Books like Fire of Life by Smithsonian Institution

James Baldwin’s 1963 essay collection, written as two letters for the centennial of the Emancipation Proclamation, confronts America’s racial injustices and urges both black and white citizens to confront the legacy of racism.

Detective Harry Bosch and rookie partner Lucia Soto reopen a decades‑old LAPD cold case when a stray bullet finally kills its victim, uncovering a politically charged mystery that turns out to be anything but random.

Orphaned siblings Kate, Emma, and Michael journey to find the magical Books of Beginning, encountering magical creatures and facing dangerous threats while trying to retrieve them.

In an 1828 letter to his partner Nicephore Niepce, Louis Daguerre wrote, "I am burning with desire to see your experiments from nature." In this book, Geoffrey Batchen analyzes the desire to photograph as it emerged within the philosophical and scientific milieus that preceded the actual invention of photography. Recent accounts of photography's identity tend to divide between the postmodern view that all identity is determined by context and a formalist effort to define the fundamental characteristics of photography as a medium. Batchen critiques both approaches by way of a detailed discussion of photography's conception in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In this refiguring of the traditional story of photography's origins, Batchen examines the output of the various nominees for "first photographer," then incorporates this information into a mode of historical criticism informed by the work of Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida. The result is a way of thinking about photography that persuasively accords with the medium's undeniable conceptual, political, and historical complexity.