That fine Italian hand

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Benjamin E. Schwartz

In Right of Boom, national security specialist Benjamin Schwartz looks at what could happen after a nuclear explosion takes place in the United States, the event that Presidents Obama and Bush, as well as would-be Presidents Mitt Romney and Hillary Clinton, have acknowledged as the greatest single national security threat we face. Hypothesizing an explosion in downtown Washington, D.C., Schwartz maps out the likely ramifications while going deep into history to explore the limited range of options available to a Commander in Chief. Drawing from his experience as an analyst at the Departments of Defense, State, and Energy, Schwartz offers a fully panoramic view of a terrifying reality.

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Geoffrey Batchen

In an 1828 letter to his partner Nicephore Niepce, Louis Daguerre wrote, "I am burning with desire to see your experiments from nature." In this book, Geoffrey Batchen analyzes the desire to photograph as it emerged within the philosophical and scientific milieus that preceded the actual invention of photography. Recent accounts of photography's identity tend to divide between the postmodern view that all identity is determined by context and a formalist effort to define the fundamental characteristics of photography as a medium. Batchen critiques both approaches by way of a detailed discussion of photography's conception in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In this refiguring of the traditional story of photography's origins, Batchen examines the output of the various nominees for "first photographer," then incorporates this information into a mode of historical criticism informed by the work of Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida. The result is a way of thinking about photography that persuasively accords with the medium's undeniable conceptual, political, and historical complexity.

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Stephen L. Sass

Stephen L. Sass's The Substance of Civilization shows that the story of human civilization can be read most deeply in the materials we have found or created, used or abused. They have dictated how we build, eat, communicate, wage war, create art, travel, and worship. Some, such as stone, iron, and bronze, lend their names to ages. Others, such as gold, silver, and diamond, contributed to the rise and fall of great empires. How would history have unfolded without glass, paper, steel, cement, or gunpowder? Sass shows us how substances and civilization have evolved together. In antiquity, iron was considered more precious than gold. Spanish miners in the New World thought platinum, which is more rare than silver, a useless nuisance. The celluloid used in movie film had its origins in the search for a substitute for ivory billiard balls. The discovery ages ago that clay could be fired to make pots was revolutionary; so was the more recent discovery that clay also contains the substance that runs our computers.

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Chris Abani

Set against the uncompromising landscape of East Los Angeles, this novel follows a struggling artist named Black, whose life and friendships reveal a world far removed from the mainstream.