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Connie Chung broke the glass and bamboo ceiling when she became the first Asian American woman to co-anchor a national news broadcast program, joining Dan Rather at the desk of the CBS Evening News. Her visibility and success led generations of Chinese parents to name their daughters Connie. In her briskly paced memoir, Connie, Chung recounts her personal and professional life with candor, humor and heart. 

Growing up as the youngest of 10 daughters and the only child in the family born in the U.S., Chung spent more time watching television than doing chores, and her family stopped everything to listen to Walter Cronkite on the CBS Evening News. The legendary newsman’s coverage of politics and government lit a spark in Chung. In 1971, she landed a job as a Washington correspondent on his program. (Cronkite, she writes, “radiated gravitas and humility, never behaving like the superstar he was.”) Over the next 40 years, Chung embraced the excitement of “getting the get”—landing an exclusive story or interview—and faced the challenges of being a woman in a male-dominated profession. Connie carries readers through the ups and downs of Chung’s career as the major networks (ABC, NBC and CBS) piped her image and voice into millions of American living rooms during prime time. Readers will glimpse the relationships that have sustained Chung; she gushes about her husband, talk show host Maury Povich: “Were it not for Maury, I could never have had the career I had. . . . He helped me navigate my treacherous path up the ladder.”

Chung pulls no punches as she describes the harassment she faced from anchors who felt threatened by her work, among them Dan Rather, who sabotaged her career after the network sent her to cover the Oklahoma City bombing (Rather was on vacation and unreachable when it occurred). And she movingly recounts going public during the #MeToo movement with the story of her own sexual assault by a gynecologist when she was in college. Connie offers words of advice for future women reporters: “Remember to have a sense of humor, take your work seriously, don’t forget to have a life and—most importantly—stretch your hand to others who are trying to climb on board.” Chung’s humanity and journalistic passion reverberate through this invigorating memoir.

With candor and humor, Connie Chung shares the highs and lows of her trailblazing career as a journalist in her invigorating memoir, Connie.
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Sid Sharp’s picture book Bog Myrtle starts as an intriguing fairy tale about two very different sisters: eternally optimistic Beatrice and forever grumpy Magnolia, who live “alone in a hideous, drafty old house” and “are so poor that they ate rats for breakfast and cockroaches for lunch.”

The action starts when Beatrice decides to make a sweater for Magnolia, who gripes about being cold. Since they have no money, Beatrice, who loves nature and crafts, heads to the forest to look for helpful treasures, and eventually encounters a monster named Bog Myrtle. Surprising things happen every step of the way, and Sharp’s sense of humor shines through—for instance, with a knitting store called “Knot in My Back Yarn.” 

Bog Myrtle offers Beatrice magic silk, which allows her to knit a truly splendid gift for Magnolia—who immediately sees potential for profit. As Magnolia launches a magic sweater business that becomes increasingly exploitative, Sharp transforms the tale into a sophisticated, humorous fable about sustainability, corporate greed and workers’ rights. Sharp manages to integrate these themes so seamlessly that they never feel strident; readers will simply find themselves cheering when the good guys beat the villain. 

Bold, contrasting colors imbue Sharp’s eye-catching illustrations with a modern, energetic vibe. Bog Myrtle offers a fun-filled yet serious look at sustainability and corporate accountability. Who would have even thought that possible? Sharp’s wizardry makes it happen. 

 

Who would have thought it possible to create an entertaining children's story about sustainability and corporate accountability? Sid Sharp's fun-filled fable, Bog Myrtle, is just that.

Though physicists get the most attention when it comes to academic contributions to war efforts, the United States’ nascent intelligence team also relied on experts of another sort. Elyse Graham’s Book and Dagger: How Scholars and Librarians Became the Unlikely Spies of World War II, tells the thrilling story of the professors, archivists and artists who were recruited by the U.S. and British governments to become highly effective spies and intelligence agents during the Second World War. 

Graham recounts the various missions made possible by professional researchers recruited from university campuses by the Office of Strategic Services, the precursor to the CIA. These men and women put their skills to use in unexpected ways, such as drawing strategic insights from the most mundane texts, like Moroccan phone directories that revealed munitions factory locations, and scientific journals available only in Europe, which kept the Allies abreast of nuclear developments.

A Hollywood version of Book and Dagger would feature heart-pounding scenes of disheveled scholars digging for scraps of crucial information in stacks of ancient tomes. Without falling into this mire of tropes, Graham follows some recurring characters and includes some thrilling scenes of sabotage. The book is also about how the OSS and U.S. military relied on unique, research-driven perspectives to outsmart and outmaneuver the Nazis. With a keen ear for narrative prose, Graham builds suspense and intrigue, and the book is a pulpy delight.

Graham acknowledges that spycraft is a complicated, messy business, and readers may find this tale of underdog heroism difficult to square with the CIA’s later history of surveillance and subterfuge in U.S. and international politics. Even so, a story where a passion for knowledge and appreciation for outsiders defeats a regime fueled by hatred and greed is most welcome. Book and Dagger is a necessary reminder of the value of the humanities and the importance of the freedom of information and ideas at a time when both of those things are under threat.

Elyse Graham’s thrilling history of how scholars and librarians helped the U.S. outsmart the Nazis is a pulpy delight.
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Twelve-year-old Charley Cuffey loves a few things: her Nana Kofi and his stories; correcting the grammar of her best friend, Cool Willie Green; and above all else, baseball. She has been obsessed since her daddy took her to see a Negro Leagues game, and is determined to be the first woman to be a professional baseball player—a big goal for anyone, but even more so for a Black girl living through segregation. When she challenges a bully to a game that takes them into the white part of town, she faces consequences that extend beyond baseball.

Newbery Medalist Kwame Alexander’s Black Star is the gripping second book of what is sure to be an impactful trilogy. The bestselling first installment, The Door of No Return, centered on Kofi, a tween living in Ghana during the 1860s, who loves swimming and his own nana’s stories. His story ended with him facing an unknown fate. This sequel jumps forward to segregated Virginia in the 1920s, where Kofi is a storytelling nana himself, slowly revealing the gaps of his life as he shares them with his granddaughter, Charley.

Alexander has found a magic formula in his verse novels featuring protagonists whose lives revolve around a sport: Their love of the game keeps the plot moving forward and offers a plethora of potential for metaphor. Charley is a vibrant and creative narrator, full of important questions for her Nana, and excellent hyperbole like “it’s so quiet / I can hear the moon.” Alexander uses every aspect of his poems to his advantage. For example, a striking chapter features poems whose titles all begin with “Fifth Sunday,” showing just how significant this big game day is to Charley.

As in The Door of No Return, a significant theme throughout Black Star is the power of storytelling. In an author’s note, Alexander explains his dedication to portraying Black history accurately. He highlights real historical events through actual poetry and information about public figures from that time, but maintains focus on the stories “about the regular families that lived, laughed, loved, danced, worked, failed, hoped, cried, and died just like everybody else.”

Readers continuing the series, as well as those starting with Black Star, will be gifted with a reading experience that is equal parts difficult and beautiful. All will be called to remember Nana Kofi’s wisdom, that “when we water our words, they grow our minds.”

 

Readers continuing Kwame Alexander’s Door of No Return trilogy, as well as those starting with Black Star, will be gifted with a reading experience that is equal parts difficult and beautiful.

Pastry chef and social activist Paola Velez describes herself as a nerd from the Bronx who truly felt seen for the first time while watching Steve Urkel on Family Matters. In a heartfelt introduction that practically begs for a longer memoir, she calls her debut cookbook, Bodega Bakes: Recipes for Sweets and Treats Inspired by My Corner Store, “a mix of my classical training and love of Americana filtered through the Bronx and the islands of the Caribbean.” Velez promises that you can find most of the ingredients for her recipes inside a bodega, a place she defines as “a densely inhabited mini market where Jarritos, Cap’n Crunch, shampoo, gossip, and chopped cheeses peacefully coexist.” The book’s first section is dedicated to cookies, most importantly, her popular Thick’ems. The OG Chocolate Chip Thick’em, which Velez once sold to raise money so that disadvantaged Brooklyn girls could buy period products, uses few ingredients to great effect. (“Makes 8 Thiiiiiick cookies,” she writes.) The OGs are followed by recipes for Triple Chocolate Noir Thick’ems, Tres Leches Thick’ems and more. Velez’s casual writing is as fun to read as a cookbook gets. For example, when describing the blending process for the Matcha Thick’ems, Velez instructs readers to “pulse the mixer on and off, almost like you’re trying to jump-start a car.” Bodega Bakes also features 13(!) ways to make flan, a beginner’s guide to Dominican cakes, freezer desserts (sweet plantain gelato, anyone?) and plenty more morsels that will demand second helpings. 

 

In the personable Bodega Bakes, pastry chef Paola Velez presents just that: sweets that can be made solely from the ingredients found at a corner store.
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Julie Heffernan is predominantly known as a self-portraitist. Her astounding large-scale oil paintings are baroque, surrealist, highly staged and detailed, and often feature a woman—herself, bare-breasted, surrounded by a riot of flora and fauna. She frequently toys with traditional representations of women in art, depicting herself in big headpieces and bigger skirts, and using titles like “Self-Portrait as Gorgeous Tumor” and “Self-Portrait as Tree House.”

Many of Heffernan’s self-portraits are reproduced in Babe in the Woods: Or, the Art of Getting Lost, her first graphic novel and a mesmeric work of autofiction. It is a loose retelling of how she became an artist, leaving a Catholic home where art didn’t exist and meeting people who helped her to discover the world of art history and her own fierce opinion and creative voice. A version of Heffernan recounts these events—often in the form of a one-sided conversation with her mother—while hiking deeper into the Appalachian Mountains with her infant child. We know from the outset that she’s getting herself lost, and as her mind whirls through her memories, examining traumas and questioning everything with a furious intensity, it is clear that she is making a dangerous, terrible choice. She is being a bad mother, and she says so.

Throughout Heffernan’s labyrinthine walk in the woods, we are treated to “revelations,” each centered on a work of classic art. Heffernan is a Professor of Fine Arts at Montclair State University, and here she delivers brief lessons on famous paintings such as “Rape of the Daughters of Leucippus” by Peter Paul Rubens and Jan Wildens, which is accompanied by Heffernan’s revelation, “DON’T GIVE UP no matter WHAT!” as she shows how the painting uses two women’s naked bodies to create the shape of a pinwheel, whirling like blades in the center of the scene. The women are about to be raped, but they still have “ACTION! MOTION!! AGENCY!!!”

Much of the illustration for the novel was done in Microsoft Paint, which gives the book a sketchy, glitchy quality, completely in opposition to her oil paintings. Many scenes, as well as some reproductions of her self-portraits, are pixelated, the color appearing to malfunction and separate. Details become difficult to see, and the viewer is forced into the same frustrating brain-fuzziness as Heffernan’s character. 

The varying styles, the collapsing of clarity, the tremendous rage and continual turning-over of past traumas—all these elements combine in Babe in the Woods to illuminate the mysteries of the creative process. It is a staggering work of graphic literature, strange and enraged, carnal and emotional, encompassing the terrific force that keeps an artist moving forward. Reading it doesn’t feel like moving in a straight line, but rather a spiral, and as Heffernan writes, “a spiral always brings us back to a center, no matter how far we travel away from it.”

Julie Heffernan’s first graphic novel, Babe in the Woods, is a mesmeric work of autofiction loosely retelling how she became an artist while following a hike in the Appalachian Mountains with her infant child.
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Countless readers have picked up The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn since it was published in 1885, and it’s commonly listed among the great American novels. Though the book is perennially popular, its author, Mark Twain, has been criticized for relying on racist caricatures when writing about Black Americans, particularly the character Jim, an enslaved Black man who travels with Huckleberry Finn in the book.

Big Jim and the White Boy by David F. Walker and Marcus Kwame Anderson offers the other side of the story of this American classic. The graphic novel retelling centers on Jim and his quest to reunite with his family after they have been sold away by Huck’s cruel and volatile father. Aided by the audacious Huck, Jim undertakes an epic journey across the antebellum South and Midwest. Interwoven with the narrative are glimpses of the elderly Jim telling his story to a group of his great-grandchildren in the 1930s, and flashes further forward in time to the 1980s and 2020s as his descendants in turn pass on the tale.

Walker and Anderson have collaborated before, on the Eisner Award-winning The Black Panther Party: A Graphic Novel History. Walker’s passion for storytelling shines through his prose, with humor and wisdom thoughtfully sprinkled into a narrative that is also realistic about the horrors of slavery. An author’s note explains the linguistic choices he made to humanize Jim while remaining authentic to the time period.

Anderson’s illustrations are distinctive and his attention to detail is impressive: His characters are recognizable at any age. Vibrant color palettes by Isabell Struble will also help readers easily distinguish between the various timelines. The choice to frame the story as being told by an old and bickering Jim and Huck in the 1930s will make readers feel like part of the enthralled in-person audience, and demonstrates the power of oral storytelling in recording Black history.

This phenomenal graphic novel doesn’t set out to replace The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, but to add immeasurably valuable context that has historically been left out. Jim’s story deserves to be told, and as Jim’s great-great-great-granddaughter says, “The story won’t tell itself.”

Big Jim and the White Boy is a phenomenal graphic novel retelling of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from Jim’s perspective, adding immeasurably valuable context and celebrating the power of oral storytelling.
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Any horror writer doing their job knows how to tap into the fears that plague us most. Jeremy Dauber’s American Scary: A History of Horror, from Salem to Stephen King and Beyond provides a robust account of how art has reflected American dread for centuries. As it turns out, our history is rife with foundational fear, making it prime territory for some scary storytelling. 

Dauber starts his “tour of American fear” with our country’s bloody beginnings and proclivity for blaming the devil for everything from bad weather to miscarriage (hello, Salem!). He then passes through slavery, the Industrial Revolution, the Civil War and beyond to more contemporary paranoias reflected in film: murderous technology (The Terminator), individual indifference (the Final Destination series) and surveillance (Paranormal Activity), to name a few. 

One of his strongest examples illuminates the anxieties of women living in the late 19th century with Kate Chopin’s “The Story of an Hour.” In the story, when a woman is told that her husband has died in an accident, her reaction is one of great, unexpected joy and an overwhelming sense of liberation. Just when you think that’s the end of the tale, she discovers the news was given in error: Her husband is still very much alive. The tale ends with her death, which somehow feels less tragic than her loss of freedom. “Chopin’s most pressing contributions to the American fearfulness,” writes Dauber, “. . . consist of the suggestion that liberation, at least for women, is impossible; that, in the end, that sort of awakening . . . is but an illusion.”

Clocking in at over 400 pages with an at-times academic approach, American Scary may come off a bit intimidating at first. But for lovers of all things macabre, the book is worth its weight. Dauber’s attention to the details of myriad cultural touchstones, both famous and obscure, will entice those who care to tiptoe deeper into the darkest of the dark. Dauber acknowledges as well that things in the real world are often scarier than the stories we tell; it’s not a new take, but it’s one he makes exceptionally well. 

American Scary’s greatest success is making readers consider what art may be born of our late-night anxieties. Spooky stuff, huh?

 

The rigorous yet still enticing American Scary invites readers to peer into the horror show of American history through the lens of literature and film.
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Despite the widespread passage of legislation limiting the ability of trans kids to access hormone treatment or other gender-affirming care, there has been little light shed on the lives of the young people these laws target—until now. In American Teenager: How Trans Kids Are Surviving Hate and Finding Joy in a Turbulent Era, Nico Lang, an award-winning nonbinary journalist who has spent a decade reporting on LGBTQ+ issues, documents the hopes, sorrows and joys experienced by seven American trans kids.  

American Teenager is not an attempt to portray a “typical transgender teenager.” Lang’s diverse subjects live in South Dakota, Texas, West Virginia, Alabama, Florida, Illinois and California. Lang spent weeks living with each of the seven families and conducted in-depth interviews with the teens, their relatives and friends. The result is a series of complex, sometimes searing and always sensitive portraits of young people whose right to existence currently hangs in the balance. These kids do have things in common—their resilience, their exhaustion and, happily, their accepting and loving families—but Lang recognizes their individuality as well. 

Several of the kids who live in red states are already fierce advocates for LGBTQ+ rights. Ruby, a young woman from Houston, Texas, testified in her state legislature against a bill that would require trans student athletes to compete on school sports teams that reflect their sex assigned at birth. Despite her efforts, the bill was eventually signed into law. Loved by her family and her church, blessed with a mother who fights passionately for trans rights, and planning a career in costume design, Ruby seems unstoppable. But she still couldn’t stay in Texas. She’s transferring to a California college and leaving behind a state whose legislators deny her humanity. 

On the other hand, there’s Clint, a 17-year-old Muslim teen who lives in Chicago and has no desire at all to be an advocate, testify in front of legislators or attend marches. Clint demands what so many of us want and have: a private life that he can live on his own terms, where his gender is irrelevant to his opportunities. Perhaps Clint’s stubborn refusal to give up his autonomy in the face of repression is the most powerful response there is. “In the end, it’s everyone’s own life,” he tells Lang. “You’ve got to live it the way you want.”

Nico Lang’s powerful American Teenager closely follows seven transgender young adults, rendering complex, searing and sensitive portraits of their lives.
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The Transit of Venus (15.5 hours), Shirley Hazzard’s 1980 novel and winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, tells the story of two Australian sisters, Grace and Caroline Bell, from their arrival in postwar England to their middle age. It is a nuanced and richly detailed exploration of love, power, fate and remorse that gets better with each rereading—and is now available for the first time as an audiobook.

Hazzard’s writing is at once deceptively simple and surprisingly complex, full of wordplay, literary and scientific allusions, and sharp-eyed observations. It could have been tempting for a narrator to exaggerate the puns and games, to make sure that the reader “gets it.” Happily, acclaimed actor Juliet Stevenson beautifully balances wit, irony and compassion to mirror the subtle richness of Hazzard’s novel. The result is a performance that invites the audience to listen again and again to this remarkable book.

Acclaimed actress Juliet Stevenson’s performance is a beautifully balanced blend of wit, irony and compassion that mirrors the subtle richness of Shirley Hazzard’s remarkable 1980 novel, The Transit of Venus.
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Humans are walking petri dishes in Alien Clay by Adrian Tchaikovsky.

The dystopian cyberpunk future is here, and the Mandate, humanity’s fascist government, punts its criminals and political opposition to alien worlds. Those who survive the journey (punctuated by an airdrop from space as their disposable shuttle falls apart) face a lifetime sentence in an off-world labor camp. While there are other camps on other planets, Tchaikovsky focuses on just one for this story: Kiln.

Xeno-ecologist (someone who studies the environments of alien worlds) Arton Daghdev is shipped to Kiln after finding himself on the wrong side of the Mandate. Once there, he’s shocked to learn that the planet is home to actual, extraterrestrial life, a secret that’s been kept hidden from the people of Earth. Monolithic white structures dot the surface of Kiln, and were apparently crafted by some type of intelligent life. While whatever species made the monoliths is not readily present, horrific beings of another sort roam the surface of Kiln. Each of these “beings” is made up of multiple, independent creatures that act as their organs, like stomachs or lungs. (Imagine that your lungs are little dudes with their own brains, hanging out in your body. One day, you pass a dying person on the road; they’re mostly dead, but their lung-dudes are crawling away looking for a new body. The dying person’s lung-dudes are shinier and cooler than your lung-dudes, so your body rejects your old lung-dudes and picks up the newer models instead. This is how all life on Kiln works.) Arton and his fellow humans are stuck on a planet crawling with lung-dudes and stomach-dudes and heart-dudes, all ready and eager to replace the organs in their bodies, no matter what the humans themselves have to say about it.

This frightening biology contributes to Alien Clay’s thesis: Science cannot be contained, no matter how much humanity may cling to our arbitrary, artificially restricted “reality.” Commandant Teloran, the director of the camp, relentlessly pushes his staff and the imprisoned scientists to find explanations for the life on Kiln that conform to the Mandate’s established rules of science, despite all the evidence that doesn’t fit within those parameters. Tchaikovsky draws a clear contrast between the hyper-adaptive, ever-changing environment of Kiln and the harsh world of the labor camp, where prisoners slave away at various tasks from toilet cleaning to analysis of alien artifacts. 

Arton is fascinated with the planet and waxes philosophical often, creating a moody, introspective atmosphere. Kiln, Commandant Teloran’s regime and the disgruntled prisoners increasingly find themselves at odds, and as life within the walls of the camp becomes more and more hostile, Arton’s options become less and less appealing. Eventually, he must choose between the safety of the science he knows and understands, or the new understanding that Kiln can teach him. Tchaikovsky is just as laser-focused on the life of Kiln as his protagonist, which may disappoint some readers interested in a broader exploration of the characters or the greater universe they inhabit. But those willing to abandon all else in pursuit of uncovering Kiln’s mysteries will be continually fascinated—and often horrified—by Alien Clay.

Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Alien Clay presents a vision of extraterrestrial life that’s as fascinating as it is horrifying.
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While women’s basketball and soccer gain attention and fans, journalist Maggie Mertens also makes a compelling case for women who run to get their due in Better Faster Farther: How Running Changed Everything We Know About Women (9.5 hours). More than that, Mertens uses the history of women’s running as a lens through which to examine—and debunk—centuries-old assumptions about physiology, gender and race. From the mythical figure of Atalanta to the latest research on women’s ultramarathon performances exceeding men’s, Mertens incorporates elements of history, sociology, gender studies and science in her thoroughly researched account. Mertens’ reading of her work is matter-of-fact but engaging, and the audiobook includes image files so listeners can see pictures of the running heroes she profiles. Better Faster Farther’s stories of female athletes who changed the running game just might inspire you to lace up your running shoes, throw in your earbuds and go for a jog.

Read our starred review of the print edition of Better Faster Farther.

Lace up your running shoes, throw in your earbuds and go for a jog accompanied by Maggie Mertens’ Better Faster Farther, an inspiring account of female athletes who changed the running game.

Effortlessly engaging, Ferdelle Capistrano’s easygoing performance highlights humor and authentic character interaction in the audiobook of Humor Me (10.5 hours), Cat Shook’s sweet tale about navigating relationships.

Presley Fry, Humor Me’s 20-something protagonist, is an overworked and underappreciated assistant at a New York City late night show. Presley keeps romantic prospects at a distance, and has mixed feelings about her BFF getting too close to someone else. Though her job entails literally looking for humor—she scouts talent at comedy clubs—Presley’s been distracted since the recent death of her mother, Patty.

Capistrano’s dulcet tones and flawless delivery capture the endearing Presley, and she shows her range with other characters, like Susan Clark, Patty’s compassionate and quirky friend. Seamless transitions between characters in dialogue and well-timed asides bring out the humor without overdoing it. This charming audiobook will engage and delight fans of romantic comedies.

Read our review of the print edition of Humor Me.

Presley Fry, Humor Me’s 20-something protagonist, is an overworked assistant at a late night show who’s been distracted since the recent death of her mother. This charming audiobook will engage and delight fans of romantic comedies.

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