Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
How to Look Away: On American Cruelty and the Refusal to Disappear

How to Look Away: On American Cruelty and the Refusal to Disappear

Peña, Daniel

Hardcover

Biographies GeneralLetters & EssaysMexican History

Publisher Price: $28.00

PREORDER - Expected ship date October 6, 2026

ISBN10: 0593596390
ISBN13: 9780593596395
Publisher: One World
Published: Oct 6 2026
Pages: 208
Weight: 1.25
Language: English
A riveting, kaleidoscopic portrait of the American compulsion toward cruelty and our power to subvert it from an award-winning contributor to The Guardian and The New York Times.

In How to Look Away, Daniel Peña explores how fringe elements of his Texas childhood--AM radio, conspiracy theories, Post-Cold War paranoia--came to dominate the American political discourse and contributed to our extreme tolerance of human rights abuses against migrants from Latin America and elsewhere. He asks: What compels us to look away from these abuses? And how do we wake ourselves into action?

These evocative essays braid journalism, cultural criticism, and memoir, roaming from the vestigial Comanche War battlefields of his native Austin, to the black markets of Mexico City, to the home of a cartel hitman's family doomed to live in the unglamorous aftermath of his crimes. Writing from both Mexico and the United States, Daniel Peña reflects on two childhood fears: demons and the death penalty. Or the answer to the question, Do you ever really belong to yourself? A question that serves as the looking glass through which Peña meditates on American citizenship and the kinds of people we are willing to disappear in the name of the American project.

How to Look Away conjures disquiet and longing beside clarity and hope as it offers a haunting account of the strange bond between two nations, this American moment, and the land upon which our bodies stand.

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