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Great Women Sculptors

The beautifully printed, encyclopedic Great Women Sculptors brings together more than 300 artists who have been excluded from institutions and canons on the basis of gender.
The beautifully printed, encyclopedic Great Women Sculptors brings together more than 300 artists who have been excluded from institutions and canons on the basis of gender.
NonfictionSocial ScienceLGBTQ+

American Teenager

Nico Lang’s powerful American Teenager closely follows seven transgender young adults, rendering complex, searing and sensitive portraits of their lives.
Nico Lang’s powerful American Teenager closely follows seven transgender young adults, rendering complex, searing and sensitive portraits of their lives.
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NonfictionFood & DrinkCookbooks

Koreaworld

Review by Yi Jiang

“You are about to read the story of a culinary revolution,” Koreaworld: A Cookbook proclaims as it launches into a frenetic exploration of Korean and Korean-inspired food spanning from Jeju Island to North Virginia. After focusing on more traditional offerings in its first half, this animated celebration jumps to new interpretations of Korean food, such as banana milk cake and Shin Ramyun with pita chips. Authors Deuki Hong and Matt Rodbard provide their own musings on different preparation styles—using 7UP to flavor pickles, for example—while peppering in cultural history and modern context. The authors spotlight chefs throughout Korea and the U.S. and all their various influences, which span a bevy of cuisines, from Jewish to Chinese.

The sheer volume of restaurants and people profiled causes the book to meander in a fashion that sometimes feels scattered, but the abundance of eclectic detail will appeal strongly to diehard Korean food enthusiasts. Hong and Rodbard’s familiar rapport with many of their subjects lends a personal feeling to Koreaworld that is accentuated by Alex Lau’s stylish, energetic photography. Anyone interested in exploring the wild, exciting new frontiers of Korean food will find this book a fresh delight.

 

Anyone interested in exploring the wild, exciting new frontiers of Korean food will find Koreaworld a fresh delight.

Dogland

Tommy Tomlinson’s wry, witty Dogland leads readers behind the scenes and in front of the judges at 100-plus dog shows around the country.
NonfictionEssays

Disability Intimacy

Review by Beth Thielman

Disabled existence is a near-constant exercise in ingenuity. Writer and activist Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha calls it “picking the lock of our lives.” Sussing out where we fit, with whom and when we can finally just be is all part of our lifelong search for belonging, partnership and access that’s specifically cripped. 

Disability Intimacy: Essays on Love, Care, and Desire is the latest anthology edited by author and activist Alice Wong (Year of the Tiger). Its 40 contributors explore the myriad ways we disabled folks long for, cultivate and savor intimacy. Yep, it’s about sex. And friendship. And activism. And pets. And art. And the self. 

True to the principles of disability justice (a term coined by artist Patty Berne, creator of the disability justice-based performance project Sins Invalid), Disability Intimacy is intersectional and multifaceted, illuminating prismatic points where all the people, experiences and places we call beloved converge. 

In this memorable follow-up to her Disability Visibility anthology, Wong has curated a collection of essays from multiply marginalized disabled people, including writers and activists who are LGBTQ+, poor, multiracial and of color. In every case, Disability Intimacy contributors offer new ways to consider how the many facets of identity shape intimacy needs, desire and relationships. An essay by journalist s.e. smith meditates on the thoughts and emotions that come up during physical therapy; Rabbi Elliot Kulka explores the liberation found in rest while parenting; Piepzna-Samarasinha writes beautifully about longing and solitude. “My body is the oldest story in the world,” writes Naomi Ortiz. “Part broken, part brilliant, all nuance, disability offers a layer of perspective that is unique and profound.” 

Taken together, the perspectives in Disability Intimacy honor our collective grief over intimacy lost (or never shared). They celebrate the joy of found community and chosen family that comes with discovering similar lived experience. And they make you think about love, closeness and heartbreak in more complex and nuanced ways.

Disability is far from a monolith; readers may relate to and enjoy some parts of this collection more than others. That’s part of what makes Wong’s collections so affirming and real. This provocative, funny and insightful book will appeal to anyone looking for a deeper understanding of disabled identities, a greater appreciation for their own disabled ingenuity, or both.

In Alice Wong’s illuminating Disability Intimacy, writers explore the myriad ways disabled people long for, cultivate and savor intimacy.

Committed

In her stirring memoir, Committed, Suzanne Scanlon tracks her entwined reading and mental health histories.
NonfictionFood & DrinkBiography

Chop Fry Watch Learn

Review by Yi Jiang

Michelle T. King’s relationship with Fu Pei-mei began in childhood, with the constant presence of Pei Mei’s Chinese Cook Book in her parents’ kitchen. She did not realize the extent of Fu’s impact or fame as the host of a beloved, long-running cooking show in Taiwan until years later. In Chop Fry Watch Learn: Fu Pei-mei and the Making of Modern Chinese Food, this personal connection with Fu allows King, a “Chinese American by way of Taiwan” (how King depicts the complexity of her cultural identity), to illuminate the often misunderstood nuances within the relationship between food and “a people like China’s—riven by decades of war, dislocation, upheaval, and migration.” As King states, food is not simply a comforting taste of home, but “a fickle mistress: a poor approximation of a beloved dish may simply remind you of everything you have lost.”

King weaves history lessons, personal anecdotes and firsthand interviews into the thoroughly researched Chop Fry Watch Learn in order to paint the extent of Fu’s legacy. It’s a tremendous undertaking, which King tackles head-on as she cycles through a vast number of subjects, ranging from historical Chinese attitudes towards food and the women cooking, to the complicated relationship between Taiwan and China throughout the 20th century, to the muddiness of diaspora identity, to broader ideas surrounding domestic labor, feminism and globalization. King argues that food binds it all together, and readers are sure to find her diligent biography compelling.

Michelle T. King’s Chop Fry Watch Learn is an engrossing biography of famed cookbook author Fu Pei-mei.

Chamber Divers

In Chamber Divers, Rachel Lance uncovers the Navy scientists who risked their lives to improve the odds of underwater and amphibious missions in World War II.
Nonfiction

Ascent to Power

Review by Roger Bishop

Harry S. Truman had served only 42 days as vice president when Franklin D. Roosevelt died on April 12, 1945. Truman had been a respected senator, best known for creating a commission that tracked government spending and saved the country millions during World War II, but despite FDR’s ailing health, the president had done nothing to prepare his successor to assume the highest office in the country. In a pointed diary note from May 6, 1948, Truman wrote, “I was handicapped by lack of knowledge of both foreign and domestic affairs—due principally to Mr. Roosevelt’s inability to pass on responsibility. He was always careful to see that no credit went to anyone else for accomplishment.”

How Truman moved to end the war and met many other challenges with long-range implications in both international affairs and domestic policy is the subject of David L. Roll’s sprawling, insightful, well-researched and engagingly written Ascent to Power: How Truman Emerged From Roosevelt’s Shadow and Remade the World. This period, Roll writes, “spawned the most consequential and productive events since the Civil War,” and the U.S. “emerged from the Second World War as the most powerful nation in the world.” Skillfully presenting often conflicting accounts of events as perceived by key figures, Roll shows that despite numerous missteps, controversies and public criticism, the Truman administration’s record of achievement is ultimately impressive.

As the Cold War developed, Truman broke from FDR’s friendly approach to the Soviet Union, blaming the nation for “destroy[ing] the independence and democratic character” of Europe. Truman boosted U.S. military strength “as a means of preventing war.” Although he faced strong opposition from Congress, Truman continued to pursue New Deal policies and introduced a courageous civil rights agenda far beyond anything ever proposed by a previous president. His international affairs initiatives, which became known as the Truman Doctrine, helped revive the economies of Western Europe and Japan, and “made bold and risky decisions that led to the liberation of millions of human beings” abroad—though Roll also admits that Truman’s support of Zionism came “at great cost to the lives of Palestinian Arabs,” who were driven from their homes and businesses to become “starving and dispossessed.” 

In 1952, Winston Churchill told Truman, “You more than any other man saved Western civilization.” Ascent to Power’s carefully crafted narrative superbly shows how he did it.

Ascent to Power is a carefully crafted biography that superbly captures the presidency of Harry S. Truman.
NonfictionMedicine

A Fatal Inheritance

Review by Deborah Mason

There are families whose histories are riddled with cancer: little boys and their young fathers dying from brain cancer, toddlers succumbing to eye cancer while their young mothers are diagnosed with breast cancer. Lawrence Ingrassia, an award-winning business journalist, comes from one of those families; he lost his mother, three siblings and a nephew to cancer. His family had no idea why they were dealt such a horrific hand. Environmental factors? A virus? The rotten luck of the draw? It never occurred to them to blame their genes. Until recently, most experts believed that genetics played no role in cancer. In A Fatal Inheritance: How a Family Misfortune Revealed a Deadly Medical Mystery, Ingrassia tells the story of how wrong these experts were.

While many researchers have investigated possible genetic links to cancer, Ingrassia focuses on the work of doctors Frederick Pei Li and Joseph Fraumeni Jr. Their research eventually led to the discovery of what is now known as Li-Fraumeni Syndrome, a rare inheritable genetic mutation that increases the risk of many forms of cancer. People with LFS are likely to have cancer at a young age, even in infancy, and frequently can develop more than one type. Ingrassia’s family carries the mutation, although he didn’t inherit it.

Ingrassia weaves in the stories of his and other Li-Fraumeni families, never allowing the reader to forget the human suffering that spurred the research. His sister Gina’s story is particularly devastating. Months after Angela, the youngest Ingrassia sibling, died from abdominal cancer at 24, Gina developed a nagging cough. She was young, a long-distance runner and a nonsmoker. Her doctor thought she might have an infection. Instead, newly married and still grieving the death of her baby sister, Gina was diagnosed with a large cell lung carcinoma usually seen in smokers in their 60s. She was only 32 when she died.

Ingrassia is a brave and honest writer. He details the suffering endured by the dying and their families and acknowledges their fear, anger and confusion, as well as the many unanswerable questions around this genetic disorder. In this compassionate book, Ingrassia grants his subjects the dignity of being remembered not only for their deaths, but for their all-too-short lives.

A Fatal Inheritance recounts the discovery of how cancer can be passed down through genes, providing a compassionate look at families forever changed.
NonfictionTrue Crime

Rabbit Heart

Review by Anna Christensen

Early in the shattering true crime memoir Rabbit Heart: A Mother’s Murder, A Daughter’s Story, Kristine S. Ervin pauses mid-sentence to tackle a question of grammar. Which tense does one use when discussing a relationship in which one person has died? It is a question that seems to form the crux of this stunning debut: that such a relationship does continue, though on very altered lines.

When Ervin was 8, her mother was abducted from a parking lot, her body later found in an Oklahoma oil field. Both the mechanics of the police investigation and emotional reverberations continued for the next 25 years, the brutal act lapsing into cold case territory. Lost in the background was Ervin, a confused child growing into a motherless teenager, the years bringing with them both new, terrible information about her mother’s killing and an evolving relationship with the mother Ervin might have had. Ervin achingly portrays not just the unmoored girlhood she experienced, but the lifelong processing of trauma that comes from personal and early knowledge of the violence against women lurking around every corner.

In the opening pages, Ervin dedicates the book to her 8-year-old self, and indeed, parts read as her efforts to reach backwards and mother her younger self in the absence of her murdered parent. While the facts of the crime and the unfolding of the investigation are clearly and baldly delineated, this is an emotional journey intimately revealed. Ervin is a poet, and her language here is lyrical. Her depictions of unimaginable cruelty cut so close to the bone that they feel almost tangibly interior. Rhapsodic and startling, Rabbit Heart moves inside of you and explores the places of rage and grief that are often left unmonitored, revealing both the power and danger of womanhood in a violent world.

Kristine S. Ervin’s Rabbit Heart is a shattering, rhapsodic true crime memoir that will get inside you.

Prescription for Pain

Prescription for Pain investigates how a pediatrician built an opioid empire in rural Ohio, leaving a trail of devastation in his wake.

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