Some of the new titles that have received advance reviews have peaked my interest. These are books that I have recently added to my list of Books to Read, as time allows!
We Are What We Eat: A Slow Food Manifesto by Alice Waters
When Waters first opened Chez Panisse in 1971, she did so with the intention of feeding people good food during a time of political turmoil. Waters came to see that the phenomenon of fast food culture, which prioritized cheapness, availability, and speed, was not only ruining our health, but also dehumanizing the ways we live and relate to one another.
Over years of working with regional farmers, Waters and her partners learned how geography and seasonal fluctuations affect the ingredients on the menu, as well as about the dangers of pesticides, the plight of fieldworkers, and the social, economic, and environmental threats posed by industrial farming and food distribution. So many of the serious problems we face in the world today—from illness, to social unrest, to economic disparity, and environmental degradation—are all, at their core, connected to food.
This is a declaration of action against fast food values, and a working theory about what we can do to change the course. As Waters makes clear, every decision we make about what we put in our mouths affects not only our bodies but also the world at large—our families, our communities, and our environment. We have the power to choose what we eat, and we have the potential for individual and global transformation—simply by shifting our relationship to food. All it takes is a taste.
The Eagle's Claw: A Novel of the Battle of Midway by Jeff Shaara
Spring 1942. The United States is reeling from the blow the Japanese inflicted at Pearl Harbor. But the Americans are determined to turn the tide. The key comes from Commander Joe Rochefort, a little known “code breaker” who cracks the Japanese military encryption. With Rochefort’s astonishing discovery, Admiral Chester Nimitz will know precisely what the Japanese are planning.
But the battle to counter those plans must still be fought.
From the American side, the shocking conflict is seen through the eyes of Rochefort and Admiral Nimitz, as well as fighter pilot Lieutenant Percy “Perk” Baker and Marine Gunnery Sergeant Doug Ackroyd.
On the Japanese side, Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto is the mastermind. His key subordinates are Admiral Chuichi Nagumo, aging and infirm, and Admiral Tamon Yamaguchi, a firebrand who has no patience for Nagumo’s hesitation. Together, these two men must play out the chess game designed by Yamamoto, without any idea that the Americans are anticipating their every move on the sea and in the air.
This is the much anticipated conclusion to Shaara’s Pearl Harbor saga that began with To Wake the Giant, now available in paperback.
The Thousand Crimes of Ming Tsu by Tom Lin
Orphaned young, Ming Tsu, the son of Chinese immigrants, is raised by the notorious leader of a California crime syndicate, who trains him to be his deadly enforcer. But when Ming falls in love with Ada, the daughter of a powerful railroad magnate, and the two elope, he seizes the opportunity to escape to a different life. Soon after, in a violent raid, the tycoon’s henchmen kidnap Ada and conscript Ming into service for the Central Pacific Railroad.
Battered, heartbroken, and yet defiant, Ming partners with a blind clairvoyant known only as the prophet. Together the two set out to rescue his wife and to exact revenge on the men who destroyed Ming, aided by a troupe of magic-show performers, some with supernatural powers, whom they meet on the journey. Ming blazes his way across the West, settling old scores with a single-minded devotion that culminates in an explosive and unexpected finale.
The Thousand Crimes of Ming Tsu is at once a thriller, a romance, and a story of one man’s quest for redemption in the face of a distinctly American brutality. Fans of Cormac McCarthy take note.
The Kissing Bug: A True Story of a Family, an Insect, and a Nation's Neglect of a Deadly Disease by Daisy Hernández
Growing up in a New Jersey factory town in the 1980s, Daisy Hernández believed that her aunt had become deathly ill from eating an apple. No one in her family, in either the United States or Colombia, spoke of infectious diseases. Even into her thirties, she only knew that her aunt had died of Chagas, a rare and devastating illness that affects the heart and digestive system. But as Hernández dug deeper, she discovered that Chagas—or the kissing bug disease—is more prevalent in the United States than the Zika virus.
After her aunt’s death, Hernández began searching for answers. Crisscrossing the country, she interviewed patients, doctors, epidemiologists, and even veterinarians with the Department of Defense. She learned that in the United States more than three hundred thousand people in the Latinx community have Chagas, and that outside of Latin America, this is the only country with the native insects—the “kissing bugs”—that carry the Chagas parasite.
Hernández chronicles a story vast in scope and urgent in its implications, exposing how poverty, racism, and public policies have conspired to keep this disease hidden. An investigation into racial politics and for-profit healthcare in the United States, The Kissing Bug reveals the intimate history of a marginalized disease and connects us to the lives at the center of it all.
Republic of Detours: How the New Deal Paid Broke Writers to Rediscover America by Scott Borchert
WPA guides and artwork are still part of every state’s history, but I know little about the program that set out to create a state-by-state guidebook to America—and employed some of the biggest names in American letters. Scott Borchert tells the story of this raucous, utopian institution, from its starry-eyed early days to its dismemberment by the House Committee on Un-American Activities. As the United States enters a new era of economic distress, political strife, and culture-industry turmoil, its lessons are urgent and strong.
The plan was idealistic. Take thousands of broke writers, whether formally unemployed or self-anointed, communists or nonconformists, urbanites or country dwellers, young or old, poets or reporters, but all of them American and put them to work writing a guidebook to a country in a Great Depression. Not one but forty-eight guides were written, along with hundreds of miscellaneous books dedicated to cities, territories, folklore, and even slave narratives, all of varying quality, each revealing distinct regional sensibilities.
All this fell within the purview of the Federal Writer’s Project, a division of the Works Progress Administration founded to employ not just writers but anyone who seemed ill-suited to manual labor. It was a predictably eclectic organization, directed by an equally eccentric man, Henry Alsberg—a Manhattanite prone to fits of melancholy who took his advice from the anarchist Emma Goldman.
The Chosen and the Beautiful by Nghi Vo
Immigrant. Socialite. Magician.
Nghi Vo’s debut novel The Chosen and the Beautiful reinvents Fitzgerald’s classic The Great Gatsby as a coming-of-age story full of magic, mystery, and glittering excess.
Jordan Baker grows up in the most rarefied circles of 1920s American society—she has money, education, a killer golf handicap, and invitations to some of the most exclusive parties of the Jazz Age. She’s also queer and Asian, a Vietnamese adoptee treated as an exotic attraction by her peers, while the most important doors remain closed to her.
But the world is full of wonders: infernal pacts and dazzling illusions, lost ghosts and elemental mysteries. In all paper is fire, and Jordan can burn the cut paper heart out of a man. She just has to learn how.
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