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On the road to Survival City, Tom Vanderbilt maps the visible and invisible legacies of the cold war, exhuming the blueprints for the apocalypse we once envisioned and chronicling a time when we all lived at ground zero. In this road trip among ruined missile silos, atomic storage bunkers, and secret test sites, a lost battleground emerges amid the architecture of the 1950s, accompanied by Walter Cotten’s stunning photographs. Survival City looks deep into the national soul, unearthing the dreams and fears that drove us during the latter half of the twentieth century.

“A crucial and dazzling book, masterful, and for me at least, intoxicating.”—Dave Eggers

“A genuinely engaging book, perhaps because [Vanderbilt] is skillful at conveying his own sense of engagement to the reader.”—Los Angeles Times

“A retracing of Dr. Strangelove as ordinary life.”—Greil Marcus, Bookforum

The Choral Turn: Performing the Chorus in the Ruins of Democracy examines the recent resurgence of the chorus—a hallmark of ancient Greek tragedy—across contemporary Western theatre, performance, and activism, arguing that this “choral turn” is inseparable from anxieties about the decline of liberal democracy. Drawing on classical studies, theatre and performance studies, and political philosophy, Holzapfel coins the term “choraperformativity” to describe performances that mobilize the formal and collective conventions of the chorus to contest or reshape dominant political narratives. The Choral Turn uses case studies—plays about war and catastrophe featuring Greek-like choruses, refugee performers theatrically reenacting their own displacement, environmental protesters staging collective mourning for a dying planet—to show how groups use choral performance to demand recognition and assert the need for change. Rather than treating the chorus as inherently progressive, the study asks hard questions about who gets included in these choral communities and who gets left out, offering a nuanced, timely look at collective action on stage and in the streets.

Ingeniously connects the history of citrus cultivation to the production and maintenance of whiteness in sites around the world.

In The Orchard in the Ruins, acclaimed historian Tiago Saraiva illuminates the global impact of cloning Californian oranges, a practice that emerged in the aftermath of the great depression of the 1890s. Cloning promised control, uniformity, and resistance to an array of environmental and economic threats. But Californian orchards—white-owned but tended by workers of Chinese, Japanese, Mexican, or Indigenous origin—were also places where plantations and race intertwined. Agricultural anxieties about strains of oranges and their value, Saraiva shows, formed a continuum with anxieties about vanishing whiteness.

The Orchard in the Ruins connects Californian history to other sites of citrus cultivation: South Africa, where concerns about white poverty grew during the early twentieth century; Mandatory Palestine, where orchards were key to Zionist undertakings; colonial Algeria, where French settlers transformed the landscape with European farming techniques; and Brazil, where orchards were cultivated post-abolition. Drawing on local histories as well as the works of John Dewey, J. M. Coetzee, Edward Said, Frantz Fanon, and artist Tarsila do Amaral, Saraiva shows that in each place, orchards grew in the wake of specific historical crises. Orange cultivation was a transnational project in cultivating whiteness, one in which studies of fruits, buds, rootstocks, fungi, and viruses became race-making experiments.

A must-read for anyone interested in the history of science, technology, agriculture, and race, The Orchard in the Ruins reveals a troubled account of science-led attempts to remedy crumbling worlds.

What is the fate of tradition in the modern world? Once a viral source of social cohesion and continuity, many traditions in the West today seem to have been undermined or to have disappeared altogether. Some observers regard this erosion of past values and practices as a disaster, the root cause of contemporary spiritual and social decay. Others see the same phenomenon as emancipatory, making possible new ways of living and new modes of cultural expression. 

The Past in Ruins engages and extends this debate beyond these two perspectives. Neither a nostalgic lament for a “world we have lost” nor a celebration of the decline of tradition, the book offers a description of what has disappeared and why, an appraisal of what has survived and how, and a discussion of what to do with tradition now that it no longer serves the integrative function it once did. 

In David Gross’s view, the collapse of tradition, though real, can easily be exaggerated. Many traditions have survived at the margins of social life; others have been reconstituted in new forms, or have persisted as “fragments” or “residues.” Yet, though vestiges of tradition remain, they have come to represent something strange or “other.” According to Gross, it is precisely this quality of otherness that makes tradition especially valuable, for today tradition can do what it has rarely done before. It can disturb and unsettle, it can force us to rethink the “givens” of modern life, and it can reconnect us with many of the past’s “lost” or undeveloped possibilities.

Most scholars who write on social contract and classical natural law perceive an irreconcilable tension between them. Social contract theory is widely considered the political-theoretic concomitant of modern philosophy. Against the regnant view, The Social Contract in the Ruins, argues that all attempts to ground political authority and obligation in agreement alone are logically self-defeating. Political authority and obligation require an antecedent moral ground. But this moral ground cannot be constructed by human agreement or created by sheer will—human or divine. All accounts of morality as constructed or made collapse into self-referential incoherence. Only an uncreated, real good can coherently ground political authority and obligation or the proposition that rightful government depends on the consent of the governed. Government by consent requires classical natural law for its very coherence.