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What to read this Halloween, based on your ideal spooky activity

Whether you’re a homebody or a thrill-hunter, we’ve got a seasonal, spine-tingling read for you.
Whether you’re a homebody or a thrill-hunter, we’ve got a seasonal, spine-tingling read for you.
NonfictionLifestylesCookbooks

Bodega Bakes

In the personable Bodega Bakes, pastry chef Paola Velez presents just that: sweets that can be made solely from the ingredients found at a corner store.
In the personable Bodega Bakes, pastry chef Paola Velez presents just that: sweets that can be made solely from the ingredients found at a corner store.
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NonfictionSocial ScienceBiography

After the Last Border

Review by Kelly Blewett

Meet Hasna and Mu Naw. Both live in Austin, Texas. Both are refugees with incredible stories, set against the shifting backdrop of policy and politics in the United States.

Mu Naw’s family came from the hill tribes of Myanmar. Young and determined, Mu Naw and husband Saw Ku travel from the verdant hills of Thailand to the suburbs of Austin, where the overwhelming cacophony of English combined with social isolation and financial hardship nearly tear them apart. Readers are with Mu Naw as she goes to English class, finds out she’s unexpectedly pregnant, is betrayed by sponsors who are supposed to protect her, forms close ties with other refugees and becomes a resilient leader. In After the Last Border, Jessica Goudeau illustrates that though stories of refugees like Mu Naw are everywhere, they can be hard to access and understand, even for those who have known the refugees for years.

Hasna’s story is less triumphant. A Syrian refugee who moves to Austin with the long-term goal of reuniting her family (Hasna has four grown children and, to date, four grandchildren), her transition is full of bitter surprises. After a lifetime of serving in the home, Hasna now works as a hotel cleaner. Her family struggles to make ends meet. Her husband, Jebreel, was disabled by a missile in Syria. Before applying to become an international refugee, Hasna lived in Jordan for a few years, and much of her story takes place there. From a rooftop garden, above an apartment she shares with two of her children, Hasna can see bombs firing in her home city across the border in Syria. Her children are now spread across the globe, refugees in three different countries. She hasn’t recovered.

These are only two stories among thousands. As Goudeau’s careful history demonstrates, attitudes toward refugees are shifting, and the current rhetoric surrounding refugee resettlement uneasily echoes the rhetoric of 80 years past. To keep history from repeating itself, it is time to understand the roots of refugee resettlement in the U.S. and to look fully into the faces of those who are being affected.

Meet Hasna and Mu Naw. Both live in Austin, Texas. Both are refugees with incredible stories, set against the shifting backdrop of policy and politics in the United States. Mu Naw’s family came from the hill tribes of Myanmar. Young and determined, Mu Naw and husband Saw Ku travel from the verdant hills of Thailand to the […]
NonfictionHealth & Fitness

Clean

Review by Sarojini Seupersad

Imagine there was one simple activity you could cut from your daily schedule that would save you time, money, water and energy and help keep countless plastic bottles out of the ocean. With all of these gains in the face of climate change, most people would probably consider it. But what if that simple activity you could cut from your daily schedule was . . . showering?

James Hamblin, a medical doctor and staff writer for The Atlantic, knows exactly what it’s like to give up showering for good. In his provocative book Clean: The New Science of Skin, Hamblin explains why he stopped showering five years ago. Although he admits that this course of action isn’t for everyone, he argues that our modern idea of extreme hygiene has gone a little overboard. In this entertaining and deeply researched book, he suggests that our addiction to soap and skincare is creating more problems than they solve. Along the way, he discusses Dr. Bronner’s, Gweneth Paltrow’s Goop and soap making, and he speaks to dermatologists, biologists, allergists, peddlers of snake oil and a paraphernalia-collecting soap historian.

Many people will be horrified at the idea of not showering for a prolonged amount of time, but according to Hamblin, our dedication to sterile cleanliness is relatively new. Following the Industrial Revolution, theories about germs and infectious diseases led to the explosion of the soap industry to promote good hygiene, but it also gave birth to the marketing ploy that clean, germ-free skin equals good health. What if we need those “germs” on our skin that we lather and wash away every day? Hamblin examines the discovery of beneficial skin microbes that live on our skin and in our pores. Wash the microbes away, and the immune system goes haywire, causing allergies, eczema and other skin conditions. What if an industry that claims to keep us healthy is actually harming us?

Organized and thorough, the research and history Hamblin presents are uncomfortably compelling. This is a fascinating, rich mix of science, marketing and culture that will have you questioning everything you think you know about your daily skincare routine.

Imagine there was one simple activity you could cut from your daily schedule that would save you time, money, water and energy and help keep countless plastic bottles out of the ocean. What if that simple activity you could cut from your daily schedule was . . . showering?

NonfictionBusiness & FinanceArt

The Death of the Artist

Review by Alden Mudge

In 2014, award-winning essayist William Deresiewicz roiled the placid ponds of academia with his controversial attack on American elite education in his book Excellent Sheep. Prepare yourself, because he’s back. His wide-ranging, vividly written new book focuses on how big tech and big money—the new economy—are devastating artists and the arts.

In The Death of the Artist: How Creators Are Struggling to Survive in the Age of Billionaires and Big Tech, one of Deresiewicz’s key points—and the object of much of his diatribe—is that it isn’t necessarily a good thing that the internet allows unmediated access to audiences and artists. Sure, there are benefits, but it also “starves professional production [and] fosters the amateur kind.” Big tech has also convinced us that we can all be artists and has given us the tools (but not the talent) to believe it, with questionable results. He writes, “Have you seen your cousin’s improv troupe? Is that the only kind of art you want to have available, not only for the rest of your life but for the rest of the foreseeable future?”

William Deresiewicz’s wide-ranging, vividly written new book focuses on how big tech and big money—the new economy—are devastating artists and the arts.

How and why we may be on the verge of this eventuality—in music, writing, visual arts, film and television—is the thrust of his inquiry. In his research, Deresiewicz interviews roughly 140 artists, most of whom we might call midlevel, midcareer artists, who make up the broad ecosystem from which great work arises, and the very people likely to disappear in a new economy that favors the few. “Bestselling books have gotten bestier; blockbuster movies have gotten bustier,” Deresiewicz pointedly observes.

In the end, he argues that a new economic paradigm has arisen, and artists must respond to it. Some of his recommendations are oddly old school. For one, artists who are now asked to work for free to build an online audience, a following, must demand to be paid. “I cannot think of another field in which people feel guilty about being paid for their work—and even guiltier for wanting to be paid,” he writes. “Arts and artists must be in the market but not of it,” which is of course easier said than done these days.

But Deresiewicz’s most profound recommendations—a breakup of tech monopolies and the end to extreme inequality—are revolutionary and perhaps impossible to achieve. So there is much to think about and even more to argue with in The Death of the Artist. And that is its point.

In 2014, award-winning essayist William Deresiewicz roiled the placid ponds of academia with his controversial attack on American elite education in his book Excellent Sheep. Prepare yourself, because he’s back. His wide-ranging, vividly written new book focuses on how big tech and big money—the new economy—are devastating artists and the arts. In The Death of […]
Nonfiction

The Last Stargazers

Review by Deborah Hopkinson

Emily Levesque, an astronomy professor at the University of Washington, trains her gaze on humans’ fascination with the stars in this engaging look at the field of astronomy and its practitioners who strive to enrich our understanding of the universe. Like many astronomers, Levesque traces her determination to study space to early childhood, when as a toddler in 1986 she caught a glimpse of Halley’s comet through the family’s backyard telescope. From that moment on, Levesque was hooked, even though she had little notion of precisely what professional astronomers do—or the obstacles she might encounter as a young female researcher in a male-dominated field. 

In her first book for a general audience, Levesque sets out to illuminate her chosen field, often using humorous or dramatic personal anecdotes to explicate the research process, the history of astronomy and how telescopes actually work. This is no dry technical narrative. Levesque knows how to tell a story, and her conversational style and clear, easygoing prose bring readers into the action, whether it’s her own first experience of a total eclipse or another astronomer’s discovery of a supernova with the naked eye. Readers will learn what it takes to be granted access to a single night of observation at one of the world’s premier telescopes or to ride along in NASA’s flying SOFIA telescope—and what happens when things go wrong. This is also an introduction to the community of astronomers working today, many of whom Levesque interviewed for her book and whose stories help make her narrative shine. She even devotes a section to how technology may change the field for future astronomers. 

While astronomy is an incredibly precise and technical field, the professional astronomers Levesque interviewed could almost always link their desire to explore the universe to a vivid moment of awe and wonder. Something, Levesque concludes, “drives us to reach outward and upward into the vast cosmos before us simply because we must.” Immensely informative and inspiring, The Last Stargazers: The Enduring Story of Astronomy’s Vanishing Explorers is the perfect complement to a summer night under the stars.

Emily Levesque, an astronomy professor at the University of Washington, trains her gaze on humans’ fascination with the stars in this engaging look at the field of astronomy and its practitioners who strive to enrich our understanding of the universe. Like many astronomers, Levesque traces her determination to study space to early childhood, when as […]
NonfictionNatureMemoir

Two Trees Make a Forest

Review by Priscilla Kipp

Like the sequoias of the U.S. Pacific Northwest, red and yellow cedars in Taiwan are so huge that just two of them, writes environmental historian Jessica J. Lee, can look and feel like a whole forest. She finds them as she hikes through the mountainous spine of the country where her beloved grandfather Gong was sent home to die, alone in the dementia of Alzheimer’s. Lee still grieves his solitary death and is determined to learn more about his life from before he and Po, her “irascible, difficult grandmother,” became Canadian immigrants. In Taiwan, where Lee is both stranger and descendant, her compass is a barely decipherable letter left behind by Gong, written as his mind disintegrated. Two Trees Make a Forest: In Search of My Family’s Past Among Taiwan’s Mountains and Coasts charts her ardent quest to discover and reconcile her family’s past with her need to claim an ancestral home.

Her journey is a challenge. Taiwan’s language is almost as foreign to Lee as its landscape—volcanic fumaroles, towering peaks enveloped in fog and the constant threat of mudslides and earthquakes. Lee studies the calligraphy of both Taiwanese and Chinese (her mother speaks Mandarin) and sprinkles her memoir with the illustrations that help her find her way through the two languages. Still, as she visits her mother’s crowded childhood home city of Taipei, Lee’s biracial features and diffident tongue reveal her as a foreigner. 

Taiwan has a complicated history, explored and exploited by Europeans and tossed back and forth between Japan and China. Lee learns that Gong was a fighter pilot with the famous Flying Tigers, risking his life on secret missions and rewarded for his bravery. Injured in a 1969 crash that should have killed him, he could no longer fly and left Taiwan for the promise of flying in Canada, only to become a factory janitor instead. 

Lee finds her own ways of imprinting her rediscovered homeland on her spirit. Using her skills as a scholar, she identifies the many species she finds as she hikes and bikes through the countryside, some existing nowhere else in the world. As Taiwan reveals itself, Lee comes to a kind of peace. Gong’s past and her present, so evocatively examined, suggest the forest she needed to find.

Like the sequoias of the U.S. Pacific Northwest, red and yellow cedars in Taiwan are so huge that just two of them, writes environmental historian Jessica J. Lee, can look and feel like a whole forest. She finds them as she hikes through the mountainous spine of the country where her beloved grandfather Gong was […]
NonfictionWomen's HistoryHistory

Looking for Miss America

Review by Jessica Wakeman

If you’ve disregarded the Miss America pageant as nothing but frivolous cheesecake, you are not alone. But consider taking a closer look at this cultural artifact, which has been around nearly as long as women have had the right to vote. In Looking for Miss America: A Pageant’s 100-Year Quest to Define Womanhood, historian Margot Mifflin encourages us to view Miss America as more complicated than just sashes, hairspray and high heels.

If you’ve disregarded the Miss America pageant as nothing but frivolous cheesecake, consider taking a closer look at this cultural artifact.

Miss America has never represented all American women—and that was kind of the point. From its beginnings on the Atlantic City boardwalk in 1921, the pageant has rewarded an idealized version of young womanhood: white, childless, unmarried, thin and beautiful (by the beauty standards of the day). 

As patriarchal white America ceded its control of women and people of color, Miss America slowly changed along with the culture. The pageant grappled with social revolution regarding women’s “ideal” bodies, sexual expression, sexual orientation, educational opportunities, gender roles and careers. “The pageant has been in constant dialogue with feminism, though rarely in step with it,” writes Mifflin.

Mifflin’s deep research, numerous support texts, nuanced analysis and punchy writing weave an engaging account. (The history of the bathing suit portion of the pageant is especially fascinating.) She interviewed over a dozen past pageant contestants, pageant employees, a judge and others for a comprehensive behind-the-scenes narrative. 

Even if you’ve never watched a single Miss America pageant on TV, anyone with an interest in American history would benefit from this deep dive into a complex cultural figurehead. 

If you’ve disregarded the Miss America pageant as nothing but frivolous cheesecake, consider taking a closer look at this cultural artifact, which has been around nearly as long as women have had the right to vote.

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