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NonfictionSelf-HelpEnvironment

Lessons From the Climate Anxiety Counseling Booth

Review by Linda M. Castellitto

Like so many of us, poet and Brown University professor Kate Schapira is deeply worried about the future of our planet. Rather than fret alone, in 2014 she set up her Climate Anxiety Counseling Booth (inspired by “Peanuts” character Lucy van Pelt) in downtown Providence, Rhode Island, as a means of communication and commiseration.

Now, she’s distilled what she heard, discussed, felt and learned into her debut book, Lessons From the Climate Anxiety Counseling Booth: How to Live With Care and Purpose in an Endangered World. Schapira, who writes in a voice resonant with empathy, encouragement and fierce determination, recommends the book be read “in order and together” because “the progression of stories, questions, and practices is designed to unwind tightly tangled grief, frustration, exhaustion, and inertia . . . into a followable path of courage, capability, and strength.”

Such a path was far from clear when her booth debuted in 2014: “No one I knew seemed to want to discuss it at all,” she writes, “and that made me feel frantic and alone.” But as her network of climate-conscious compatriots grew, Schapira developed a process to help readers “transform what [they] feel, with others, into connection and action,” which this book details across eight chapters rife with information and analysis.

Schapira also takes on capitalism and white supremacy, which she believes create and perpetuate climate change. For example, she describes so-called sacrifice zones, “places where ecology, including human well-being, is sacrificed for power and profit,” noting residents “are usually people culturally devalued by their city or nation.” And she cites the work of activists she encountered, like Mark, who walked a cross-continent barefoot pilgrimage to Brooklyn-based BK ROT, a compost-hauling service whose hiring practices ensure “some of the people hit hardest by capitalism and white supremacy feed themselves, their families, and the soil.”

Ultimately, Schapira writes, her book is “not the last word on anything—or the first word either,” but it’s certainly a valuable reading experience for those seeking shared solace as well as motivation for positive, productive communal action. An extensive contributors and resources section, as well as a glossary, nicely bolster Schapira’s smart, heartfelt and inspirational efforts.

Kate Schapira offers a guide to transforming climate angst into collective action in her inspiring Lessons From the Climate Anxiety Counseling Booth.
NonfictionMemoir

Where Rivers Part

Review by Alden Mudge

Kao Kalia Yang’s mother grew up in a Hmong village near the juncture of two rivers that run through the forests and highlands of Laos, a land that Yang writes evocatively about in the opening chapters of Where Rivers Part: A Story of My Mother’s Life. The Hmong, an ethnic minority in southwest China, Laos and surrounding countries, were devastated by the Vietnam War, which began soon after Yang’s mother Tswb (pronounced “chew’) was born. Her home village, Dej Tshuam, was a place where people were bound by family ties and ancestral traditions; her family fled the invasion of North Vietnamese soldiers when she was 14.

The ruinous impacts of the war on the lives of Yang’s parents and relatives are related here. But the point and power of Where Rivers Part lies elsewhere. In an audacious act of love and art, Yang writes this memoir from her mother’s point of view. We hear from Tswb’s perspective about her own mother’s marriage at 15 to a much older man with children, and how her mother transformed herself from a submissive wife and daughter-in-law into a matriarch. Later we experience teenage Tswb’s decision to marry a handsome 19-year-old boy named Npis (pronounced “be”) she met on the trail while their families were fleeing capture. Soon there are doubts and reassessments. We witness the emergence of the fierce determination to survive that will see her family through harrowing years of deprivation in a Thai refugee camp, and that will impel Tswb, Npis and their children forward as refugees making their way in the alien world of Minnesota.

There are moments of poignant beauty. There are also humiliations. Tswb is small and brown; her English is not good. In America, she is easily overlooked. In this exceptional book, Yang shows what a mistake it is to underestimate her: “I wanted to claim the legacy of the woman I come from, the women who had to define for themselves what it meant to live in a world where luck was not on your side.” She has done so with deep feeling and grace.

In the extraordinary Where Rivers Part, Kao Kalia Yang writes with deep feeling and grace about her mother, a Hmong woman who escaped the cascading violence from the Vietnam War.
NonfictionSelf-Help

The Ritual Effect

Review by Deborah Hopkinson

Behavioral scientist Michael Norton may be a business professor at Harvard, but he’s probably best known for his TEDx Talk, “How to Buy Happiness.” Norton’s lively new book, The Ritual Effect: From Habit to Ritual, Harness the Surprising Power of Everyday Actions, may be just what the doctor ordered.

Many of us grow up associating rituals with traditional religions. Yet, Norton tells us, other kinds of rituals have an important place in our everyday lives. Personal, “secular rituals” can encompass everything from a child’s bedtime routine to activities more eccentric, like how Agatha Christie always ate an apple during her evening bath. Norton explains that rituals are different from mere habits; they strike our emotions more deeply and provide meaning to our lives.

While Norton does define what makes a ritual, his main focus is exploring the “ritual effect”: ways in which rituals can help us realize our human potential and face challenges, whether it’s public speaking, practicing self-control or being a more aware and responsive parent or partner. For example, in a section on relationship rituals, Norton discusses rituals that wake up our experience of commitment. These might be recognizing the special nature of annual celebrations, or even ordering the same takeout meal one night a week. Norton reminds us that “it matters much less what you do and much more that both of you do it regularly together.”

The Ritual Effect covers a wide range of rituals, including those associated with life-changing events like grief and loss. Norton’s examples draw from experts and a wide range of cultures and traditions. He closes his fascinating book with an invitation, or perhaps a challenge: to experiment with, explore and discover rituals to help you transform the ordinary into the extraordinary.

Michael Norton’s fascinating The Ritual Effect encourages us to experiment with, explore and discover rituals to help transform the ordinary into the extraordinary.
NonfictionMemoir

The Exvangelicals

Review by Sarah McCraw Crow

When Sarah McCammon was growing up in the Midwest in the ’80s and ’90s, every aspect of her life was governed by her family’s evangelical faith, a faith underscored at her sprawling nondenominational church and her Christian school with expectations of an obedient childhood and “pure” young adulthood that forbid sex and, essentially, dating until marriage. Within this sheltered realm, the possibility of eternal damnation was ever-present. “The thought that there was something I could do that was beyond the reach of God’s forgiveness terrified me, and often kept me awake at night,” McCammon writes. “Intrusive thoughts would slip in randomly, at any moment . . . and suddenly I’d be gripped by fear.”

In The Exvangelicals: Loving, Living, and Leaving the White Evangelical Church, McCammon details her journey away from this upbringing, into a life as a questioning adult and then a journalist covering the 2016 Trump campaign and the reproductive rights beat for NPR. Mixing memoir and reportage, McCammon focuses on the growing number of young people who, like her, have left the evangelical fold to navigate a new world, often with ambivalence, a group loosely known as exvangelicals.

McCammon describes the mix of comfort, fear and trauma she experienced growing up: her confusion about her parents’ rejection of her surgeon grandfather, who came out as gay after his wife died; her first encounter with secular teens during a stint as a Senate page; the shock of the physical punishment her parents administered after she had a panic attack in high school. She weaves her story around those of her interviewees and the larger history of the evangelical movement’s quest for political ascendance; for instance, Phyllis Schlafly’s anti-women’s rights newsletter informed her mother’s activism, and McCammon worked as a high school intern for Schlafly. Though her own exodus came years earlier, McCammon notes that fervent support of Trump is the factor spurring the majority of young people to exit the evangelical faith.

McCammon renders exvangelicals’ search for life after evangelicalism with sensitivity, showing the difficult balance of gaining self-acceptance and a broader understanding of the world while often losing the comfort of families and worship, especially for LGBTQ+ people. The Exvangelicals is a welcome addition to the story of faith in 21th-century America.

Mixing memoir and reportage, Sarah McCammon documents the growing number of young people who, like her, have left the evangelical fold to navigate a new world.
NonfictionMemoir

The Mango Tree

Review by Amanda Haggard

As we grow, we come to reckon with the pieces of ourselves that originate from the people who raised us. The realization can be both empowering and painful as we recognize the good and ugly traits we’ve absorbed and the lessons our parents imparted that we took to heart. In The Mango Tree: A Memoir of Fruit, Florida, and Felony, Annabelle Tometich untangles her identity in light of the unbearable moments she experienced being raised by a struggling and often enraged Filipino mother, and the loss of her white father who died during her childhood, taking with him the upper-middle-class privilege that he afforded her.

“All I wanted as a child was to be normal, to hide my weird family, their weird deaths and weird antics behind a big GPA and a spot as captain of the swim team,” she writes. “As an adult, I still strive for this ideal, knowing full well the impossibility of it.”

Her memoir begins in a Florida courtroom where her mother faces a felony charge for shooting out a man’s window in retaliation for picking a mango from her tree. The case, and tree, are a touchstone throughout the book as Tometich navigates her life story. Her mother and father fought mercilessly before his death. After her mother was left to parent on her own and went to work as a nurse, Tometich helped raise her younger siblings.

Tometich, now a food writer, started her career in medical school, then worked as a chef, and eventually landed a job at the sports desk at The News Press in Fort Myers, Florida. Here, she got the dreaded call from a co-worker about her mother’s court case. Anyone with a less than normal family can relate.

Not-so-perfect family dynamics—and the wounds that emerge from them—are popular literary fuel because of their universality. Yet it’s rare to see an author give an honest account of every bit of it, which in this case includes added layers of tragedy, racism and class struggle: the sting of hearing her grandmother use a slur against her mother, the bittersweetness of seeing her mother care for Tometich’s own child, the reckoning about the harm that was intended as good parenting. And, of course, the moment Tometich comes to recognize that it really is impossible to separate herself from her upbringing. In the end, The Mango Tree reminds us that all trees derive strength from their roots.

Annabelle Tometich’s memoir, The Mango Tree, may be about a fractured mother-daughter relationship, but it also understands that all trees derive strength from their roots.
NonfictionLiterature

The Secret Lives of Booksellers and Librarians

Review by Jessica Peng

If you’re reading this, you probably love books. You’ve probably stepped into a bookstore and felt an immediate rush of comfort, along with the thrill of getting to browse the bestsellers in your favorite genres, be it poetry or romance or biography. You might’ve grown up frequenting your local library, searching for obscure titles in the computer catalog or laughing at the absurd comments left in well-worn paperbacks. While most book fans are familiar with the experience of visiting bookstores, libraries and other delightful book places, few of us have had the privilege of discovering what goes on behind the scenes. 

That’s where The Secret Lives of Booksellers and Librarians comes in. This project from internationally bestselling author James Patterson and frequent collaborator Matt Eversmann highlights dozens of dedicated, on-the-ground booksellers and librarians to give readers an inside look at the joys and challenges of working amid shelves of books. After taking the time to meet and interview industry experts from around the country, Patterson and Eversmann tell their stories in short, first-person vignettes. Readers will delight in the New York librarian championing literary programs in the prison complex on Rikers Island, the Barnes & Noble manager who started a young adult book club for teens and the independent bookstore owner who fell in love at the store she now runs. 

Of course, the stories in The Secret Lives of Booksellers and Librarians are not all optimistic. Patterson and Eversmann’s heroes face a number of serious problems, from lack of funding to natural disasters to book bans. Although the featured booksellers and librarians handle conflict with competence and goodwill, it is clear that their efforts alone are not enough to save an industry that is threatened by political tension, monopolies and new technologies. The Secret Lives of Booksellers and Librarians is an unique and enchanting work of nonfiction, but it’s also a call to action, a cry for communities to rally around their booksellers.

Patterson is well-known for the millions of dollars and years of work he has already poured into promoting access to literature. There is no better mouthpiece for this project. The Secret Lives of Booksellers and Librarians is an homage to anyone who felt the tingle of magic that only comes with reading, and who made it their mission to share their love with everyone. The first thing you’ll do after reading this book is take a visit to your local bookstore or library!

The Secret Lives of Booksellers and Librarians is a heartwarming celebration that will delight bibliophiles of all stripes.
NonfictionMemoirMedicine

Facing the Unseen

Review by Priscilla Kipp

Conventional wisdom has long held that mental illness is disconnected from physical health, requiring two separate courses of treatment. In Facing the Unseen: The Struggle to Center Mental Health in Medicine, psychiatrist Damon Tweedy aims to debunk this long-standing theory. The acclaimed author of the New York Times bestseller Black Man in a White Coat, Tweedy offers what feels like a personal invitation into his office, his expertise and, most of all, his hard-earned wisdom. 

Tweedy straightforwardly describes his training through Duke University School of Medicine, including his growing frustrations with an unsatisfactory system of care. He is critical of his colleagues for overlooking, stereotyping or dismissing the “unseen” signs of mental illness, bringing issues of class, race and gender into focus. He also questions his own biases, first as an aspiring cardiologist, and then as a psychiatrist struggling to understand how mind and body work together. 

Mostly, though, Facing the Unseen is about his patients. Tweedy is an excellent storyteller, making the people whom he treats unforgettably visible in all their complexities. Their stories embody why recognizing the mind-body connection is critical. There’s Natalie (all patients’ names are pseudonyms), an Iraq war veteran with PTSD, who came to the ER desperate for help. But treating her drug withdrawal was not considered a medical priority, and she was left to seek outpatient psychiatric care elsewhere. A passionate advocate for integrated medical and psychiatric care, Tweedy cites statistics that tally addiction and opioid abuse, PTSD, depression and anxiety, and the prevalent use of prescription pills. Throughout, he uses powerful descriptions that yield keen insights, showing us how the health care system sets doctors up to fail their patients, and offering solutions that will help. 

Improving access to effective treatments by coordinated caregivers is improving, but the need for better care is also growing. Facing the Unseen sounds both an alarm and a rallying cry. 

In Facing the Unseen, Black Man in a White Coat author Damon Tweedy makes an impassioned call for better mental health care.
NonfictionLifestylesDesign

The Space That Keeps You

Review by Linda M. Castellitto

Home is where the heart is—but what makes that heart want to live in that home forever? As someone who’s moved 10 times in his adult life and is “fascinated by the kind of people whose grandchildren visit the home that they raised their children in,” interior designer Jeremiah Brent found himself wondering what makes people stay put. As he explains in his heartfelt introduction to The Space That Keeps You: When Home Becomes a Love Story, Brent “wanted to understand what it takes to fall in love with a space, because my fantasy was to truly come home.” The fruits of his exploration are contained in this sumptuous “emotional design” book filled with photos of, yes, beautifully decorated homes, but also carefully curated mementos, as Brent relays stories shared with him by nine families in the U.S. and abroad. From a Venetian palazzo to Oprah Winfrey’s home in Montecito, California, Brent thoughtfully distills what makes spaces special to those who reside in them, offering inspiration and aspiration to readers who appreciate “the beauty of intention and connection, perception and memory, ceremony and ritual—and most importantly, of life and love.”

Jeremiah Brent’s sumptuous The Space That Keeps You offers “inspiration and aspiration” to help you fall in love with your home.
NonfictionLifestylesCrafts, Hobbies & Home

The Soul of Gift Wrapping

Review by Deborah Hopkinson

If Marie Kondo inspired you to change the way you fold T-shirts, then artist Megumi Lorna Inouye’s guide to creating beautiful gift-wrapping is for you. Inouye traces her passion for this art to memories of watching her mother care for the lovingly wrapped garments in her kimono chest. In Japan, Inouye tells us, wrapping is considered part of the gift itself, a way to show respect, gratitude and love. And if your skills are confined to sticking presents into a bag, never fear. With a focus on sustainability, Inouye provides step-by-step instructions for wrapping, often making use of recycled materials or natural objects: Even a broken, moss-covered branch can add beauty to a gift. The photographs here are as elegant as the text, and useful too. And while the book is aimed at adults, it’s possible to do most of these projects with kids. The Soul of Gift Wrapping: Creative Techniques for Expressing Gratitude, Inspired by the Japanese Art of Giving is more than a how-to guide: This gorgeous book is a reminder that gift giving can bring the givers themselves joy.

The Soul of Gift Wrapping is a gorgeous reminder that gift giving can bring the givers themselves joy.
NonfictionLifestylesCookbooks

Second Helpings

Review by Becky Libourel Diamond

An astonishing 30-40% of food goes to waste in the U.S. “As well as being financially foolish, wasting food damages the planet because it accelerates climate change,” notes food writer and cookbook author Sue Quinn in her latest cookbook, Second Helpings: Delicious Dishes to Transform Your Leftovers, which aims to keep food from our own kitchens out of the trash. Quinn kicks off with a chapter of recipes for base dishes (soup, pasta bake, risotto, to name a few) that teach the reader skills that can be used for everyday meals. She moves to sections on small plates, light meals, main meals, sweet things and bits and bobs, the last of which includes ways to incorporate leftovers such as mashed potatoes, salad greens and the spoonfuls and scrapings left in various types of jarred foods.The book’s structure gives many different options for each recipe, resulting in numerous dishes to use up the items you have on hand. I made the roast dinner enchiladas using some cooked chicken from the night before, sliced peppers and jarred tomatoes, which transformed into an amazing sauce when simmered with Quinn’s suggested mix of spices. Second Helpings is the perfect blueprint for repurposing leftover food into other nutritious, delicious meals.

Second Helpings is the perfect blueprint for repurposing leftover food into other nutritious, delicious meals.
NonfictionLifestylesHumor

The Good Enough Guide to Better Living

Review by Anna Christensen

When I was 18, I found myself living on my own and quickly discovered that I didn’t know how to do it. It was hunger that finally motivated me to seek help in the form of an adult figure I trusted: Martha Stewart. I gamely subscribed to her magazine, and in the intervening decades, what began as an attempt to receive simple instruction on how to cook myself a hamburger has metastasized into a person who is completely inflexible about leaving dishes in the sink, the laundry schedule and cleaning the upholstery.

This self is very stressed. She is also, in a suspicion I hold at the very edges of my consciousness, scary and unpleasant.

Upon first cracking the cover of Alison Throckmorton’s The Good Enough Guide to Better Living: Leave Your Dishes in the Sink, Serve Your Guests Leftovers, and Make the Most Out of Doing the Least at Home, it felt clear that I would simply have to take this funny little book as tongue in cheek, have a laugh and be done with it. It was best not to overexamine why the section on leaving the dishes to soak ad infinitum gave me a small muscle spasm.

Throckmorton’s great success with this book, through all the quippy humor and highly designed pages, is to hilariously reorient the home as the place where living happens. The dishes are dirty because you used them, and have remained dirty because your life is full—whether it is full of children, of friends or of Netflix is beside the point. The bedside table is cluttered with items because the bed is cozy, and having everything you need at arm’s length will allow you to stay there for as long as possible. When entertaining friends, who cares if the canapes are made with saltines if you’re having fun? Macaroni and cheese is an infinitely flexible dish; we wouldn’t eat fistfuls of carbs and shredded cheese if it wasn’t delicious.

I would not say that Throckmorton has made me a convert. But I will say that I let the dishes “soak” for two hours while I watched “The Buccaneers” under a blanket. That’s saying something.

The Good Enough Guide to Better Living cheerfully encourages us to let our houses look like people are living in them—dirty dishes and all.
NonfictionWomen's HistoryMiddle Eastern HistoryHistory

Woman, Life, Freedom

Review by Kelly Blewett

Marjane Satrapi’s graphic memoirs Persepolis and Persepolis II—and the Oscar-nominated film adapted from the books—tell the story of the author-illustrator’s coming of age in 1980s Iran. Her new work is concerned with the life of another young Iranian woman, 22-year-old Mahsa Amini, who died in police custody after being arrested, detained and severely beaten because some of her hair escaped her headscarf in 2022. Civilian protests erupted in Iran and were quickly taken up elsewhere, the movement’s slogan, “Woman, Life, Freedom,” echoing around the world.

Satrapi’s new graphic anthology, Woman, Life, Freedom, presents the story of the titular movement through short graphic vignettes. The project pairs artists with experts on Iran: Satrapi herself, plus two journalists and an Iranian-born Stanford University professor. These experts composed the words that accompany each of the 23 vignettes, which are divided among three sections that detail Amini’s death and the aftermath; contextualize the events in light of late 20th-century revolutions; and explore everyday life in Iran today, where tensions increasingly show a divide between the ruling party and the people. The vignettes demonstrate the complexity of interactions among residents: State-sanctioned violence, surveillance and propaganda foment confusion and sow mistrust among neighbors. The predominant culture is one of fear.

Some of the graphic illustrations in Woman, Life, Freedom read like political cartoons, while others offer intimate scenes of daily life. The styles reflect the individuality of the creators—swooping, impressionistic, single-color and frameless illustrations exist alongside framed, sequenced, multicolor ones. In all cases, the visual medium enhances the storytelling and creates an immersive reading experience that accessibly communicates information. In my favorite vignettes, such as “In the Heart of the Diaspora,” I felt like I was eavesdropping on conversations that felt both familiar and incredibly complex, much as I felt while reading Persepolis.

Satrapi’s memoirs were widely praised for creating complex images of Iran that probed the subjective, everyday experiences of people living there. She brings the same ability to relate to readers here. She writes in her preface that an aim of the book is to “remind Iranians that they are not alone.” The anthology is being published in many languages for distribution around the world and made freely available online in Persian for Iranian readers. Woman, Life, Freedom offers a look at the human toll of an authoritarian regime, and a people’s heroic, ongoing movement against it.

Persepolis author Marjane Satrapi’s new anthology offers a look at the human toll of Iran’s authoritarian regime, and a people’s heroic, ongoing movement against it.
NonfictionHistoryEuropean History

Four Shots in the Night

Review by Anne Bartlett

The epitome of success for an intelligence agency is to place an informer within the highest echelons of the enemy’s organization. But what if that mole is then asked to do something that endangers lives? Does the agency sacrifice the spy and jeopardize their mission, or allow someone on their own side to die?

In the murky world of secret agents and their handlers, this ugly quandary known as “the spymaster’s dilemma” is at the heart of British author Henry Hemming’s enthralling Four Shots in the Night: A True Story of Spies, Murder, and Justice in Northern Ireland, an account of the real-life intelligence war between British authorities and the Irish Republican Army (IRA) during Northern Ireland’s “troubles.” The 1968–1998 conflict led to the deaths of more than 3,500 people and created an atmosphere of constant fear and heartbreak.

Hemming follows an array of participants, but his focus is on three men: Frank Hegarty, Freddie Scappaticci and Martin McGuinness. Hegarty and Scappaticci were working-class Catholics with IRA connections who were recruited as informers by the British; McGuinness was a top IRA leader who ultimately morphed into a successful politician. Hegarty was killed by the IRA in 1986, and his murder led to what Hemming calls “kaleidoscopic fallout” in Britain that has lasted well into this century.

Hemming artfully unspools this complex tale with the skill of a suspense novelist, from Hegarty’s recruitment in 1980 by a fellow greyhound enthusiast, through the 2016 police investigation meant to bring closure to the case. Hemming’s greatest strength is his ability to take the reader inside the spies’ tradecraft: We learn how informants are persuaded (or coerced) into cooperation, how they meet with their handlers and exactly how they die when they’re betrayed. And like iconic espionage novelist John le Carré, Hemming shows us how internal bureaucratic rivalries can have lethal consequences.

Was Scappaticci the infamous British agent “Stakeknife” who was on the IRA’s hit squad? Was McGuinness a British asset? Who ordered Hegarty’s execution, and who did the deed? The main players are all dead now, and we’ll never know for sure. But Hemming allows us some informed guesses and forces us to face the inevitable moral tradeoffs of our shadow wars.

With the skill of a suspense novelist, Henry Hemming artfully unspools an enthralling investigation into espionage during Northern Ireland’s “troubles.”

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