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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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Your Asian Veggie Patch

Connie Cao’s well-organized, easy-to-follow book provides guidance on growing, harvesting and cooking Asian veggies.
NonfictionCrafts, Hobbies & Home

Garden Wonderland

Review by Deborah Hopkinson

In the innovative Garden Wonderland: Creating Life-Changing Outdoor Spaces for Beauty, Harvest, Meaning, and Joy, garden designer Leslie Bennett teams up with writer and editor Julie Chai to explore how to create outdoor spaces that nurture family, friends and community. 

At the outset, the authors suggest that readers grab a blank notepad to jot down ideas and goals as they go along. And that’s wise advice, as this book is replete with helpful tips as well as the fundamentals. Part 1 focuses on the practical, which will be appreciated by those new to gardening or garden design. The authors share four principles that ground their approach to gardening: making plants part of your daily life; surrounding yourself with beauty; making space for connection; and fortifying your sense of belonging. Most importantly, they stress that rather than conforming to someone else’s idea of what a garden should be, individuals and families should create spaces that work for them. Bennett and Chai also discuss considerations such as space allotment, seating arrangements and sun exposure. There’s also helpful information on design concepts, with tips about selecting plants for foliage and color.

The second part of the book focuses on inspiration. This section features garden “wonderlands” that celebrate edible and floral landscapes, along with gardens designed to serve as gathering places or to spotlight cultural heritages. Full color photographs throughout show gardens, plants, and the individuals and families who treasure them. With its seamless integration of gardening principles with advanced design ideas, Garden Wonderland is the perfect gift for new gardeners—or anyone in need of a little inspiration.  

With its seamless integration of gardening principles with advanced design ideas, Garden Wonderland is the perfect gift for new gardeners—or anyone in need of a little inspiration.
NonfictionFood & DrinkCookbooks

The Contemporary African Kitchen

Review by Laura Hutson Hunter

James Beard Award-winning author Alexander Smalls includes 120 recipes from 33 chefs, restaurateurs, caterers, cooks and writers in The Contemporary African Kitchen: Home Cooking Recipes From the Leading Chefs of Africa. It’s a massive undertaking that spans an entire continent filled with innumerable culinary styles. But that breadth is important to Smalls, who writes in the book’s foreword that “our culture has been kept alive in great part through our culinary currency and traditions.” The book is organized into broad geographic segments: Northern, Eastern, Central, Southern and Western Africa are all represented. The Northern African section includes a particularly interesting recipe for Egyptian okra stew, which is loaded with garlic, basil, cilantro and mint and looks at once lush and hearty. In his description of the stew, chef Mostafa Seif writes, “Some foods are as much for nourishment as they are a tool for showing off.” He goes on to describe how people would hang okra from their balconies on the days that it was on the menu as a kind of demonstration of abundance. This book is great for adventurous eaters from all backgrounds, but that’s not to say an experimental palette is a prerequisite; if you’re more comfortable with traditionally American fare, you may be surprised by how familiar some of these dishes are: from Ethiopian deviled eggs and a chocolate cake recipe from Uganda to a buttery, garlicky recipe for South African mashed potatoes with spinach.

 

James Beard Award-winning author Alexander Smalls’ The Contemporary African Kitchen collects recipes that span an entire continent filled with innumerable culinary styles and traditions.

A Year in Bloom

Planting bulbs usually means planning ahead. A Year in Bloom is a practical, beautiful handbook that will find a place in any gardener’s library.
NonfictionFood & DrinkCookbooks

Our South

Review by Becky Libourel Diamond

The recipes in the lavishly presented Our South: Black Food Through My Lens feature a fascinating blend of ingredients, flavors and techniques. Acclaimed chef Ashleigh Shanti, a queer Black woman from Appalachia, shares the region’s history and her own backstory to show how she developed a love of all things culinary. Recalling past meals rich in bacon, lard, butter and country ham, Shanti includes an abundance of regional dishes, such as Virginia Brunswick stew, and black pepper quail and leather britches, a southern Appalachian specialty dish of dried green beans and smoky seasoned meat. I made the gingered shrimp, watermelon and peach skewers—like eating summer on a plate—and the cucumber and celery heart salad, which is bathed in zesty, pickled goodness and tasted even better the second day. Shanti notes that her book is meant to “amplify your understanding of the complexities of Black food” and “dispel the myths of what America thinks Black cooking is and is not.” Our South is a perfect gift for anyone curious about the intersections of food and culture.

Ashleigh Shanti’s excellent, lavishly presented Our South twines the recipes and culture of Black Appalachia with the chef’s own culinary journey.
NonfictionFood & DrinkCookbooks

Breaking Bao

Review by Becky Libourel Diamond

Breaking Bao: 88 Bakes and Snacks From Asia and Beyond by award-winning pastry chef Clarice Lam is a striking collection of thoughtfully crafted baked goods, highlighting her “love for Asian flavors while simultaneously connecting the dots between cultures.” Recalling her diverse background (her mother is from Hong Kong and her father from the Philippines) and experiences (the family lived and traveled all over the world), Lam explains how food was her solace during times when she felt like an outsider. On her path to becoming a chef, she gained knowledge and appreciation of the “interwoven food histories” that sustained her when the rest of the world shut her out. Organized into three main sections—Bao, Cakes and Desserts, and Snacks—Lam’s highly detailed instructions accompanied by texturally rich close-up photos will help assist even the most inexperienced pastry chef, as many of the recipes can be rather complicated and span several pages. Detailed chapters on ingredients, tools and equipment helpfully describe how and why they are used and where to get them. Dishes range from traditional Asian recipes such as shokupan (Japanese milk bread—one of the most common recipes in Asian baking) and chili crisp (a staple oil in every Chinese household), to dishes with an Asian-inspired twist, such as matcha-azuki Mont Blanc and pandan-lime meringue pie. This beautiful, informative cookbook is the perfect gift for anyone who enjoys being creative in the kitchen, and might even inspire home bakers to invent their own confectionary delights. 

Clarice Lam’s Breaking Bao is a striking collection of thoughtfully crafted baked goods that highlights the inventive pastry chef’s love of Asian flavors.

Every Last Bite

Every Last Bite is an accessible, practical cookbook that will be welcomed by anyone looking to rein in their food budget and avoid excess waste and energy usage.
NonfictionLiteratureBiography

Didion and Babitz

Review by Sarah McCraw Crow

In her introduction to Didion and Babitz, Lili Anolik lays out her plan: “What this book attempts to do: See Joan Didion plainly; see Eve Babitz plainly. Except Joan Didion can’t be seen plainly,” only “through a glass darkly. Eve Babitz is that glass.”

Babitz, born in 1943, was a child of Hollywood. Her father was a violinist for movie studios, her godfather was Igor Stravinsky. At 20, she made waves for posing nude with Marcel Duchamp as the two played chess. Though she wanted to be an artist and design album covers, she’s remembered for her memoir and short stories recounting the sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll scene of early-1970s Los Angeles. But Babitz’s drug-fueled lifestyle got in her way, and her writing was largely forgotten until Anolik got to know her in 2012. Anolik’s profile for Vanity Fair and a 2019 biography, Hollywood’s Eve, sparked a resurgence of interest in Babitz’s writing. 

After Babitz died in 2021, Anolik stayed in touch with Babitz’s sister, Mirandi, who invited Anolik to examine the writer’s collection of letters. Anolik found one of particular interest: an unsent 1972 letter from Babitz to her friend Joan Didion. By turns earnest and angry, it sets up Babitz and Didion not as merely friends but as writerly rivals; Babitz chides Didion for dismissing Virginia Woolf and, Babitz claims, wanting to write like a man. The revelation led Anolik to begin another book about Babitz, this time including Didion.

The resulting book draws on copious interviews with Babitz’s and Didion’s networks, and the archives of Didion, Babitz and a host of others. Didion and Babitz situates the two in the 1970s LA scene that both wrote about, following them to the end of their lives—they died within days of one another. It’s a lively recounting of freewheeling partier Babitz and ambitious “cool customer” Didion. Despite the title, the narrative is notably tilted towards Babitz, more grounded in her work and life than in Didion’s. Still, the book captures a period and a vibe, and the celebrity gossip alone will entertain any ’70s-curious reader. Like Babitz herself, Didion and Babitz is an engaging narrative that Didion fans may quibble with, but that situates the two writers as the prime chroniclers of 1970s LA. 

Lili Anolik’s Didion and Babitz is a freewheeling and engaging narrative about two iconic literary rivals and their world in 1970s Los Angeles.

We All Shine On

Elliot Mintz recounts his one-of-a-kind friendship with John Lennon and Yoko Ono in an intimate memoir that is unduly hard to put down.
NonfictionArtPhotographyArt

The African Gaze

Review by Laura Hutson Hunter

Amy Sall’s The African Gaze: Photography, Cinema and Power began as a university course Sall developed at New York City’s The New School. An undercurrent of academic rigor flows throughout the volume, which functions as an introduction to African photography and film as well as a collective biography of some of its most influential players. In her preface, writer and archivist Sall distills her thoughts on the subjects she spent so many years studying, and each sentence is packed with authoritative insight. The photography section begins with self-portraits by Ghanaian Felicia Abban, who also happens to be one of the few “named and known” women photographers in Africa. Many of the book’s other highlights involve female subjects: a striking studio portrait of three women by Augustt Azaglo Cornélius Yawo; a candid shot of four young women seated around a table at a party by Jean Depara; and a woman posing seated with a single high-heeled sandal that’s been placed atop her oversized skirt by Seydou Keita. Cinema is more difficult to capture in still images, and so the Filmmakers section relies on the breadth of its subjects, which includes artists working in documentary and animation in addition to scripted dramas. Particularly evocative are images of the two protagonists of Djibril Diop Mambéty’s Touki Bouki, or the stunning close-up of the main character in Ousmane Sembene’s Black Girl. The African Gaze is an essential, encyclopedic study of African image-makers, and reading through it in its entirety made me feel like I’d actually enrolled in Sall’s course.

Amy Sall’s The African Gaze is an essential, encyclopedic study of African photographers and filmmakers that’s packed with insight and images.

Ingenious

Richard Munson’s splendid biography of Benjamin Franklin provides an insightful view of the statesman’s lesser known accomplishments in science.

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