mónica teresa ortiz

NonfictionSocial ScienceNature

The Serviceberry

Review by mónica teresa ortiz

The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World is the latest offering from botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer, an enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, one of the great Anishinaabe peoples of the Great Lakes. This slim but powerful volume continues the work of her previous books, including Gathering Moss and the New York Times bestseller Braiding Sweetgrass. Here, she draws from the traditional Anishinaabe economy for her understanding of reciprocity and gift economies, ones where, she writes, “a system of redistribution of wealth [is] based on abundance and the pleasure of sharing.”

Through vivid descriptions of the heartbeats around her—cedar waxwings, bluebirds, neighbors sharing garden-grown zucchini—Kimmerer immerses readers in her kinship and connection to the land. Moving between Western science and her own Potawatomi knowledge, she illustrates an accessible model for building reciprocal relationships with both nonhuman and human life around us through the harvesting and sharing of a fruit known as Amelanchier—or serviceberry, “Saskatoon, Juneberry, Shadbush, Shadblow, Sugarplum, Sarvis.” Kimmerer writes that “ethnobotanists know that the more names a plant has, the greater its cultural importance” and informs us that serviceberries are medicinal fruits that also synchronize “the seasonal rounds of traditional Indigenous people, who move in an annual cycle through their homelands to where the foods are ready.”

Kimmerer breaks down how an extractive economic system like capitalism, which focuses on individualism, competition and exploitation of resources, impacts our spirits; she does so in a language and tone that is generous, even toward the violence of such a system. Indigenous people, she explains, change themselves to suit the land’s changes of harvest, whereas Western methods of farming attempt to make the land suit a population’s desires and consumptions. “We force the food to come to us, at considerable financial and ecological costs,” Kimmerer notes, “rather than following the practice of taking what has been given to us, each in its own time.”

“The land is the source of all goods and services, which are distributed in a kind of gift exchange: one life is given in support of another. The focus is on supporting the good of the people, not only an individual.” The Serviceberry is a kind reminder that we would do well to restore the sovereignty and practices of Indigenous peoples for the present and future of our world.

Botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer, author of Braiding Sweetgrass, returns with a powerful meditation on economics rooted in abundance and sharing.
NonfictionMemoir

First in the Family

Review by mónica teresa ortiz

In the opening chapter of Jessica Hoppe’s stunning memoir, First in the Family: A Story of Survival, Recovery, and the American Dream, the debut author writes, “The most powerful weapon in the American arsenal is the story.” And what a storyteller she is. Moving between lyrical prose and straightforward narration, Hoppe weaves a multigenerational family saga with biting critiques of the oppressive systems that enable devastating pipelines of addiction. 

Hoppe begins with her own alcoholism and path to recovery. But First in the Family is not your standard recovery memoir. Hoppe, who is a daughter of Honduran and Ecuadorian immigrants, writes that “the conditions caused by the traumas of migration, assimilation, colonialism, and marginalization . . . are never properly linked to substance use disorder: instead they’re pathologized and reduced to stereotypes.” If that sounds heady, keep reading. Hoppe illustrates this argument with memorable scenes that show the fraught histories of homelands and lingering harms passed down in families. 

“I know we carry generations of pain, and because we don’t tend to this sorrow—because we don’t know how to—we continue to hurt others,” Hoppe writes after the passing of her grandfather, her mother’s “greatest tormentor” who abandoned the family when she was a child. Like Hoppe, he had substance abuse disorder. In early sobriety, Hoppe sought out more information about him to understand her own addiction. Her grandfather came of age during the “decades of dictators” in Honduras, working as a laborer for the American-owned United Fruit Company, which was known for its exploitation of workers. Like many others, the company introduced drugs and alcohol to workers, and addiction was used as a method of control. “Overworked and underpaid, alcohol dulled the pang of workers’ oppression,” she writes. Her grandfather “was no match against greedy imperial forces.” His dreams of success turned to disillusionment, and “conditions caused by the traumas” did their work. 

As Hoppe digs further into her family history, she unearths hard truths that her loved ones have hid from one another and, oftentimes, from themselves. First in the Family stitches together recollections from her family with her historical and social investigations, balancing stories of harm and violence with the voice of a tender narrator. The result is a deeply moving memoir about how understanding our histories—both present and past—allows for recovery and healing rooted in the politics of liberation. 

Jessica Hoppe’s stunning debut memoir, First in the Family, shows that understanding our histories allows for recovery, healing and liberation.
NonfictionSocial ScienceEnvironment

The Nature of Our Cities

Review by mónica teresa ortiz

Soil sensors prevent trees from dying in a college town in the Netherlands. A Boston arborist digitally tracks the city’s urban forest, helping efforts to maintain and preserve the canopy. A Silicon Valley entrepreneur develops an app to alert residents of wildfires. In The Nature of Our Cities: Harnessing the Power of the Natural World to Survive a Changing Planet, author and ecological engineer Nadina Galle sprints from one environmental challenge to the next, studying—and sometimes offering—possible ways to repair urban ecosystems in a time of urgent climate disaster. 

As Galle moves from region to region, the book finds its emotional center through the different people she works with. One of the most instrumental connections she makes is with Richard Louv, the 73-year-old bestselling author of Last Child in the Woods and an advocate for fostering relationships between children and nature. On a hike outside San Diego, Louv shares his belief that technology should be used “to restore our equilibrium with nature,” noting that “The right tech gets us outside, enriching our experience. The wrong tech locks us into a screen.” The conversation prompts Galle to study kid-friendly apps that draw people out of their homes, like Pokémon GO and iNaturalist, while also noting that “nature’s value should not be reduced to what it does for us.” 

The Nature of Our Cities is an approachable and easily digestible read for anyone interested in learning more about the convergence of technology in urban landscapes from a social science perspective. However, the optimistic, accessible tone means that the book skates over directly naming systems like capitalism or colonialism as the causes of vulnerability in our most critical infrastructures. Instead, Galle tends to stick to the small picture, calling out “planners and municipal leaders who subscribed to an ill-fated ambition to sever our connection with the ecosystems around us.” 

Galle visits lands recovering from disaster, such as Paradise, California, an area left scorched by wildfires. In this chapter, the author makes a rare nod to the land management skills of Indigenous people, acknowledging the “bounty of plant and animal life” that European and American settlers encountered in the Pacific Northwest. “They believed it to be a perfect representation of an unspoiled, permanent landscape rather than a delicate equilibrium in everlasting flux.” More research into Indigenous land management and technology would have deepened the narrative and provided a less Eurocentric lens. 

Galle, who grew up in a once heavily forested part of southern Ontario, is a naturalist in the way of Ralph Waldo Emerson, writing, “The longer I stay in the woods, the more I change.” The Nature of Our Cities shows her deep enthusiasm for finding ways that technology can support ecosystems in crisis, and will be of use to those interested in such innovations. 

An ecological engineer travels the world to learn how technology can address urban eco-crises in the approachable The Nature of Our Cities.
NonfictionMemoirLGBTQ+

Pretty

Review by mónica teresa ortiz

As the Texas legislature attempts to ban books; dismantle diversity, equity and inclusion; and threaten LGBTQ+ people with draconian laws, poet and author KB Brookins’ debut memoir, Pretty, arrives when we need it most. Brookins is a Black, queer and trans writer and cultural worker whose previous work includes two poetry collections, Freedom House and How to Identify Yourself With a Wound. Pretty details their experience navigating gender and Black masculinity while growing up in Fort Worth, Texas, exploring how they have moved through a world of cisgender Black and non-Black people, from their biological parents to their adopted family, from classmates to lovers, and from their gender transition through adulthood.

Brookins spent their youth challenging binary spaces and expectations. From early childhood to the present, they have desired to be seen as pretty, and this book is the search to find out what that means for them: “Though not gendered, we often associate prettiness with womanhood, femininity, and objects we see as dainty,” they write. “I’ve never been interested in womanhood, but I’ve always wanted to be treated softly, like a fat pleasantry to the eyes.” Through often striking prose and imagery, Brookins questions the restrictions involved in those associations: “When I was femme, my prettiness was canceled out by Blackness. When I was butch, my prettiness was seen as invalidating my masculinity. Who taught us that masculinity can’t be pretty? Who taught us that Blackness was devoid of prettiness and delicacy?”

While Brookins searches for answers to these questions, they continuously remind us of how hostile the U.S. is to Black and trans people: “As the perception of me changes before my eyes, I realize that it is a specific sadness—embodying patriarchal masculinity in a country that wants your blood more than it wants you to breathe.” We need words and stories like this. By describing their movement through the world, Brookins simultaneously critiques the conditions that oppress Black and racialized people who seek radical self-acceptance, and refuses the state’s malicious attempts to criminalize gender and sexuality.

Pretty offers far more than just pretty words—Brookins tells their side of the story as an act of resistance against those who would silence them. This book is as much a story of self-discovery and survival as it is a love letter to their younger and current self.

As Texas threatens LGBTQ+ people with draconian laws, KB Brookins’ memoir, Pretty, is an act of resistance against those who would silence trans writers.
NonfictionMemoir

The Dead Don’t Need Reminding

Review by mónica teresa ortiz

Julian Randall’s The Dead Don’t Need Reminding: In Search of Fugitives, Mississippi, and Black TV Nerd Shit is a dazzling ghost story that braids intimate narratives with cultural commentary to explore the author’s own past, present and future.

Randall, a Chicago-born poet and author, opens The Dead Don’t Need Reminding in Oxford, Mississippi, where he is attending an M.F.A. program. There, living in the South for the first time in his life, he reflects on the origins of plantation-style architecture in the university’s modern-day fraternity houses and endures violent encounters with racists. He seeks out the history of his Southern-born great-grandfather who “fled his home under threat of tar and feather.” Throughout, he riffs on Miles Morales, Jordan Peele, “BoJack Horseman” and many more cultural touchstones to tell stories of his lineage, of himself and of the places that shaped his family. 

These are the “stories that shape us. The stories we turn to out of scarcity, the cousins we make out of characters.” While there are tender notes in his writing, Randall never avoids the violence of our American history and present, writing that “white supremacy is a death cult, a religion for the feral.” And, “America is a gaping mouth with an insatiable appetite for Black suffering, Black labor, Black cool, Black flex, Black silence, Black death.”

This is a story not just about a Black man surviving a visit to the Deep South, but about him staying alive long enough to learn where he came from. Our narrator invites us to witness his vulnerability and imagination, shepherding us through time and place from Chicago to the South and back again as he shares his research into his lineage and the depths of his depression. Through smart cultural critique to rich poetic imagery, Randall’s writing moves at a quick pace that reflects his city roots; but when he slows down to describe the lands and people that haunt him, we witness a gifted Southern storyteller. And so we gather on the porch, waiting to hear this story, low and soft, drifting through the kudzu.  

In The Dead Don’t Need Reminding, Chicago poet Julian Randall braids memoir, history and cultural criticism, revealing himself to be a gifted storyteller.

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