In a surprise rereading of the classic Peyton Place by Grace Metalious, Sally Hirsh-Dickinson contends that it scandalized the nation precisely because of the way in which sexuality in the novel is conflated with America's problematic relationship to race. This charge is buttressed by the oft-forgotten detail that the fictional Peyton Place was founded by one Samuel Peyton, an escaped slave.

Hirsh-Dickinson argues that the town's inability to come to terms with its black history informs its dysfunctional relationship to sex, power, and justice, mirroring America on the eve of the civil rights movement. She writes of New England in the larger American consciousness, touching on discussions of white studies and the racialized lower classes in American fiction. Dirty Whites and Dark Secrets is a thought-provoking study of a genre classic that will speak to both scholars and students about the deeper truths hidden in popular fiction.

In 1807, at the height of the Napoleonic war, ships of nearly all the European nations crowded the malarial wharves of West Africa where merchants traded at the great slaveholding pens and packed their human property into ships' holds bound for the sugar mills of Cuba and Haiti, and the tobacco plantations of Virginia.

In that same year Great Britain passed the Abolition Act, and the last English slave ship left the African coast with her cargo, shortly to be replaced by the ships and men of the Royal Navy's Preventive Squadron. For the next fifty years this small fleet patrolled 3,000 miles of treacherous coastline in a determined, unilateral, and only quasi-legal effort to interdict vessels with their human cargoes.

The squadron lost more than 17,000 men to disease, conflict, and varied misfortunes, but they liberated more than 150,000 African slaves, and slowly--through negotiation, intimidation, and military and diplomatic triumphs and setbacks--they helped put an end to the rich, shameful, "peculiar institution" of European and American trade in West African slaves. Through firsthand accounts of naval adventures, ship-to-ship actions, bold raids into the interior, and daily life at sea, Sian Rees brilliantly colors this huge canvas in a series of vivid portraits of the men and officers of the Preventive Squadron. Sweet Water and Bitter is a moving chronicle of suffering, exploitation, and one nation's determination to suppress slavery.

Clean, fresh drinking water is essential to human and animal life. It's equally important to the world economy: it functions as a universal solvent, makes possible industrial cooling and transportation, and is necessary for all kinds of agriculture. Antoine Frerot, CEO of Veolia Water, takes us on a tour of the world's waters, of our water. Lack of clean water kills 2.2 million people every year, and nearly 1 billion people do not have reliable access to clean drinking water. Using examples that transform theory into close-to-home reality, Frerot issues a serious challenge while showing us how to ensure that all the fast-growing cities of Asia, Africa, and Latin America have enough water. He considers how climate change will cause water shortages and explains what we can do now to prevent them. We have the political, economic, and scientific means to ensure the future of water on earth: we need only the will to take action.