New Books: May 25

ENGLISH. Explains how the "Oxford English Dictionary" was created and discusses the relationship between the editor and one of his most influential contributors, a psychotic murderer in one of England's cruelest asylums.

HISTORY. Perhaps no other symbol has more resonance in African American history than that of "forty acres and a mule"the lost promise of Black reparations for slavery after the Civil War. In I've Been Here All the While, we meet the Black people who actually received this mythic forty acres, the American settlers who coveted this land, and the Native Americans whose holdings it originated from.

MATHEMATICS.The Babylonians invented it, the Greeks banned it, the Hindus worshiped it, and the Church used it to fend off heretics. Now it threatens the foundations of modern physics. For centuries the power of zero savored of the demonic; once harnessed, it became the most important tool in mathematics.

PERFORMING ARTS. Hero and Claudio fall in love almost at first sight, but an outsider, Don John, strikes out at their happiness. Beatrice and Benedick are kept apart by pride and mutual antagonism until others decide to play Cupid.

RELIGIOUS STUDIES. Famously known as the text that Martin Luther King Jr. sought inspiration from in the days leading up to the Montgomery bus boycott, Howard Thurman's Jesus and the Disinherited helped shape the civil rights movement and changed our nation's history forever.

SCIENCE. Fusing science and social justice, public health researcher Dr. Arline T. Geronimus offers an urgent book exploring the ways in which systemic injustice erodes the health of marginalized people.

TECHNOLOGY. Drawing on over one hundred interviews with industry insiders, former Spotify employees, and musicians, Mood Machine takes us to the inner workings of today’s highly consolidated record business, showing what has changed as music has become increasingly playlisted, personalized, and autoplayed.

UPPER SCHOOL OFFICE & BELONGING. Recounts Dorothy's remarkable journey from the Greenwich Village political and literary scene of the 1920s through her conversion to Catholicism and her lifelong struggle to help bring about "the kind of society where it is easier to be good.

VISUAL ARTS. Patrick Bringly details his decade-long career as a security gaurd at the Metropolitan Museum of Art after leaving his job as a staff writter at the 'New Yorker' magazine.

WORLD LANGUAGES. A young poet tells the unforgettable story of his harrowing migration from El Salvador to the United States at the age of nine.