With whole-hearted essays and tempting, approachable recipes, Appetite for Change: Soulful Recipes From a North Minneapolis Kitchen shines with pluck, heart and social consciousness. Influenced by the predominantly Black residents of Minneapolis’s Northside community, the recipes have diverse roots—African, Caribbean, Southern—and were assembled by Northside-based nonprofit, Appetite for Change (AFC).
AFC was co-founded by authors Michelle Horovitz, Tasha Powell and Princess Titus in response to Northside’s troubling history of redlining, poverty and violence as well as the impact of a devastating 2011 tornado, all of which created a food desert with “no place to sit down and be served a meal of fresh ingredients.” The women “gathered friends and neighbors and literally began cooking up change” with cooking classes, gardening projects and AFC’s Breaking Bread Café. Six chapters, each with an essay by AFC co-founders and other AFC staff and volunteers, cover everything from bold vegetables to sweet treats.
Along with these recipes, Appetite for Change shows the positive social power of growing, preparing and enjoying fresh, wholesome food to nourish body, mind and spirit.
Appetite for Change collects recipes from the predominantly Black residents of Minneapolis’s Northside community, and shows the positive social power of growing, preparing and enjoying fresh, wholesome food.
You can’t help but root for the glamorous gentleman jewel thief at the center of Dean Jobb’s immersive true crime saga, the aptly titled A Gentleman and a Thief.
Each section of neuroscientist and corporate coach Nicole Vignola’s Rewire: Break the Cycle, Alter Your Thoughts and Create Lasting Change is titled with phrases that will sound familiar to readers bent on self-improvement: “Ditch the Negative,” “Shift Your Narrative,” “Boost the Positive.”
While those imperatives may not be new, the author’s explanations of how one might actually achieve those goals—via understanding and taking advantage of the brain’s neuroplasticity—feel remarkably fresh, thanks to her knowledgeable, approachable voice and gift for making the complex clear.
An edifying mix of scientific research, personal anecdotes and real-world examples of rewiring done right provide aha moments galore as Rewire leads readers on a path toward change. Herself a reformed “stressy messy,” Vignola explains that we ignore the fundamental interplay between physical and mental health at our peril (or at least frequent frustration): “The brain is your hardware, and the memories, thoughts, habits and behaviors within it are the software.” For example, someone who’s not eating properly or getting good sleep will run on “low-power mode,” making it especially difficult to overcome negative self-talk, a tendency toward rumination and other long-held habits.
Similarly, while social media is vital to Vignola’s coaching practice and educational endeavors, it’s become a serious energy drain for so many—and a brain without ample rest or space to daydream isn’t receptive to rewiring. “Imagine you were on a treadmill for eight hours a day . . . and then in your lunch break you move on to the stationary bike . . . you’re not actually taking a break,” which stymies “brain energy renewal.” However, planned “strategic breaks” shore up the overworked brain; exercise releases myokines, which “aid in alleviating depressive symptoms, improving anxiety,” and more; and visualization techniques boost adaptability, as exemplified by Olympian Michael Phelps.
Vignola firmly believes that once armed with a deeper understanding of how the brain works, even non-Olympians are capable of effecting positive and lasting change. In Rewire she provides a “neuroscientific toolkit” rife with practical strategies and tips, data and experience to back them up, and an unwaveringly supportive refrain: “You can, if you so wish, create yourself. Whoever you want to be.”
In Rewire, neuroscientist Nicole Vignola provides a remarkable toolkit rife with practical strategies and tips for self-improvement.
Couldn't get enough of Challengers, director Luca Guadagnino's sophisticated and steamy story of a tennis pro love triangle? We've got some reading material for you.
Ann Powers makes an unexpected revelation early in her new book, Traveling: On the Path of Joni Mitchell. In the second paragraph of the introduction, “Drawing the Maps,” Powers cuts to the chase, writing, “I’m not a biographer, in the usual definition of that term; something in me instinctively opposes the idea that one person can sort through all the facts of another’s life and come up with anything close to that stranger’s true story.”
While we may be unable to know Mitchell’s true story, Powers crafts a rich and textured portrait of the artist many consider to be America’s finest songwriter. Though she did not speak to Mitchell for the book, Powers did interview Mitchell’s friends and collaborators, including Wayne Shorter, Judy Collins, Taj Mahal and Brandi Carlile. She also draws from archival interviews and several other books about Mitchell, including David Yaffe’s 2017 biography, Reckless Daughter.
Powers says she knew she wanted to add something new to the canon of Joni studies, and she relied on her instincts as a critic to guide her to fresh territory. They’re well-honed instincts, as Powers is the lead music critic at NPR Music and has contributed to numerous outlets throughout her multidecade career, including the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times.
“With Joni, because there is so much writing about her, I wanted to seek the critical context around her as well,” Powers tells BookPage. “And I needed to confront her as a public figure, as that much-overused word ‘icon,’ or ‘legend.’ She’s a much-beloved figure. I wanted to think about how she became that way, what she and her music offered, at different points in history, to her audience as her audience grew and changed . . . I wanted to have that freedom to be more mobile, as my subject is mobile.”
Traveling follows Powers’ 2017 book, Good Booty: Love and Sex, Black and White, Body and Soul in American Music. Where that book snaked its way through scenes and subcultures to interrogate sexuality and race in American music, Traveling maps out Mitchell’s life through place, eschewing a neat timeline in favor of curious sightseeing, hitting all the must-sees while taking fascinating and enlightening diversions. (Powers literally drew a map of Mitchell’s travels, though that, unfortunately, did not make it into the book.)
“I found spots that others hadn’t spent a lot of time in. Like Florida, for example,” Powers says, referring to Mitchell’s late ’60s idyll in folk enclave Coconut Grove. “That was really helpful—understanding her journeys, whether they were geographical or musical or personal. She went places the casual Joni fan isn’t as aware of, and I got really interested in that. I got interested in her byroads.”
Powers says that she didn’t write the book in chronological order, instead beginning her writing journey by digging into the era Mitchell spent in Laurel Canyon, a music and counterculture enclave in the Hollywood Hills, where she was closely associated with acts like Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young. (“I just worked my butt off trying to be as good as she was,” David Crosby told Powers.) Powers attended Joni 75: A Birthday Celebration in 2018, where a bevy of artists performed Joni covers, and she spoke to James Taylor and Graham Nash about their work with Mitchell and her still-unfolding legacy. Nash shares that when he and Mitchell were romantically involved, he “tried to give her as much space as possible” to make room for her brilliance. Taylor muses on the development of Mitchell’s rich inner life, which he theorizes owes, in part, to the quiet of her rural childhood.
“Obviously, I knew Blue very well, as so many of us do,” Powers says. “That’s our entryway, for a lot of us, into Joni’s story. I knew I wanted to write about, for that chapter, her relationship to those collaborators and friends and lovers that she had, and I wanted to try to really understand that scene. There had been a lot written about it. So, that’s where I dove in.”
As that material developed, Powers “went backward and forward,” learning about Mitchell’s childhood while considering her spirituality as well as drawing connections to the American folk music revival of the mid-20th century. It was through this back-and-forth movement that Powers discovered the book’s structure.
“That’s really when the metaphor of traveling kind of took hold,” she explains. “And that helped me center the narrative, in a lot of ways, thinking about her literal life on the road and then, also, her spiritual life as a traveler, her artistic life as a traveler.”
Some pit stops include Mitchell’s childhood, of which Powers writes, “This girl was a real person, one who’d lain on prairie grass and gazed at the wide sky, an explorer in her own backyard who soon knew she’d have to flee far beyond it.” There’s Mitchell’s foray into jazz, on which Powers says she initially wrote 30,000 words and hopes one day to explore in greater depth. Then there was Mitchell’s 2015 aneurysm, which pulled her out of public life until her triumphant return to the stage in recent years.
“I needed to confront her as a public figure, as that much-overused word ‘icon,’ or ‘legend.’”
Writing about a monumental figure who is still living and working—Mitchell performed at this year’s Grammy Awards, to rapturous acclaim—had its intimidating moments, Powers says, and she found solace in Geoff Dyer’s 1997 Out of Sheer Rage, in which he records his struggle to write a book about the complicated life and legacy of D.H. Lawrence.
“I needed that, sort of like having a good friend tell you a story,” she says. “Like, ‘Oh, you know, I relate to your problem. And let me tell you a funny and rich story about how I went through that.’ So, that would unlock some things for me. And one thing that unlocked was that it showed me that I could and should foreground my own struggles.”
Accordingly, many of the book’s more potent moments come when Powers shares her own personal experiences, finding connections or contrasts between herself and the artist. Mitchell placed her child, Kilauren Gibb, up for adoption in 1965, and Powers is an adoptive mother. Though Powers writes she “felt hesitant to make any conjectures about this most intimate connection” (and she doesn’t), she shares the story of a brief encounter with Mitchell in 2004 that connects the dots between them.
Nine months after adopting her daughter, Powers traveled to Montreal to watch Mitchell receive an honorary degree from McGill University. “Adrift in the dream state of sleep-deprived early parenthood,” Powers shared thoughts on Blue during a panel discussion, becoming emotional when remarking on “Little Green,” which Mitchell wrote for Kilauren.
As Mitchell and Gibb had only reunited seven years earlier, Mitchell was relatively new to parenthood, too, and Powers felt a complicated kinship with her, one that is still revealing itself today.
“Twenty years later, I can see that Joni and I were, in that moment, in one version of the same boat,” Powers writes. “We were both newly visible mothers negotiating uncommon definitions of that term.”
Those anecdotes bring Mitchell’s story back down to earth, an impressive feat given her penchant for self-mythologizing. They remind us that Mitchell may have written “Both Sides Now,” but she’s still a human being, still imperfect and messy and seeking resolution to the same existential questions all of us have but none of us can answer.
It’s a point Powers makes early in the book, a few paragraphs after she shares her reluctance to write a straightforward biography. “Every legend is also one of us,” she writes, and in the following 10 chapters, she bears that out, bringing us into her complicated relationship with a complicated artist making complicated art in a complicated world.
With Traveling, Joni Mitchell becomes a little more “of us” than she’s ever been.
Ann Powers author photo by Emily April Allen.
By mapping Mitchell's geographical, musical and personal journeys, Powers frees the woman from the icon.
Swift River is a mesmerizing account of inherited trauma in a “sundown town,” propelled by the insightful and often-humorous narration of 16-year-old Diamond Newberry, the
Boyce Upholt wrangles the geological, political and cultural history of the wild Mississippi River in a compelling, lively narrative that will delight history fans.
Morgan Talty follows up Night of the Living Rez with Fire Exit, a beautifully written novel that is sometimes funny, often heartbreaking and hopeful against
Deanna Raybourn will keep readers’ minds working and hearts pounding as they root for her fabulous assassins of a certain age in Kills Well With Others.
Okchundang Candy is a beautifully rendered remembrance of grief and loss, as well as a moving meditation on the bonds of family and the power of everlasting love.
With its earnest and likable protagonist, The Peach Thief is a lovely, well-drawn novel that will appeal to historical fiction fans and kids who love plants.
Raised by genteel, churchgoing parents, actress Geena Davis was a shy young woman while she was growing up, but over time, she found her true self as an artist and feminist. She chronicles her personal evolution in her companionable memoir, Dying of Politeness. With wit and honesty, Davis takes stock of her time as a model, key film roles (including Thelma & Louise), important relationships and motherhood. She also considers the difficulties of being a woman in Hollywood. Throughout this vivid book, Davis proves a skillful storyteller with hard-won wisdom to share
Singer and actor Billy Porter opens up about his difficult childhood in Unprotected. As a gay Black kid in 1970s Pittsburgh, Porter was harassed at school and abused at home. But he found empowerment in performing and—thanks to his remarkable talents—went on to achieve professional success. From living with HIV to starring on Broadway, Porter candidly covers personal tests and triumphs. His frankness as he delves into topics like gay rights, racism and the redemptive power of art make his memoir a rewarding book club pick.
Comedian Jo Koy explores his biracial background in Mixed Plate: Chronicles of an All-American Combo. From an early age, Koy—the son of a white father and Filipina mother—struggled to find a sense of self. Inspired by figures like Richard Pryor, he decided to become a comedian. On the path to success, Koy contended with racism and his own sense of uncertainty. In this bold yet vulnerable book, he shares fascinating details about his creative methods and growth. Themes of identity, the immigrant experience and racial stereotyping will kickstart lively dialogue among readers.
With Finding Me, Oscar winner Viola Davis offers an unflinching account of her difficult journey to stardom. One of six children, Davis grew up in a poor family with an abusive father. At Rhode Island College and the Juilliard School, she studied acting and laid the groundwork for an acclaimed career on stage and screen. In her memoir, she traces her development as an actress, reflecting on the challenges of being typecast and the lack of substantial film roles for Black women. Inspired and revealing, Finding Me gives readers insights into the mindset of a legendary actress.
Book clubs will be swept away by 4 rewarding autobiographies by Viola Davis, Geena Davis, Billy Porter and Jo Koy.
Who wouldn’t want to keep reading a book that opens with these lines: “Yabom was lucky. She heard one flat tone, then an abrupt pop. A moment of silence, then the flat tone again. Thank God, she thought. The phone was ringing.” With the brisk pacing of investigative journalism, Mara Kardas-Nelson’s revelatory We Are Not Able to Live in the Sky: The Seductive Promise of Microfinance probes the perils and promises of microfinance for women in developing countries.
The idea behind microfinance originated with Nobel Peace Prize-winning economist Muhammad Yunus, who theorized that microcredit could end poverty. He believed that by giving women a few dollars, they could start small businesses and take care of themselves and their families, and he engaged in this practice by giving a total of $27 to 42 poor women in a village in his native Bangladesh in 1976. Although Kardas-Nelson first learned about microfinance in the early 2000s, the word and the idea had fallen out of the zeitgeist by 2010. When she moved to West Africa in 2015, however, she started hearing about it again.
Drawing on interviews with more than 350 people, from policy makers to aid workers and loan recipients, Kardas-Nelson focuses on the stories of women who’ve taken microloans in hopes of pulling themselves out of poverty and building a sustainable future. Aminata, for example, took out a loan so she could make and sell yogurt, but she lost all her goods in the chaos that led up to the 2023 Freetown, Sierra Leone, elections. Kadija has used her loan to support her work as a hairstylist; while she complains about the high interest rates and fees, she feels lucky to be able to borrow at all. Yabom’s phone call that opens the book, and this review, was to a friend; she begged him to check on her young children after she was brought to the police station for failing to pay back her loan. No one has seen or heard from her since. As Kardas-Nelson points out, “microfinance is remarkably unremarkable: just another source of debt woven into a complex tapestry of lending and borrowing, an expensive, burdensome appendage they’ve learned to live with.” Yet, she observes, “Women are terrified of the loans and their consequences. And they are also terrified of life without them.”
With riveting storytelling, We Are Not Able to Live in the Sky reveals the often heartbreaking human dimensions of international monetary policy.
The riveting We Are Not Able to Live in the Sky probes the perils and promises of microfinance for women in developing countries.
Ann Powers’ biography of Joni Mitchell is a travelogue of one of the greatest artistic journeys ever taken, and it's a pleasure to go along for the ride.
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.
