"Ehrenreich is at her best (and she’s very, very good) when chronicling the outrageous human downside of our economy, the costs it imposes on people who can’t afford a bacon-infused old-fashioned. There’s the hospital worker whose employer garnished her paycheck for an emergency room visit, 'a condition of debt servitude reminiscent of early-20th-century company towns.' There’s the poor man who got himself arrested in order to live more comfortably in prison, because 'we are reaching the point . . . where the largest public housing program in America will be our penitentiary system' . . . A tight and chilling companion volume to Nickel and Dimed, Ehrenreich’s account of her own experience working undercover in the low-wage economy."—Eve Fairbanks, The New York Times Book Review 

 

"When the British left Kenya in 1963, they built bonfires and burned the meticulous records they kept. Most of these dealt with a period known as 'the Emergency,' when the colonial government attempted to stamp out the Mau Mau movement . . . that arose among the Kikuyu, a hill-dwelling farming tribe and Kenya's largest ethnic group. Elkins, working in archives and traveling throughout Kenya, has undertaken an extraordinary act of historical recovery, to find out what the burned documents would have told us: the British, in their 'civilizing mission' to pacify the colony, created a cruel system of detention centers, where interrogations often ended in death. With the moral fervor [of] a prosecutor, Elkins provides potent evidence of how a society warped by racism can descend into an almost casual inhumanity."—The New Yorker

"The 14th Amendment was 'by far the most sweeping and complex change ever made in the original Constitution,' argues Garrett Epps in this valuable history of the amendment's adoption. Over time, he writes, it has 'changed almost every detail of our national life.' A University of Oregon law professor and former Washington Post reporter who has published two novels, Epps brings crisp writing to a story whose political complexities and obscure cast of characters pose tall hurdles for any popular history."—David Garrow, The Washington Post