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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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Africatown

Review by Anne Bartlett

When word of emancipation reached them, the last men and women kidnapped in West Africa and sold to American enslavers just wanted to go home. They’d only been in the Mobile, Alabama, area about five years; they belonged in Yorubaland. So they saved their tiny wages and offered $1,000 to the captain of the Clotilda, the ship that had illegally brought them to the U.S. in 1860, to take them back. He refused.

Stuck in Alabama, they made the best of it. They paired off, bought land, built a church and founded the communities on Mobile’s north side known as “Africatown.” It’s still there, and its residents are still fighting for justice.

Nick Tabor’s absorbing Africatown: America’s Last Slave Ship and the Community It Created tells the story of these “shipmates” and their neighborhood up to the present day. The timing of its publication is auspicious, just a few years after the wreckage of the Clotilda was identified off the coast of Alabama in 2018. Zora Neale Hurston’s book Barracoon, based on interviews in the 1920s with shipmate Cudjo Lewis, was finally published that same year.

Africatown was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2012, an action that was long overdue. If you are looking for a single community that epitomizes the Black experience in the American South, Africatown is a contender. It thrived as industry brought decent jobs, locally owned businesses prospered, and churches and an excellent school provided centers for civic life. But the factories polluted the air and water, then shut down. The residents were targets of white supremacist violence and voter suppression. Highway projects destroyed homes and commerce.

Tabor tells this history seamlessly through key individuals such as Lewis; Henry Williams, a welder who became an early activist; and Joe Womack and Anderson Flen, contemporary native sons who work to protect Africatown from continued environmental racism and to redevelop it as a heritage tourism center. Progress has been halting. The Mobile city government is happy to install laudatory plaques but reluctant to spend the money for real preservation. But the spiritual and biological descendants of that first Africatown generation, dragged from their homes and enslaved by racist white criminals, push on.

Nick Tabor’s absorbing Africatown tells of the Alabama community founded by the last Africans to be kidnapped and enslaved in America, and their descendants’ continued fight for justice.

Bang Bang Crash

Novelist Nic Brown’s stylish memoir examines his past life as a drummer and the ways it both haunts and informs his current life as a writer.
NonfictionLiteratureLifestylesFilm

But Have You Read the Book?

Review by Susannah Felts

For a literary spin on the movies, there’s But Have You Read the Book?, a compendium of 52 stories taken from print to screen. You won’t be surprised to discover titles such as To Kill a Mockingbird and Blade Runner here, but did you know Jaws was first a book? Goodfellas? The Social Network?

Author Kristen Lopez succinctly parses differences between the versions of each story, pointing out actor credits and box office facts for the movies and themes explored in the books. Rarely are the book and film notably similar; in the case of No Country for Old Men, Lopez writes that the Coen brothers “brought their patented blend of dark humor to [Cormac] McCarthy’s wild Texas landscape, transforming the book from a noirish, cynical take on the degradation of the country post-Vietnam into a melancholic look at the Western genre.”

So is But Have You Read the Book? for film buffs or book nerds? Both, I suppose, with its sweet spot in the Venn diagram overlap of the two.

Is Kristen Lopez’s But Have You Read the Book? for film buffs or book nerds? We say both.

Colors of Film

You’ll never take color for granted again after perusing Charles Bramesco’s Colors of Film, which explores the palettes used in 50 iconic films through four eras of cinema.
NonfictionSelf-HelpFamily & Relationships

Drama Free

Review by Sarah Carter

Licensed therapist and author Nedra Glover Tawwab offers readers practical guidance on breaking the cycle of family dysfunction in Drama Free: A Guide to Managing Unhealthy Family Relationships. In the introduction, Tawwab writes, “How people engage in the family is usually how they engage in the world.” This might be a relief for the lucky few who grew up in perfect families, but for most of us, unlearning the cycle of family dysfunction takes hard work and a little help. 

Drama Free offers just that: clear, easy-to-understand direction for identifying and breaking dysfunctional family patterns. The book is divided into three sections titled “Unlearning Dysfunction,” “Healing” and “Growing”—three important milestones on the road from chaotic family relationships to healthy ones. Each chapter begins with a quote or a real-life example from Tawwab’s therapy practice. Then it moves on to a brief analysis of the dynamics at play in the opening story and ends with a series of self-reflective questions. Chapters cover a wide range of topics including codependency, enmeshment, thriving versus surviving, managing relationships with people who won’t change and troubleshooting relationships with parents.

Tawwab’s longtime career as a therapist, her thriving Instagram community (@nedratawwab) and her New York Times bestselling debut, Set Boundaries, Find Peace: A Guide to Reclaiming Yourself, have made her a leading voice on relationships and boundaries. Drama Free builds on this work by concentrating specifically on family relationships, supporting readers as they take responsibility for their own actions and move toward greater authenticity. 

Whether you’re struggling to process trauma, addiction or neglect in your childhood or just looking for increased transparency in your family relationships, Drama Free offers clinical insight in the warm, accessible tone for which Tawwab is known.

Nedra Glover Tawwab builds on her work in Set Boundaries, Find Peace by concentrating on family relationships in Drama Free, helping readers unlearn the cycle of family dysfunction.
NonfictionNatureMemoirFamily & Relationships

Forager

Review by Alice Cary

Journalism professor Michelle Dowd was raised in California’s Angeles National Forest as part of an ultrareligious cult known as the Field, which was begun by her grandfather. She grew up fearing the apocalypse might arrive at any moment, and public education was shunned and largely avoided. “Outsiders” were never to be trusted. As Dowd writes in her excellent memoir, Forager: Field Notes for Surviving a Family Cult, her father taught his children that “preparing for war is an essential component of growing up.” He forced them to embrace discomfort, limited their food, weighed them after meals and sent them hiking in the snow in tennis shoes. Although there are numerous memoirs about growing up in religious cults, Dowd’s unique spin and reflective voice elevate her story.

Forager is reminiscent of Tara Westover’s Educated, especially in the way that Dowd used her innate curiosity and thirst for education as a means to eventually break free. As a child, she began devouring the Bible—the only thing she had to read—taking secret notes on the many things she found puzzling or contradictory, “as if constructing a map for a prison escape.” Often she joined other cult members on long cross-country trips to raise money by performing in circuslike road shows. Dowd learned to endure her father’s frequent “rage and random violence” but never stopped yearning for her mother’s love and approval. Her mother was often absent, hugs weren’t allowed, and little if any nurturing was provided. 

The one thing Dowd’s mother did provide was an exceptional naturalist’s education, which serves as the book’s framework. Since the apocalypse was believed to be imminent, Dowd and others were expertly trained in survival skills. Each chapter begins with an illustration and short discussion of a plant that might provide sustenance, such as chokeberry, yucca or Jeffrey pine. Dowd’s survival skills, which have long provided her with a life raft, both mentally and physically, are not only admirable but fascinating.

Although Forager chronicles a horrific upbringing, Dowd’s narration is ultimately hopeful, uplifting and always appreciative of our intimate, fragile dependence on our planet. As she so beautifully concludes, “The sustenance I rely on is from the Mountain, which has made my mind large, open, like the night sky, where there is room for paradox.”

Although there are numerous memoirs about growing up in religious cults, Michelle Dowd's reflective voice and unique connection to nature elevate her story.
NonfictionSocial ScienceBody, Mind & Spirit

Real Self-Care

Review by Linda M. Castellitto

Yoga classes, cleanses, wellness retreats: We’ve all heard these and other remedies marketed as “self-care” for life in an exhausting and distressing world. But debut author Pooja Lakshmin wants readers to know that, while these types of self-care may make us feel temporarily better, they are part of an ineffectual system that keeps people (especially women and minorities) feeling inadequate and overwhelmed. As the psychiatrist and New York Times contributor writes in her introduction to Real Self-Care: A Transformative Program for Redefining Wellness (Crystals, Cleanses, and Bubble Baths Not Included), “This book is my letter to every woman out there who has flirted with hopping in the car and running away from it all.”

Lakshmin wants to help readers find ways to more authentically enjoy their everyday lives, and she uses anecdotes about her patients to illustrate what this might look like. For example, there’s Shelby, who shifted from viewing breastfeeding as imperative to something that just didn’t work out (and that’s OK!), and Clara, who started her own business after realizing teaching was no longer sustainable.

How did they get there? Via Lakshmin’s four principles for real self-care: setting boundaries without guilt, practicing self-compassion, exploring your real self and asserting power. Helpful tools, exercises, scripts and a “Real Self-Care Compass” smooth the way to the gratifying final stage, which is “facing, straight-on, the toxicity and trauma that our culture brings to women . . . and it’s only when a critical mass of women do this internal work that we will come to collective change in our world.”

Daunting? Sure. Doable? The author believes so, and she contends that the hard, ongoing work is worth it. After all, she is writing as a fellow traveler alongside her readers. “I ended up falling for Big Wellness in the worst way,” she writes. “I joined a cult!” While her time with the cult, which practiced “orgasmic meditation,” did offer some benefits (she worked with neuroscientists at the Rutgers fMRI orgasm lab, and the meditation practice “was healing for me in profound ways”), when she left the group, she was deeply depressed for quite some time. 

Over time, Lakshmin realized that “real self-care is not a noun, it’s a verb—an ongoing internal process that guides us toward profound emotional wellness and reimagines how we interact with others.” In her heartfelt and empathetic Real Self-Care, she shares how she moved beyond shame and regret to a happier, more true-to-herself life, something she believes readers can do, too. Lakshmin’s first step: reclaiming the term self-care by imbuing it with self-knowledge, sustainability and joy.

Psychiatrist Pooja Lakshmin wants to reclaim the term self-care by helping readers find ways to more authentically enjoy their everyday lives.

Saving Time

Many writers have imitated Jenny Odell’s unique style since the publication of How to Do Nothing, but Saving Time proves that no one can do Odell like Odell.
NonfictionTrue CrimeSocial Science

Still Life With Bones

Review by Deborah Mason

Dr. Alexa Hagerty, an associate fellow at the University of Cambridge and an anthropologist with a Ph.D. from Stanford, can read bones. In Still Life With Bones: Genocide, Forensics, and What Remains, Hagerty explores the close connection between bones and words. Like words, bones can be articulated (arranged into a coherent form, such as a skeleton) and become articulate (capable of clear expression). Using sight, touch, smell and even sound, Hagerty can interpret the stories that bones conceal. For example, she can tell by touch if a bone’s fracture took place before, during or after its owner’s death. She can piece together the shattered remnants of a little girl’s skull to reveal the bullet hole in the middle of her forehead. She can even determine how a person’s occupation shaped their bones. A dairy worker might have compression fractures in their neck from leaning their face against a cow’s flank. A grooved incisor might once have held a tailor’s pins.

Still Life With Bones is in part a memoir of how Hagerty gained this extraordinary expertise, recounting the physically and emotionally draining work of meticulously searching for bones and identifying the dead and how they died. It sounds bleak, but there is also pleasure in these pages: the camaraderie of co-workers, the friendly competition among fellow students and the joy when a skeleton is reunited with the community who believed they would never see their beloved again. 

However, Still Life With Bones is more than just a memoir. Woven throughout these memories and lyrical reflections on bones, anthropology and storytelling are the actual horrors that some particular bones reveal. Hagerty did her fieldwork in the mass graves of Guatemala and Argentina; her subjects are the victims of genocidal wars committed by dictators against these countries’ citizens. Her colleagues are forensic anthropologists committed to reclaiming the dead and returning them to their grieving families at great personal risk and cost. Every beautifully written page of this extraordinary book affirms the individuality of each victim, and honors the living who serve them and their survivors.

Anthropologist Alexa Hagerty's extraordinary memoir pays tribute to the victims of genocide in South America, whose bones Hagerty returned to their grieving families.

Sugar High

Is there any better way to get your CBD or THC than through a luscious chocolate custard? Chris Sayegh’s cannabis dessert cookbook will show you how.

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