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A firsthand account of the remarkable rise of Minnesota’s unconventional governor.

Jesse Ventura burst into national consciousness-and late-night punch lines-when the former professional wrestler was unexpectedly elected governor of Minnesota in 1998. An overnight political sensation whose only previous relevant experience was a brief period as mayor of a Minneapolis suburb, Ventura became a lightning rod for the media, combining the bravado of a Navy SEAL, the showmanship of a movie actor, and the blunt speech and bluff humor of a talk-radio host with a surprising passion for public policy and legislative reform.

An expansive and revelatory study of Robert Smithson’s life and the hidden influences on his iconic creations

This first biography of the major American artist Robert Smithson, famous as the creator of the Spiral Jetty, deepens understanding of his art by addressing the potent forces in his life that were shrouded by his success, including his suppressed early history as a painter; his affiliation with Christianity, astrology, and alchemy; and his sexual fluidity. Integrating extensive investigation and acuity, Suzaan Boettger uncovers Smithson’s story and, with it, symbolic meanings across the span of his painted and drawn images, sculptures, essays, and earthworks up to the Spiral Jetty and beyond, to the circumstances leading to what became his final work, Amarillo Ramp.

While Smithson is widely known for his monumental earthwork at the edge of the Great Salt Lake, Inside the Spiral delves into the arc of his artistic production, recognizing it as a response to his family’s history of loss, which prompted his birth and shaped his strange intelligence. Smithson configured his personal conflicts within painterly depictions of Christ’s passion, the rhetoric of science fiction, imagery from occult systems, and the impersonal posture of conceptual sculpture. Aiming to achieve renown, he veiled his personal passions and transmuted his professional persona, becoming an acclaimed innovator and fierce voice in the New York art scene.

Featuring copious illustrations never before published of early work that eluded Smithson’s destruction, as well as photographs of Smithson and his wife, the noted sculptor Nancy Holt, and recollections from nearly all those who knew him throughout his life, Inside the Spiral offers unprecedented insight into the hidden impulses of one of modern art’s most enigmatic figures. With great sensitivity to the experiences of loss and existential strife that defined his distinct artistic language, this biographical analysis provides an expanded view of Smithson’s iconic art pilgrimage site and the experiences and works that brought him to its peculiar blood red water.

A radical reassessment of the trial of Joan of Arc that gives a new sense of Joan in her time.

The transcripts of Joan of Arc’s trial for heresy at Rouen in 1431 and the minutes of her interrogation have long been recognized as our best source of information about the Maid of Orleans. Historians generally view these legal texts as a precise account of Joan’s words and, by extension, her beliefs. Focusing on the minutes recorded by clerics, however, Karen Sullivan challenges the accuracy of the transcript. In The Interrogation of Joan of Arc, she re-reads the record not as a perfect reflection of a historical personality’s words, but as a literary text resulting from the collaboration between Joan and her interrogators.

Tracy Dahlby is an award-winning journalist who has reported internationally as a contributor to National Geographic magazine and served as a staff correspondent for Newsweek and the Washington Post. In this memoir of covering a far-flung swath of Asia, he takes readers behind the scenes to reveal “the stories behind the stories”—the legwork and (mis)adventures of a foreign correspondent on a mission to be the eyes and ears of people back home, helping them understand the forces and events that shape our world.

Into the Field centers on the travel and reporting Dahlby did for a half-dozen pieces that ran in National Geographic. The book tours the South China Sea during China’s rise as a global power, visits Japan in a time of national midlife crisis, and explores Southeast Asia during periods of political transition and tumult. Dahlby’s vivid anecdotes of jousting with hardboiled sea captains, communing with rebellious tribal chieftains, enduring a spectacular shipboard insect attack, and talking his way into a far place or out of a tight spot offer aspiring foreign correspondents a realistic introduction to the challenges of the profession. Along the way, he provides practical advice about everything from successful travel planning to managing headstrong local fixers and dealing with circumstances that can range from friendly to formidable. A knowledgeable, entertaining how-to book for observing the world and making sense of events, Into the Field is a must-read for student journalists and armchair travelers alike.

Dolores del Río first came to Hollywood from Mexico in 1925 and within a year had become an international star for her role in Raoul Walsh's 1926 film What Price Glory. She would go on to work with Hollywood’s top directors, including John Ford and King Vidor, and star opposite such leading men as Henry Fonda, Fred Astaire, Orson Welles (with whom she had a scandalous affair), and Elvis Presley. Voted by Photoplay magazine in 1933 as having "the most perfect feminine figure in Hollywood," del Río was billed as one of cinema’s most "exotic" and "aristocratic" beauties. This image-carefully crafted by her producers, her studio publicists, and by del Río herself-reveals many fascinating insights into Hollywood’s evolving attitudes toward race and femininity.

In The Invention of Dolores del Río, Joanne Hershfield explores the intersection of ethnicity, gender, and stardom in American popular culture through the lens of del Río’s successful and unusually lengthy career, which lasted until the 1960s. Hershfield offers close readings of del Río’s films—discussing in detail the roles she played, her costumes and makeup, the music and mise-en-scène, advertising, publicity, and reviews—that provide a nuanced understanding of how Hollywood constructed del Río as an exotic commodity and blunted the inherent challenge her sexual and ethnic image posed to both prevailing standards of white femininity and widespread injunctions against miscegenation. Throughout this astute and imaginative case study, Hershfield looks at del Río’s Hollywood films in relation to shifting ideologies about nationality, gender, and race between the 1920s and 1960s, offering an important contribution to the debate surrounding Hollywood’s ability to both reflect the nation’s racial and sexual obsessions and influence its perceptions about ethnic and gender identity.

Isaac Bashevis Singer brought the vibrant milieu of pre-Holocaust Polish Jewry to the English-speaking world through his subtle psychological insight, deep sympathy for the eccentricities of Jewish folk custom, and unerring feel for the heroism of everyday life. His novels, including The Family Moskat and Enemies: A Love Story, and his short stories, such as "Yentl"  and "Gimpel the Fool," prove him a consummate storyteller and probably the greatest Yiddish writer of the twentieth  century.

The visionary voice who helped shape American Judaism—and Charleston’s cultural soul.

Isaac Harby of Charleston, 1788–1828 is a richly detailed biography that brings to life one of early America’s most fascinating and underappreciated Jewish intellectuals. Gary Phillip Zola offers a compelling portrait of Harby—a playwright, newspaper editor, drama critic, educator, and religious reformer—who emerged as a central figure in Charleston’s vibrant cultural scene during the early 19th century. At a time when Charleston was experiencing both economic prosperity and cultural efflorescence, Harby stood at the crossroads of literary ambition and religious innovation.

A descendant of Sephardic Jews, Harby was deeply engaged in the intellectual and civic life of his city. He founded a literary journal at just eighteen, established a private academy, and wrote prolifically on politics, education, and religion. But his most enduring legacy lies in his role as a pioneer of Reform Judaism in America. As a founding member of the Reformed Society of Israelites in 1825, Harby advocated for a rational, modernized approach to Jewish worship—one that emphasized universal ethics and intellectual engagement over ritual formalism. His efforts, though controversial in his time, laid the groundwork for the broader Reform movement that would flourish later in the century.

Drawing on newly uncovered archival materials, including Harby’s personal library and writings, Zola’s biography not only illuminates Harby’s life and thought but also offers a window into the broader cultural, religious, and political transformations of the early American republic. This book is essential reading for anyone interested in American Jewish history, Southern intellectual life, and the roots of religious reform in the United States.

When Isaiah Rogers died in 1869, the Cincinnati Daily Times noted that “in his profession he was, perhaps, better known than any other person in the country.” Yet until now there has been no study that fully examines his remarkable, influential, and instructive career. Based largely on Rogers's own diary, this book tells his story and adds much to our understanding of architectural practice in the United States before the Civil War. 

In 1944 the distinguished historian Talbot Hamlin wrote of New York's Merchant Exchange (1836–42) that the building had “been so grandly conceived, so simply and directly planned, and so beautifully detailed . . . [that] the whole was welded inextricably into one powerful organic conception that shows Rogers as a great architect in the fullest sense of the word.” Rogers's Tremont House in Boston has been called the world's first modern hotel; it spawned many progeny, from his first Astor House in New York to his Burnet House in Cincinnati and beyond. 

Rogers designed buildings from Maine to Georgia and from Boston to Chicago to New Orleans, supervising their construction while traveling widely to procure materials and workmen for the job. He finished his career as Architect of the Treasury Department during the Civil War. In this richly illustrated volume, James F. O'Gorman offers a deft portrait of an energetic practitioner at a key time in architectural history, the period before the founding of the American Institute of Architects in 1857.

On the eve of the Six-Day War in 1967, Israel was nineteen years old and as much an adolescent as the average nineteen-year-old person. Issues of identity and transition were the talk among Israeli intellectuals, including the writer Nissim Rejwan. Was Israel a Jewish state or a democratic state? And, most frustratingly, who was a Jew? As Nancy Berg's foreword makes clear, these issues became more critical and complex in the two decades after the war as Israel matured into a regional power. Rejwan, an Iraqi-born Jew whose own fate was tied to the answers, addresses the questions of those days in his letters, essays, and remembrances collected in Israel's Years of Bogus Grandeur.

Israel's overwhelming victory in 1967 brought control of the former Palestinian territories; at the same time, Oriental Jews (i.e., those not from Europe) became a majority in the Israeli population. The nation, already surrounded by hostile, recently humiliated Arab neighbors, now had an Arab majority (Jewish, Muslim, Druze, and Christian) within its borders—yet European Jews continued to run the country as their own. Rejwan wrote tirelessly about the second-class status of Arab Israelis (and especially of Arab Jews), encouraging a more inclusive attitude that might eventually help heal the wounds left by the Six-Day War. His studies in sociology at Tel Aviv University informed his work. For his cause, Rejwan lost his job and many of his friends but never his pen. Through Munich, Entebbe, political scandals, economic crises, and the beginning of the Intifada, Rejwan narrates Israel's growing pains with feisty wit and unwavering honesty.

William Goyen was a writer of startling originality and deep artistic commitment whose work attracted an international audience and the praise of such luminaries as Northrop Frye, Truman Capote, Gaston Bachelard, and Joyce Carol Oates. His subject was the land and language of his native East Texas; his desire, to preserve the narrative music through which he came to know his world. Goyen sought to transform the cherished details of his lost boyhood landscape into lasting, mythic forms. Cut off from his native soil and considering himself an “orphan,” Goyen brought modernist alienation and experimentation to Texas materials. The result was a body of work both sophisticated and handmade—and a voice at once inimitable and unmistakable.

It Starts with Trouble is the first complete account of Goyen’s life and work. It uncovers the sources of his personal and artistic development, from his early years in Trinity, Texas, through his adolescence and college experience in Houston; his Navy service during World War II; and the subsequent growth of his writing career, which saw the publication of five novels, including The House of Breath, nonfiction works such as A Book of Jesus, several short story collections and plays, and a book of poetry. It explores Goyen’s relationships with such legendary figures as Frieda Lawrence, Katherine Anne Porter, Stephen Spender, Anaïs Nin, and Carson McCullers. No other twentieth-century writer attempted so intimate a connection with his readers, and no other writer of his era worked so passionately to recover the spiritual in an age of disabling irony. Goyen’s life and work are a testament to the redemptive power of storytelling and the absolute necessity of narrative art.