Books published by The New Press

A bold agenda for a better way to assess societal well-being, by three of the world's leading economists and statisticians.

Two groundbreaking sociologists explore the way the American dream is built on the backs of working poor womenMany Americans take comfort and convenience for granted. We eat at nice restaurants, order groceries online, and hire nannies to care for kids.Getting Me Cheap is a riveting portrait of the lives of the low-wage workersprimarily womenwho make this lifestyle possible. Sociologists Lisa Dodson and Amanda Freeman follow women in the food, health care, home care, and other low-wage industries as they struggle to balance mothering with bad jobs and without public aid. While these women tend to the needs of well-off families, their own children frequently step into premature adult roles, providing care for siblings and aging family members.Based on years of in-depth field work and hundreds of eye-opening interviews, Getting Me Cheap explores how America traps millions of women and their children into lives of stunted opportunity and poverty in service of giving others of us the lives we seek. Destined to rank with works like Evicted and Nickle and Dimed for its revelatory glimpse into how our society functions behind the scenes, Getting Me Cheap also offers a way forwardwith both policy solutions and a keen moral vision for organizing women across class lines.

In Their Names busts open the public safety myth that uses victims' rights to perpetuate mass incarceration, and offers a formula for what would actually make us safe, from the widely respected head of Alliance for Safety and JusticeWhen twenty-six-year-old recent college graduate Aswad Thomas was days away from starting a professional basketball career in 2009, he was shot twice while buying juice at a convenience store. The trauma left him in excruciating pain, with mounting medical debt, and struggling to cope with deep anxiety and fear. That was the same year the national incarceration rate peaked. Yet, despite thousands of new tough-on-crime policies and billions of new dollars pumped into ';justice,' Aswad never received victim compensation, support, or even basic levels of concern. In the name of victims, justice bureaucracies ballooned while most victims remained on their own.In In Their Names, Lenore Anderson, president of one of the nation's largest reform advocacy organizations, offers a close look at how the political call to help victims in the 1980s morphed into a demand for bigger bureaucracies and more incarceration, and cemented the long- standing chasm that exists between most victims and the justice system. She argues that the powerful myth that mass incarceration benefits victims obscures recognition of what most victims actually need, including addressing their trauma, which is a leading cause of subsequent violent crime.A solutions-oriented, paradigm-shifting book, In Their Names argues persuasively for closing the gap between our public safety systems and crime survivors.

Nominated for the 49th NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work (Nonfiction)A 2017 Washington Post Notable Book A Kirkus Best Book of 2017Butler has hit his stride. This is a meditation, a sonnet, a legal brief, a poetry slam and a dissertation that represents the full bloom of his early thesis: The justice system does not work for blacks, particularly black men.The Washington Post The most readable and provocative account of the consequences of the war on drugs since Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow . . . .The New York Times Book ReviewWith the eloquence of Ta-Nehisi Coates and the persuasive research of Michelle Alexander, a former federal prosecutor explains how the system really works, and how to disrupt itCops, politicians, and ordinary people are afraid of black men. The result is the Chokehold: laws and practices that treat every African American man like a thug. In this explosive new book, an African American former federal prosecutor shows that the system is working exactly the way its supposed to. Black men are always under watch, and police violence is widespreadall with the support of judges and politicians. In his no-holds-barred style, Butler, whose scholarship has been featured on 60 Minutes, uses new data to demonstrate that white men commit the majority of violent crime in the United States. For example, a white woman is ten times more likely to be raped by a white male acquaintance than be the victim of a violent crime perpetrated by a black man. Butler also frankly discusses the problem of black on black violence and how to keep communities saferwithout relying as much on police. Chokehold powerfully demonstrates why current efforts to reform law enforcement will not create lasting change. Butlers controversial recommendations about how to crash the system, and when its better for a black man to plead guiltyeven if hes innocentare sure to be game-changers in the national debate about policing, criminal justice, and race relations.

Powerful, wry essays offering modern takes on a primitive practice, from one of our most widely read death penalty abolitionistsAs Ruth Bader Ginsburg has noted, people who are well represented at trial rarely get the death penalty. But as Marc Bookman shows in a dozen brilliant essays, the problems with capital punishment run far deeper than just bad representation. Exploring prosecutorial misconduct, racist judges and jurors, drunken lawyering, and executing the innocent and the mentally ill, these essays demonstrate that precious few people on trial for their lives get the fair trial the Constitution demands.Today, death penalty cases continue to capture the hearts, minds, and eblasts of progressives of all stripes—including the rich and famous (see Kim Kardashian’s advocacy)—but few people with firsthand knowledge of America’s “injustice system” have the literary chops to bring death penalty stories to life.Enter Marc Bookman. With a voice that is both literary and journalistic, the veteran capital defense lawyer and seven-time Best American Essays “notable” author exposes the dark absurdities and fatal inanities that undermine the logic of the death penalty wherever it still exists. In essays that cover seemingly “ordinary” capital cases over the last thirty years, Bookman shows how violent crime brings out our worst human instincts—revenge, fear, retribution, and prejudice. Combining these emotions with the criminal legal system’s weaknesses—purposely ineffective, arbitrary, or widely infected with racism and misogyny—is a recipe for injustice.Bookman has been charming and educating readers in the pages of The Atlantic, Mother Jones, and Slate for years. His wit and wisdom are now collected and preserved in A Descending Spiral.

New Press track record with Zinn: The abridged version of A People's History of the United States, published by The New Press, has sold over 117,000 copies.Based on a bestselling, classic work of history: A People's History of the United States has sold over 2 million copies and continues to be one of the most successful history books of all time. Even in death, Howard Zinn remains one of America's most popular and beloved historians. His A People's History of the United States is part of the cultural fabric of the nation and features regularly in films, TV shows and in print media.Major anniversary: The book will publish on August 2, 2022, in anticipation of Zinn's 100th birthday on August 24. Major publications are sure to be doing retrospectives on Zinn's work during this month and the book will tie in perfectly.New, compelling package: We will publish the paperback with an inviting cover illustration of the young Zinn to appeal to a younger audience. Reader feedback indicated enthusiasm for the work as an "introduction to Zinn," and positioning will reflect that.Connections to education orgs: Teaching for Change, the Zinn Education Project, and HowardZinn.org are all excited to spread the word about the paperback edition of Truth Has a Power of Its Own.Media opportunities: As a host of World Affairs, Ray Suarez is well-connected to the world of radio and will be able to speak on the book. He appeared on "On Contact" with Chris Hedges to promote the hardcover edition.

A groundbreaking examination of how Latinos' new collective racial identity upends the way Americans understand race.

Serial: The previous books in the series were picked up for serial in major LGBTQ and photography publications, and there is a strong likelihood that this will be too. Outreach: Dedicated communications and advertising campaign geared toward LGBTQ community.Beautiful, affordable package: French flaps with full color throughout.Funding: The book is funded by the ARCUS foundation, which will help promote the book.

The first comprehensive account of the Trump administrations efforts to destroy our government institutions, by the man Ralph Nader says writes authoritatively and with revealing detail about important topics that few others coverTom McGarity writes authoritatively and with revealing detail about important topics that few others cover. Ralph NaderKoch Industries spent $3.1 million in the first three months of the Trump administration, largely to ensure confirmation of Scott Pruitt as head of the EPA. By July 2018, more than sixteen federal inquiries were pending into Pruitts mismanagement and corruption. But Pruitt was just the first in a long line of industry-friendly, incompetent, and destructive agency heads put in place by the Trump administration in its effort to dismantle the federal governments protective edifice.Remember Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke, who, before he faced eighteen separate federal inquiries and was fired, made a deal with Halliburton to build a brewery on land that Zinke owned in Montana? Or how about Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao, who rescinded requirements that high-hazard trains install special braking systems, weakened standards for storing natural gas, and lengthened the hours that truck drivers could be on the road without a break, even as she failed for two years to divest her interest in a road materials manufacturer? And then there were Rick Perry, Betsy DeVos, Sonny Perdue, Andrew Puzder . . . the list goes on.In an original and compelling argument, Thomas McGarity shows how adding populists to the Republicans traditional base of free market ideologues and establishment Republicans allowed Trump to come dangerously close to achieving his goal of demolishing the programs that Congress put in place over the course of many decades to protect consumers, workers, communities, children, and the environment. Finally, McGarity offers a blueprint for rebuilding the protective edifice and restoring the power of the American government to offer all Americans better lives.

With history and the extraordinary parallels between Biden and FDR as his guide, the veteran political analyst diagnoses whats at stake for America in 2022 and beyondJoe Biden has found his way back to Franklin Roosevelts New Deal. After four decades of diminishing prospects for ordinary people, the public likes what Biden is offering. Yet American democracy is in dire peril as Republicans, increasingly the national minority, try to destroy democracy in order to cling to power. It is the best of times and the worst of times. In Going Big, bestselling author and political journalist Robert Kuttner assesses the promise and peril of this critical juncture.Biden, like FDR in his time, faces multiple challenges. Roosevelt had to make terrible compromises with racist legislators to win enactment of his program. Biden, to achieve the necessary governing coalition, needs to achieve durable multiracial coalitions. Roosevelt had to conquer fascism in Europe; Biden must defeat it at home. And after four decades of neoliberal policy disasters reflecting Wall Streets political influence, Biden needs to go beyond what even FDR achieved, to restore a democratic economy of broad possibility.From a writer with an unparalleled understanding of the history and politics that have made this moment possible, this book is the essential guide to what is at stake for Joe Biden, for America, and for our democracy.

A bold call for the American Left to extend their politics to the issues of Israel-Palestine, from a New York Times bestselling author and experts on U.S. policy in the region In this major work of daring criticism and analysis, scholar and political commentator Marc Lamont Hill and Israel-Palestine expert Mitchell Plitnick spotlight how holding fast to one-sided and unwaveringly pro-Israel policies reflects the truth-bending grip of authoritarianism on both Israel and the United States. Except for Palestine deftly argues that progressives and liberals who oppose regressive policies on immigration, racial justice, gender equality, LGBTQ rights, and other issues must extend these core principles to the oppression of Palestinians. In doing so, the authors take seriously the political concerns and well-being of both Israelis and Palestinians, demonstrating the extent to which U.S. policy has made peace harder to attain. They also unravel the conflation of advocacy for Palestinian rights with anti-Semitism and hatred of Israel.Hill and Plitnick provide a timely and essential intervention by examining multiple dimensions of the Israeli-Palestinian conversation, including Israel's growing disdain for democracy, the effects of occupation on Palestine, the siege of Gaza, diminishing American funding for Palestinian relief, and the campaign to stigmatize any critique of Israeli occupation. Except for Palestine is a searing polemic and a cri de coeur for elected officials, activists, and everyday citizens alike to align their beliefs and politics with their values.

A National BestsellerIf we first recognize that we are in a war, and then learn the lessons and follow the lead of those who have shown they know how to prevail, we can definitely win the Civil War, secure a multiracial democracy, and end white supremacy for good. from the introductionThe bestselling author and national political commentator pulls no punches on what America needs to do to strengthen its multiracial democracySteve Phillipss first book, Brown Is the New White, helped shift the national conversation around race and electoral politics, earning a spot on the New York Times and Washington Post bestseller lists and launching Phillips into the upper ranks of trusted observers of the nations changing demographics and their implications for our political future.Now, in How We Win the Civil War, Phillips charts the way forward for progressives and people of color after four years of Trump, arguing that Democrats must recognize the nature of the fight were in, which is a contest between democracy and white supremacy left unresolved after the Civil War. We will not overcome, Phillips writes, until we govern as though we are under attackuntil we finally recognize that the time has come to finish the conquest of the Confederacy and all that it represents.With his trademark blend of political analysis and historical argument, Phillips lays out razor-sharp prescriptions for 2022 and beyond, from increasing voter participation and demolishing racist immigration policies to reviving the Great Society programs of the 1960sall of them geared toward strengthening a new multiracial democracy and ridding our politics of white supremacy, once and for all.