Mehdi Hasan

“A delicious and mouthwatering book about food and family, the complicated love for both, and how that shapes us into who we are . . . I absolutely loved it!” —Valerie Bertinelli Rabia Chaudry—known from the podcast Serial and her bestselling book, Adnan’s Story, as well as her own wildly popular podcast, Undisclosed—serves up a candid and intimate memoir about food, body image, and growing up in a tight knit but sometimes overly concerned Pakistani immigrant family. “My entire life I have been less fat and more fat, but never not fat.” Rabia Chaudry was raised with a lot of love—and that love looked like food. Delicious Pakistani dishes—fresh roti, chaat, pakoras, and shorba—and also Pizza Hut, Dairy Queen, and an abundance of American processed foods, as her family discovered its adopted country through its (fast) food. At the same time, her family was becoming increasingly alarmed about their chubby daughter’s future. Most important, how would she ever get married? In Fatty Fatty Boom Boom, Chaudry chronicles the dozens of times she tried and failed to achieve what she was told was her ideal weight. The truth is, though, she always loved food too much to hold a grudge against it. At once an ode to Pakistani cuisine, including Chaudry’s favorite recipes; a love letter to her Muslim family both here and in Lahore; and a courageously honest portrait of a woman grappling with a body that gets the job done but refuses to meet the expectations of others. For anyone who has ever been weighed down by their weight— whatever it is—Chaudry shows us how freeing it is to finally make peace with body we have.

One of NPR's Books We Love in 2022. Longlisted for the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography In this erudite and piercing biography, best-selling author Reza Aslan proves that one person’s actions can have revolutionary consequences that reverberate the world over. Little known in America but venerated as a martyr in Iran, Howard Baskerville was a twenty-two-year-old Christian missionary from South Dakota who traveled to Persia (modern-day Iran) in 1907 for a two-year stint teaching English and preaching the gospel. He arrived in the midst of a democratic revolution―the first of its kind in the Middle East―led by a group of brilliant young firebrands committed to transforming their country into a fully self-determining, constitutional monarchy, one with free elections and an independent parliament. The Persian students Baskerville educated in English in turn educated him about their struggle for democracy, ultimately inspiring him to leave his teaching post and join them in their fight against a tyrannical shah and his British and Russian backers. “The only difference between me and these people is the place of my birth," Baskerville declared, “and that is not a big difference.” In 1909, Baskerville was killed in battle alongside his students, but his martyrdom spurred on the revolutionaries who succeeded in removing the shah from power, signing a new constitution, and rebuilding parliament in Tehran. To this day, Baskerville’s tomb in the city of Tabriz remains a place of pilgrimage. Every year, thousands of Iranians visit his grave to honor the American who gave his life for Iran. In this rip-roaring tale of his life and death, Aslan gives us a powerful parable about the universal ideals of democracy―and to what degree Americans are willing to support those ideals in a foreign land. Woven throughout is an essential history of the nation we now know as Iran―frequently demonized and misunderstood in the West. Indeed, Baskerville’s life and death represent a “road not taken” in Iran. Baskerville’s story, like his life, is at the center of a whirlwind in which Americans must ask themselves: How seriously do we take our ideals of constitutional democracy and whose freedom do we support?

Leading historians provide perspective on Trump’s four turbulent years in the White House The Presidency of Donald J. Trump presents a first draft of history by offering needed perspective on one of the nation’s most divisive presidencies. Acclaimed political historian Julian Zelizer brings together many of today’s top scholars to provide balanced and strikingly original assessments of the major issues that shaped the Trump presidency. When Trump took office in 2017, he quickly carved out a loyal base within an increasingly radicalized Republican Party, dominated the news cycle with an endless stream of controversies, and presided over one of the most contentious one-term presidencies in American history. These essays cover the crucial aspects of Trump’s time in office, including his administration’s close relationship with conservative media, his war on feminism, the solidification of a conservative women’s movement, his response to COVID-19, the border wall, growing tensions with China and NATO allies, white nationalism in an era of Black Lives Matter, and how the high-tech sector flourished. The Presidency of Donald J. Trump reveals how Trump was not the cause of the political divisions that defined his term in office but rather was a product of long-term trends in Republican politics and American polarization more broadly. With contributions by Kathleen Belew, Angus Burgin, Geraldo Cadava, Merlin Chowkwanyun, Bathsheba Demuth, Gregory Downs, Jeffrey Engel, Beverly Gage, Nicole Hemmer, Michael Kazin, Daniel C. Kurtzer, James Mann, Mae Ngai, Margaret O’Mara, Jason Scott Smith, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, and Leandra Zarnow.

A groundbreaking journey tracing America’s forgotten path to global power―and how its legacies shape our world today―told through the extraordinary life of a complicated Marine. "Far more extraordinary than even the life of Smedley Butler." ―The Washington Post Smedley Butler was the most celebrated warfighter of his time. Bestselling books were written about him. Hollywood adored him. Wherever the flag went, “The Fighting Quaker” went―serving in nearly every major overseas conflict from the Spanish War of 1898 until the eve of World War II. From his first days as a 16-year-old recruit at the newly seized Guantánamo Bay, he blazed a path for empire: helping annex the Philippines and the land for the Panama Canal, leading troops in China (twice), and helping invade and occupy Nicaragua, Puerto Rico, Haiti, Mexico, and more. Yet in retirement, Butler turned into a warrior against war, imperialism, and big business, declaring: “I was a racketeer for capitalism." Award-winning author Jonathan Myerson Katz traveled across the world―from China to Guantánamo, the mountains of Haiti to the Panama Canal―and pored over the personal letters of Butler, his fellow Marines, and his Quaker family on Philadelphia's Main Line. Along the way, Katz shows how the consequences of the Marines' actions are still very much alive: talking politics with a Sandinista commander in Nicaragua, getting a martial arts lesson from a devotee of the Boxer Rebellion in China, and getting cast as a P.O.W. extra in a Filipino movie about their American War. Tracing a path from the first wave of U.S. overseas expansionism to the rise of fascism in the 1930s to the crises of democracy in our own time, Gangsters of Capitalism tells an urgent story about a formative era most Americans have never learned about, but that the rest of the world cannot forget.

A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice An innovative account of Abraham Lincoln, constitutional thinker and doer Abraham Lincoln is justly revered for his brilliance, compassion, humor, and rededication of the United States to achieving liberty and justice for all. He led the nation into a bloody civil war to uphold the system of government established by the US Constitution―a system he regarded as the “last best hope of mankind.” But how did Lincoln understand the Constitution? In this groundbreaking study, Noah Feldman argues that Lincoln deliberately and recurrently violated the United States’ founding arrangements. When he came to power, it was widely believed that the federal government could not use armed force to prevent a state from seceding. It was also assumed that basic civil liberties could be suspended in a rebellion by Congress but not by the president, and that the federal government had no authority over slavery in states where it existed. As president, Lincoln broke decisively with all these precedents, and effectively rewrote the Constitution’s place in the American system. Before the Civil War, the Constitution was best understood as a compromise pact―a rough and ready deal between states that allowed the Union to form and function. After Lincoln, the Constitution came to be seen as a sacred text―a transcendent statement of the nation’s highest ideals. The Broken Constitution is the first book to tell the story of how Lincoln broke the Constitution in order to remake it. To do so, it offers a riveting narrative of his constitutional choices and how he made them―and places Lincoln in the rich context of thinking of the time, from African American abolitionists to Lincoln’s Republican rivals and Secessionist ideologues. Includes 8 Pages of Black-and-White Illustrations

THE INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER! Michael C. Bender, senior White House reporter for the Wall Street Journal, presents a deeply reported account of the 2020 presidential campaign that details how Donald J. Trump became the first incumbent in three decades to lose reelection—and the only one whose defeat culminated in a violent insurrection. Beginning with President Trump’s first impeachment and ending with his second, FRANKLY, WE DID WIN THIS ELECTION chronicles the inside-the-room deliberations between Trump and his campaign team as they opened 2020 with a sleek political operation built to harness a surge of momentum from a bullish economy, a unified Republican Party, and a string of domestic and foreign policy successes—only to watch everything unravel when fortunes suddenly turned. With first-rate sourcing cultivated from five years of covering Trump in the White House and both of his campaigns, Bender brings readers inside the Oval Office, aboard Air Force One, and into the front row of the movement’s signature mega-rallies for the story of an epic election-year convergence of COVID, economic collapse, and civil rights upheaval—and an unorthodox president’s attempt to battle it all. Fresh interviews with Trump, key campaign advisers, and senior administration officials are paired with an exclusive collection of internal campaign memos, emails, and text messages for scores of never-before-reported details about the campaign. FRANKLY, WE DID WIN THIS ELECTION is the inside story of how Trump lost, and the definitive account of his final year in office that draws a straight line from the president’s repeated insistence that he would never lose to the deadly storming of the U.S. Capitol that imperiled one of his most loyal lieutenants—his own vice president.