Gold Of Our Fathers

The chief inspector in the Ghana police force investigates a gold miner’s death in this “atmospheric” mystery set in West Africa (Entertainment Weekly). “Fans of The #1 Ladies’ Detective Agency may have a new hero: Detective Inspector Darko Dawson.” —The Wall Street Journal Darko Dawson has just been promoted to chief inspector in the Ghana police service—and it even comes with a (rather modest) salary bump. But he doesn’t have much time to celebrate, because his new boss is transferring him from Accra, Ghana’s capital, out to remote Obuasi in the Ashanti region, an area notorious for the illegal exploitation of its gold mines. When Dawson arrives at the Obuasi headquarters, he finds it in complete disarray. The office is a mess of uncatalogued evidence and cold case files, morale is low, and discipline among officers is lax. Then, on only his second day on the job, the body of a Chinese mine owner is unearthed in his own gold quarry. As Dawson investigates the case, he quickly learns how dangerous it is to pursue justice in this kingdom of illegal gold mines, where the worst offenders have so much money they have no fear of the law. Chosen for Entertainment Weekly’s “Must List,” Gold of Our Fathers is “exceptional . . . A window into another culture” (Publishers Weekly, starred review).

The National Book Award–winning, New York Times–bestselling history of Yiddish-speaking immigrants on the Lower East Side and beyond. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, two million Jewish immigrants poured into America, leaving places like Warsaw or the Russian shtetls to pass through Ellis Island and start over in the New World. This is a “brilliant” account of their stories (The New York Times). Though some moved on to Philadelphia, Chicago, and other points west, many of these new citizens settled in New York City, especially in Manhattan’s teeming tenements. Like others before and after, they struggled to hold on to the culture and community they brought from their homelands, all the while striving to escape oppression and find opportunity. They faced poverty and crime, but also experienced the excitement of freedom and previously unimaginable possibilities. Over the course of decades, from the 1880s to the 1920s, they were assimilated into the great melting pot as the Yiddish language slowly gave way to English; work was found in sweatshops; children were sent to both religious and secular schools; and, for the lucky ones, the American dream was attained—if not in the first generation, then by the second or third. Nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award, World of Our Fathers explores the many aspects of this time and place in history, from the political to the cultural. In this compelling American story, Irving Howe addresses everything from the story of socialism, the hardships of the ghetto, and the tragic Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire that killed scores of garment workers to the “Borscht Belt” resorts of the Catskills in colorful and dramatic detail. Both meticulously researched and lively, it is “a stirring evocation of the adventure and trauma of migration” (Newsweek).

Los Angeles Times Book Prize Finalist: A “wonderfully vivid” crime novel about race, money, and the American Dream (Publishers Weekly, starred review). A banker in small-town Minnesota, J.W. has been caught embezzling funds to support his gambling addiction. He’s on the verge of losing everything when his boss offers him a scoundrel's path to redemption: sabotage a competing, Native banker named Johnny Eagle. A single father, Eagle recently returned to the reservation, leaving a high-powered job in the hope of simultaneously empowering his community and saving his troubled son. When J.W. moves onto the reservation and begins to work his way close to Eagle, hundreds of years of racial animosities rise to the surface, inexorably driving the characters toward a Shakespearean and shattering conclusion, in this elegant, page-turning novel by the screenwriter of the Oscar-nominated House of Sand and Fog. “A rousing and satisfying climax. Otto’s wonderfully vivid debut narrative is reminiscent of well-known crime novelist William Kent Krueger.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review) “Captivating from the first page.”—The Missourian

All of the historical facts about the U.S. gold aid that was given to China. How American Gold in China changed history in 1949 and is still having an impact on our lives today. You will gain a much better understanding of the Sino-American relationship and today’s world after reading this book.

No one questions that men are profoundly influenced by their fathers, but the shape and substance of that influence varies with each family. In this, the first anthology of nonfiction prose to explore this issue in depth, editor Steven Shepherd has collected a diverse and invariably compelling group of narratives about sons and their fathers. "Fourteen excellent essays by some of our best writers," says Anne Morris of the Austin American-Statesman. Among the contributors: James Baldwin, who reflects in his classic "Notes of a Native Son," on the father he barely knew, "partly because we shared, in our different fashions, the vice of stubborn pride." The brothers Geoffrey and Tobias Wolff, who write of their father from dramatically different perspectives. A second-generation undertaker, Thomas Lynch, who writes lovingly of burying his father. And the acclaimed scholar of African-American culture, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., who grew up with a father who "was not a race man," yet their arguments were vital to the son's education.