As loathe as I am to admit it, it’s not possible to read a single book on a subject and understand. So if you want to understand, you have to read a lot. I read to understand. I have, ever since I was young. This past year, I changed what I read. It was deliberate but I did not know what it would do to me. I read fiction and nonfiction, science fiction and history, all written from perspectives that …
One response to the complexity of explaining the Haitian Revolution is to narrow the scope, as Sudhir Hazareesingh does in Black Spartacus: The Epic Life of Toussaint Louverture by focusing on Toussaint. Despite his tinier canvas and his younger audience, Hale, in the tenth installment of his wildly popular series of graphic histories of thrilling episodes …
Congratulations to Seattle-based author Don Mee Choi for winning the National Book Award for Poetry for her book DMZ Colony, which was published by Seattle-based Wave Books. Woven from poems, prose, photographs, and drawings, Don Mee Choi’s DMZ Colony is a tour de force of personal and political reckoning set over eight acts. Evincing the power …
How is one to live a moral and compassionate existence when one is fully aware of the blood, the horror inherent in life, when one finds darkness not only in one’s culture but within oneself? If there is a stage at which an individual life becomes truly adult, it must be when one grasps the …
Martha Jones is a giant in the field of African American history and this book is her best yet. Beautiful storytelling, which incorporates Jones’s own family history, makes this the perfect book for any armchair historian. Jones brings to light the stories of dozens of black women who are often ignored in history books, proving that …
Set in Alaska in the 1920s, a husband and wife are drifting apart. Unable to have their own child, they create one out of snow one night, and it changes their whole lives. This novel is full of rich imagery and wonderful characters. Eowyn Ivey has written a beautiful fairy tale that really reaches out …
Girls Who Build by Katie Hughes This book is cool! It is an introduction to building (tools, safety, supplies), profiles of 45 girls with interviews about why/what they like to build, AND an activity book for building projects from bee houses to candle holders to shelves. –sweet pea Generation Brave by Kate Alexander This collection of activists …
I have been reading books since the early 1950s and reviewing/posting the reviews for the past decade. I do not know how I missed Blake Pierce for all of those years. I have just read book one in the European Voyage Cozy Mystery series entitled Murder (and Baklava). It has two components that I am …
Clap When You Land was the favorite book from the LatinX Book Club at Rediscovered Books for 2020. Each page opens multiple doors and invites to to see things differently. The language feels easy and simple as you read, and at the end you are reminded that a genius is one who can take complex …
