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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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Hope for Cynics

Psychologist Jamil Zaki’s illuminating Hope for Cynics shows how and why cynicism is a harmful social disease, and what we can do about it.
NonfictionSocial Science

From the Ashes

Review by Deborah Mason

Grief can be mistaken for mere sadness. As a result, those who are grief-stricken may feel pressured to easily come to terms and find closure—and the sooner, the better. In From the Ashes: Grief and Revolution in a World on Fire, labor journalist Sarah Jaffe describes it as a complete rupture; it is both sorrow and rage. In her radical vision of grief, Jaffe insists that it becomes part of the mourner. It tinges the past, invades the present and forms the future. Grief insists that we are intertwined, complex beings, and not commodities or cogs—and thus, she asserts, grief defies the pulverizing effects of unbridled capitalism.

In this steadfastly personal book, Jaffe explores her own grief after the death of her father. But the death of a loved one is not the only source of grief she explores and honors. From the Ashes recounts the grief felt by refugees forced to leave their homes; workers whose livelihoods and communities were destroyed when they became unprofitable; “essential” workers who were overworked and underprotected during the COVID-19 pandemic; and survivors of climate change disasters. Their grief is intense, and reading about it can be overwhelming.

But, paradoxically, this book about sorrow is profoundly optimistic. Jaffe believes that grief, with its terrific rage and energy, can fuel revolutionary changes in our lives, our communities and our world. For example, Mohamed Mire, a refugee from the civil war in Somalia, joined forces with other Somali workers in Minnesota and forced Amazon to the bargaining table. When Margaret Thatcher closed coal mines after a bitter and violently repressed strike, Kevin Horne and other miners became health care workers, recreating the solidarity and community they had lost. After Hurricane Maria ravaged Loiza, Puerto Rico, and it became apparent that the government would not provide aid to the survivors, the women of Taller Salud, a women’s health nonprofit, worked to provide assistance and to demand justice for the people of their community.

Detailed, lucid and richly sourced, Jaffe’s book provides many more examples of these transformations, which offer compelling evidence that we can generate healing, justice and equity “from the ashes.”

Detailed, lucid and richly sourced, Sarah Jaffe’s From the Ashes shows how the transformational power of grief can fuel revolutionary change.

Fashion First

Beloved actress Diane Keaton’s Fashion First is both a style bible and an essential record of how to be cool.
NonfictionMemoir

First in the Family

Review by mónica teresa ortiz

In the opening chapter of Jessica Hoppe’s stunning memoir, First in the Family: A Story of Survival, Recovery, and the American Dream, the debut author writes, “The most powerful weapon in the American arsenal is the story.” And what a storyteller she is. Moving between lyrical prose and straightforward narration, Hoppe weaves a multigenerational family saga with biting critiques of the oppressive systems that enable devastating pipelines of addiction. 

Hoppe begins with her own alcoholism and path to recovery. But First in the Family is not your standard recovery memoir. Hoppe, who is a daughter of Honduran and Ecuadorian immigrants, writes that “the conditions caused by the traumas of migration, assimilation, colonialism, and marginalization . . . are never properly linked to substance use disorder: instead they’re pathologized and reduced to stereotypes.” If that sounds heady, keep reading. Hoppe illustrates this argument with memorable scenes that show the fraught histories of homelands and lingering harms passed down in families. 

“I know we carry generations of pain, and because we don’t tend to this sorrow—because we don’t know how to—we continue to hurt others,” Hoppe writes after the passing of her grandfather, her mother’s “greatest tormentor” who abandoned the family when she was a child. Like Hoppe, he had substance abuse disorder. In early sobriety, Hoppe sought out more information about him to understand her own addiction. Her grandfather came of age during the “decades of dictators” in Honduras, working as a laborer for the American-owned United Fruit Company, which was known for its exploitation of workers. Like many others, the company introduced drugs and alcohol to workers, and addiction was used as a method of control. “Overworked and underpaid, alcohol dulled the pang of workers’ oppression,” she writes. Her grandfather “was no match against greedy imperial forces.” His dreams of success turned to disillusionment, and “conditions caused by the traumas” did their work. 

As Hoppe digs further into her family history, she unearths hard truths that her loved ones have hid from one another and, oftentimes, from themselves. First in the Family stitches together recollections from her family with her historical and social investigations, balancing stories of harm and violence with the voice of a tender narrator. The result is a deeply moving memoir about how understanding our histories—both present and past—allows for recovery and healing rooted in the politics of liberation. 

Jessica Hoppe’s stunning debut memoir, First in the Family, shows that understanding our histories allows for recovery, healing and liberation.

By the Fire We Carry

Rebecca Nagle’s gripping By the Fire We Carry chronicles how the appeal of a decades-old Oklahoma murder restored land rights to Muscogee and Cherokee Nations.
NonfictionLifestylesFood & DrinkCookbooks

Belly Full

Review by Laura Hutson Hunter

The colorful, flavorful Belly Full: Exploring Caribbean Cuisine through 11 Fundamental Ingredients and over 100 Recipes accomplishes what might appear to be a daunting task—distilling a multifaceted culture’s cuisine into a 256-page book. Luckily, Brooklyn-based author Lesley Enston understands that challenge, and has chosen to make Belly Full a playful, not overwhelming, read. She organizes the book into fundamental ingredients: beans, calabaza, cassava, chayote, coconut, cornmeal, okra, plantains, rice, salted cod and Scotch bonnet peppers. Beyond that, she describes additional common ingredients—such as culantro, which is similar to but not exactly like cilantro—so that newbies to Caribbean cuisine have an informed approach. Enston grew up in a half-Trinidadian, half-Canadian household in Toronto, and often attended Trinidadian family functions. “We never talked much about the origins of these dishes,” she writes, “but the pride that went into preparing and serving them was clear.” In keeping with its Caribbean subject matter, Belly Full is filled with saturated colors and vibrant photography from Marc Baptiste. Enston’s Trini chow mein is particularly appealing, with its kitchen-sink approach to the traditional Asian dish. It’s also a fun portal into the culture: “This is a clear example of the influence of the Chinese indentured servants brought to Trinidad by British colonists after the abolition of slavery in the region,” she writes. An even deeper dive into cultural distinction is that the dish uses lo mein, not chow mein, noodles. “Why it’s called chow mein when you use lo mein noodles is beyond me,” Enston writes. “I chalk it up to the joy we seem to get from mixing names up.”

 

Belly Full is a charming, playful cookbook that uses 11 fundamental ingredients to distill the multifaceted cuisine of the Caribbean.
NonfictionTrue Crime

How American journalist Rollo Romig tackled writing about Indian right-wing extremism

Behind the Book by Rollo Romig

Back in September 2019, I set aside a day to organize the piles of books I knew I’d have to read in order to write I Am on the Hit List. “It’s like wilting spinach,” a friend said. We take everything we’ve read and chop and blend and season and simmer, and if all goes well we end up with something new and nourishing.

Book jacket image for I Am on the Hit List by Rollo Romig

My book’s central subject is the 2017 murder of an incredibly brave and vibrant journalist named Gauri Lankesh, in Bangalore, India. Gauri had devoted her career to battling the rising right wing in India, so her story was a window into the climate of hate and the triumph of autocracy that had gripped the India she loved. There was so much I needed to explain—first to myself, then to my readers—and those piles of books grew taller and taller.

I started writing about India over a decade ago, partly because I’d married into an Indian family. But as an American, I’ve never felt entirely comfortable with writing about India as an outsider. That’s good—it should make me uncomfortable, and if I’ve ever written anything about India worth reading, that discomfort has been the catalyst. My top concern is always to get it right.

I’ve never felt entirely comfortable with writing about India as an outsider. That’s good—it should make me uncomfortable

I’m always aware of writing for multiple audiences: an American audience that might know absolutely nothing about what I’m writing, and will need everything explained from scratch, and an Indian audience that will know much of what I’m writing about far better than I do. The challenge is to make it work for both audiences at the same time: clear and engaging for a reader who comes in knowing little, and also, somehow, with enough fresh insight to make reading worthwhile even for someone who knows a lot.

I quickly found that it’s often those terms that seem the most obvious—for example, “Hinduism” or “caste”—that are the trickiest to explain. It turns out that this is one of my favorite jobs as a writer: stepping back from a concept or a word I’d previously taken for granted, finding that it’s actually so complex as to defy definition, and then slowly finding a definition anyway, triangulating everything I’d learned to arrive as close to a fact as I could, without sacrificing either complexity or clarity.

Read our review of ‘I Am on the Hit List’ by Rollo Romig.

This meant spending months in India talking to as many people as possible—dozens and dozens of interviews, often lasting hours. Then I had to read: hundreds of books, thousands of pages of police and court documents, uncountable newspaper and magazine articles. (I owe a huge debt to Indian journalists who’ve been closely following the Gauri Lankesh case, such as Johnson T.A. of the Indian Express and K.V. Aditya Bharadwaj of The Hindu.) Trying to exhaust the literature and reporting on subjects that are, in reality, inexhaustible is how I blew my deadline by three years.

Often these texts were in languages I don’t read—Kannada or Tamil or Malayalam—so I hired translators to unlock them for me and for my English-language readers. I commissioned one of these translators, Amulya Leona, to translate two memoirs written by Gauri’s parents. But the realities of what’s going on in India kept intruding. One day, Amulya messaged me to say she’d be delayed with some translations because she’d gotten so involved in the mass protest movement against the bigoted new citizenship laws that the Indian government had passed. The next thing I knew, she’d been arrested and jailed for sedition for something she’d said at a demonstration. Nineteen years old, she instantly became public enemy number one on India’s right-wing news channels, and her story became an important chapter in my book.

Photo of Rollo Romig by Eva Garmendia.

Seven new true crime books recount chilling stories, minus the sensationalism.

Romig's outsider status helped him tell the story of Gauri Lankesh, a fearless Indian journalist who was assassinated in 2017.
Science Fiction & FantasyNonfictionFictionScience FictionLiterary FictionHistoryClassics

The Hold List: Hidden gems from heavy hitters

Feature by Meagan Vanderhill & Trisha Ping & Yi Jiang & Savanna Walker

The Host

Stephenie Meyer mastered the love triangle in her famous Twilight Saga, but Edward and Jacob aren’t the only Meyer heartthrobs. In her lesser-known sci-fi thriller, The Host, an equally intriguing love triangle (parallelogram?) forms between bad-boy Jared, sensitive Ian and Melanie—plus the parasitic alien borrowing Melanie’s body. After Earth is invaded by aliens, most humans become hosts before they can even begin to fight back, but a small group resists. When Melanie is captured, the alien Wanderer is placed in her body to to shut down the human rebellion. But Melanie won’t cooperate, and Wanderer finds herself inside a body that still desperately loves another. Wanderer and Melanie become unlikely allies as Wanderer begins to understand why humans fight for love. I find myself returning to The Host often and urge Twilight lovers (or haters) to give another Meyer story a try. When you do, let me know . . . Team Jared or Team Ian?

—Meagan Vanderhill, Production Manager

Thunderstruck

Most people know Erik Larson for his dual-narrative history, the deservedly omnipresent The Devil in the White City, or, my personal favorite, In the Garden of Beasts. However, 2006’s Thunderstruck deserves just as much praise. Like Devil, Thunderstruck centers a shocking, sensational crime—Hawley Harvey Crippen’s murder of his wife in 1910—within a historical event. But in this case, the event is more of a paradigm shift: Guglielmo Marconi’s attempts to patent and popularize radio communication. In a previous era, Crippen may very well have vanished before justice could be served. But thanks to radio, Crippen’s attempted escape to Canada was instead the first true crime news story to unfold in real time for a breathless readership. Larson weaves these tales together with his signature novelistic flair, producing highly entertaining portraits of the loathsome Crippen and the obsessive, passionate and at-times hilariously obtuse Marconi.

—Savanna Walker, Managing Editor

The Shuttle

Reading The Secret Garden (1911) has been a rite of passage for generations. But did you know that Frances Hodgson Burnett first earned fame and fortune by writing for adults? Burnett began her career selling romantic tales to magazines, publishing her first novel in 1877. Dozens more adult novels followed, the best of which is 1907’s The Shuttle. New York City heiress Bettina Vanderpoel has always wondered why her gentle older sister, Rosalie, cut ties to the family after marrying an English peer. Once she’s old enough, Betty crosses the Atlantic to get answers. Her adventure features a dastardly villain, a surly yet handsome lord, a crumbling estate (and an ensuing renovation to delight HGTV fans)and the most charming typewriter salesman in literature, plus plenty of trenchant observations on the differences between the English and Americans that still ring true. If you loved Downton Abbey or wish the works of Edith Wharton were a little less mannered, put The Shuttle on your reading list.

—Trisha Ping, Publisher

Outer Dark

Long before venturing southwest with Blood Meridian and All the Pretty Horses, his most famous titles, Cormac McCarthy plumbed his native Appalachia for visceral cruelty and mythological beauty. Outer Dark may be the most eerie, devastating book in his flawless oeuvre. After falsifying the death of his newborn son—the product of incest with his sister, Rinthy—and abandoning him in the wilderness, Culla Holme wanders through a dreamlike, nebulous Southern landscape populated with bizarre characters. Meanwhile, Rinthy uncovers the empty grave and sets off in search of her child. Alternating between the two siblings’ perspectives, the novel reveals the staggering violence and deep tenderness within the human soul, both of which McCarthy captured with peerless acuity over his seven-decade career. Each scene in Outer Dark has a torrential fluidity: As you drift through this haunting, remarkable creation, remember to breathe.

—Yi Jiang, Associate Editor

A breakout success can bring new attention to an author’s body of work—or, one book can so define them that it overshadows earlier titles that are just as excellent. Here are four overlooked books from great authors that deserve their own moment in the limelight.
NonfictionScienceNature

What the Wild Sea Can Be

Review by Becky Libourel Diamond

We are inundated by media updates about global warming, from statistical warnings and satellite images to news and weather reports on the latest storms, fires and floods. These ever-present alerts often focus on what’s happening to the land, but what about threats to the unique ecosystems of our oceans?

This vast water world is the focus of marine biologist and author Helen Scales’ latest book, What the Wild Sea Can Be: The Future of the World’s Ocean. Organized into three sections covering the ocean’s history, vanishing species and habitats, and the ocean’s restoration and future, the book takes a global perspective while also highlighting how specific regions and their wildlife are affected by the changing climate. Statistics drive home the immediacy of the crisis: “Within just the past fifty years, as people have been overexploiting species, destroying habitats, and releasing pollutants, the total mass of vertebrate life in the ocean has halved.”

Scales explores key issues impacting marine life, from warming waters, to disease-causing bacteria and viruses, to plastics contamination, along with striking examples of how these trends play out. For example, whales have a particularly high risk of microplastics consumption due to the shrimp and krill they eat: During migration to the coast of California, blue whales consume more than 10 million of these plastic particles, which can accumulate in tissues and alter expressions of genes, per day. Ecosystem shifts cause invasive migrations that upset the ecological balance, such as that of lionfish; native to the Indian and Pacific Oceans, they are now found along America’s east coast and in the Mediterranean. These invasive lionfish number five times their population in their native waters, and they threaten to consume other species to extinction.

But as the title suggests, the book is not all gloom and doom. In her introduction, Scales encourages readers to take part in “mental time travel” and “keep seeing the glory and feeling wonderment in the ocean.” By offering hopeful scenarios and advice for making “conscious decisions about the future of the earth’s biodiversity,” she provides the reader with a level of positivity not often heard amid the overwhelming climate news that can often make us feel helpless. “I hope this book will offer an antidote to the rising tide of eco-anxiety and fears for the future of the planet,” Scales writes. “Turn that fear into commitment and initiative.” What the Wide Sea Can Be provides a glimmer of light in a darkening world.

Helen Scales’ inspiring What the Wild Sea Can Be addresses climate-caused threats to our oceans, while providing a glimmer of light in a darkening world.

The Quiet Damage

The Quiet Damage investigates the destructive impact of QAnon on individuals and families, exploring the delicate art of bringing those lost to conspiracy theories back to reality.

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