Urofsky presents a history of affirmative action from its beginning with the Civil Rights Act of 1866 to the first use of the term in 1935 with the enactment of the National Labor Relations Act (the Wagner Act) to 1961 and John F. Kennedy’s Executive Order 10925, mandating that federal contractors take “affirmative action” to ensure that there be no discrimination by “race, creed, color, or national origin” down to today’s American society. In this important, ambitious, far-reaching book, readers will come to fully understand the societal impact of affirmative action: how and why it has helped, and inflamed, people of all walks of life; how it has evolved; and how, and why, it is still needed. Melvin Urofsky is a professor emeritus of history at Virginia Commonwealth University and was the chair of its history department. He is the editor (with David W. Levy) of the five-volume collection of Louis Brandeis’s letters, as well as the author of The Affirmative Action Puzzle, Dissent and the Supreme Court, and Louis D. Brandeis. He lives in Gaithersburg, Maryland.

  April is the coolest month for poetry lovers because poets – those soothsayers of our age –  are recognized for their talent for “putting the best words in the best order.” Whether you believe, as William Carlos Williams wrote, that “men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there,” we know that people turn to poetry at times of heightened emotion – be it joy or sorrow. During National Poetry Month poets will be out and about in bookstores and libraries giving readings and championing their art. National Poetry Month was established in 1996 by the Academy of American Poets. April was chosen by teachers, booksellers, librarians, and poets as a time to embrace and celebrate poetry—and to encourage the reading of poetry throughout the year. It has become one of the highest profile annual literary celebrations in the world! Dip into the pond of these newly published poetry volumes - from masters and mavericks -  and feel the ripple effect of their beauty. You guessed it! Metaphors be with you…   BROWN: POEMS by Kevin Young James Brown. John Brown’s raid. Brown v. the Topeka Board of Ed. The prize-winning author of Blue Laws meditates on all things “brown” in this powerful new collection. Divided into “Home Recordings” and “Field Recordings,” Brown speaks to the way personal experience is shaped by culture, while culture is forever affected by the personal, recalling a black Kansas boyhood to comment on our times.   POEMS OF ROME edited by Karl Kirchwey (Everyman's Library) A beautiful hardcover Pocket Poets anthology of poems inspired by the art and architecture of the Eternal City. Poems of Rome ranges across the centuries and contains the work of poets from many cultures and times, from ancient Rome to contemporary America. Designed to accompany readers visiting the city—whether in person or in imagination—the book is divided into sections by place. The poets range from Horace and Ovid to Pasolini and Pavese, and from Byron and Keats and Rilke to James Merrill, Adrienne Rich, Derek Walcott, and Jorie Graham.   THE LAST SHIFT: POEMS by Philip Levine Now in paperback—the final collection of new poems from one of our finest and most beloved poets. The poems in this wonderful collection touch all of the events and places that meant the most to Philip Levine. There are lyrical poems about his family and childhood, the magic of nighttime and the power of dreaming; tough poems about the heavy shift work at Detroit’s auto plants, the Nazis, and bosses of all kinds; telling poems about his heroes—jazz players, artists, and working people of every description, even children. There is a peace within that comes to full fruition in Levine’s moving goodbye to his home town in the collection’s final poem, “The Last Shift.”   NIGHT SCHOOL by Carl Dennis (Penguin Poets) A masterful new collection of poetry from the winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the Ruth Lilly Prize The poems in Carl Dennis’s thirteenth collection are informed by an engagement with a world not fully accessible to the light of day, a world that can only be known with help from the imagination, whether we focus on ourselves, on people close at hand, or on the larger society. To read these poems is to find ourselves invited into a dialogue between what is present and what is absent that proves surprising and enlarging.   ORPHIC PARIS by Henri Cole Henri Cole’s Orphic Paris combines autobiography, diary, essay, and poetry with photographs to create a new form of elegiac memoir. With Paris as a backdrop, Cole, an award-winning American poet, explores with fresh and penetrating insight the nature of friendship and family, poetry and solitude, the self and freedom. Written under the tutelary spirit of Orpheus—mystic, oracular, entrancing—Orphic Paris is an intimate Paris journal and a literary commonplace book that is a touching, original, brilliant account of the city and of the artists, writers, and luminaries, including Cole himself, who have been moved by it to create.   BLUE ROSE by Carol Muske-Dukes (Penguin Poets) Carol Muske-Dukes has won acclaim for poetry that marries sophisticated intelligence, emotional resonance, and lyrical intensity. The poems in her new collection, Blue Rose, navigate around the idea of the unattainable - the elusive nature of poetry, of knowledge, of the fact that we know so little of the lives of others, of the world in which we live. Many of the poems draw inspiration from the lives of women who persisted outside of convention, in poetry, art, science: the painter Paula Modersohn-Becker; the pioneering molecular biologist Rosalyn Franklin, best known for her role in the discovery of DNA; and the American poet and writer Ina Coolbrith, California’s first poet laureate.   DREAMPAD by Jeff Latosik A hopeful, timely new collection of poems that take up our ever-evolving relationship with technology. Starting from an urge to reconcile the human need for stability with what’s happening in a constantly fluid “now,” Dreampad, Trillium Book Award for Poetry winner poet Jeff Latosik’s startling new collection, ponders whether an ideal for living is viable when we’re not sure we can say yes or no to anything in a world that’s growing increasingly ephemeral and entangled with the virtual.   AMERICAN POETRY: THE NINETEENTH CENTURY (The Library of America Anthology) edited by John Hollander At last in a deluxe collector’s edition boxed set, the most complete and authoritative anthology of 19th century American poetry ever published. From the lyrics of Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson to folk ballads and moving spirituals, one of our nation’s greatest cultural legacies is the distinctly American poetry that arose during the nineteenth century. Unprecedented in its comprehensive sweep and textual authority, and now presented for the first time in a deluxe two-volume boxed set, the Library of America’s acclaimed anthology American Poetry: The Nineteenth Century reveals for the first time the full beauty and diversity of that tradition.   DOTHEAD: POEMS by Amit Majmudar A captivating, no-holds-barred collection of new poems from an acclaimed poet and novelist with a fierce and original voice. Dothead is an exploration of selfhood both intense and exhilarating. Within the first pages, Amit Majmudar asserts the claims of both the self and the other: the title poem shows us the place of an Indian American teenager in the bland surround of a mostly white peer group, partaking of imagery from the poet’s Hindu tradition; the very next poem is a fanciful autobiography, relying for its imagery on the religious tradition of Islam. From poems about the treatment at the airport of people who look like Majmudar (“my dark unshaven brothers / whose names overlap with the crazies and God fiends”) to a long, freewheeling abecedarian poem about Adam and Eve and the discovery of oral sex, Dothead is a profoundly satisfying cultural critique and a thrilling experiment in language. United across a wide range of tones and forms, the poems inhabit and explode multiple perspectives, finding beauty in every one.   For even more on these and other poetry volumes: Poetry 2018

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Only now, forty years after the artist’s death, is the full story of Calder’s life being told in this biography, which is based on unprecedented access to private letters and papers as well as scores of interviews. Calder’s life takes on a transatlantic richness, from New York’s Greenwich Village in the Roaring Twenties, to the Left Bank of Paris during the Depression, and then back to the United States, where the Calders bought a run-down old farmhouse in western Connecticut. New light is shed on Calder’s lifelong interest in dance, theater, and performance, ranging from the Cirque Calder, the theatrical event that became his calling card in bohemian Paris to collaborations with the choreographer Martha Graham and the composer Virgil Thomson. Penguin Random House author Joshua Cohen ( Book of Numbers and Moving Kings) praises CALDER: “Not all brilliant studies are definitive, and not all definitive studies are brilliant: Jed Perl’s Calder succeeds at being both. It’s a masterwork account of the life of one of America’s greatest artists that’s also an account of America coming into its own. Passionate, learned, playful and ranging, it’s as solidly-grounded as a stabile, but like a mobile it appears to defy gravity—and float.” Jed Perl is a regular contributor to The New York Times Review of Books. He was the art critic for The New Republic for twenty years and a contributing editor to Vogue for a decade, and is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship. His previous books include Magicians and Charlatans, Antoine’s Alphabet, and New Art City, which was a New York Times Notable Book and an Atlantic Book of the Year.  

Mokhtar Alkhanshali is twenty-four and working as a doorman when he discovers the astonishing history of coffee and Yemen’s central place in it. He leaves San Francisco and travels deep into his ancestral homeland to tour terraced farms high in the country’s rugged mountains and meet beleaguered but determined farmers. But when war engulfs the country and Saudi bombs rain down, Mokhtar has to find a way out of Yemen without sacrificing his dreams or abandoning his people. The San Francisco Chronicle’s Gabriel Thompson calls THE MONK OF MOKHA “Exquisitely interesting… This is about the human capacity to dream—here, there, everywhere.” Dave Eggers grew up near Chicago and graduated from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. In 2002, he co-founded 826 Valencia, a nonprofit youth writing and tutoring center in San Francisco’s Mission District. Sister centers have since opened in seven other American cities under the umbrella of 826 National, and like-minded centers have opened in Dublin, London, Copenhagen, Stockholm, and Birmingham, Alabama, among other locations. Egger’s work has been nominated for the National Book Award, the Pulitzer Prize, and the National Book Critics Circle Award, and has won the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, France’s Prix Médicis, Germany’s Albatross Prize, the National Magazine Award, and the American Book Award. Eggers’ novels include The Circle, A Hologram for the King, and Heroes on the Frontier.  

  FICTION  Mohsin Hamid, EXIT WEST  (Riverhead) Arundhati Roy, THE MINISTRY OF UTMOST HAPPINESS  (Knopf)   NONFICTION Masha Gessen, THE FUTURE IS HISTORY: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia (Riverhead)     BIOGRAPHY Howard Markel, THE KELLOGGS: The Battling Brothers of Battle Creek (Pantheon) Kenneth Whyte, HOOVER: An Extraordinary Life in Extraordinary Times (Knopf)   AUTOBIOGRAPHY Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, THE GIRL FROM THE METROPOL HOTEL: Growin Up in Communist Russia (Penguin)       View the complete list of NBCC finalists here. Winners of the NBCC awards will be announced on Thursday, March 15 in NYC at the New School’s Tishman Auditorium.  A finalists’ reading will be held on March 14 at 6:30 p.m. in the same location. Both events are free and open to the public. The National Book Critics Circle was founded in 1974 at New York’s Algonquin Hotel by a group of the most influential critics of the day, and awarded its first set of honors in 1975.  The NBCC now comprises more than 1,000 working critics and book-review editors throughout the country.  The NBCC annually bestows its awards in six categories, honoring the best books published in the past year in the United States.