I S is the Robert A. Lovett Professor of History at Yale University. His previous books include The United States and the Origins of the Cold War; Strategies of Containment; The Long Peace; We Now Know; The Landscape of History; Surprise, Security, and the American Experience; and The Cold War: A New History. Professor Gaddis teaches courses on Cold War history, grand strategy, international studies, and biography; has won two Yale undergraduate teaching awards; was a 2005 recipient of the National Humanities Medal; and is the winner of the 2012 Pulitzer Prize in Biography for George F. Kennan.

A master class in strategic thinking, distilled from the legendary program the author has co-taught at Yale for decades

ON GR A N D ST R AT EGYJ O H N L E W I S G A D D I S

isbn: 9780525522577price: $30.00

on sale: 4/3/2018

U N T I T L E DM A R K H A L P E R I N & J O H N H E I L E M A N N

Mark Halperin and John Heilemann once again bring their deep and unique access and unparalleled political know-how to the 2016 presidential election, going behind the scenes of the Republican and Democratic campaigns to present the untold, compelling, and gripping story in full for the first time.

Examining the candidates and their campaigns in the years, months, and days leading up the election, and reporting up to the minute through present day with Trump now firmly in the White House, Halperin and Heilemann give listeners complete access to the game changing moments as well as the looming, unexplored - and previously

undercovered - questions still surrounding both Clinton and Trump. Reporting on Ivanka, Jared Kushner, and James Comey, from how Bill Clinton screwed things up to what Trump really thinks about himself and his temperament, all amidst the FBI’s ongoing investigation into Russia and Trump’s attempts - as president - to squash it, Halperin and Heileman dig deep and provide us with never-before disclosed newsbreaks. Riveting, revelatory, and necessary, this unforgettable and extraordinary account of the 2016 election and its aftermath is a must-listen for anyone and everyone who played a part in the election. In sum, for all of us.

M A R K H A L P E R I N is an author, senior political analyst for MSNBC and NBC News, and contributor and former co-managing editor of Bloomberg Politics. He is the co-author of Game Change and Double Down, and the co-host of the political documentary series The Circus. Halperin, who has covered eight presidential elections, received his B.A. from Harvard University and resides in New York City with Karen Avrich.

J O H N H E I L E M A N N is the National Affairs Analyst at NBC News and MSNBC. An award-winning journalist and author of Pride Before the Fall, he is a former staff writer for The New Yorker, Wired, and The Economist. He is also the co-author of Game Change and Double Down, and the co-host of the political documentary series The Circus. He lives in Brooklyn.

The imperative, essential, and news-breaking account of the explosive 2016 presidential election, from the authors of the New York Times

bestsellers Game Change and Double Down, with previously uncovered news, insight, and information that will forever change the way we

understand the shocking outcome of November 8th.

U N T I T L E DM A R K H A L P E R I N & J O H N H E I L E M A N N

isbn: 9780735224322price: $35.00

on sale: 4/10/2018

E M PI R E OF GU NSP R I YA S AT I A

We have long understood the Industrial Revolution as a triumphant story of innovation and technology. Empire of Guns, a rich and ambitious new book by award-winning historian Priya Satia, upends this conventional wisdom by placing war and Britain’s prosperous gun trade at the heart of the Industrial Revolution and the state’s imperial expansion.

Satia brings to life this bustling industrial society with the story of a scandal: Samuel Galton of Birmingham, one of Britain’s most prominent gunmakers, has been condemned by his fellow Quakers, who argue that his profession violates the society’s pacifist principles. In his fervent self-defense, Galton argues that the state’s heavy reliance on industry for all of its war needs means that every member of the British industrial economy is implicated in Britain’s near-constant state of war.

Empire of Guns uses the story of Galton and the gun trade, from Birmingham to the outermost edges of the British empire, to illuminate the nation’s emergence as a global superpower, the roots of the state’s role in economic development, and the origins of our era’s debates about gun control and the “military-industrial complex”—that thorny partnership of government, the economy, and the military. Through Satia’s eyes, we acquire a radically new understanding of this critical historical moment and all that followed from it.

Sweeping in its scope and entirely original in its approach, Empire of Guns is a masterful new work of history—a rigorous historical argument with a human story at its heart.

P R I YA S AT I A is a Professor of History at Stanford University. She is the author of Spies in Arabia: The Great War and the Cultural Foundations of Britain’s Covert Empire in the Middle East, and her writing has appeared in Slate, the Financial Times, The Nation, and the Huffington Post, among other publications. She received a MSc in Development Studies (Economics) at the London School of Economics and a PhD in History at the University of California, Berkeley. She lives in Stanford, California with her family.

By a prize-winning young historian, an authoritative work that reframes the Industrial Revolution, the expansion of

British empire, and emergence of industrial capitalism by presenting them as inextricable from the gun trade

E M PI R E OF GU NSP R I YA S AT I A

isbn: 9781101981542price: $25.00

on sale: 4/10/2018

C A K EM AIR A K AL M AN &

BARBAR A SCOT T - GOODM AN

In Cake, renowned artist and author Maira Kalman and food writer Barbara Scott-Goodman bring us a beautifully illustrated book dedicated to their mutual love of cakes. Kalman’s enchanting

illustrations, in her inimitable style, and Scott-Goodman’s mouthwatering recipes complement each other perfectly, making Cake a joyful whimsical celebration of a timeless dessert.

M A I R A K A L M A N is an illustrator, author, and designer. She is the author of Beloved Dog, And the Pursuit of Happiness and The Principles of Uncertainty. She is the illustrator of Michael Pollan’s Food Rules and the bestselling edition of William Strunk and E. B. White’s The Elements of Style. Kalman’s work is shown at the Julie Saul Gallery in Manhattan.

B A R B A R A S C OT T- G O O D M A N is an author, food writer, and designer. She is the author of The Beach House Cookbook, Wine Bites, and Brooklyn Bar Bites. She lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

With great style, wit, and joy, Maira Kalman and Barbara Scott-Goodman celebrate their favorite dessert.

C A K EM AIR A K AL M AN &

BARBAR A SCOT T - GOODM AN

isbn: 9780735223196price: $20.00

on sale: 5/1/2018

D C -T!J O A N A AV I L L E Z & M O L LY YO U N G

Just as there are few cities as storied and replete with life as New York City, there are few illustrators or writers who have charmed as many generations as William Steig. To Molly Young and Joana Avillez, a connection between the two seemed obvious, and so D C-T! (“The City!”) was born.

Using a playful phonetic language first invented by Steig in his now classic 1968 book CDB!—but which in today’s world of text message and internet shorthand feels uncannily contemporary—Young and Avillez tell a different story on each page of this collection of illustrations stuffed to brim with humor and cleverness:

• “S L-I-F!” (It’s alive!) A boy shouts gleefully at a pile of rubbish seething with rats

• “I M B-Z” (I’m busy) Declares the phone-wielding businesswoman to the would-be mugger

• “R U I?” (Are you high?) Asks the clerk at a bodega to the blissed out shopper

Brought to life in Avillez’s distinctively ebullient and droll style are precocious pets and pet-owners, iconic architecture, and startlingly intrepid anthropomorphic rats. At once recognizable, and imagined like never before, are the full complement of surprising, intoxicating, and not-always-entirely-welcome sights, sounds, and smells of New York City.

Full of wit, romance, and sheer delight, D C-T! is both an affectionate portrait of the visual cornucopia that is New York City and a gracious love letter to the great William Steig, sure to enchant readers young and old alike just as his work has for half a century.

MOLLY YOUNG is a contributing writer at the New York Times Magazine. She has written features for GQ, Elle, New York magazine, n+1 and other publications, and has authored columns for the New York Times Book Review and the New York Times. She has also published crossword puzzles in the New York Times.

JOANA AVILLEZ is an illustrator from and still living in New York. Her drawings and illustrated stories have appeared in The New Yorker, the New York Times, New York magazine, Zeit Magazin, Apartamento, and many other places. She illustrated Lena Dunham’s memoir, Not That Kind of Girl.

A joy-inducing illustrated book about New York City in the ingenious style of William Steig’s classic CDB!

D C -T!J O A N A AV I L L E Z & M O L LY YO U N G

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