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Golden Years

James Chappel’s thought-provoking Golden Years offers strategies to understand and address the needs of America’s aging population.
James Chappel’s thought-provoking Golden Years offers strategies to understand and address the needs of America’s aging population.
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John Lewis

Raymond Arsenault’s mesmerizing biography of John Lewis chronicles the life of the Civil Rights icon and congressman whose vision of a just and equitable society has inspired generations.
NonfictionLifestylesBody, Mind & Spirit

Breathe

Review by Susannah Felts

Last year I told everyone who would listen about a book I was reading—Breath by James Nestor—and how radically it had impacted my thinking. Most of us breathe poorly, and it’s a real problem. Another excellent, easy-to-browse resource to get your breathing back on track is Jean Hall’s Breathe: Simple Breathing Techniques for a Calmer, Happier Life. You might think of it as the “now do this” counterpart to Nestor’s researched narrative. The breathing exercises offered here, many of which are adapted from yogic philosophy, are designed “to return the breath to its natural optimum pattern of slow, soft, steady spaciousness,” Hall writes. The outcome? Better mental and physical health (and yes, science backs this up). Some breath patterns are designed to enable sleep, others to energize or focus the mind, some to prep for meditation. If a class-based yoga practice isn’t the right fit for you, this book offers some of the basic teachings in a clear, succinct format.

Jean Hall’s Breathe is an excellent, easy-to-browse resource to get your breathing back on track.

Madness

Antonia Hylton’s Madness offers an unsparing reckoning with history as it excavates an infamous mental hospital for Black patients.
NonfictionLifestylesFood & Drink

Praisesong for the Kitchen Ghosts

Review by Susannah Felts

“I am the keeper of the stories, the writer, the one who has carried the stories in my apron for so many years,” writes Crystal Wilkinson in her culinary memoir, Praisesong for the Kitchen Ghosts: Stories and Recipes from Five Generations of Black Country Cooks. Wilkinson, a Kentucky native and author of several books of fiction and poetry, shares here the recipes and memories of her Black Appalachian forebears, including her grandmother who raised her. “I am always reaching back,” she writes, recalling her grandmother’s jam cake or imagining the life of a distant ancestor, Aggy, an enslaved woman who married her white enslaver’s son. Cooking a mess of dandelion greens, Wilkinson deepens the connection to her kitchen ghosts and reflects on the lean times her family encountered during the scarcity of winter. She finds delight and abundance in recipes for caramel cake, blackberry cobbler, sweet sorghum cookies, biscuits and cornbread. “I’ve always felt a power larger than myself while cooking,” Wilkinson reflects. We’re lucky that she’s sharing the power with us through this tender and important book.

Crystal Wilkinson’s tender Praisesong for the Kitchen Ghosts collects the memories and recipes of her Black Appalachian forebears.

The Cancer Factory

Jim Morris’ urgent, heartbreaking The Cancer Factory traces how a known toxic chemical destroyed the health, happiness and lives of Goodyear factory workers.
NonfictionScienceFamily & Relationships

Come Together

Review by Sarah McCraw Crow

Emily Nagoski’s third book, Come Together: The Science (and Art!) of Creating Lasting Sexual Connections, like her second, Come as You Are, focuses on better sex. But where Come as You Are was aimed at women, Come Together is for couples in long-term relationships. To be clear, though, Come Together isn’t a book filled with sex tips or techniques; it’s a book about relationships, communication and methods to frame and understand emotions. 

Nagoski, a sex educator who trained at Indiana University and the Kinsey Institute, sets out to debunk popular beliefs, primarily one that “puts desire at the center of our definition of sexual wellbeing.” She argues that when we focus too much on desire—a “spark, a spontaneous, giddy craving for sexual intimacy”—our worry about losing that spark “hits the breaks and puts sex further out of reach.” Instead, Nagoski argues that partners should center pleasure, writing that “great sex over the long term is not about how much you want sex, it’s about how much you like the sex you’re having.” Nagoski offers tools to increase pleasure, such as an “emotional floorplan,” a map of the brain’s different emotional states, some which are pleasure-favorable (lust, play, seeking), and some pleasure-adverse (fear, grief, rage); prompts to help partners discuss sex; and even a breathing exercise to help readers tap into their “erotic wisdom.” 

Happily, Nagoski does not exclusively focus her attention on heterosexual sex. Through the dozens of interviews conveyed in the book, Nagoski includes LGBTQ+ couples, as well as those in polyamorous relationships, kink and BDSM communities, and more.

Nagoski reminds readers that the key to great sex over the long term isn’t frequency, novelty or special skills. Instead, it’s trusting and admiring your partner, prioritizing one other and prioritizing sex. She shares research findings, the ongoing stories of three very different couples, and pieces of her own story—for instance, how her work as a sex researcher and coach caused her to lose all interest in sex, and how she and her partner grappled with this loss. For readers with shorter attention spans, Nagoski closes each chapter with a TL;DR summary and questions to consider. Well-researched but accessible, Come Together is an inclusive, good-humored and reassuring book that offers something for every couple in a long-term relationship.

Emily Nagoski’s Come Together is a refreshing, inclusive and good-humored guide to sex between long-term couples.
NonfictionHistoryBlack History

Medgar and Myrlie

Review by Alice Cary

When civil rights activist Medgar Evers met the love of his life, Myrlie Louise Beasley, the 25-year-old had graduated from college and fought in World War II. Myrlie, 17, was a gifted singer and pianist. They married a year later, on Christmas Eve 1951, forming a bond that is the heart of Joy-Ann Reid’s moving biography, Medgar and Myrlie: Medgar Evers and the Love Story That Awakened America.

Readers familiar with Reid’s MSNBC show, “The ReidOut,” will recognize the passionate voice that fervently guides the narrative. This love story, she writes, is also about Medgar’s “deep and unfaltering love for Mississippi,” as well as “the higher love it took for Black Americans to love America and to fight for it, even in a state that butchered more Black bodies via lynching than any other.” The Everses could have easily joined the northern exodus of many Black families to more hospitable places, but the couple wanted to raise their children in their home state, fighting to obtain the basic human rights that they were denied.

Reid argues that Medgar’s accomplishments have been overshadowed by the many events and assassinations that took place after he was gunned down in his carport in 1963, leaving the quiet, formidable Myrlie to raise their three children and carry on her husband’s legacy. But after reading this book, readers will long remember Medgar’s courage, as well as Myrlie’s devotion and bravery—especially since the couple knew he was likely to be the victim of an assassination attempt. The details are searing: Their house had no front door because that might have left them too vulnerable, and the children regularly practiced shooting drills in their own home, diving to the floor and crawling soldier-style to the safety of the bathtub, preparing for the horrors that soon arrived on their doorstep.

Reid draws on a variety of sources, including her own recent interviews with Myrlie. She portrays a sweeping history of Civil Rights activism, describing clashing strategies and factions, including the fact that the national office of the NAACP refused to provide Medgar with the security protection that might have saved his life. Myrlie never stopped fighting to have her husband’s killer prosecuted. It took 30 years for Klansman Byron De La Beckwith to be convicted of homicide and sentenced to life in prison; without Myrlie, justice would never have prevailed.

Page by page, Medgar and Myrlie paints unforgettable portraits of two American heroes who faced American racism with unimaginable courage.

Page by page, Joy-Ann Reid’s Medgar and Myrlie paints unforgettable portraits of Medgar and Myrlie Evers, two American heroes who faced American racism with unimaginable courage.
NonfictionMemoir

Alphabetical Diaries

Review by Catherine Hollis

As evidenced in her breakout How Should a Person Be and 2022’s Pure Color, Sheila Heti writes books that explode the boundaries between nonfiction and fiction. Alphabetical Diaries is a compellingly weird new experiment, this time in diary-keeping. Creating a nonlinear timeline, Heti organizes the sentences of 10 years of her journals alphabetically by the first letter of each sentence.

Given the constraints of the alphabetical form, the book nonetheless forms a coherent narrative with recurring themes: writing, money, sex, clothes and conversations with friends. Heti’s ambition and intelligence weave through many of these entries as she balances a desire for the peace necessary for writing with the restlessness of her desire for sex, love and travel. Just because her diary entries are nonlinear doesn’t mean they don’t tell a profoundly personal story about a glamorous young writer. Knowing this going in, the reader can relax and enjoy the ride. 

Daring and revealing, Alphabetical Diaries, which was first published in part in the New York Times, will appeal to anyone who has ever kept a diary and wondered “Why am I writing about the same things, again and again?” Each of Heti’s relationships, for example, repeats the patterns of the past. Her lovers and friends appear and reappear, as the reader gradually pieces together Heti’s intense relationships.

Lots of writers’ diaries are fascinating because they reveal the underside of the published books: the work and doubt and insecurity the writer faces from conception to publication. Alphabetical Diaries has put a glorious twist on the genre, highlighting a more circular and repetitive logic to diaristic writing. Only Heti could have written this book, the latest in an oeuvre that is marked by increasingly profound experiments in language and storytelling. Personal and profane, quietly and radically subversive, this unusual version of a writer’s diary offers readers an often-comic glimpse into experiments in prose. 

Sheila Heti’s memoir, Alphabetical Diaries, gloriously explodes the genre with her signature experiments in language and storytelling.

The Explorers Club

Jeff Wilser’s stunning The Explorers Club showcases some of today’s tremendously exciting scientific expeditions.
NonfictionTrue Crime

The Bishop and the Butterfly

Review by Anna Christensen

A roadside discovery of the body of a beautiful, would-be starlet; an investigation into a city’s underbelly to find her killer; a cat-and-mouse game between detectives and criminals reminiscent of an early 20th-century detective noir. For many, this may call to mind the 1947 case of the Black Dahlia, a gruesome Los Angeles murder that lives on in the popular imagination. The crime at the center of Michael Wolraich’s The Bishop and the Butterfly: Murder, Politics, and the End of the Jazz Age occurred 16 years earlier, across the country amid the freewheeling glamour of 1931 New York City, and held the public just as in thrall. 

Prohibition helped to nurture corruption throughout the government of New York, with the political machine of the Democratic Party, Tammany Hall, holding crucial positions in its fist. As America was pivoting from the glitter and excess of the Jazz Age to the scarcity of the Great Depression, the organization increasingly demanded loyalty, including from one Franklin D. Roosevelt, a young, charismatic politician with aspirations to the governorship of New York. 

With a concise voice schooled by years of reporting, Wolraich describes how the Tammany Hall empire of power began to teeter when Vivian Gordon was found strangled by the side of the road in Van Cortlandt Park. As police sought to learn more about the victim, details emerged: She was a small-time starlet, she had gangster ties, she made a living by blackmailing the wealthy men who hired her for sex work—and she had been days away from delivering damning information about the police, the courts and politicians to Samuel Seabury, a former judge charged with investigating corruption in the city. So straight-laced and impervious to corruption himself that he was nicknamed “The Bishop,” Seabury posed the first legitimate threat to Tammany Hall. Gordon’s murder became the catalyst for a series of events that would change the face of New York City forever.

In this meticulously drawn account of the crusade against unscrupulous characters deeply embedded in the halls of power, The Bishop and the Butterfly shares a glimpse into a fight for decency and fairness that continues to this day.

Michael Wolraich’s true crime saga, The Bishop and the Butterfly, chronicles a judge and a sex worker who rooted out corruption in Jazz Age New York City.

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