Things have never been worse for California and its citizens, and Liberalism is to blame. In Taxifornia, James V. Lacy identifies and examines California's “one-party” domination of the liberal faction of the California Democratic Party and their union and environmental lobby cronies as the cause of California's rotting economy, and how all Americans are losing as a result. Liberalism is to blame for California's rotting economy. The biggest and most important state in America was once a land of opportunity in a wonderful climate. But times have surely changed. Things have never been worse for California and its citizens. California's “one-party” domination of the liberal faction of the California Democratic Party and their union and environmental lobby cronies have wrecked havoc on California, and all Americans are losing as a result. In Taxifornia, James V. Lacy identifies and examines the true causes of California’s decline. Californians are victims of the heaviest taxation in all of America, and those high taxes are now steadily destroying the state’s economy. Tax-and-spend liberals who are in control have created a state that taxes and regulates more than any other state in the country, and have engineered a rotting economy with among the highest unemployment of any state in the nation. Its high taxes hurt all Californians by making the state too expensive for business to turn profitable. Business flight has become endemic. California’s over-regulation of businesses depresses employment in the state. A widely accepted tenet among liberal politicians, political science academics, and the media in California is that no development at all is a good thing. It is a state that educates the worst but pays the best to its teachers, a place that is widely considered by most CEOs to be one of the worst locations in the nation to run a business, where local governments are going bankrupt, and where an out-of-control public employee pay and pension system threatens to gobble up and divert almost all available taxpayer resources to a point where cities and counties simply cannot afford to pay for police, fire, or road maintenance anymore. California has an outdated environmental policy and an energy policy that makes the state almost totally dependent on one source of power: imported natural gas. It is a place where the public employee union worker who controls traffic in the Bay Area Rapid Transit District maintenance yard in poverty-stricken and near bankrupt Oakland is paid more annually than the Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court in Washington, D.C. Top leaders of the California Republican Party readily acknowledge their party is in very deep trouble. Jim Brulte, the state chairman of the GOP and a respected veteran of the California Legislature, has identified the source of the GOP's sorry condition as a "failure to recognize changing demographics" and has said that Republicans have been too reluctant to venture into communities outside of their traditional power base. "If we want to be successful, we have to get outside of our comfort zone," Brulte said. "Too many Republican Party leaders or Republican elected officials spend all their time talking to the choir." Having identified the problems correctly, Lacy offers observations--with over 800 footnotes--about what can be done to restore political balance in the state, as well as some rational ideas for how California can fix its economic problems. But the economic and political situation in California today is at such an extreme, whether California can ever return to the broad prosperity of the past and once again lead the nation, is a very open question.

A series of vividly rendered personal narratives, Trespasses: A Memoir recounts the coming of age of three generations in the rural Great Plains. In examining how class, race, and gender play out in the lives of two farm families who simultaneously love and hate the place they can’t escape, Lacy Johnson presents rural whiteness as an ethnicity worthy of study. As she dismantles the complex history of a forgotten place while fighting to keep its people whole, Johnson reflects on a place that outsiders can cross into or pass through, but may never fully know. From formal and informal research methods, Johnson has produced an innovative collection of prose poems and essays that together create an exciting work of contemporary nonfiction. Examining region through the lenses of memory (experience), history (memory made public), and theory (experience abstracted), Trespasses is a deeply intelligent work, at the center of which is the author, always feeling as if she doesn’t belong but not sure where she else she should be. In this profound work, Johnson drifts gracefully back and forth between timelines and voices in a way that illustrates how her present is connected to the many pasts she chronicles.

“Unflinching and honest…both timely and timeless” (Houston Chronicle), this extraordinary collection of essays by the award-winning writer of The Other Side—rooted in her own experience with sexual assault—pursues questions that strike at the heart of our national conversation about the justness of society. In 2014, Lacy Johnson was giving a reading from The Other Side, her “instant classic” (Kirkus Reviews) memoir of kidnapping and rape, when a woman asked her what she would like to happen to her rapist. This collection “attempts to parcel out several knotted problems and suggests forms of meaningful justice” (Booklist, starred review). Drawing from philosophy, art, literature, mythology, anthropology, film, and her own experience of violence, Johnson considers how our ideas about justice might be expanded beyond vengeance and retribution to include acts of compassion, patience, mercy, and grace. “The Reckonings is not a book about changing the world. It’s philosophy in disguise, equal parts memoir, criticism, and ethics…The twelve essays deserve great consideration, while you read it and long after” (NPR). From “Speak Truth to Power,” about the condition of not being believed about rape and assault; to “Goliath,” about the ways evil is used as a form of social control; to “The Fallout,” about ecological and generational violence, Johnson creates masterful, elaborate, gorgeously written essays that speak incisively about our current era. She grapples with justice and retribution, truth and fairness, and sexual assault and workplace harassment, as well as the broadest societal wrongs: the BP Oil Spill, government malfeasance, police killings. The Reckonings is a powerful and necessary work, ambitious in its scope, which “challenges our culture’s expectations of justice and expose the limits of vengeance and mercy” (Ms. Magazine).

*A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER AND INDIE NEXT PICK* Writer and performer on Late Night with Seth Meyers Amber Ruffin writes with her sister Lacey Lamar with humor and heart to share absurd anecdotes about everyday experiences of racism. Now a writer and performer on Late Night with Seth Meyers and host of The Amber Ruffin Show, Amber Ruffin lives in New York, where she is no one's First Black Friend and everyone is, as she puts it, "stark raving normal." But Amber's sister Lacey? She's still living in their home state of Nebraska, and trust us, you'll never believe what happened to Lacey. From racist donut shops to strangers putting their whole hand in her hair, from being mistaken for a prostitute to being mistaken for Harriet Tubman, Lacey is a lightning rod for hilariously ridiculous yet all-too-real anecdotes. She's the perfect mix of polite, beautiful, petite, and Black that apparently makes people think "I can say whatever I want to this woman." And now, Amber and Lacey share these entertainingly horrifying stories through their laugh-out-loud sisterly banter. Painfully relatable or shockingly eye-opening (depending on how often you have personally been followed by security at department stores), this book tackles modern-day racism with the perfect balance of levity and gravity.