Defiant Dreams

January 1, 2023

A professor at UCLA's Anderson School of Management, Hershfield illuminates an idea that's recently been in the news: to improve your life now, you need to work harder to imagine and connect meaningfully to Your Future Self (45,000-copy first printing). With The Con Queen of Hollywood, award-winning investigative journalist Johnson expands on his Hollywood Reporter story about the con artist who managed to rip off millions of dollars from people in the entertainment industry (100,000-copy first printing). With The Elissas, Leach presents a cautionary tale centering on best friend Elissa, who was thrown out of private school and sent to a $10,000-a-month boarding school for troubled teenagers, where she bonded with classmates named (eerily) Alissa and Alyssa; Elissa died of encephalitis shortly after graduating, and her two friends subsequently succumbed to drug use (60,000-copy first printing). As a girl in the Taliban-ruled Afghanistan, Mahfouz was denied an education but still entertained Defiant Dreams, teaching herself mathematics at age 16 and sneaking into Pakistan to take the SATs; she eventually escaped to the United States and is now a quantum computing researcher at Tufts University. Patterson's Chaos Kings focuses on the Universa fund to illuminate the activities of high-risk traders who go after so-called black swans--unforeseeable upheavals that can yield billions in profits. Having explained in the nearly million-copy best-selling The Color of Law how U.S. federal, state, and local governments have not just facilitated but actively created segregation, Richard Rothstein teams with housing policy expert (and daughter) Leah Rothstein in Just Action to explain how segregation can be dismantled, focusing on what local organizations can do about securing renters' rights, diversifying exclusively white areas, and more. President of the nonpartisan Brennan Center for Justice at the NYU School of Law, Waldman shows how the U.S. Supreme Court's conservative Supermajority has driven the Court's rulings far from what most people in the country want and what the implications will be.

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May 1, 2023
An inspiring memoir about escaping repression, violence, and protracted war. Writing under a pseudonym to protect her family, Mahfouz, who now lives in the U.S., recounts her eventful life story to Kapoor, a writer and producer of the radio public affairs broadcast "In Deep." Born in 1996, just two years after the rise of the Taliban, Mahfouz grew up under an oppressive regime. "In the name of Islam," she reveals, "the Taliban banned television, music, games, photographs, and most schools." Women were forced to wear the burqa, which completely covered their faces and bodies, and they could not walk alone in public. Although her parents--her mother had been a college teacher--hoped she would get an education, when she was 11, two men came to her house, threatening to burn her face with acid if she continued to go to school. Suicide bombs and rockets made daily life "brutally dangerous." In Kabul, the Taliban transformed a soccer stadium into a public execution arena, where killings took place in front of spectators. By the time she was 13, Mahfouz rarely left the house. She felt pressured to make an early marriage but resisted what she believed would mean "the death of my personality, my independence, my girlhood." Determined to break free, she taught herself English and then discovered classes at Khan Academy, from which she learned math, science, and literature. On Skype, she connected with Emily, an American, so she could practice speaking English, and soon the connection turned into friendship. Desperate to earn the credentials needed to apply to colleges in America, Mahfouz tried to find ways to take an SAT and language proficiency test only to be turned down by Afghani and Pakistani authorities. The author describes Emily's resourceful help on her behalf as well as her own dogged pursuit of an escape from the atrocities that consumed her homeland--exacerbated after the Americans' hasty withdrawal of troops. A moving debut memoir of courage and persistence.

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June 1, 2023
Readers see some of the modern history of Afghanistan through the experiences of Mahfouz and her family in this memoir cowritten with human rights activist Kapoor. Rigid Muslim ways loosen for a time but then are reinstated by the government. Girls are educated to a certain age, then, once married, their lives narrow to home and children. Each of Mahfouz's siblings hopes to escape Kandahar, the boys through higher education in other countries, the girls by marrying Afghan husbands who live abroad. Sola, always different, tries to live according to the traditional ways but rebels. She has only the barest schooling but discovers Khan Academy, the free online-education option, and excels in mathematics and physics. Her U.S. conversation partner, Emily, manages to assist her in extraordinary ways, by making her plight known, establishing a crowdfund for her travel, and finding her a place in a university. While Sola eventually comes to the U.S., she never loses her attachment to her family. This is an important read for Americans wanting to know more about the real Afghanistan.

COPYRIGHT(2023) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.