by Leah ZaniStrike Patterns

FORTHCOMING TITLES

STRIKE PATTERNS Lives After a Secret War LEAH ZANI

In the tradition of Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, a vividly drawn narrative that asks: how do people create meaningful lives after war?

From 1964 to 1973, the United States engaged in a covert air war and counter-insurgency programme against Laos. Ultimately it dropped two million tons of ordnance on the tiny Asian nation, killing a tenth of its inhabitants and leaving it the most heavily bombed country per capita in the world. Known as the Secret War, the conflict in Laos remains the longest and most intense air war in history, but despite its becoming a kind of model for modern warfare, it is not well-known – in part because its casualties and effects feel so remote. In STRIKE PATTERNS, the poet and ethnographer Leah Zani brings home – and down to earth – the aftermath of this war.

A strike pattern is a signature of violence etched into the land – as bomb craters, unexploded ordnance, the fragments left behind by war. Yet, as Zani movingly shows, the human consequences of war far exceed this zone of physical destruction. Through a collection of linked stories, STRIKE PATTERNS excavates the far larger human impact zone of loss, longing, fear and shared hope.

Our stories of war generally focus on the gore of the battleground – but what happens after the soldiers leave and the planes fly away? A half-century after the war, Zani tells the stories of Communist Party cadres, spies, shamans and ritual healers, ghosts, war scrap traders, farmers and explosives-clearance technicians whom she encounters in her fieldwork. Despite residing in a country pockmarked by bombing and with the daily threat of buried explosives underfoot, the people she speaks to find meaning and hope, leading lives delicately balanced between the mundane and the extraordinary.

Combining rigorous ethnography and gorgeous prose, Zani paints a rich picture of lives lived in a land ravaged by a long-ago war.

LEAH ZANi is an anthropologist and author writing on the social impact of war. She received her PhD and MA in anthropology from the University of California, Irvine, and has since been awarded several grants and fellowships, including the Human Rights Center Fellowship, the Social Science Merit Fellowship, the Social Science Research Network Fellowship, and the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Program Fellowship. She has conducted research with both academic and development organizations internationally, including as a Human Rights Research Fellow with the Nobel prize–winning Mines Advisory Group in Laos. She is the author of BOMB CHILDREN: Life in the Former Battlefields of Laos (Duke University Press, 2019). Her writing has appeared in American Anthropologist, Cultural Anthropology, Environmental Humanities, Asian Ethnology, Anthropology and Humanism, Somatosphere, Platypus, Los Angeles Review of Books, Broad Street Magazine, Consequence Magazine and Tikkun Magazine.

Agent: Tisse Takagi

Publisher: Stanford University Press Delivery: Autumn 2020 Publication: Autumn 2021 Status: Proposal and sample chapters Length: 65,000 words

RECENTLY PUBLISHED

WATERS OF THE WORLD The Story of the Scientists Who Unravelled the Mysteries of Our Seas, Glaciers ands Atmosphere – and Made the Planet Whole SARAH DRY

Sparkles with lyricism and wit. Dry is a gifted storyteller, and her research into the pre-history of Earth system science has turned up gripping tales of risk, adventure, defiance, and discovery. A unique and important book – Deborah R. Coen, author of CLIMATE IN MOTION

Not only timely but also one of the most beautifully written books on science that I have seen in a long time… seductive, poetic, enthralling – Philip Ball, author of H 2 O: A Biography of Water

Brings to life [the] chain of researchers who helped to reveal the dynamics of Earth’s planetary systems and humanity’s growing impact on them – NATURE

How did we come to have a global climate? What role do the complex interactions of ice, ocean and atmosphere play in sustaining life on Planet Earth? And who are the scientists who worked out all these intricate processes?

WATERS OF THE WORLD is a tour through 150 years of the history of a significant but underappreciated idea: that the Earth has a global climate system made up of interconnected parts, constantly changing on all scales of both time and space. A prerequisite for the discovery of global warming and climate change, this idea was forged by scientists studying water in its myriad forms. This is their story.

Linking the history of the planet with the lives of those who studied it, Sarah Dry follows the remarkable scientists who ascended volcanic peaks to peer through an atmosphere’s worth of water vapour, cored mile-thick ice sheets to uncover the Earth’s ancient climate history and flew inside storm clouds to understand how small changes in energy can produce both massive storms and the general circulation of the Earth’s atmosphere. Each toiled on his or her own corner of the planetary puzzle. Gradually, their cumulative discoveries coalesced into a unified working theory of our planet’s climate.

We now call this field climate science, and in recent years it has provoked great passions, anxieties and warnings. But no less than the object of its study, the science of water and climate is – and always has been – evolving. By revealing the complexity of this history, WATERS OF THE WORLD delivers a better understanding of our planet’s climate at a time when we need it the most.

SARAH DRY is a writer and historian of science. She has a PhD in the history of science from the University of Cambridge, where she was awarded a Gates Cambridge Fellowship from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and studied history and literature as an undergraduate at Harvard University. Her previous books include CURIE: A Life (Haus, 2004) and THE NEWTON PAPERS: The Strange and True Odyssey of Isaac Newton’s Private Manuscripts (Oxford University Press, 2013). She lives in Oxford with her family.

Agent: Peter Tallack

Publisher: University of Chicago Press (US)/Scribe (UK) Publication: 25 October 2019 (US)/10 October 2019 (UK) Length: 336 pages

All rights available excluding UK & Commonwealth (Scribe), US & Canada (University of Chicago Press), Japan (Kawadeshobo-Shinsha), Russia (Alpina)