Don’t forget to pick up some books for the holiday weekend! Your local independent bookstore may be taking a much-needed day off on July 4th, so check in with them online or over the phone to know their hours for the holiday weekend, and while you’re at it, you can purchase some great reads. What …
. . .we have Wes Moore’s Five Days: The Fiery Reckoning of an American City. While the title sounds like it could be about any number of locations during the last few months, Five Days is about life in Baltimore after the death of Freddie Gray, back in 2015. Moore (with assistance from Erica L. …
Saidiya Hartman’s Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments contains some of the most imaginative, inventive, and radical history writing I’ve ever encountered. Taking as her subjects the black women excluded from the US historical archive, Hartman challenges and unsettles dominant understandings of who “makes” history. In vibrant and ecstatic prose, Hartman tells the story of how the wayward, the …
by Jhoti Roy for Literary Arts During a special broadcast on OPB Radio on Monday, June 22, 2020, the winners of the 33rd Annual Oregon Book Awards, selected by panels of out-of-state judges, were announced. ELOISE JARVIS MCGRAW AWARD FOR CHILDREN’S LITERATURE Cathy Camper of Portland Lowriders Blast from the Past LESLIE BRADSHAW AWARD FOR YOUNG ADULT LITERATURE …
…and speaking of building better tomorrows, we’re delighted to see Ibram X. Kendi has cleverly put out a baby board book. Timing is everything, and nothing happens overnight in book publishing, which makes the arrival of Antiracist Baby this week a marvel. Kendi, whose Stamped From the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America and How to …
No better $35 can be spent for a book in this country than this collection of James Baldwin’s collected non-fiction— what were published as five books, from Notes of a Native Son through The Devil Finds Work, with a selection of essays not previously collected included. Timely in their day, this writing feels prophetically and astoundingly true …
Arguably one of the most outstanding Americans of the 20th century, yet seemingly almost forgotten today, George Washington Carver gets an enlightening biographical treatment in this beautifully illustrated picture book. The book focuses on George’s childhood, as he tends a hidden garden and teaches himself botany through observation and experimentation, but his social and scientific …
As it says on the cover, there are cowboys in Compton, which has been known to resemble the Wild West on occasion. The Compton Junior Posse was founded in 1988, and it has been instrumental in preserving the historical legacy of the black man in the opening of the West during the later part of …
Here’s a cool book. Donald R. Prothero is going to tell us how the world came to be with The Story of the Earth in 25 Rocks. Each of the chapters in this book talk about an important discovery or realization in the history of geology, highlighting both a specific geological puzzle and the people who …
In 1986, 20-year-old Christopher Knight left his home in Massachusetts, drove to Maine and disappeared into the woods. He would not have another conversation with another person for the next 27 years. Christopher Knight had no real plan for living in the woods, he just wanted to be alone. But he found a secluded area …
