New Releases | February 21, 2023

Looking for your next great read? We're here to help! Each week, our marketing team—Dylan Schleicher (DJJS), Gabbi Cisneros (GMC), Emily Porter (EPP), and Jasmine Gonzalez (JAG)—highlights four newly released books we are most excited about. 

Book descriptions are provided by the publisher unless otherwise noted.

This week, our choices are:

The Big Myth: How American Business Taught Us to Loathe Government and Love the Free Market by Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway, Bloomsbury Publishing (DJJS) 

In their bestselling book Merchants of Doubt, Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway revealed the origins of climate change denial. Now, they unfold the truth about another disastrous dogma: the “magic of the marketplace.” 
 
In the early 20th century, business elites, trade associations, wealthy powerbrokers, and media allies set out to build a new American orthodoxy: down with “big government” and up with unfettered markets. With startling archival evidence, Oreskes and Conway document campaigns to rewrite textbooks, combat unions, and defend child labor. They detail the ploys that turned hardline economists Friedrich von Hayek and Milton Friedman into household names; recount the libertarian roots of the Little House on the Prairie books; and tune into the General Electric-sponsored TV show that beamed free-market doctrine to millions and launched Ronald Reagan's political career. 
 
By the 1970s, this propaganda was succeeding. Free market ideology would define the next half-century across Republican and Democratic administrations, giving us a housing crisis, the opioid scourge, climate destruction, and a baleful response to the Covid-19 pandemic. Only by understanding this history can we imagine a future where markets will serve, not stifle, democracy. 

The Body Code: Unlocking Your Body's Ability to Heal Itself by Dr. Bradley Nelson, St. Martin’s Essentials (EPP) 

The Body Code is a revolutionary method of holistic, whole-body healing. Dr. Nelson, a globally renowned expert in bioenergetic medicine, has spent decades teaching his powerful self-healing method and training practitioners around the globe, but this is the first time his complete system of healing will be available to the general public in the form of The Body Code. 
 
The Body Code is based on the simple premise that the body is self-healing and knows what it needs in order to thrive and flourish. The Body Code method allows readers to tap into this inner knowing, and map the 6 key imbalances—Energies, Circuits and Systems, Toxicity, Nutrition and Lifestyle, Misalignments, and Pathogens—that are the root cause of every physical issue. In understanding these imbalances, readers become empowered to activate their body's natural knowledge and healing power. 
 
Filled with powerful first-hand accounts of healing, hundreds of color illustrations, and concrete, actionable steps, The Body Code is a roadmap to healing based in deep study of the human body, time-proven ancient practices, and the unlimited power of the subconscious mind. 

Walk through Fire: The Train Disaster that Changed America by Yasmine Ali, Citadel (JAG) 

On the night of February 22, 1978, a devastating freight train derailment drastically altered Waverly, Tennessee, and its place in history. This was one of the worst train explosions of the twentieth century, killing 16 people, injuring hundreds more, and causing millions of dollars in damage. 
 
What could have been dismissed as a single community’s terrible misfortune instead became the catalyst for radical change, including the formation of FEMA, much-needed reforms in emergency response training, and the creation and enforcement of national and state safety regulations. Response to the disaster reshaped American infrastructure and laid the groundwork for the future of emergency management and disaster relief . . . and yet most Americans have never heard of Waverly. 
 
Dr. Yasmine S. Ali, an award-winning medical writer and Waverly native, sets out to change this in Walk through Fire, drawing from over a decade of meticulous research and interviews with survivors, first responders, and other firsthand accounts, including those of her own parents, first-generation Americans who were on call at the local hospital that treated the victims. Ali weaves a compelling narrative of small-town tragedy set against the broader backdrop of U.S. railroad history, rural healthcare, and other elements of American infrastructure that played a part in the creation—and the aftermath—of the Disaster. 
 
A tribute to resiliency and a call to action, Walk through Fire tells the harrowing story of the Waverly Train Disaster from the perspectives of those who survived it, and those who still feel its impact today, illuminating how much a nation still has to learn from one small town in Tennessee. 

Wolfish: Wolf, Self, and the Stories We Tell About Fear by Erica Berry, Flatiron Books (GMC) 

“This is one of those stories that begins with a female body. Hers was crumpled, roadside, in the ash-colored slush between asphalt and snowbank.” 
 
So begins Erica Berry’s kaleidoscopic exploration of wolves, both real and symbolic. At the center of this lyrical inquiry is the legendary OR-7, who roams away from his familial pack in northeastern Oregon. While charting OR-7’s record-breaking journey out of the Wallowa Mountains, Erica simultaneously details her own coming-of-age as she moves away from home and wrestles with inherited beliefs about fear, danger, femininity, and the body. 
 
As Erica chronicles her own migration—from crying wolf as a child on her grandfather’s sheep farm to accidentally eating mandrake in Sicily—she searches for new expressions for how to be a brave woman, human, and animal in our warming world. What do stories so long told about wolves tell us about our relationship to fear? How can our society peel back the layers of what scares us? By strategically unspooling the strands of our cultural constructions of predator and prey, and what it means to navigate a world in which we can be both, Erica bridges the gap between human fear and grief through the lens of a wrongfully misunderstood species. 
 
Wolfish is for anybody trying to navigate a world that is often scary. A powerful, timeless, and necessary book for our current and future generations.