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NonfictionMemoir

The Harder I Fight, the More I Love You

Neko Case’s memoir, The Harder I Fight, The More I Love You, is an ode to the persistent ability to love, and how it transforms our lives.
Neko Case’s memoir, The Harder I Fight, The More I Love You, is an ode to the persistent ability to love, and how it transforms our lives.
NonfictionMemoir

The Loves of My Life

Pleasure reigns supreme in Edmund White’s brilliant, envelope-pushing, sex-positive memoir, The Loves of My Life.
Pleasure reigns supreme in Edmund White’s brilliant, envelope-pushing, sex-positive memoir, The Loves of My Life.
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NonfictionSocial Science

Unassimilable

Review by Annie Harvieux

Sociologist and activist Bianca Mabute-Louie has wrestled with a conundrum for her entire life: Is it better to assimilate into mainstream American culture, or embrace one’s own heritage and, thus, stand out? In her scholarly yet personal book, Unassimilable: An Asian Diasporic Manifesto for the 21st Century, Mabute-Louie finds these options to be a false binary. Twining memoiristic reflections with Asian American political and cultural history, her book proposes a third, freeing alternative: becoming unassimilable.

Mabute-Louie grew up in California’s San Gabriel Valley, an “ethnoburb” rich in Chinese groceries, language academies, churches and small businesses. She describes her popo (maternal grandmother) moving to the area from Hong Kong after a stressful divorce in her 70s. Able to speak Cantonese, prepare her favorite foods and make new friends in California thanks to the robust Chinese community, Mabute-Louie’s popo quickly thrived. “My popo and the ethnoburb demonstrate that we can create our own power and belonging without learning English, participating in White institutions, and Americanizing,” she writes. “But it is a communal endeavor, one that requires everybody’s imagination and care.” Rather than an act of individualism, unassimilability is an “interdependent community of popos finding each other.”

The author builds her book’s central case by describing her personal experience coming to racial consciousness, and discussing key selections from Asian American history and culture. She details the contrast between her ethnoburb and her largely white private school, her complex relationship with Chinese American Christian culture, and the liberatory framework she found for herself in academia through Ethnic Studies. The interspersed Asian American history ranges from American immigration quotas and bans during World War II, to the origins of the “model minority” stereotype, to fights over affirmative action’s value and impact on Asian students, to political conflicts both among broader communities of color and within Asian communities. At each chapter’s end, the author’s illustrations and comics provide bonus reflections.

Mabute-Louie shows how being unassimilable provides opportunity for wholeness, mission and community. “I am not ‘torn between two cultures,’ as they say, because I occupy a third space in the diaspora,” Mabute-Louie writes, “from where a collective identity emerges that is neither repulsed by foreignness nor longing for Whiteness, but adamantly unassimilable.”

In her powerful manifesto, Bianca Mabute-Louie unapologetically rejects assimilation and forges an Asian American identity on her own terms.

The Sinners All Bow

Kate Winkler Dawson’s deftly handled The Sinners All Bow examines the birth of the true crime genre and the murder that inspired The Scarlet Letter.
NonfictionTrue Crime

The Secret History of the Rape Kit

Review by Alice Cary

Pagan Kennedy, a veteran journalist who counts Inventology and The First Man-Made Man among her previous 10 books, has long explored how new technologies can bring about social change. With The Secret History of the Rape Kit: A True Crime Story, the author now unearths a remarkable chapter of history that might otherwise have become a forgotten footnote. At the center of her story is Martha Goddard, the woman who spearheaded the creation of sexual assault examination kits.

Goddard was known as Marty; having a name that could be construed as male worked to her advantage in the 1970s while she developed “a new way of thinking about prosecuting rape.” As a volunteer at a Chicago crisis hotline for teenagers, Goddard learned that many runaways were sexual abuse victims. Determined to find a way to hold predators accountable, she developed the first standardized rape kit to gather and preserve criminal evidence. It eventually became one of the most powerful tools in our criminal justice system, pushing “against the widespread belief in law enforcement that sexual assault wasn’t a ‘real’ crime.”

“As I was digging into Marty’s life in the 1980s, the era sometimes felt as if it were ancient history,” Kennedy writes. Ironically, Goddard’s kits originally bore a man’s name—that of Chicago police sergeant Louis Vitullo. Kennedy explains that Goddard “thought the only way forward was to present her vision as a collaboration between the State’s Attorney’s Office and the police department, making it clear that men would be in charge.” Even more ironic, the initial funding came from Hugh Hefner of Playboy magazine, whose private foundation supported efforts to increase female autonomy. (As an extra dash of irony, Hefner has since been accused of sexual assault by Playboy models.)

Kennedy adeptly explores a variety of threads, including her own victimization as a child and teenager. Goddard’s life, it turns out, was incredibly hard to document; before her death, she had virtually disappeared, incapacitated by alcoholism and mental illness. Kennedy remained undeterred, however, and even haunted, “partly because I’d come to think of her as a maternal figure. She was the woman who had believed little girls.”

Part engrossing memoir, part page-turning detective story and part mesmerizing biography, The Secret History of the Rape Kit is a brave, bold story of social oppression and revolution that everyone should read.

Part engrossing memoir, part page-turning detective story and part mesmerizing biography, The Secret History of the Rape Kit is a bold, feminist history of a game-changing innovation.

The Crazies

Who owns the wind? A fifth-generation rancher and billionaire go to court over the matter in Amy Gamerman’s captivating The Crazies.
NonfictionScience

The Forgotten Sense

Review by Linda M. Castellitto

Jonas Olofsson, professor and director of the Sensory Cognitive Interaction Lab at Stockholm University, is a passionate olfactory advocate who believes “the sense of smell, often unnoticed, influences so many of the most important parts of our lives.” In The Forgotten Sense: The New Science of Smell—and the Extraordinary Power of the Nose, he offers a fascinating overview of this understudied, underappreciated sense and makes a convincing case for bringing our noses to the forefront of research, culture and everyday life.

Conventional wisdom indicates animals are superior sniffers, but at the 2015 Association for Chemoreception Sciences annual meeting, “the old myth was blown out of the water,” Olofsson writes. “Humans were more sensitive than other animals to the vast majority of odor molecules.” Certainly, “Dogs are the olfactory kings of the animal kingdom,” but “we humans actually perform so well in the smell tests that we can even give dogs a run for their money.”

The author also explores culturally prominent scents like Sweden’s “polarizing” sour herring and durian, “the stinking fruit, or as it is called in Southeast Asia, the king of fruits.” He looks at aroma-centric professions (chef, sommelier, perfumer) and pulls back the curtain on scent marketing. Ever enjoyed florals in a hotel or followed your nose to a Cinnabon? Oloffson adroitly explains the corporate strategies that rely on an aroma’s ability to trigger memories and emotions and influence our choices.

In a section on health, he notes that, as for 2022, the COVID-19 pandemic “might have left 20 million people with a permanently impaired sense of smell” and discusses the physical and psychological effects of anosmia, from loss of appetite to a “strong sense of loneliness when you can no longer share the olfactory worlds of others.”

All the more reason, then, to consider his recommendation for brain-boosting “smell training” that could improve quality of life for professional sniffers and regular folks alike. After all, Oloffson writes, “Every smell is an intersection between our thoughts and our emotions.” The Forgotten Sense is an excellent, enthusiastic guide through “the little-known depths of scent and how it shapes us.”

The Forgotten Sense is a passionate, enthusiastic guide to learning how the understudied, underappreciated sense of smell shapes us.

Matty Matheson

Matty Matheson’s new cookbook highlights the chef’s (and The Bear actor’s) unfussy nature and enthusiasm for no-frills tasty food.
NonfictionSocial ScienceSelf-Help

Reclaiming the Black Body

Review by Natalia Berry

Reclaiming the Black Body: Nourishing the Home Within explores how eating disorders, or eating imbalances, as author Alishia McCullough aptly calls them, flourish under white, Western capitalist power structures, and have a unique impact on Black and brown women. McCullough investigates the origins of our negative relationships with food and our bodies, and shares the tools we can employ to reach healing transformation.

McCullough, a licensed clinical mental health therapist and founder of Black and Embodied Counseling and Consulting, is profoundly engaging and empathetic. “Embodiment,” the core principle of McCullough’s counseling philosophy, means self-acceptance that stems from connecting the physical, mental and spiritual aspects of ourselves. She offers new language for clinical terms, writing, “It is not that our eating is disordered, it’s that our relationship to our bodies and how we have come to nourish ourselves has become fragmented and created imbalance within us.” She’s specifically concerned with how historical forces have caused this fragmentation. For example, body-hatred as experienced by Black people can be traced to chattel slavery, lack of land ownership and food scarcity; one way to process this is through somatic therapy, which McCullough defines as “a body-centered approach that examines the mind-body connection.”

This book serves as a much-needed foil to the misinformation and stigma against fat people, especially Black and Indigenous women in larger bodies. Along with sharing her own experiences in these areas, McCullough covers subjects like patriarchal indoctrination, body-shaming, fatphobia and Black beauty standards. As much as Reclaiming the Black Body is a historical and sociocultural study, it’s also a deeply insightful guide for people of color struggling with body image, self-worth and confusion around what is healthy. It takes sharp aim at diet culture, self-imposed eating restrictions and so-called “health journeys” popular in Western society. In guided practice segments at the end of each chapter, McCullough turns to the reader and asks questions to help them reflect on how food and body insecurity have played a role in their lives.

McCullough specifically addresses Black women throughout: “You are dealing with a normal adaptive response to surviving in a system that was invented to deem your existence as something that should not have survived past the plantation,” she insists, adding, “I repeat: It is not your fault.” Innovative and groundbreaking, Reclaiming the Black Body asks us to consider the ways in which we are disconnected from ourselves and why. Embodiment is a lifelong revolutionary act that requires support and self-compassion. McCullough assures us that it’s worth it, and there is hope and healing ahead.

Alishia McCullough’s groundbreaking Reclaiming the Black Body takes a sharp aim at diet culture, providing a much-needed foil to the misinformation and stigma about fat people and a deeply insightful guide for women of color struggling with body image.
NonfictionMemoir

Lost Found Kept

Review by Amy Scribner

As someone who could only watch the lurid reality TV show Hoarders through my fingers, I approached Lost Found Kept with trepidation. The A&E show’s dramatization of mental illness and exploitation of its subjects is disturbing, to say the least. So, three hundred pages describing the layers of accumulated possessions and trash in one woman’s home? Can one read through their fingers?

But Lost Found Kept is no Hoarders on the page. Author and clinical psychologist Deborah Derrickson Kossmann has created a beautiful, piercing and empathetic—if at times tough to read—memoir in which she reckons with her chaotic childhood: a deeply flawed mother and an abusive stepfather who eventually exited their lives in a haze of mental illness and alcohol.

When Kossmann and her sister realize their aging mother is no longer able to care for herself, they finally visit their childhood home to prepare it for sale. The sisters have long suspected the house had fallen into disrepair, but their mother insisted they not come past the curb. When Kossmann opens the door, she understands why. “There is no floor, there’s kind of a sloping step made of things: bags, unidentifiable solidified objects that are about a foot tall,” she writes. “It feels like two worlds have collided in a planetary disaster, and I’m standing in the middle of the rubble.”

Kossmann and her husband wear long sleeves, pants, hiking boots and respirator masks. They spray themselves with insect repellant and enter what they have darkly begun calling the Hoarder House. Alongside her sister and brother-in-law, they spend weeks unearthing old family treasures strewn about in unthinkable conditions. Yet even as she sweats her way through the project in the late summer humidity, raging at her mother for letting things get so bad, Kossmann shares clear-eyed reflections on her conflicting feelings about the woman who raised her. The most remarkable thing among many remarkable things in Lost Found Kept is Kossmann’s ability to acknowledge the humanity and goodness in a woman who has brought her so much pain, in part by learning how the pattern of mother-daughter trauma started before her birth.

“From mother to daughter, the anger and pain from your mother, it’s like a stone in your heart,” a family therapist tells Kossmann’s mother. And while that stone can never be truly dissolved, through her poignant memoir, Kossmann provides a sketch for anyone seeking to forgive and move forward.

Deborah Derrickson Kossmann reckons with family trauma and her mother’s hoarding disorder in her piercing, empathetic debut memoir, Lost Found Kept.

Icons of Style

You’d be hard-pressed to come up with a more complete history of everyday fashion than Josh Sims’ Icons of Style.
NonfictionHistoryBlack HistoryAmerican History

In Open Contempt

Review by Kelly Blewett

Who are American heroes? What are American values? How do the answers to these questions change with time and perspective? Irwin Weathersby Jr. takes up these fundamental issues of our times in his indispensable In Open Contempt: Confronting White Supremacy in Art and Public Space, which examines how we bear witness to sites and perpetrators of racial trauma, both collectively and individually.

Weathersby opens the book in New Orleans, just after Mayor Mitch Landrieu’s 2017 fiat that Confederate statues be removed from public spaces. He visits the sites of these absences and talks with people there: unaware tourists, gloomy white supremacists, a man who paused to see whether his dog would be willing to pee on a pedestal that used to elevate the figure of Jefferson Davis. Elsewhere, sites attempt to tell a more complete history, such as Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello, which offers a tour about the lives of Jefferson’s over 600 slaves. Weathersby also visits sites of counternarratives, including the partially completed Crazy Horse memorial that stands in tension with Mount Rushmore, and Kehinde Wiley’s Rumors of War, a bronze statue of a contemporary Black man atop a horse in the style of Civil War monuments. Weathersby explores public spaces from Louisiana to Alabama, South Carolina, Virginia, New York and beyond, and his vivid prose will likely have you searching online to see what he describes.

Weathersby also examines the history of the public spaces he encountered throughout his life as a Black person from Louisiana. Weathersby’s longing for education led him to Morehouse, a historically Black college in Atlanta whose campus showcases inspiring sculptures created by Ed Dwight, the first Black candidate for NASA’s astronaut program, whose rejection by NASA spurred him toward the arts. Learning about Dwight’s life showed Weathersby “how our lives are often unconsciously shaped by unseen sculptors of the physical and divine.” The New Orleans street where Weathersby grew up was one of dozens in the city named after enslavers. His family home was demolished after Hurricane Katrina. Monuments, Weathersby writes, “may appear to underscore the past—and they do this too—but in the process, they suppress other events and stories that shaped the commemorated life and space.”

In Open Contempt asks the reader to explore their own landscapes, and Weathersby knows what they will find: many traces, both obvious and subtle, of white supremacy. “Go looking for white supremacy, find it everywhere. Go looking for nothing, find white supremacy everywhere.” In this impeccable book, Weathersby exhorts readers to pay attention, and he offers his own story of looking so that we can see—and confront—our history alongside him.

Irvin Weathersby Jr.’s indispensable In Open Contempt examines how we bear witness to sites and perpetrators of racial trauma.

How to Be Enough

Ellen Hendriksen’s chatty, accessible How to Be Enough shows how to quit being your own toughest critic, and is a great addition to the self-help bookshelf.

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