President of the LBJ Foundation and award-wining author of Second Acts and The Last Republicans draws on interviews and conversations with seven presidents to identify the essence of character, leadership and legacy that has defined each of them and the modern American presidency.

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In Freedom Season, acclaimed historian, Peniel E. Joseph, offers a stirring narrative history of 1963, marking it as the defining year of the Black freedom struggle—a year when America faced a deluge of political strife and violence and emerged transformed.

Nineteen sixty-three opened with the centenary of the Emancipation Proclamation and ended with America in a state of mourning. The months in between brought waves of racial terror, mass protest, and police repression that shocked the world, inspired radicals and reformers, and forced the hands of moderate legislators. By year’s end the murders of John F. Kennedy, Medgar Evers, and four Black girls at a church in Alabama left the nation determined to imagine a new way forward. Alongside the stories of historical giants like James Baldwin and Martin Luther King Jr., Joseph uplifts the perspectives of less celebrated leaders like playwright Lorraine Hansberry and activist Gloria Richardson.

Over one heartbreakingly tumultuous year, America unraveled and remade itself as the world looked on. Freedom Season shows how the upheavals of 1963 planted the seeds for watershed civil rights legislation and renewed hope in the promise and possibility of freedom. 

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About the Author

Peniel E. Joseph is the Barbara Jordan Chair in Ethics and Political Values, founding director of the Center for the Study of Race and Democracy at the LBJ School of Public Affairs, and distinguished service leadership professor and professor of history at the University of Texas at Austin. He is the author and editor of eight award-winning books on African American history, including The Third Reconstruction and The Sword and the Shield. He lives in Austin, Texas.

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Thorns of the Mesquite is set on a cattle and sheep ranch in West Texas in the late 1930’s. World War I has expanded America’s horizons and sense of hegemony in the world; the Depression has taken a terrible toll in rural areas, combined with the great drought and the Dustbowl. The threat of World War II destabilizes throughout. 

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The novel’s main character, Dona Rose Willis, grew up on the ranch, and though her life is circumscribed by the land she loves and customs of her time and place, it is through her and the characters who come into her life that we experience a complex world of racism, sexism, tyranny of religion, devotion to land, forgiveness and love of many kinds. 

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About the Author

I was born and raised in Austin, Texas, and though I moved to New England with my family many years ago, the spirit of the Lone Star State—as they say—has never left me. My early childhood was marked by visits to my grandparents' ranch in West Texas, and the powerful images from that landscape and life have infused my writing for decades.

 

It was while I was leading a writing retreat in Ireland that the seed for Thorns of the Mesquite was planted. An image of my great-aunt Dona, whom I'd met only briefly at age five (but I remember to this day how she called the chickens), appeared to me, walking a dirt road on that very ranch. I was compelled to follow. What resulted, years later, is this novel, a made-up story born of deep personal roots.

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A groundbreaking investigation into a string of unsolved murders at America’s premier special operations base, and what the crimes reveal about drug trafficking and impunity among elite soldiers in today’s military
 

In December 2020, a deer hunter discovered two dead bodies that had been riddled with bullets and dumped in a forested corner of Fort Bragg, North Carolina. One of the dead men, Master Sergeant William “Billy” Lavigne, was a member of Delta Force, the most secretive “black ops” unit in the military. A deeply traumatized veteran of America’s classified assassination program, Lavigne had done more than a dozen deployments in his lengthy career, was addicted to crack cocaine, dealt drugs on base, and had committed a series of violent crimes before he was mysteriously killed. The other victim, Chief Warrant Officer Timothy Dumas, was a quartermaster attached to the Special Forces who used his proximity to clandestine missions to steal guns and traffic drugs into the United States from abroad, and had written a blackmail letter threatening to expose criminality in the special operations task force in Afghanistan.

As soon as Seth Harp, an Iraq war veteran and investigative reporter, begins looking into the double murder, he learns that there have been many more unexplained deaths at Fort Bragg recently, other murders connected to drug trafficking in elite units, and dozens of fatal overdoses. Drawing on declassified documents, trial transcripts, police records, and hundreds of interviews, Harp tells a scathing story of narco-trafficking in the Special Forces, drug conspiracies abetted by corrupt police, blatant military cover-ups, American complicity in the Afghan heroin trade, and the pernicious consequences of continuous war.

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About the Author

Seth Harp is an investigative reporter and foreign correspondent who writes about the intersection of armed conflict and organized crime. A contributing editor at Rolling Stone, he has reported from countries including Iraq, Syria, Mexico, Ukraine, and elsewhere for Harper’s, the New Yorker, The Intercept, and Columbia Journalism Review. He has also written for the New York Times and the Texas Observer.  He is currently working on a book for Viking Press about drug-trafficking in the U.S. Army Special Forces and a series of unsolved murders at Fort Bragg, North Carolina.

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Before becoming a journalist, Harp practiced law for five years, and was an Assistant Attorney General for the state of Texas. During college and law school, he served in the U.S. Army Reserve and did one tour of duty in Iraq. He lives in Austin, Texas, where he was born and raised.

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