For many civil rights activists, the Vietnam War brought the dangers of US imperialism and the global nature of antiracist struggle into sharp relief. Martha Biondi tells the story of one such group of activists who built an internationalist movement in Chicago committed to liberation everywhere but especially to ending colonialism and apartheid in Africa.
Among their leaders was Prexy Nesbitt. Steeped from an early age in stories of Garveyism and labor militancy, Nesbitt was powerfully influenced by his encounters with the exiled African radicals he met in Dar es Salaam, London, and across the United States. Operating domestically and abroad, Nesbitt's cohort worked closely with opponents of Portuguese and white minority rule in Mozambique, Angola, and South Africa. Rather than promoting a US conception of Black self-determination, they took ideas from African anticolonial leaders and injected them into US foreign policy debates.
The biography of a man but even more so of a movement, We Are Internationalists reveals the underappreciated influence of a transformative Black solidarity project.
REVIEWS
From the Back Cover:
"Through Chicagoan Prexy Nesbitt's life of organizing at the grassroots and crisscrossing the globe, we learn about long-forgotten efforts spanning decades to support the many liberation and peace struggles in southern Africa. Now more than ever, young Americans need to know that internationalism and solidarity with anticolonial struggles in the Global South have a deep history in the American Left, especially the Black Left."
—Angela Y. Davis, author of Freedom Is a Constant Struggle
"At this moment, when the lives of Bayard Rustin, Ella Baker, Claudette Colvin, and others are gaining fresh attention and new appreciation, Prexy Nesbitt's story is both relevant and necessary. A huge audience is eager for a deeper awareness of where we've come from, where we are today, and where we might go."
—Bill Ayers, author of When Freedom Is the Question, Abolition Is the Answer
"The most consequential social movement to develop in the United States after the civil rights era of the 1960s was the movement to end apartheid in South Africa. Despite its significance, we know very little about it. And we know next to nothing about the amazing efforts of Black Americans like Prexy Nesbitt to address the colossal injustices facing the whole region of southern Africa. We Are Internationalists fills a long-standing void in our understanding of the vast and sometimes vacuous post–civil rights era."
—Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, author of From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Martha Biondi is Lorraine H. Morton Professor of Black Studies and Professor of History at Northwestern University and author of The Black Revolution on Campus and To Stand and Fight: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Postwar New York City.
InJustice: How Politics and Fear Vanquished America’s Justice Department
by Carol Leonnig and Aaron C. Davis
Penguin Press, 2025
[Publication date: November 4, 2025]
An Instant New York Times Bestseller
“An amazing piece of work . . . This is not just a series of newly reported anecdotes and pieces of information. It is a remarkable thesis about how Trump effectively broke the Justice Department in his first term by bullying it.”
—Rachel Maddow, The Rachel Maddow Show
From Pulitzer Prize–winning Washington Post reporters Carol Leonnig and Aaron C. Davis, a shocking investigation of unparalleled depth into the subversion of the Justice Department over the last decade, culminating in President Donald Trump upending this cornerstone of democracy and threatening America’s rule of law as we have long known it
Throughout his first administration, Trump did more than any other president to politicize the nation’s top law enforcement agency, pressuring appointees to shield him, to target his enemies, and even to help him cling to power after his 2020 election defeat. The department, pressed into a defensive crouch, has never fully recovered.
Injustice exposes not only the Trump administration’s efforts to undermine the department at every turn but also how delays in investigating Trump’s effort to overturn the will of voters under Attorney General Merrick Garland helped prevent the country from holding Trump accountable and enabled his return to power. With never-before-told accounts, Carol Leonnig and Aaron C. Davis take readers inside as prosecutors convulsed over Trump’s disdain for the rule of law, and FBI agents, the department’s storied investigators, at times retreated in fear. They take you to the rooms where Special Counsel Jack Smith’s team set off on an all-but-impossible race to investigate Trump for absconding with classified documents and waging an assault on democracy—and inside his prosecution’s heroic and fateful choices that ultimately backfired.
With a plethora of sources deeply embedded in the ranks of three presidencies, Leonnig and Davis reveal the daily war secretly waged for the soul of the department, how it has been shredded by propaganda and partisanship, and how—if the United States hopes to live on with its same form of government—Trump’s war with the Justice Department will mark a turning point from which it will be hard to recover. Injustice is the jaw-dropping account of partisans and enablers undoing democracy, heroes still battling to preserve a nation governed by laws, and a call to action for those who believe in liberty and justice for all.
REVIEWS:
"Most legal stories rely on the inherent drama of trials, but in Injustice Leonnig and Davis take on the more challenging assignment of depicting a bureaucracy. Zoom meetings, as a rule, are less riveting than cross-examinations, but their upshots, especially here, can be more consequential. The heart of Injustice is the authors’ reconstruction of how Garland led the investigation of the Jan. 6, 2021, attempt to overturn the 2020 election . . . If Injustice has heroes, it’s the investigators from the House Select Committee on the events of Jan. 6, who did what Garland forbade his subordinates to do: examine the role of Trump and his White House in the attack on the Capitol . . . The disturbing takeaway of Injustice is that, at the Justice Department, political independence has been replaced by abject servility to Trump."
—Jeffrey Toobin, The New York Times Book Review
"The most detailed account yet of the Justice Department’s disastrous effort to bring Donald Trump to trial during Joe Biden’s administration, which is likely to long rank among U.S. law enforcement’s greatest failures. History will not judge this effort kindly, but perhaps more importantly — at this fractious and precarious moment in American politics — [Injustice] contains critical lessons for a future administration that wants to focus on serious legal accountability for powerful political figures . . . If Democrats are to avoid making the same mistakes all over again, Leonnig and Davis’ book offers both an engaging and enraging opportunity to learn. It’s a journalistic tour-de-force." —Politico
ABOUT THE AUTHORS:
Carol Leonnig, a five-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize, is the author of three bestselling books and an investigative reporter who has worked at The Washington Post for the last twenty-five years. She won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for her reporting on security failures by the Secret Service. She also was part of Post teams awarded Pulitzers in 2024, 2022, 2018, and 2014. Leonnig, a contributor to MSNBC, is the author of Zero Fail and coauthor of A Very Stable Genius and I Alone Can Fix It.
Aaron C. Davis is an investigative reporter for The Washington Post who has won the Pulitzer Prize twice and has been a finalist three times. He was a lead writer and reporter on the Post’s investigative series into the January 6 attack, which won the George Polk Award, the Toner Prize, and, with other Post coverage, the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service. In 2018, he was part of a Post team that won the Pulitzer for Investigative Reporting. Davis has reported from fourteen countries. He began at The Washington Post in 2008, after reporting for the Associated Press, The Mercury News, and Florida Today.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
[1]
A Righteous Prosecution?
In 2018, a week before Thanksgiving, Kamil Shields and David Kent-two federal prosecutors who worked in the U.S. Attorney's Office for the District of Columbia-were losing sleep over high-level interference in their criminal case. It was shocking to them, they confided to colleagues, but the person imperiling a fair prosecution was their ultimate boss, the president of the United States.
Outside the legal community, the work of federal prosecutors such as Kent and Shields has often not been well understood. They were cogs in a network of ninety-three U.S. Attorney's Offices, which fan out across the country from the Department of Justice's main headquarters in Washington, D.C. Together, the attorneys in those offices form a field army that, since President George Washington's first appointments to such posts, has been charged with carefully investigating crimes and pursuing justice on behalf of the U.S. government. Shields and Kent were on the front lines, and their assignment was among the department's most sensitive. Secretly, they were probing one of the government's highest-ranking law enforcement chiefs, Andrew McCabe, who had recently departed as second-in-command at the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
As if the case wasn't fraught enough, the occupant of the Oval Office was ratcheting up the stakes, and the stress level, for the prosecutorial team. Since his surprise victory in the 2016 presidential election, Donald Trump had become locked in an increasingly tense standoff with leaders of the Justice Department, the traditionally rigorous executive branch agency. The FBI, the investigative arm of the department, was the lead federal agency responsible for identifying and interrupting threats to national security. In fulfilling that role, its agents had been probing unusual contacts between Trump's campaign advisers and the Russian government before the election, but the new president had abruptly fired James B. Comey when the FBI director refused to bend to Trump's pressure to either shutter the probe or publicly exonerate him. The dramatic removal, less than four months into Trump's arrival in the White House-and six years before Comey's ten-year term was set to expire-prompted McCabe to open an investigation of the president. It also compelled DOJ leaders to appoint an independent special counsel to take over the Russia investigation and to determine if, by removing Comey, the president had intended to obstruct that probe. In social media posts, Trump had repeatedly blasted the ongoing investigation led by Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller III, the widely respected former FBI director. Trump questioned why Democrats and their sympathizers should not also be subject to federal investigations, and McCabe was one of the president's top targets. In Trump's view, McCabe sat alongside the ranks of Hillary Clinton, Comey, and others whom Trump labeled as criminals.
McCabe had, in fact, erred. He had initially given investigators a false account of his role in leaking information to the press. That was why he was no longer the current FBI deputy director. But the president wasn't supposed to decide if that wrongdoing rose to the level that it should be prosecuted criminally. In fact, he should have steered far clear.
Under a system of guidelines and case reviews honed over more than a century-and then tightened significantly following the Watergate scandal-the Justice Department had a tried-and-true method for deciding whether to criminally prosecute a U.S. citizen. That careful review process had made the Justice Department a beacon for democracy worldwide. And that was in no small part because every time, deep in the bureaucracy, the real work of evaluating a case began with attorneys like Shields and Kent. They were among a class of career attorneys who did their jobs year in and year out, under Republican presidents and Democratic ones, insulated from politics and expected to focus on the facts of a case and how the law applied given each particular set of circumstances. Often, attorneys drew cases based solely on merit and the track record they had amassed in successfully representing the government. Kent, forty-six, had spent most of his legal career in the D.C. office, investigating and indicting the architects of complex crimes and frauds. Peers viewed him as having a thoughtful legal mind. A Stanford Law graduate, he pored over the details and precedent of his cases. His coworkers in the esteemed Fraud and Public Corruption Section, which handled some of the office's toughest cases, considered him a mensch and "a good soldier." In other words, he didn't shy away from problem cases.
Shields, forty, had been on the government staff for nearly five years, primarily prosecuting cybercriminals who had stolen money or secrets by hacking. A Harvard undergrad and Yale Law School graduate, she had been rated a rising star at the prestigious New York firm Sullivan & Cromwell but left before making partner. Not long after becoming a prosecutor, she and her husband had welcomed their first child, a boy.
The two were what are known as line attorneys, due to their position on the front lines in upholding the nation's laws. They partnered with FBI agents to gather the facts of a case, and when they found evidence of serious crimes, they presented it to a grand jury that met in secret. When a jury agreed with the prosecutors that a suspect's acts merited criminal charges, it handed down an indictment, and the line attorneys proceeded to argue for conviction in court. At key steps along the way, they had to answer to layers of supervisors and section chiefs above them. Those checks repeatedly stress-tested the facts of a case and allowed for healthy second-guessing as to whether prosecutors had properly applied the law. Shields, Kent, and their colleagues in the D.C. office-one of the largest and most prestigious in the country-paused before bringing major charges, gathering in a conference room stuffed with well-worn chairs to "murder" one another's draft prosecution memos. Fellow prosecutors would sit around for hours, attempting to attack a proposed argument as a defense attorney or a judge might in hopes of preemptively identifying flaws that could doom the government's quest for justice.
Like so many of their colleagues, Shields and Kent took pride in not just winning convictions but hewing closely to the Justice Department's strict guidelines for impartial decision-making. Both accepted a fraction of the compensation available at private law firms because of the sense of mission and, candidly, the excitement that came with defending the rule of law. Countless federal prosecutors over the years had eventually moved on to jobs in politics, policy, or even plum gigs in private practice, only to wistfully recall their days on the line for the government. There was nothing quite like running a federal investigation, protecting the public, and having the license to go after bad guys no matter how powerful. The work was a calling.
Nine months earlier, in February 2018, Shields had been a little surprised when her supervisors had assigned her and Kent to investigate McCabe, who for a time after Comey's firing had risen to acting director of the FBI. The prosecutors were tasked with reviewing evidence that he had lied to federal agents about the leak of investigative information to a newspaper. A criminal probe of such a senior public official would normally be handled exclusively by the Fraud and Public Corruption Section. A supervisor in that division had decided Shields would be a good fit for the assignment, but she wondered aloud if he had pulled her into the McCabe investigation because no one else was willing to take it on. For much of 2018, Trump had roared that his Justice Department must fire McCabe. His demand had laid bare that the independence and integrity of the Justice Department, foundational goals when Congress created the executive branch agency in 1870, rested almost entirely on whether the elected occupant of the White House faithfully executed their oath of office to preserve and protect the Constitution.
In the five decades since Watergate, the notion of a president pushing the department to prosecute an individual American had become implausible, laughable even, to federal prosecutors. The department's informal motto was to pursue justice "without fear or favor." After President Nixon had resigned in disgrace, Congress had enacted reforms, and Justice had strengthened its code of conduct to try to prevent another president from misusing the immense power of the department. But Trump spoke of the Justice Department as an impediment to his agenda, and as lacking a key ingredient to his liking: loyalty to him. That summer, Trump's adviser Steve Bannon was explicit in a closed-door meeting with special counsel attorneys and FBI agents. Trump, he said, viewed a good attorney general and Justice Department attorneys as "people who really protected their president."
Since early summer, Shields and Kent had been trying to ignore the president's comments about McCabe, they told colleagues. They just wanted to follow the normal painstaking steps in making a case, calling witnesses to testify before a grand jury that was meeting at a federal courthouse near the U.S. Capitol. Bit by bit, they had assembled evidence indicating that McCabe had withheld information from federal agents. Still, the two prosecutors told colleagues they had serious doubts about whether the Justice Department should proceed. It wasn't clear the U.S. government could win in court, and primarily for one unusual reason: Trump's public statements and potentially other actions by the White House could backfire and kill the case. The president's cries that McCabe had "committed many crimes!," as well as his all-caps tweets demanding McCabe's imprisonment, could lead a jury to see the prosecution as politically motivated. They also had reason to fear a potential "ticking time bomb" of broader White House interference that could upend the case in embarrassing fashion.
Heading into the Thanksgiving holiday, however, they faced a deadline. J. P. Cooney, an aggressive prosecutor who had recently been promoted to chief of the Fraud and Public Corruption Section, told Shields and Kent that it was time to give him a "CIM," a case impression memo, summarizing the strengths and weaknesses of charging McCabe. The two were fast approaching the line in the American criminal justice system that every prosecutor must decide whether to cross-and then live with afterward-to prosecute or not?
Federal prosecutors are trained to wield their enormous power-to poke into a person's bank accounts or survey their phone contacts-with care. Long before any charge, a single subpoena for information can forever tarnish an innocent person's reputation. And then, when prosecutors know they have the goods to prove the elements of a crime, they must weigh whether the costs of bringing the charges are worthy and will serve the greater cause of justice and the rule of law. So fraught is the decision that the Justice Department maintains a twenty-three-thousand-word Principles of Federal Prosecution-a bible of sorts for its attorneys to consult about when to prosecute or not.
Shields and Kent believed that McCabe had initially withheld the full truth about his role two years earlier in directing information to The Wall Street Journal, they told their colleagues. They had established that McCabe had instructed Lisa Page, an FBI attorney and his legal adviser, to confirm to a reporter the existence of an investigation into then presidential candidate Hillary Clinton's family foundation-and in a way that described McCabe as supporting several field offices pressing forward on this politically sensitive probe. The story stood to benefit McCabe, an internal watchdog found, by countering complaints from some right-wing pundits and conservative FBI agents that McCabe was conflicted because of his wife's ties to a Democratic donor close to Clinton who had supported her failed run for a state senate seat. After the story ran, however, investigators said McCabe had given his boss, Comey, as well as others, the impression that he didn't know the source of the leak. Initially, McCabe also gave an inaccurate account to investigators, but days later called them to say he had been distracted when they first spoke and now thought he might have authorized a deputy to talk to a reporter.
Making a false statement to an investigator is a federal offense-a 1001, as it's known. The FBI academy drills into agents that, if the government is going to hold anyone to account for mistruths, a sin that can upend the work of solving a crime, it will be them. Yet Kent and Shields felt intense unease about seeking an indictment.
Over that sleep-deprived Thanksgiving weekend, the two wrote and rewrote the CIM, spelling out the challenges of indicting McCabe amid Trump's white-hot pressure campaign, in which he often conflated the McCabe probe with Mueller's Russia investigation. "Universities will someday study what highly conflicted (and NOT Senate approved) Bob Mueller and his gang of Democrat thugs have done to destroy people. Why is he protecting Crooked Hillary, Comey, McCabe . . . and all of his friends on the other side," Trump ranted on November 15, the Thursday before Thanksgiving. Upon returning to work, Shields and Kent shared their memo-and their reservations-with Cooney, their new boss.
Shields and Kent had closely studied the reactions of the grand jury hearing the McCabe case, something prosecutors do to "read" the jurors for doubts or concerns to better tweak or hone their arguments. Prosecutors are legally prohibited from publicly discussing what happens in a grand jury, but word of their CIM and briefings with supervisors circulated in the office. Shields told Cooney the jurors had had very strong and sympathetic reactions to key FBI witnesses who worked with McCabe. Lisa Page, the lawyer and former counselor to McCabe, had laid bare to the grand jury critical weaknesses in a potential prosecution of the FBI leader. She explained that McCabe had a terrible memory for the high volume of cases and decisions that crossed his desk, and frequently had to be reminded by his notes or aides. Importantly, Page also shared that McCabe had no practical reason to lie about or hide what he had done; he was one of the few FBI officials explicitly authorized to communicate with the press. What's more, the FBI's chief press officer had also forgotten McCabe's instructions to share probe information with a reporter when he was questioned. Yet the press officer wasn't being eyed for charges of lying to investigators. The jury clearly liked Page, Shields explained, and watched her with pathos and rapt attention as she recounted the personal toll of Trump's attacks. Page had broken down in tears describing how she felt she had let McCabe down when her internal texts were collected and revealed she had been having an affair with another FBI official, Peter Strzok. Page and Strzok were public figures by this point, after disparaging remarks they had privately shared about Trump being an "idiot" and other personal messages were turned over to Congress and reported on nationally. Trump had subsequently crusaded against them, often vilifying the two as liberals who had helped launch a "Rigged Witch Hunt" to hobble his presidency. He repeatedly called on Congress and other authorities to "Investigate the Investigators."
Furious Minds: The Making Of The MAGA New Right
by Laura K. Fields
Princeton University Press, 2025
[Publication date:
November 4, 2025]
“[An] excellent new book.”—Michelle Goldberg, New York Times
The story of the radical conservative intellectual movement shaping Donald Trump’s agenda—and how it threatens American freedoms, values, and democracy
Donald Trump is not a big thinker, but his 2016 presidential victory presented a grand opportunity for people who are, and it set off a radicalization and reconfiguration of the American conservative intellectual world. In Furious Minds, Laura Field, who spent close to a decade in conservative academic circles, chronicles the rise of the New Right—the network of academics, public intellectuals, and influencers who provide ideological fuel to Trumpism. This movement includes figures such as Patrick Deneen, Christopher Rufo, Peter Thiel, and JD Vance. Their agenda is built to last, and it has dire long-term implications for liberal democracy.
The New Right has precedents in American history, but it is distinct for its youthfulness, misogyny, and extraordinary successes—most notably the elevation of Vance to the vice presidency. The movement—which draws together associates of the right-wing Claremont Institute, National Conservatives, Postliberals, and the Hard Right—advocates nationalist economics, tight borders, isolationism, and reactionary social values. It helped to strategize January 6th and created Project 2025. But above all, the New Right is engaged in a vast culture war against modern liberal pluralism. It is determined to harness state power and use it in new, illiberal ways, from college campuses to the international scene—all driven by the fantasy of restoring a pure America.
Incisive and urgent, Furious Minds tells the story of the thinkers of the New Right—and their powerful assault on American freedoms, values, and ideals.
"In the ever-growing field of books aiming to explain the rise of the MAGA movement, Furious Minds, by a political theorist with longstanding experience in conservative academia, stands out for its emphasis on ideas. Field shows how the New Right, drawing on a loose network of academics and influencers, has coalesced around a vision of America that is socially reactionary, economically isolationist and deeply skeptical of pluralism as an inherent social good." ― New York Times
"Furious Minds is the most up-to-date introduction we have to the MAGA intellectual right reshaping America with astonishing speed today."---Mark Lilla, New York Review of Books
"A fascinating taxonomy of the wild world of far-right thinking."---Zack Beauchamp, Vox’s The Gray Area
"A meticulous and unsettling revelation of a right-wing plan for a 'new old-fashioned world.'"
―Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)
"A revelatory, at times horrifying deconstruction of the New Right; it shows how we arrived at this moment, and it discusses the intentions of those who hope to push it further. Understanding their intellectual underpinnings is crucial to organizing an effective response. . . . We recommend her book for the essential knowledge it contains—and for its important advice."
---Michelle Anne Schingler, Foreword
"A meticulous, nuanced study of the patchwork of the US’s far right."---Jeff Fleischer, Foreword (Starred review)
"A perceptive history and analysis, bolstered by the author’s proximity to the subject. . . . a valuable guide to understanding that ideology and countering it."
---Kenneth Silber, Splice Today
"[Laura K. Field's] background perfectly positions her to deliver this lively, devastating taxonomy and critique of MAGA’s ideologues. She was originally trained in Straussian scholarship—a reading of classical political thought that criticizes the modern turn away from the sources of moral authority toward liberalism and, in Strauss’s view, nihilism. His approach has had a deep influence on leading conservative American intellectuals of the past half century. . . . Nearly a decade in these academic circles makes Field a knowledgeable guide to a subject she takes seriously. She’s also a Canadian woman, a double identity that puts her at a skeptical distance from the more and more extreme world of the American right."---George Packer, The Atlantic"[Laura K. Fields is] a latter-day Athena soothing today’s Furies to rescue American democracy. . . . Readers will benefit from the best researched and most comprehensive account of the New Right that has appeared—or is likely to."---William Galston, The UnPopulist
REVIEWS:
“A pathbreaking intellectual history from the world’s preeminent researcher of the contemporary American right. Furious Minds scrupulously chronicles the coalescence of a modern movement that took place as much online as in the seminar room or the corridors of power. Essential reading to understand today’s political situation.”
—John Ganz, New York Times–bestselling author of When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s
“Why should we care about the obscure and often fanatical right-wing intellectuals that populate Furious Minds? Because as Laura Field deftly shows, they now have access to the corridors of power, with many now serving as advisers to President Trump and designing his hard-right policies. Readers should be rushing to this book to understand how and why conservative elites embraced extremism. —Elizabeth Anderson, University of Michigan
“No one has done more than Laura Field to shine a spotlight on the arcane but enormously important ecosystem of New Right intellectuals that now drives the second Trump administration. Writing with precision and passion, she makes clear why liberals have grievously underestimated these thinkers and their ideas, and why the New Right’s radical plans for remaking the world are appealing, ambitious, and extremely dangerous.”
—Geoffrey Kabaservice, author of Rule and Ruin: The Downfall of Moderation and the Destruction of the Republican Party, from Eisenhower to the Tea Party
“Every now and then, a book comes along that makes precisely the inquiry called for by the times. Furious Minds is one of those books. It is rich and relentlessly probing, yet at the same time altogether fair. Field has done several remarkable things: She has taken the ideas that lie behind Donald Trump seriously and held them up for moral and critical scrutiny. This is a genuinely important book.”
—Benjamin Wittes, editor in chief of Lawfare and coauthor of Unmaking the Presidency: Donald Trump’s War on the World’s Most Powerful Office
“Laura Field’s Furious Minds
is a literary event of the highest order. With seriousness, care, and
precision, Field mines the depths of the ‘MAGA mind.’ There is no Ivory
Tower tall enough or corner of the internet dark enough to escape her
critical eye. This is essential reading for anyone who wants to
understand the thinking that led to this era of American politics.”
—Nicholas Buccola, author of One Man’s Freedom: Goldwater, King, and the Struggle over an American Ideal
Water Mirror Echo: Bruce Lee and the Making of Asian America
by Jeff Chang
Mariner Books, 2025
[Publication date: September 23, 2025]
Named one of the 10 Best Books of the Year by Publishers Weekly
Named a Best of the Year by NPR, Vogue, Kirkus Reviews
"This book is as celebratory as it is incisive, as it is, at times, heartbreaking. A massive achievement." — Hanif Abdurraqib, National Book Award-winning author of There’s Always This Year and A Little Devil in America
A cultural biography, both sweeping and intimate, of the legend Bruce Lee, set against the extraordinary, untold story of the rise of Asian America—from the author of the award-winning classic Can’t Stop Won’t Stop and one of the finest culture observers of our era.
More than a half-century after his passing, Bruce Lee is as towering a figure to people around the world as ever. On his path to becoming a global icon, he popularized martial arts in the West, became a bridge to people and cultures from the East, and just as he was set to conquer Hollywood once and for all, he died of cerebral edema at age thirty-two. It’s no wonder that Bruce Lee’s legend has only bloomed in the decades since. Yet, in so many ways, the legend has eclipsed the man.
Forgotten is the stark reality of the baby boy born in segregated San Francisco, who spent his youth in war-ravaged, fight-crazy Hong Kong. Forgotten is the curious teenager who found his way back to America, where he embraced West Coast counterculture and meshed it with the Asian worldviews and philosophies that reared him. Forgotten is the man whose very presence broke barriers and helped shape the idea of what being an Asian in America is, at the very dawn of Asian America.
Water Mirror Echo—a title inspired by Bruce Lee’s own way of moving, being and responding to the world—is a page-turning and powerful reminder. At the helm is Jeff Chang, the award-winning author of Can’t Stop Won’t Stop, whose writing on culture, politics, the arts and music have made him one of the most acclaimed and distinctive voices of our time. In his hands, Bruce Lee’s story brims with authenticity.
Now, based on in-depth interviews with Lee’s closest intimates, thousands of newly available personal documents, and featuring dozens of gorgeous photographs from the family’s archive, Chang achieves the nearly impossible. He reveals the man behind the enduring iconography and stirringly shows Lee’s growing fame ushering in something that’s turned out to be even more enduring: the creation of Asian America.
REVIEWS:
"A uniquely American origin story.... With a probing pen born from decades as a prominent music and culture journalist ... Chang artfully blends Lee's life story and Asian American history with the skill and touch of a hip-hop DJ. As Lee's life story spins on one turntable, Chang adds in the social and political conditions of the time — racism, immigration and war — as the backbeat, artfully weaving and crossfading between the two.... Water Mirror Echo shows [the] evolution of an icon and the birth of a nation with rhythm and receipts." - San Francisco Chronicle
"Exuberant.... A capacious and entertaining account of Lee’s life and times.... Chang has rummaged through the archives and interviewed Lee’s surviving family members and friends; he writes with the diligence of a scholar and the propulsive energy of a fan.... Chang guides us through the life in a bustling narrative filled with vibrant anecdotes, historical context and chatty asides, alongside numerous photos of Lee that include high-contrast film stills and grainy, casual shots from the family archive." - New York Times Book Review
"[A] lively and deeply researched biography of Lee that doubles as a probing exploration of Lee’s profound effect on Asian American identity. Along with telling the gripping story of Lee’s life and groundbreaking career, Chang ... reframes the legend as a crucial pioneer and catalyst of assimilation, pride, and representation who, decades after his death at the age of 32, remains a powerful icon of power and resistance. This is that rare book that’s monumental in scope, ambition, and execution—and it’s both wildly fun and deeply rewarding. " - Vogue
"[A] panoramic biography.... Peppering the narrative with rich historical details and poignant analyses, Chang persuasively argues that Lee’s presence on screen helped shape the idea of what it means to be Asian in America. This definitive account cements Chang as a preeminent chronicler of Asian American history." - Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"This expansive biography of an iconic actor doubles as a nuanced history of Asian American empowerment. Chang ... adeptly shows how Lee’s magnetism and physical talents, showcased in Enter the Dragon and other beloved action movies, helped spur 'an awakening among racialized minorities.' ... Chang relates these details against a shifting set of crisply depicted backdrops, from 1960s Asian American student activism to the stylistic debates that shaped martial arts during Lee’s time. ... A rousing portrait of a charismatic actor who redefined global stardom." - Kirkus Reviews
"This meticulously sourced, image-rich biography of Bruce Lee comes along at a time when America’s leadership is disturbingly bullish on re-entrenching the racial barriers and retrograde anti-Asian views that Lee once confronted. But this book isn’t about an icon or a savior, rather the lesser-known facets of his identity — immigrant, fighter, seeker, teacher and ally — that drove the man Chang calls 'the global hero of the underdog' to unite Asian and American culture with an incendiary combination of spiritual tradition and undeniable cool. Water Mirror Echo uses a wealth of primary sources and archival material to reinscribe Lee’s legacy."
- Salon
"In Jeff Chang’s epic new biography of Lee, Water Mirror Echo: Bruce Lee and the Making of Asian America, the author disregards the arcane debates one might hear among fanboys or critics and instead prioritizes who Lee actually was at various points of a brief cultural history. While others have focused overmuch on Lee’s early death and how it supercharged his transformation into a worldwide phenomenon, Chang instead takes us through the chapters of Lee’s short life, the internal and external battles he overcame, and also the ones he didn’t."
- Alta Book Review
"I didn’t realize what I didn’t know about Bruce Lee until I read Jeff Chang’s Water Mirror Echo. His portrait of Bruce Lee is epic and deeply personal, recasting this icon as a flawed yet empowering figure who seismically changed Asian America. Chang updates and imbricates Lee’s complicated life within America’s history of racism, giving new depth to the man, the community, and the world he helped to change. Water Mirror Echo is a revelation and a stunning accomplishment." - Cathy Park Hong, author of Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning
"Water Mirror Echo thrives not just as an ode, or a tome of cultural appreciation, but also as a rich analysis of the history within, and the landscape upon which a cultural icon can be formed, can be shaped, can be beloved. This book is as celebratory as it is incisive, as it is, at times, heartbreaking. A massive achievement."
- Hanif Abdurraqib, National Book Award-winning author of There's Always This Year and A Little Devil in America
"Water Mirror Echo is a remarkable story of a man, the traditions and communities that created him, and the new worlds he made possible. Like Bruce Lee himself, Jeff Chang is blessed with the vision to see things we do not yet see, thinking and writing with a restless, chasm-crossing, almost prophetic ambition."
- Hua Hsu, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Stay True: A Memoir
"Jeff Chang's singular gift is his ability to balance intimacy and grandeur — to tell the story of a movement, a nation, a generation simply by telling the story of a man. Precise, incisive, thoughtful and compassionate, he is the most important cultural historian of our time, and Water Mirror Echo is a brilliant addition to his corpus."
- Adam Mansbach, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Golem of Brooklyn and Go the F*ck to Sleep
"In Water Mirror Echo, Jeff Chang crafts a deeply intimate yet expansive portrait of Bruce Lee, seamlessly blending personal narrative with the larger-than-life impact of Lee’s legacy. Chang delves into the private struggles and quiet moments of Lee’s life, capturing the man behind the myth while also exploring how his extraordinary journey shaped the Asian American experience. With heartfelt nuance, the book reveals Lee’s lasting influence, not only as a cultural icon but as a symbol of resilience, pride, and the fight for identity in a complex world."
- Bao Nguyen, filmmaker and director of Be Water
"With the number of words written about him, Bruce Lee is up there with the likes of Jesus Christ and Muhammad Ali. And keeping all those words and perspectives about Bruce in mind, Jeff Chang has done the impossible. He has found something new to say about Bruce Lee. And in the process he has gone deeper than all the rest. Jeff Chang has written the definitive biography of Bruce Lee.” - W. Kamau Bell, Peabody- and Emmy-award winning television producer, stand-up comedian, and co-author of Do the Work! An Antiracist Activity Book
"Chang has masterfully crafted a riveting, nuanced and complex portrait of an icon. He tracks Bruce Lee’s remarkable journey as a charismatic child star turned delinquent teen fighter in Hong Kong, to his lonely and humbling exile to America. Chang not only offers one of the most powerful and thoroughly human looks at the flawed but vulnerable man behind the myth, but of an America that continues to question our right as Asian Americans simply to exist in this country." - Olivia Cheng, actor and star of Bruce Lee’s Warrior
"Chang, a hip-hop scholar (“Can’t Stop Won’t Stop”) and activist, places his subject in the context of Asian American identity and pride. Tracing Lee’s journey from youth in Hong Kong to his rise to Western stardom to his death at the age of 32, Chang reveals both the global icon and the complex human being who helped put martial arts on the American map." - Los Angeles Times in its "30 Must-Read Books for Summer" Round-up
"Masterful.... Water Mirror Echo convincingly, compellingly transforms Lee from heroic idea to an unforgettable man central to Asian American history." - BookPage (starred)
“This revelatory biography vividly captures [Lee's] hunger and his hubris, as well as the sparkplug charisma and rigid discipline that made him an icon. But what really elevates Water Mirror Echo is the way Jeff Chang, author of the touchstone Can’t Stop Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation, places Lee’s story within a concurrent bloom of Asian American identity. Chang tracks that cultural and political dimension so deftly that it feels inseparable from his biographical subject — and more than 50 years after his untimely death, so it is.” - NPR
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Jeff Chang’s first book, Can’t Stop Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation, was named one of the best American nonfiction books of the last quarter century. He has been a USA Ford Fellow in Literature and, among numerous other honors, has won the American Book Award and the Asian American Literary Award. Chang has written three other acclaimed bestsellers on American history and culture, music, and the arts. In May 2019, he and director Bao Nguyen created a four-episode digital series adaptation of his award-winning book We Gon’ Be Alright for PBS Indie Lens Storycast. Chang was featured in Nguyen’s ESPN Bruce Lee documentary, Be Water; the PBS series, Asian Americans; and Lisa Ling’s CNN series, This Is Life.
