In The Face Evil: Helping Others, a Reading

Julia Flynn Siler is the author of Lost Kingdom: Hawaii's Last Queen, the Sugar Kings, and America's First Imperial Adventure, and The House of Mondavi: The Rise and Fall of an American Wine Dynasty, a finalist for a James Beard Award and a Gerald Loeb Award for distinguished reporting. A veteran journalist, Siler is a longtime contributor and former staff writer for The Wall Street Journal and has been a guest commentator on the BBC, CNBC, and CNN. Siler is the author of The White Devil's Daughters: The Women Who Fought Slavery in San Francisco's Chinatown (Knopf), a revelatory history of the trafficking of young Asian girls that flourished in San Francisco during the first hundred years of Chinese immigration, and an in-depth look at the "safe house" that became a refuge for those seeking their freedom. Beginning in 1874, the Occidental Mission Home on the edge of San Francisco's Chinatown served as a gateway to freedom for thousands of enslaved and vulnerable young Chinese women and girls. Run by a courageous group of female abolitionists who fought the slave trade in Chinese women, it survived earthquakes, fire, bubonic plague, and violence directed against its occupants and supporters. With compassion and an investigative historian's sharp eye, Siler tells the story of both the abolitionists who challenged the corrosive anti-Chinese prejudices of the time and the young women who dared to flee their fate. This is a remarkable chapter in an overlooked part of our history, told with sympathy and vigor.

Maggie Paxson is a writer, anthropologist, and performer. She is the author of Solovyovo: The Story of Memory in a Russian Village, and her essays have appeared in The Washington Post Magazine, Wilson Quarterly, and Aeon. In The Plateau (Riverhead Books), Paxson sets out to explore an extraordinary story: During World War II, in the Plateau Vivarais-Lignon, a region in Nazi-held Southern France, ordinary people risked their lives to rescue many hundreds of strangers, mostly Jewish children. In fact, there is a tradition there, dating back centuries, of offering refuge to those in need. Today it offers refuge to migrants. Why? As she explores, what began as an anthropological pursuit becomes personal. Her search turns up new answers, new questions, and a renewed faith in the possibilities for us all, in an age when global conflict has set millions adrift. In a starred review, Publishers Weekly noted that The Plateau was “Lyrical, complex, [and] genre-melding...History, memoir, profound soul-searching about peace, and meditations on the moral limitations of observation (rather than action) […] The beautifully written, often heartrending narrative is as unforgettable as the region and individuals it brings to life.”