Non-Fiction

The biggest victories of medical science--over polio, smallpox, heart attacks, and the like--are stories of prevention. Then there's sports, where we just run around until something breaks, leading to pain, frustration, and sometimes even expensive surgery. Injuries are a major cause of society's growing mobility crisis. What if we could predict and prevent them?

Blending cutting-edge science with gripping storytelling, award-winning data journalist and competitive amateur athlete Henry Abbott reveals that we are on the cusp of a new era in sports medicine, built around the science of ballistic movements--leaping and landing--and the unique fingerprint of your body's physics.

Abbott's inspiring narrative tells the story of sports scientist Dr. Marcus Elliott and the Peak Performance Project (P3), who use technology to study how athletes move and why they get hurt. Applying machine learning and lessons from biomechanics, medicine, and physiology, doctors at P3 can now detect elevated risk of an ACL tear or a pulled hamstring like an echocardiogram can see warning signs of a heart attack.

Their data-driven findings are full of surprises. Your body's most important defense against knee and ankle injuries are the little-known muscles in the lower leg and hip area, which typical workouts rarely target. Similarly, the glutes--not the core--do the most to prevent back pain. Transformative benefits flow from training underappreciated kinds of athleticism like rotation, deceleration, and relaxation. Most of all, science shows that the best athletes don't avoid ballistics--they master them.

Through riveting stories of elite athletes overcoming injuries and pushing themselves to the limit, Abbott presents an evidence-based case for intervening early to protect our bodies. And he suggests that we can all harness the science of ballistic movement not just to run fast or jump high but to move with joy and lead fulfilling athletic lives.

"A compelling case for standing up for justice at a time when everything, it seems, is on the line."--Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

For many, it can feel like change takes too long, and it might seem that we have not moved very far. But political activist Kareem Abdul-Jabbar believes that public protest is a vital part of affecting change, even if that change doesn't come "right now."

In We All Want to Change the World, he examines the activism of people of all ages, ethnicities, and socio-economic backgrounds that helped change America, documenting events from the Free Speech Movement through the movement for civil rights, the fight for women's and LGBTQ rights, and, of course, the protests against the Vietnam War. At a time in our history when we are witnessing protests across campuses, within the labor movement, and following the killing of George Floyd, Abdul-Jabbar reminds us that protests are a lifeblood of our history:

"Protest movements, even peaceful ones, are never popular at first. . . . But there is a reason protest gatherings have been so frequent throughout history: They are effective. The United States exists because of them."

Part history lesson and part personal reminiscences of his own activism, We All Want to Change the World will resonate with anyone who recognizes the need for social change and is willing to do the work to make it happen.

The author of Call Me by Your Name returns with a deeply romantic memoir of his time in Rome while on the cusp of adulthood.

Aciman's time in Rome did not last long before he and his family moved across the ocean, but by the time they did, he was leaving behind a city he loved. In this memoir, the author, a genius of "the poetry of the place" (John Domini, The Boston Globe), conjures the sights, smells, tastes, and people of Rome as only he can. Aciman captures, as if in amber, a living portrait of himself on the brink of adulthood and the city he worshipped at that pivotal moment. Roman Year is a treasure, unearthed by one of our greatest prose stylists.