Every Last Bite is an accessible, practical cookbook that will be welcomed by anyone looking to rein in their food budget and avoid excess waste and energy usage.
In her introduction to Didion and Babitz, Lili Anolik lays out her plan: “What this book attempts to do: See Joan Didion plainly; see Eve Babitz plainly. Except Joan Didion can’t be seen plainly,” only “through a glass darkly. Eve Babitz is that glass.”
Babitz, born in 1943, was a child of Hollywood. Her father was a violinist for movie studios, her godfather was Igor Stravinsky. At 20, she made waves for posing nude with Marcel Duchamp as the two played chess. Though she wanted to be an artist and design album covers, she’s remembered for her memoir and short stories recounting the sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll scene of early-1970s Los Angeles. But Babitz’s drug-fueled lifestyle got in her way, and her writing was largely forgotten until Anolik got to know her in 2012. Anolik’s profile for Vanity Fair and a 2019 biography, Hollywood’s Eve, sparked a resurgence of interest in Babitz’s writing.
After Babitz died in 2021, Anolik stayed in touch with Babitz’s sister, Mirandi, who invited Anolik to examine the writer’s collection of letters. Anolik found one of particular interest: an unsent 1972 letter from Babitz to her friend Joan Didion. By turns earnest and angry, it sets up Babitz and Didion not as merely friends but as writerly rivals; Babitz chides Didion for dismissing Virginia Woolf and, Babitz claims, wanting to write like a man. The revelation led Anolik to begin another book about Babitz, this time including Didion.
The resulting book draws on copious interviews with Babitz’s and Didion’s networks, and the archives of Didion, Babitz and a host of others. Didion and Babitz situates the two in the 1970s LA scene that both wrote about, following them to the end of their lives—they died within days of one another. It’s a lively recounting of freewheeling partier Babitz and ambitious “cool customer” Didion. Despite the title, the narrative is notably tilted towards Babitz, more grounded in her work and life than in Didion’s. Still, the book captures a period and a vibe, and the celebrity gossip alone will entertain any ’70s-curious reader. Like Babitz herself, Didion and Babitz is an engaging narrative that Didion fans may quibble with, but that situates the two writers as the prime chroniclers of 1970s LA.
Lili Anolik’s Didion and Babitz is a freewheeling and engaging narrative about two iconic literary rivals and their world in 1970s Los Angeles.
Amy Sall’s The African Gaze: Photography, Cinema and Power began as a university course Sall developed at New York City’s The New School. An undercurrent of academic rigor flows throughout the volume, which functions as an introduction to African photography and film as well as a collective biography of some of its most influential players. In her preface, writer and archivist Sall distills her thoughts on the subjects she spent so many years studying, and each sentence is packed with authoritative insight. The photography section begins with self-portraits by Ghanaian Felicia Abban, who also happens to be one of the few “named and known” women photographers in Africa. Many of the book’s other highlights involve female subjects: a striking studio portrait of three women by Augustt Azaglo Cornélius Yawo; a candid shot of four young women seated around a table at a party by Jean Depara; and a woman posing seated with a single high-heeled sandal that’s been placed atop her oversized skirt by Seydou Keita. Cinema is more difficult to capture in still images, and so the Filmmakers section relies on the breadth of its subjects, which includes artists working in documentary and animation in addition to scripted dramas. Particularly evocative are images of the two protagonists of Djibril Diop Mambéty’s Touki Bouki, or the stunning close-up of the main character in Ousmane Sembene’s Black Girl. The African Gaze is an essential, encyclopedic study of African image-makers, and reading through it in its entirety made me feel like I’d actually enrolled in Sall’s course.
Amy Sall’s The African Gaze is an essential, encyclopedic study of African photographers and filmmakers that’s packed with insight and images.
Rick McIntyre began working at Yellowstone National Park in 1994, just before the Fish and Wildlife Service reintroduced gray wolves in an effort to balance the ecological diversity of the park. He has spent thousands of hours observing many generations of wolves, and documents his insights into their social dynamics in his endlessly compelling Alpha Wolves of Yellowstone series, which has brought a groundbreaking understanding of the species to readers.
Thinking Like a Wolf: Lessons From the Yellowstone Packs explores personal territory: how the wolves have inspired the author. In 2015, when McIntyre was recovering from major heart surgery, he began seeing wolf 926 (the wolves are not named) in his dreams. Small but intelligent, 926 had lived a tough life but rose to dominance in her pack. McIntyre writes that in time of need, she “motivated me to emulate her determination to advance in life regardless of any setbacks and trauma.”
He follows this powerful introduction with eight stories of different wolves. While Thinking Like a Wolf is the fifth book in the Alpha Wolves of Yellowstone series, it’s not necessary to have read any of the previous titles. The author provides a treasure trove of information at the start, including maps of the parks, illustrated renderings of the wolves and timelines that record each pack’s principal members. Based on McIntyre’s extensive field research notes, as well as deep knowledge of Yellowstone and wolf behavior, the portraits are fascinating, informative and sometimes heartbreaking. McIntyre provides remarkable histories, like that of 755, a lone wolf who sired pups in several different packs over more than nine years before disappearing from human view (he likely outlasted the battery in his collar).
The power struggles documented are reminiscent of the jockeying for dominance in Game of Thrones, and thanks to McIntyre’s compelling storytelling and keen observations, the narrative sparkles. At one point, he watches five little cubs play “like kids during recess in a schoolyard.” One of those pups is 926, the wolf who inspired the author in his cardiac recovery. Her later death and McIntyre’s efforts to honor her legacy remind us that protecting the wilderness and the wolves that call it home is not simply a responsibility, but a privilege. Thinking Like a Wolf, and the entire Alpha Wolves of Yellowstone series, is a remarkable account of animal behavior, and a singular contribution to our understanding of wildlife.
The fifth entry in Rick McIntyre’s Alpha Wolves of Yellowstone series chronicles the lives of eight wolves in stories that sparkle with insight.
In 2020, a long cypress barn near the tiny town of Drew, Mississippi, captured the attention of author Wright Thompson. Here, in the early morning hours of August 28, 1955, 14-year-old Chicagoan Emmett Till was kidnapped and then tortured and murdered by a gang of white men. His capital offense? Allegedly whistling at the wife of one of his killers. It’s a story that’s been told by other writers, but in the hands of native Mississippian Thompson, the crime and the troubled soil out of which it grew take on a profound new resonance.
Thompson grew up a half-hour’s drive away, yet he never knew that a nondescript structure just 23 miles south of his family’s home was the site of a savage murder. What’s more: It was still standing, without a marker or sign indicating what transpired there. Thompson learned of the barn from Patrick Weems, a local activist who runs the Emmett Till Interpretive Center, an organization that was formed to push Tallahatchie County to acknowledge its fault in Till’s murder and the obstruction of justice after the crime.
“Ultimately it’s a book about the fight to erase versus the fight to remember.”
Interviewed from his home in Oxford, Mississippi, in an unmistakably Southern-accented voice that comes rumbling from a place deep in his body, Thompson tells BookPage, “As a Mississippian, I needed to know more about this barn.”
The result is The Barn: The Secret History of a Murder in Mississippi, a deeply reported history rooted in that unique and specific piece of ground.
Drew is located within a 36-square mile segment of Sunflower County that, Thompson writes, has “borne witness to the birth of the blues at the nearby Dockery Plantation, to the struggle of [1960s voting rights activist] Fannie Lou Hamer, to the machinations of a founding family of the Klan, and to the death of Emmett Till.” The exact legal location of the barn is “Township 22 North, Range 4 West, Section 2, West Half, measured from the Choctaw Meridian,” a phrase that is repeated, occasionally in altered forms, more than 60 times in The Barn. Thompson says that by the time the book reaches its conclusion, he hopes his very intentional repetition “carries the swelling power of chorus.”
The Barn was a passion project, one that propelled Thompson through hundreds of interviews, some 100 visits to the barn, and archival research in places as distant as Spain and England. However, “this was not work,” he tells BookPage. “This was something I was going to do whether anybody knew anything about it or not.” Though Thompson is best known as a writer for ESPN, his last book, 2020’s Pappyland: A Story of Family, Fine Bourbon and the Things That Last, revealed that his interests extend beyond the world of sports.
“I hope everybody who reads this book will learn that telling the truth about ourselves doesn’t make you a weaker American; it makes you a stronger one.”
After sketching out the story of Emmett Till’s murder and the predictable, yet inexcusable exoneration of the men who committed it, Thompson moves into a detailed economic and cultural history of that small patch of land the barn stands on and the territory surrounding it. Though his survey spans some 400 years, he homes in most on the period from the invention of the cotton gin in 1793 through 1933, the year Congress saved the cotton industry from collapse amid the Great Depression. In that era, he says, “cotton was oil,” and Mississippi “had a seemingly limitless supply of the world’s most important commodity.”
Thompson says that one crucial element of The Barn is its focus on people like Till’s cousin Rev. Wheeler Parker Jr., who was visiting Mississippi with Till at the time of the murder; Parker’s wife, Marvel; and Drew residents like Gloria Dickerson, who integrated the town’s school system as a child and has spent her retirement working to preserve the memory of Emmett Till and give meaning to his life and death. It was important to Thompson that he honor their efforts to secure justice for Till, he says, “because ultimately it’s a book about the fight to erase versus the fight to remember.”
The work of Till’s family members and Drew residents culminated in the 2023 authorization of a national monument to commemorate Emmett Till and his mother, Mamie Till-Mobley, whose insistence on forcing Americans to confront the brutality of her son’s lynching by allowing photos of his corpse to be published in Jet magazine galvanized the Civil Rights movement. Like the Tulsa Race Massacre in 1921 and the murder of George Floyd a century later, the killing of Emmett Till is one of the most heinous racial crimes in an American history that’s deeply stained with them.
Thompson also candidly interrogates his own ambivalent relationship to his home state, writing that “the story of Till’s death is the story of the rise and rot of a tribe of people, of which I am one.” In this regard, he’s unsparing of his own ignorance. Near the end of the book, for example, he recounts his experience in a boarding school as a 16-year-old, where he festooned the walls of his dorm room with Confederate flags.
Questioned about his choice of decor, he says he had buried the memory for many years, but when it suddenly surfaced as he listened to a speech at an Emmett Till commemoration, he raced home to record it. When asked why he felt he had to take ownership of that long-ago episode, he admits some initial ambivalence, but then says, “Man, if you’re not doing this, you need to give the money back. If you’re not doing this, then everything you say you want this book to be is a lie.” The Barn is an eloquent antidote to Americans’ propensity to forget, and Thompson hopes there will be some healing power flowing from this work.
“The story of Till’s death is the story of the rise and rot of a tribe of people, of which I am one.”
“I’m a very proud American,” he says. “I hope everybody who reads this book will learn that telling the truth about ourselves doesn’t make you a weaker American; it makes you a stronger one. And seeing ourselves clearly doesn’t make us a lesser country, but a greater one. If the Mississippi Delta, and therefore America, has any future at all, it has to start with standing on one postage stamp of ground and saying, ‘This is what happened here.’ I certainly didn’t start off with that intention, but that became my sort of prayer for the thing. It’s not a book. It’s a map.”
Even as he expresses that ambition for his work, Thompson is notably humble in describing the product of his efforts: “I feel a profound sense of being a carrier of something, not the creator of it. There are going to be a lot of books written about this murder. There have been; there will be a lot more. So I’m very aware of being a tiny piece in a large mosaic of people still trying to understand how a 14-year-old child gets tortured for whistling.
“You can’t go back in time and stop it. But you can go back in time and understand exactly and specifically over the longest possible arc how all of these people came to be occupying the same piece of land on the same day at the same time in 1955. And I hope that answering that question adds to the mosaic, not just of that murder, but of every one like it.”
Photo of Wright Thompson by Evan France.
Fourteen-year-old Till was murdered in a nondescript barn in the Mississippi Delta. But few know the barn still stands today, or fully understand its history. Thompson believes we should.
In Wild Girls: How the Outdoors Shaped the Women Who Challenged a Nation, Tiya Miles explores the lives of a group of remarkable women. As she tells the stories of Louisa May Alcott, Harriet Tubman, Pocahontas and other notable female figures, Miles looks at the ways in which the great outdoors impacted their personal development and understanding of the world. Her narrative is a beautifully observed testament to the importance of place. Reading groups will find a range of discussion topics, including women’s empowerment and the influence of nature.
What an Owl Knows: The New Science of the World’s Most Enigmatic Birds by Jennifer Ackerman offers fresh perspectives on the nocturnal predator. Over the centuries, the owl has been portrayed as intelligent, vigilant and enlightened while remaining strangely inscrutable. Ackerman penetrates the bird’s unique mystique as she teams up with ornithologists and other experts to find out how owls connect with each other, acquire food and migrate. Blending the latest research with her own discerning impressions, Ackerman delivers an exceptional scientific study that’s revealing and accessible.
In Bicycling With Butterflies: My 10,201-Mile Journey Following the Monarch Migration, Sara Dykman shares the story of the remarkable odyssey she undertook in 2017. Beginning in Mexico and traveling on a ramshackle bike, Dykman followed the migration course of the eastern monarch butterfly to draw attention to the vulnerability of the species. In a tale that’s funny, insightful and poetic, Dykman reflects on the fragility of nature and the challenges of bike travel, and acquaints readers with the majestic monarch. Themes of ecology, exploration and solitude make this a rewarding book club pick.
Melissa L. Sevigny chronicles the journey of two mavericks in Brave the Wild River: The Untold Story of Two Women Who Mapped the Botany of the Grand Canyon. The hazards of the Colorado River did not deter botanists Elzada Clover and Lois Jotter, who navigated the treacherous waterway in 1938 in order to index the Grand Canyon’s plant species. Aided by a small team, the duo traveled for 43 days. Sevigny brings their expedition to vivid life in a narrative that’s at once a rip-roaring adventure story and a thoughtful account of the natural world.
Fall is a terrific time to connect with nature. Grab one of these books, gather your friends and get outside!
Leigh Ann Henion is the bestselling author of Phenomenal: A Hesitant Adventurer’s Search for Wonder in the Natural World (2015), a lyrical memoir of seeking a fulfilling life. Her second book, Night Magic: Adventures Among Glowworms, Moon Gardens, and Other Marvels of the Dark, is just as personal and personable, this time focusing on the wisdom she has found in darkness.
We are, unfortunately, obsessed with illuminating the night. Henion explains that 99% of people in the U.S. live under the influence of “skyglow—diffuse, artificial brightening of the night sky,” and she shares data about how light pollution causes health problems for humans and destroys ecosystems and the migratory patterns of birds. “Darkness is often presented as a void of doom rather than a force of nature that nourishes lives, including our own,” she writes.
Henion’s nocturnal investigation takes her to Appalachia for synchronous lightning bugs, Ohio for a moth festival and soggy, foggy Grandfather Mountain for glowworms. She hunts for migrating salamanders with a professor and his class, and she describes the harm that streetlights cause to owl habitats. She meets with specialists and scientists, and in her cheerful, thoughtful style, she shares all she learns about bats, bioluminescent mushrooms and more.
Readers who choose to follow Night Magic into the dark may find the courage to turn off that backyard floodlight, allow their eyes to adjust and see something spectacular.
It’s been over a decade since Amy Tan published her last novel, but there’s a good reason for that. In 2016, while hard at work on her next literary endeavor, Tan found her psyche and creative drive overwhelmed by the political turmoil consuming the country. When writing fiction failed to provide refuge, Tan sought it elsewhere: Making good on a long-held promise to learn to draw, she began taking nature journaling classes and found herself captivated by the birds she observed. Soon, the hobby turned into a full-on obsession, leading Tan to transform her backyard into an ideal sanctuary for local birds so she could document and sketch the fauna that visited her yard.
Written in her hallmark heartfelt and lively prose, The Backyard Bird Chronicles curates excerpts from Tan’s personal birding journals from 2017 to 2022, sharing anecdotes about her hunt for the perfect squirrel-proof seeds and feeders, the awe she felt sighting her first great horned owl, and the comedy of baby birds learning to feed. Each entry is complemented with Tan’s own drawings.
Tan’s childlike wonder at the birds she observes is contagious, but the book goes beyond a compendium of avian observations: You’ll also find introspection and rumination on universal questions about mortality, empathy, racism and our connection (and responsibility) to nature. Because her journals were written without any intention of publication, there is something truly exhilarating about the candor of Tan’s thoughts; her unguarded presence on the page sparkles with cleverness and compassion. It is the rare reader who will be immune to her unbridled enthusiasm and her message that sometimes life’s sweetest pleasures are its simplest.
The Backyard Bird Chronicles showcases a master novelist in a new light. These pages will be a buoyant balm to the soul for inquisitive readers.
Atlas Obscura got its start as a community-driven website about the weirdest destinations around the globe, but it has expanded into a podcast and books such as the bestselling Atlas Obscura and Gastro Obscura. The latest book, Atlas Obscura: Wild Life: An Explorer’s Guide to the World’s Living Wonders by Cara Giaimo and Joshua Foer, is a monumental tour through the world’s most interesting organisms, with heaping piles of facts, stories, photographs and illustrations.
Divided into chapters based on habitat, the book begins with a section on humans that emphasizes the positive aspects of our relationship with Earth. “We are of course bound to [plants, animals and organisms] with every breath of air and every bite of food. But we also learn from the species around us, using our observations of them to build new understandings of how life on Earth has been, is, and could be,” the authors write. This sets a curious and optimistic tone for the book, which is true to the overall Atlas Obscura vibe.
Wild Life is for people who say things like “Nature is metal!” when a lion kills a gazelle and are thrilled about the fact that platypuses glow under black light. Did you know that slime molds were able to replicate the Tokyo railway system? Did you know that moss balls travel as a pack in the Eurasian tundra, and no one knows why?
Along with facts about more than 500 organisms, the book also includes Q&As with such people as a grass weaver, a walrus watcher and “a crow-human conflict mediator,” suggesting that our own lives can be almost as wild as those of these incredible creatures.
—Cat Acree
Leaf, Cloud, Crow
In Margaret Renkl’s The Comfort of Crows (2023), the third book from the bestselling author, Tennessee naturalist and New York Times contributing writer, readers were invited into a weekly communion in her Nashville backyard, with 52 essays coinciding with brilliantly colorful collages by her brother, Billy Renkl. With her new guided journal, Leaf, Cloud, Crow: A Weekly Backyard Journal, Renkl extends her invitation further, drawing us into a yearlong commitment to seeing the world more clearly and, in doing so, knitting ourselves closer to it.
In her introduction to Leaf, Cloud, Crow, Renkl explains that her praxis of observation is one that she has cultivated for three decades, but even now, “It isn’t always easy to give myself over to the timeless beauty outside my window.” To help get you into the right mindset, she offers her essay “How to Pay Attention,” a clear and declarative list of things to do and be as a backyard naturalist. “Silence and stillness are your greatest tools,” she writes. “Take care not to frighten anybody. Sit quietly and let the world come to you.”
From there, Renkl puts your powers of observation and evaluation to work. Organized by seasons, the journal begins in winter, during the week of December 21-27, when the user is encouraged to go find something in the natural world—a dead leaf will do—and then make a metaphor from it. From there we learn about birding, the pain and glory of seasonal changes, the willingness to be completely perplexed by something we’ve seen, and so on, each prompt coinciding with an excerpt from The Comfort of Crows.
If you despair at the loss of ecosystems and the damage that we have done to the wild world, Renkl’s words and the lessons she imparts are a balm. For those who wish to do better, see better and (of course) write better, it’s an excellent gift.
—Cat Acree
Looking for a holiday gift for a birder, tree-hugger or civilian scientist? We’ve got just the thing.
Maria Ressa’s book is a political history of the Philippines and an intimate memoir, but it’s also a warning to democracies everywhere: Authoritarianism is a threat to us all.
