Recent Reviews

Barbara Ehrenrich’s latest offering, Natural Causes: An Epidemic of Wellness, the Certainty of Dying, and Our Illusion of Control, adds to her benignly cranky repertoire of cultural critique. This contribution to the recent bestsellers about Americans’ unnatural relationship with natural aging—namely Gawande’s Being Mortal—distinguishes itself because she writes from a place that “could not be euphemized as ‘middle-aged.’” Ehrenreich bravely translates the latest science that debunks the comforting idea of the body as a whole rooting for eternal life, arriving instead at a transcendent view of death that enfolds the illusory self into the longevity of the universe. Recommended by Kelly.

"Just because you don't remember a place, doesn't mean its not in you." A fantastically illustrated journey of remembrance--the whole country, which sounds like the inside of a drum-- beach poems, and 'bats like blankets' fly off each page, as Lola explores her own history. ​Lovely story. Recommended by Jenna

Just listen to the conceit of BK Fischer’s amazing poetry collection Radioapocrypha: it’s a novella in verse explaining what would’ve happened if Jesus had appeared as a smart-alleck chemistry teacher in Maryland in 1989, the year Depeche Mode’s “Personal Jesus” came out. Of course, it’s good for laughs: the last supper is KFC takeout, water gets turned into boxed wine, and wisdom gets dispensed like “If a girl is wearing cut-off shorts with peace signs on her butt cheeks, make friends with her.” But Fischer’s most impressive feat is pulling a John Hughes and mining real pathos from the comic premise. Her gospel of the suburbs is ultimately an affecting and original meditation on sexuality, grief, rage, and the universal desire to get out: after all, “No one needs to stick around to find out if they open a Subway.” Recommended by Danny

My spirits are still aloft three hours after finishing Laura Moriarty's book American Heart. You may have heard about all the flak she has taken for the book and about the censored review—a review written by a Muslim woman of color—pulled after pressure from people who feared the book represented another white savior narrative because its admittedly flawed white teenage protagonist commits to seeing a woman to safety in an America—not very unlike our own—that has put all Muslims like this woman in an internment camp in Nevada. This is a Muslim woman, I might add, who has stayed in America even after her husband and son fled to Canada because she had hoped to outlast the virus of fear spreading the country, had hoped to stay in a teaching job at a university where she could help students learn not only about engineering but also about how to conquer their own fears of difference, had hoped to stay in a country that had become her home. The book is as much about her as it is about its white protagonist. American Heart ultimately heralds two good people doing the right thing at great personal risk. Recommended by Kelly