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Defining Style

Emphasizing personal style, Joan Barzilay Freund’s Defining Style is a freeing, inspiring and extremely innovative look at interior design.
Emphasizing personal style, Joan Barzilay Freund’s Defining Style is a freeing, inspiring and extremely innovative look at interior design.
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Black Folk

Black Folk illuminates the intelligence, sense of community, hard work, resilience and courage of the Black working class, whose members have made crucial contributions to American history.
NonfictionEnvironmentAnimals

Eight Bears

Review by Priscilla Kipp

Gloria Dickie, an award-winning journalist and climate correspondent for Reuters, begins her intensive study of the eight remaining species of bears by recalling the familiar children’s story of Goldilocks. “We have entered the bears’ home without permission and selfishly laid claim to what we found there,” Dickie writes in Eight Bears: Mythic Past and Imperiled Future, alluding to everything humans have done to endanger these creatures.

Dickie brings readers along for the global trek she took while reporting and writing this book. Eight Bears is divided into three geographic parts, according to her subjects’ habitats: South America is home to the elusive spectacled bear in Ecuador and Peru; sloth, sun, moon and panda bears live in Asia, including India, Vietnam and China; and in North America, readers meet the American black and brown bears (United States) and the polar bear (Canada).

There is a lot to learn here about the mythic panda, the shy spectacled bear, the aggressive sloth bear, the controversial grizzly, the potentially doomed polar bear and others, and Dickie shows just how vulnerable they all are. Climate change is everywhere, threatening animals and humans with droughts, deforestation, warming seas and withering food sources. Human greed, corruption and exploitation make things worse; the captors of sloth “dancing bears” in India and the extractors of bear bile in Vietnam, for example, have earned their infamy. In the U.S., the pros and cons of continuing to protect grizzlies while ranchers and farmers deal with the dire consequences of their predation are up for debate. In other parts of the world, different species are being forced to share dwindling food sources, such as the spectacled bear and the puma as lowlands warm in the Andes. Six of these eight bear species are on the verge of extinction, and in addition to outlining their peril, Dickie also speaks with several of the activists and scientists who are working to secure a better future for them.

Our relationship with bears has been complicated but tender, Dickie notes. Remember the whimsical Paddington Bear, the beloved Berenstain Bears, the cute stuffed teddy bear in a baby’s crib? And the panda bear, so idolized that it is given as a political gift to China’s favored friends? Perhaps it is just such a history that can inspire more work to save them from extinction.

Gloria Dickie’s study of the eight remaining species of bears is laced with climate change warnings as she explores all the ways humans both love and endanger these creatures.

Evidence of Things Seen

Sarah Weinman’s second true crime anthology confronts how social media, misogyny, racism and classism shape how we perceive crime.
NonfictionWomen's HistoryHistory

First to the Front

Review by Deborah Hopkinson

If you haven’t heard of Dickey Chapelle, you’re not alone. But Lorissa Rinehart’s authoritative biography, First to the Front: The Untold Story of Dickey Chapelle, Trailblazing Female War Correspondent, makes it clear that this courageous photojournalist, who was the first female war correspondent to be killed in combat, deserves wider recognition.

Born Georgette Louise Meyer in 1918 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Chapelle had an early love of aviation and even studied for a time at MIT. After she flunked out of school, Chapelle’s parents sent her to live with her grandparents in Florida, where she got a job publicizing a Miami airshow. After being sent to Havana to cover another airshow, the ambitious Chapelle pitched a story to the New York Times. When the ace pilot crashed before her eyes, she raced to a phone booth to dictate the story. A chance encounter with a fellow journalist on the scene led to a job offer in New York City, where she took photography classes from an older photojournalist named Tony Chapelle. The two eventually married—and then divorced, after his violent behavior escalated in tandem with her growing success as a journalist.

Rinehart’s account follows Chapelle’s wide-ranging international career from Panama to the Pacific, to 1950s postwar Europe, to Laos, Vietnam and a host of other locations. Chapelle covered conflicts as well as humanitarian crises, and Rinehart details her exceptional courage, her understanding of Cold War politics and her unflinching commitment to telling the stories of people oppressed by harsh regimes or fighting for independence. 

Rinehart also explores the reasons why Chapelle is not well known despite her extraordinary career. Saying she was “ahead of her time” may sound like a platitude, but Rinehart demonstrates that Chapelle’s storytelling truly was different from many of her fellow journalists, who accused Chapelle of being obsessed with her career and not being objective. While some journalists relied heavily on government sources, Chapelle took an intense, immersive approach to stories, prioritizing “the voices, the lives, and the experiences of those she reported on,” Rinehart writes.

Chapelle died in 1965 while embedded with U.S. Marines in Vietnam. With her trademark black-rimmed glasses and pearl earrings, Chapelle was unforgettable, fearless and compassionate. At the time of her death at age 47, she had been reporting in conflict zones across the world for 25 years.

First to the Front is a valuable, long-overdue tribute to an American woman whose work and commitment to human rights is more relevant than ever.

Lorissa Rinehart’s authoritative biography makes it clear why Dickey Chapelle, a courageous photojournalist and the first female war correspondent to be killed in combat, deserves wider recognition.

Goblin Mode

Might you be a goblin? A weirdo who loves plants and cozy clutter? Read this book to find out, and prepare to both feel seen and up your goblin game.
NonfictionLifestylesCrafts, Hobbies & Home

How to Be a Rule-Breaking Letterer

Review by Susannah Felts

When I was a kid, bubble letters were very on-trend, and I spent hours perfecting my ABCs in bubble form. How I wish I’d had Huyen Dinh’s How to Be a Rule-Breaking Letterer: A Guide to Making Perfectly Imperfect Art back then to goad me into becoming a bona fide word-artist, or at least to nudge me toward further experimentation.

Dinh’s personal story is of the “good girl gets fed up and flees corporate malaise, follows passion” variety (one I’m rather partial to). Now, after years of struggling, she is no longer afraid to make what pleases her. While she neatly breaks down lettering fundamentals—developing your typographic eye, mastering brushstrokes, talking the talk (ascenders and descenders and swashes, oh my!)—her bigger agenda is to encourage free thought, to open up readers to their own preferences and to the wealth of ideas just waiting to be plucked from thin air. She’s quite candid about her own process and clunky first drafts, too, which is always a plus.

Huyen Dinh neatly breaks down hand lettering fundamentals, but her bigger agenda is to encourage free thought and open up readers to their own preferences and ideas.

I Know Who You Are

Some retirees quilt; others fish. And then there’s Barbara Rae-Venter, who identified the Golden State Killer using investigative genetic genealogy and sparked a forensic revolution.
NonfictionScienceMemoirArts & Culture

Life on Other Planets

Review by Sarah McCraw Crow

“I started my life with one thing: science. Astronomy, to be specific. And I dove into it,” writes Aomawa Shields in the introduction to her memoir, Life on Other Planets. “Then I found something else I liked: the arts. Acting, to be specific. So I dove into that instead. Neither one by itself felt fully right.” 

Beginning with her initial glimmers of love for the stars and planets as a preteen, Shields tells her story chronologically, with writing that is immediate, sometimes poetic. In a scene rich in detail, she recounts the snowy winter night when, as a high school student at Phillips Exeter Academy, she first glimpsed Jupiter and its moons through a telescope. “That I could measure something in space, just by looking—this was the shattered ceiling of the Earth, ascending up and through the atmosphere into nothing,” she writes. At MIT and then the University of Wisconsin, Shields steeped herself in astronomy. But the pull of acting, which she discovered in high school playing the role of Truvy in Steel Magnolias, never faded, and she eventually put her work in STEM on hold to pursue an M.F.A. in acting at UCLA.

Shields’ nonlinear path through science, acting, the arts and back to astronomy (she returned to graduate school at age 35 and is now a tenured professor of astronomy and physics at UC Irvine) makes up the rest of the memoir’s narrative. Yes, she faced a bevy of struggles: As a Black woman, Shields was buffeted by racism in graduate school, as well as by self-doubt and impostor syndrome. She’s also candid about the sometimes-difficult balance of marriage, family and work, and her worry about whether she’s “Black enough” in certain settings. Throughout, Shields is an illuminating guide to her own idiosyncratic journey, seamlessly unpacking complicated concepts about stars and planets.

In Life on Other Planets, Shields has written an inspiring memoir about charting her own path and merging her scientific and artistic pursuits. Along the way, she also gives us glimpses of the wonder she’s found while studying the cosmos.

Astrobiologist Aomawa Shields’ Life on Other Planets is an inspiring memoir about charting her own path and merging the two worlds of science and art.

Little, Crazy Children

In his latest true crime investigation, James Renner refuses to let the murder of Shaker Heights, Ohio, teenager Lisa Pruett be washed away by the tide of time.
NonfictionMemoirFamily & Relationships

Owner of a Lonely Heart

Review by Alden Mudge

The astonishing first line of Beth Nguyen’s revelatory memoir Owner of a Lonely Heart reads, “Over the course of my life I have spent less than twenty-four hours with my mother.” That time consisted of six brief visits over the course of 26 years, beginning when Nguyen was a 19-year-old college student and reunited with her mother in Boston for the first time since Nguyen was 8 months old.

The explanation for this startling fact is fairly straightforward. In April of 1975, as South Vietnam fell to the forces of the North Vietnamese, Nguyen escaped Vietnam by boat with her older sister, paternal grandmother, father and uncles. Her father and uncles had fought for the losing side and now faced “reeducation,” or worse. So they came to America and ended up in a tiny community of Vietnamese refugees in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Nguyen’s mother had been living with her own mother and her other children in another part of Saigon during the collapse. She only discovered that her daughters and their father had fled some days later.

The feelings and implications of these circumstances, on the other hand, are anything but straightforward. Fittingly, Owner of a Lonely Heart is not a chronological memoir. It circulates among memories, embellishing and deepening the reader’s and Nguyen’s understanding of them. In a chapter called “My Mothers,” she writes not of her biological mother but of her grandmother Noi, who provided a safe place for Nguyen in a chaotic household, and of the woman her father married when Nguyen was 3, the daughter of Mexican migrants whom Nguyen credits with saving her life. In another chapter, Nguyen writes of her “white mother,” a high school boyfriend’s parent who taught Nguyen the “ways of whiteness” and helped her read the hieroglyphics of a coded society. Throughout the memoir, Nguyen also writes movingly about being a mother herself, something that has clearly shifted her perspective on her experiences.

During her childhood, Nguyen’s family did not talk about Vietnam or the war. They had no vocabulary for trauma, and her father’s unacknowledged PTSD bodied forth in anger, drinking and home improvement projects that never reached completion. A superb writer, Nguyen gives readers a tactile sense of her childhood home life and the love and anguish she felt there.

“Growing up,” Nguyen writes, “I was afraid all the time. It was a low-lying fear that I couldn’t explain to myself or dare admit out loud.” In her beautiful memoir, Nguyen finally acknowledges this fear—and much, much more—out loud.

Beth Nguyen has only spent 24 hours with her mother over the course of her adult life, and her revelatory memoir depicts all the love and anguish bound up with this fact.
NonfictionSelf-Help

Social Justice for the Sensitive Soul

Review by Kelly Blewett

Many of us long to help the world bend toward justice, as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. put it. However, our culture’s image of the social justice warrior—fiery, loud, unapologetically confrontational—limits who can participate and how it should be done. Dorcas Cheng-Tozun’s essential new book, Social Justice for the Sensitive Soul: How to Change the World in Quiet Ways, is written specifically for highly sensitive people (HSPs) with a passion for social reform. It encourages and equips those who don’t fit the typical social justice warrior profile to work toward the changes they want to see in the world while still taking care of themselves, particularly in the current climate of public disagreement, trolling and outright hostility. With gentleness and vulnerability, Cheng-Tozun persuades readers that the world needs HSPs’ strengths now more than ever. 

Social Justice for the Sensitive Soul first explores what it means to be highly sensitive, both in terms of strengths and limitations. Cheng-Tozun writes that HSPs are defined by four traits: “depth of processing, quicker to overstimulation, emotional reactivity, and sensing the subtle.” Next, she considers key questions that can help HSPs critically analyze sustainable options for participating in social justice causes. The third section offers an abundant and exciting set of pathways for politically active HSPs, organized by the different roles they could play according to their strengths and visions for the future—such as connectors, creatives, record keepers, builders and so on. Throughout these sections, Cheng-Tozun draws on survey data from over 200 HSPs, shares her own struggles with debilitating burnout and offers insights from social movements of the past.

Each section builds on what came before, and the loving touches throughout—the heartfelt personal examples, the memorable illustrations from history, the strong and affirming overall vision—make it truly unforgettable. Like a deep breath of fresh air in the morning, this is a book that can draw readers back to center and give them new ideas to move forward. Be sure to inscribe your name in your copy; you will want to share this hopeful, practical, richly evidenced, deeply personal and exceptionally well-organized book with your friends.

Dorcas Cheng-Tozun’s hopeful, practical book will equip highly sensitive people to work toward justice and social reform while still taking care of themselves.

The Art Thief

Stéphane Breitwieser stole more than 300 irreplaceable artworks. Journalist Michael Finkel now attempts to understand why this criminal aesthete hoarded those treasures in his attic.

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