"A fictional autobiography in an alternate 20th Century that chronicles one woman's unusual life, including the price she pays to survive and the cost her choices hold for the society she is trying to save"--

"Before the First World War, enthusiasm for a borderless world reached its height. International travel, migration, trade, and progressive projects on matters ranging from women's rights to world peace reached a crescendo. Yet in the same breath, an undercurrent of reaction was growing, one that would surge ahead with the outbreak of war and its aftermath. In Against the World, a sweeping and ambitious work of history, acclaimed scholar Tara Zahra...

The spellbinding story of the Roosevelt-Willkie election season, when bitterly divided Americans debated the fate of the nation and the world. "In 1940, against the explosive backdrop of the Nazi onslaught in Europe, two farsighted candidates for the U.S. presidency--Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt, running for an unprecedented third term, and talented Republican businessman Wendell Willkie--found themselves on the defensive against American isolationists...

"Walls are going up. Nationalism and identity politics are on the rise once more. Thousands of miles of fences and barriers have been erected in the past ten years, and they are redefining our political landscape. ; There are many reasons why we erect walls, because we are divided in many ways: wealth, race, religion, politics. In Europe the ruptures of the past decade threaten not only European unity, but in some countries liberal democracy itself....

The world is changing in ways most of us find incomprehensible. Terrorism spills out of the Middle East into Europe. Russia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, China and Japan vie to see who can be most aggressive. Financial breakdown in Asia and Europe guts growth, challenging hard-won political stability. Yet for the Americans, these changes are fantastic. Alone among the world's powers, only the United States is geographically wealthy, demographically robust,...

"Franklin Roosevelt awoke at 2:50 a.m. on September 1, 1939 to the news that Germany had invaded Poland, signaling the start of World War II. The president had warned for years that Hitler's fascist regime posed an existential threat to democracy, but the American public remained stubbornly isolationist as fascist sympathizing groups, egged on by right wing media stars promoting anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, plotted to overthrow the president....