The Art Thief, A True Story of Love, Crime, and a Dangerous Obsession by Michael Finkel
The Art Thief, A True Story of Love, Crime, and a Dangerous Obsession is a propulsive read, meticulously researched and compellingly told. I look forward to Finkel’s future books.
Still Life at Eighty, The Next Best Thing by Abigail Thomas
You won’t find the secret of life buried here among the sentences and paragraphs, what you will find, however, will be transparency and authenticity – you’ll find a woman who has come to terms with being referred to as elderly … because, frankly, Abigail Thomas’s eighty is nothing you’ve experienced before.
A Hundred Lives Since Then by Gail Rosenblum
Rosenblum’s collection of essays is a delightful way to end a day – with each essay encompassing a mere 2-3 pages, it’s the perfect nightcap to end a long day.
The Other Family Doctor; A Veterinarian Explores What Animals Can Teach Us About Love, Life, and Mortality by Karen Fine, DVM
Brimful of touching, joyful, heartbreaking, and life affirming tales, THE OTHER FAMILY DOCTOR is a must-read for animal lovers and pet owners.
The Stories Whiteness Tells Itself: Racial Myths and Our American Narratives by David Mura
The Stories Whiteness Tells Itself: Racial Myths and our American Narratives by David Mura should be required reading in all high school and college classrooms – and for all Americans. Mura presents a cohesive, comprehensive, and uncompromising look into how white stories about race erase our true historical narrative and foster racism in the present.
The Girl I Am, Was, and Never Will Be by Shannon Gibney
Transracial adoption is never tidy, and cannot be encapsulated in an individual story, but Gibney does a masterful job of helping the reader understand the complexities of identity and the machinations of the adoption industrial complex. A writer with courage and heart, Gibney lays bare her experience for the benefit of us all.
Seven Aunts by Staci Lola Drouillard
Reading SEVEN AUNTS, I was overwhelmed with gratitude for these women and the author’s commitment to truth telling. Drouillard writes with such integrity. I cared deeply about the aunties, and I didn’t want to leave them. Extraordinary women leading ordinary lives; they lived in a world that did not recognize their contributions, but the lessons of their lives changed the world for future generations.
Guardians of the Trees: A Journey of Hope through Healing the Planet by Kinari Webb
The summer after graduating from college, Kinari Webb traveled to Indonesia Borneo to study orangutans but after witnessing the devastating effects of deforestation in the region, and realizing that it was negatively effecting the health of the community, she enrolled at Yale School of Medicine to become a doctor. Guardians of the Trees: A Journey of Hope Through Healing the Planet, is Webb's memoir about her efforts to mitigate climate change and provide affordable health care to the people of Indonesia Borneo.
The Last Bookseller, A Life in the Rare Book Trade
One of the most delightful aspects of Goodman’s book is the footnotes. If you buy the book for nothing but the footnotes, it’s a dollar well spent. They’re hilarious and snarky and reveal more about the author than the subject. For both bibliophiles and booksellers, THE LAST BOOKSELLER is a must read. With humor and great affection, Goodman invites us in for a look behind the curtain before it closes for the last time.
We Are Meant to Rise: Voices for Justice from Minneapolis to the World, Edited by Carolyn Holbrook and David Mura
At the dawn of summer 2020, with the world spinning from the Covid 19 pandemic, Minneapolis went into a nose dive after the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officers. In the weeks and months that followed, Minneapolis became the epicenter of worldwide demands for justice. In a compelling new collection, WE ARE MEANT TO RISE, edited by Carolyn Holbrook and David Mura, Indigenous writers and writers of color bear witness to one of the most unsettling years in the history of the United States.
Somebody's Daughter, A Memoir by Ashley C. Ford
SOMEBODY'S DAUGHTER is a heartbreaking story about a girl growing up in poverty, famished for love and acceptance, searching for an identity outside of the broken family she’d grown up in. But rather than remaining a victim, Ashley C. Ford becomes the heroine of her story, and the only one she needed to save her, was herself.
There's a Revolution Outside, My Love, Letters from a Crisis, Edited by Tracy K. Smith and John Freeman
The stories, poems, essays, and letters in this collection are a battle cry -- beaten down by a pandemic, police brutality, political divisiveness, and an armed insurrection – the writers question whether America has the stuff it takes to make the changes required. “As long as socio-racial segregation and discrimination persist, and as long as the presence of the state is limited to the increasingly armed police force, then neither the biggest smile nor the use of any hollow expressions of “American Nice” is going to remedy what for a very long time most people of color have lived as a daily experience of injustice in this country,” writes Sofian Merabet.
Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer
Kimmerer writes lyrically, with the heart and eye of a poet, and the mind of a botanist. BRAIDING SWEETGRASS should be required reading. How do we get back the connections we have lost? Whatever it takes, I feel as though Robin Wall Kimmerer’s BRAIDING SWEETGRASS will be an element in that confluence, that coming together again, for me. The problem and the solution both laid out before us in this beautiful collection.
Caste: The Origins of our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson
One of the most startling revelations in Caste is that the Nazi’s wrote their Nuremburg Laws using the Jim Crow South as their model. Wilkerson quotes Yale legal historian James Q. Whitman: “In debating how to institutionalize racism in the Third Reich, they began by asking how the Americans did it.” Hitler praised the United States’ near genocide of Native Americans and the Nazi’s were impressed by the American custom of lynching its subordinate caste of African Americans and the American “knack for maintaining an air of robust innocence in the wake of mass death.”