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Goodreads Choice AwardNominee for Best Mystery & Thriller (2016) Her eyes are wide open. Her lips parted as if to speak. Her dead body frozen in the ice…She is not the only one. When a young boy discovers the body of a woman beneath a thick sheet of ice in a South London park, Detective Erika Foster is called in to lead the murder investi...Details, rating and comments
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Against all odds, Katniss Everdeen has won the Hunger Games. She and fellow District 12 tribute Peeta Mellark are miraculously still alive. Katniss should be relieved, happy even. After all, she has returned to her family and her longtime friend, Gale. Yet nothing is the way Katniss wishes it to be. Gale holds her at an icy distance. Peeta has turn...Details, rating and comments
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#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER A landmark volume in science writing by one of the great minds of our time, Stephen Hawking’s book explores such profound questions as: How did the universe begin—and what made its start possible? Does time always flow forward? Is the universe unending—or are there boundaries? Are there other dimensions in space...Details, rating and comments

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LOCA
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Sal and Charo both in their early 20s are relative newcomers to the city. Charo arrived first after an uncle living in the United States agreed to adopt her so she could immigrate more easily. As if repaying her debt to him and sending money to her parents back home weren’t hard enough she’s now a mother. Her daughter’s father means well but Charo suffocates under the weight of his expectations and those of the Bronx’s Dominican community. Moving to the U.S. was supposed to liberate her but instead of freedom she’s got nothing but responsibility. Meanwhile Sal can’t escape the memory of a horrific crime committed against one of his closest friends the event that propelled him to leave Santo Domingo. As he’s navigating through his identity as a gay Latine man and the anguish of grief he falls for a man who welcomes him and Charo into his friend group offering them a refuge in his corner of New York’s queer community. Perhaps if they try they can and do belong. This is pre-9/11 pre-Bloomberg New York. Members of the Dominican community still reel from past wars in their home country and the violence in their new one. People outside of New York barely know the island nation exists and are perplexed by folks like Sal and Charo who look Black to them but speak English by way of Spanish. Marriage equality and PrEP are more than a decade away. This historical context isn’t in the book exactly but that’s the point—Charo and Sal need to grapple with their individual and collective pasts and the uncertainty of the future. What would the 2000s hold? A good question but like its protagonists the book meanders. For readers looking for more of a vibe than a plot this is a solid debut about working through the confusion of intersectional identities and trauma.


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THE LAUNCH DATE
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Grace Hastings feels as if she’s clawed her way to the role of marketing manager for a London dating app called Fate struggling with imposter syndrome every step of the way. Meanwhile she writes off her workplace rival Eric Bancroft’s effortless rise as a result of his popularity family name and good looks. When the upcoming launch of a new kind of dating app forces them together—and with a promotion dangling for one of them—Grace and Eric set aside their frequent jabs for the sake of their research and hopefully a successful launch. The new app has an unusual focus on in-person experiences pairing up compatible users and sending them on curated dates. But before it can launch Grace and Eric are asked to assess each experience—from hikes to cooking classes to yoga—as if they were two people going on the date themselves. Grace is a frustrating character; though she frequently tells herself that she’s worked hard to get where she is and deserves her position outwardly she acts like a doormat. Her boss frequently takes advantage of her and it’s only through Eric’s encouragement that she gains confidence and begins setting boundaries. Her journey would have felt more impactful if she’d mustered the courage to stand up for herself rather than relying on a love interest to be the catalyst for change. The opposites-attract romance is cute albeit a bit slow until nearly the end of the book. The litany of inventive dates is what propels the book forward as the reader looks forward to seeing what sort of adventure Eric and Grace will be subject to next.


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THE WATERMARK
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The portentously named Augustus Fate is “one of the most famous and celebrated authors alive today.” He’s also a world-class loon. Young Jaime Lancia is your standard underachiever though not for want of trying: At the beginning of Mills’ novel he’s filled out more than 540 job applications. Landing an interview with Fate may land Jaime a journalism gig and so he heads to the Welsh countryside to find the great man who meets him not in the resplendent cape of his author photos but “wearing a navy jumper with holes in it a pair of brown corduroys and sandals displaying a row of large gnarled toes.” Fate is more interested in Jaime’s tale than his own especially when it comes to Jaime’s yearning for Rachel Levy so much so that Jaime winds up inventing tales about her to see what Fate will do with them: “The thought of him stealing my lies and weaving them into his prose confident all the while that he was turning life into art made me smile.” Well abracadabra Fate does him much better stealing Jaime and Rachel away and locking them into a series of stories one Dickensian one a kind of pastiche Gogol one set in London a generation or so after Jaime’s own day. “My novel is but a refuge from this world” says one of several narrators one of them Rachel who at one point says self-referentially “We’re going to crash.…Funny how panic turns you into a narrator.” David Mitchell did much of this work crash and all with considerably more skill in Cloud Atlas and not all of Mills’ rhetorical flourishes ring true. But her yarn has its moments and it’s a passable entertainment.


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STONE YARD DEVOTIONAL
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The narrator’s initial reasons for visiting the abbey are vague: She’s tired; she wants to escape; her marriage is falling apart; she’s still grieving her parents dead for more than 35 years; she’s disillusioned with her work in the environmental conservation movement. The predictability of the nuns’ rituals turns out to be profoundly restorative. When Part II opens the narrator has been at the abbey for four years. No one can make sense of her decision—not her husband not her friends not her colleagues who see her abdication as a lack of faith in their mission and least of all the narrator herself a self-described atheist who explains “I came back here one last time and then just…didn’t go home.” A plague of mice—an effect of climate change—the complicated logistics of trying to bring home the body of a murdered nun in the early days of the pandemic and the return of a problematic figure from the narrator’s past nudge the plot forward but what’s most gripping about the book isn’t what happens but rather the narrator’s quiet meditation on cruelty and kindness love and forgiveness our petty irritations with others and the process of allowing them to drift away. The “stone yard” in the title of Wood’s novel is the name of a neighbor’s sheep paddock. Devotion means love or loyalty; a devotional is a short worship service. Wood threads a contemplative path for believers and nonbelievers alike. Reading her prose—sanded to deceptive simplicity—feels like spending time with a dear friend. What if attentiveness and “habitual kindness” the narrator seems to ask are bedrocks of a moral life?


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BETA VULGARIS
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Recent college graduate Elise is in debt—she can’t even afford her antidepressants—although she doesn’t tell her boyfriend Tom nor does he know about her longtime eating disorder. Elise is grateful for the opportunity to make good money with Salt of the Earth Sugar plus she sees harvest work as “a real life experience. Something they could say they’d done when they got back to Brooklyn where hardscrabble Steinbeckian authenticity was social currency.” At the campground where she and Tom park their camper Elise meets “hot and cool” queer girl Cee another seasonal worker; develops a crush on her; and fears that Tom has done the same. (Elise’s preoccupation with being cool can be amusing and is presumably intended to play as merely juvenile rather than mockable.) One day at a nearby church that offers harvesters free meals Elise sees a sign that reads “The beets can only hurt you if you LISTEN to them!!!!” and before long she’s hearing a voice in her head that says “Return the dirt.” Sarsfield’s writing is sturdy throughout and the farm setting and duties are vividly rendered but the novel doesn’t seem to know where to go with its surreal turns which come to include the disappearance of harvest workers. Elise’s self-pity can be tiresome and her self-destructive tendencies which include erratic spending can be wearying but readers won’t draw any conclusions about Elise that she hasn’t already drawn; she thinks of herself as quite perfectly “an expert in egomaniacal self-hatred the dark art of inventing new and spectacular ways to feel bad.”


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IDLE GROUNDS
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Glimmering with foreboding Bamford’s debut is an eerie consideration of family secrets in a sun-dappled setting. The action is confined to a late-1980s summer day in the life of a group of relatives accompanied by their partners and children but the novel also reaches to the backstory as everyone gathers in Frankie’s house to celebrate a birthday. It’s a familiar setting to the family. Nearby is the home where Frankie and her four siblings grew up and also the burned-out remains of their mother Beezy’s childhood house. Yet to the next generation a group of young cousins this patch of horse country has suddenly become sinister. A zipping creature a glutinous visual effect hanging over the forest and terrified animals all spook them. When 3-year-old Abi goes missing her brother 12-year-old Travis heads after her and vanishes too. This leaves the other children searching the surroundings hearing voices and seeing visions reacting with childlike volatility. The parents meanwhile ignore them and bicker. The narrative is delivered in the confiding first-person voice of one of the cousins—“what you should probably know is that the day was bright and clean”—who’s looking back from adulthood mixing the events of the day with speculation suggestion and glimpses of past familial discord including some violence. The narrative is sometimes interrupted by “Intermezzos” telling various family stories all threaded with a strange humor. The novel casts an atmospheric spell with its surreal episodes and hints of unhappiness observed from the children’s perspective. Malignity hovers events and artifacts are left dangling—a missing watch a painted statuette a pristine tennis court—and tragedy does eventually arrive. But the story concludes elsewhere with the now-grown narrator still teasing its dark implications.


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WHAT'S IN THE WALLS?
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Alone in the gym 10-year-old Zack hears a curious scratching sound as he’s putting away the floor hockey equipment. Zack’s used to odd noises—St. Joseph’s is more than a century old after all—but this one is different. His best friend Henry agrees that the sound is definitely not normal but gym teacher Mrs. Clark and school custodian Mr. Lucas don’t seem concerned. Henry’s older sister Justine suggests that the boys have encountered Marcel the school ghost. A mysterious incident with a bin of trash the next morning spurs Zack to further action and he ropes Henry into participating in what he thinks will be a quick ghost hunt to confirm his supernatural theories. Unfortunately he discovers a much more earthly problem—and as it turns out Mr. Lucas knows more than he’s letting on. As other evidence comes to light Zack and company try to find a way to prove to the adults that something dangerous is afoot before it’s too late. The slightly silly and dramatic tone pairs well with the abundant and action-packed art for a squirm-inducing very quick story that will delight readers. Physical descriptions are minimal but characters vary in skin tone in Bigué’s illustrations.


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RADICAL NEXT
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In her nonfiction debut futurist and technology entrepreneur Rad helps readers acclimate to a world “where change accelerates far faster than any standardized test or rubric can reflect or contain.” Humanity is experiencing huge advances in processing power artificial intelligence and biotechnology along with the advent of all kinds of neural interfaces on the horizon—technological transformation on a scale never seen before. The situation heralds what the author refers to as “the wholesale sunsetting of humanity’s current OS” and in these pages she encourages her readers to take the leap into the new world. Rad’s not advocating a complete overhaul of that old “operating system” but rather a reclamation of what she holds to be essential human skills: “connection compassion critical thinking collaboration and creativity.” The author walks readers through various aspects of the coming post-human future from digital platform algorithms to the “attention economy” with its concentration on “extracting dollars from our eyeballs clicks tracking cookies and more.” Throughout the illustrated bullet-pointed chapters Rad affirms the centrality of the human experience as a compass to navigate the technological changes in the near future. The author has concerns about major subjects like artificial intelligence worrying “if we’re feeding a system that’s essentially just a fancy copy machine it might be able to emulate connection but we’re getting imitation goods.” On this subject and a couple of others Rad can be too casually dismissive; when she comments that “people who think AI will render the creative arts obsolete don’t understand how AI currently works” for instance she’s missing the point—many of those people are worrying about how AI will work as the tech grows more sophisticated. Still her open-minded optimism carries the book.


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HOW TO MOVE A ZOO
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In the early 20th century the zoo at Moore Park in Sydney Australia moved to the suburb of Taronga. Most of the animals were transported by truck but Jessie was far too large for any vehicle so she simply walked through the town in the early morning before most people had awakened then boarded a ferry. This picture book chronicles Jessie’s travels. She surprises the milkman’s horse alarms an onlooker and ambles over grass always walking calmly with her keeper Mr. Miller even as others react in shock. After she makes it across in the ferry she arrives at her new home greeted by lions and monkeys. The author’s note sheds light on the true story of the animals’ move explaining that the fastest route was via ferry since the Sydney Harbour Bridge hadn’t yet been built. Much like Jessie’s journey the story is a quiet one though the illustrations give it life. The most stunning images depict Jessie’s early-morning start the pale pinks in the sky set against an otherwise blue-washed layout; Jessie’s face and eyes are rendered with careful detail. Readers will appreciate the beautiful art and the novelty of an elephant’s walk through town.


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EVERY TOM, DICK & HARRY
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When Emma Lewis’ parents ask her to move back to Harrow and take over Estate of Mind—their business staging home sales for estates downsizers and others—she steps in with relative ease having been been sticking price tags on candelabras all her life. Since they’re retiring to Cape Cod they also offer her their house and have already arranged a roommate: her father’s friend Frank Crowley a retired math teacher recently widowed when his wife was struck by lightning on the golf course. The warm relationship that develops between Frank and Emma as they share the house and soon the responsibilities of the business is at the heart of this tale of love and money and love-for-money. Estate of Mind soon has the opportunity to put on a sale at the infamous house at 1010 Quail Ridge Road which operated variously as a B&B and a brothel known as Lola’s Ladies. Meanwhile Frank has begun dating Connie Winooski a recent widow and mother of the police chief Luke Winooski. When Luke and Emma also start seeing each other sticky situations arise. This book is all about the complications and overlapping romantic alliances that are the leitmotif of small-town drama and some readers may find it useful to make a character list to keep track of all the names and relationships. For example who is Theo? Well he’s former kindergarten teacher Athena’s son; she’s now dating Manny the disgraced former police chief who was married to Lola the “housemother.” Theo himself is dating Rain aka Francine the daughter of Frank’s dead wife Ginger from her marriage to Stefan. Lipman seems to be having herself a grand old time with this sort of thing. For the Daily Double what’s the connection between John-Paul Uncle Paul and Paulina? Devoted readers will be ready for the quiz.


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SOMEONE FROM THE PAST
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It’s certainly her most sharply focused. Alarmed that a series of anonymous threats she’s been receiving have escalated London magazine editor Sarah Lampson asks Nancy Graham her old roommate and colleague at Diagonal Press to help figure out which of her former lovers is intent on killing her. But it’s already too late for one of the candidates artist Donald Spencer reports to Nancy the next morning that Sarah’s dead in her bed. Determined to make sure the police don’t suspect Donald who’s become her own boyfriend Nancy hurries over to Sarah’s place and methodically cleans up every trace of evidence that points to Donald’s presence there. Unfortunately her conscientious labors only ensure that she’s taken in for questioning by Detective Inspector Crewe. Despite her salt-and-pepper relationship with Sarah Nancy is a highly sympathetic narrator but Crewe is one sharp cookie and he soon catches her in the first of many misstatements. When Nancy meets with the other suspects—Peter Abbott a crook who was Sarah’s first love; Laurence Hopkins features editor at another Diagonal magazine; and stage actor Michael Fenby whose divorce from Sarah has just become final—the dialogue is so brittle and charged with recriminations that readers may wonder if the whole story is one round robin of interrogations. Continuing to stretch the truth to Crewe and everyone else Nancy ultimately digs herself in so deep that Crewe brands her “the worst liar in the business.” She certainly is one of the most entertaining.


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A FOREST SONG
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A curious tan-skinned curly-haired child in a wide-brimmed hat follows a path into the forest heeding its siren call. Along the way the unnamed youngster discovers the calming sensory experiences of nature and all that it has to offer from the way “the branches rustle strange and stirred” to the way “the leaves kick’d by my feet soon sing.” As the journey progresses and night approaches the child is comforted by the joy of being outdoors before heading to bed and waking up near the cool comforts of nature. Hall’s cento poem text uses lines from the poetry of Robert Frost Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Emily Dickinson among others whose works “were their own tributes to the woods” and whose “messages hold the same meaning today.” Orange yellow and purple gouache illustrations are dramatic in scope—vast and grand yet nurturing at times—with the branches acting as arms keeping the child close. Backmatter includes an author’s note as well as a further look at cento poems and tips for readers to create their own work. A list of “poets and the lines they wrote” is also provided though the titles of the works aren’t cited.


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WE ALL LIVE HERE
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Lila Kennedy thought she had the perfect family—a loving mother a doting stepfather two wonderful daughters and a great husband. She even wrote a self-help book about repairing a marriage which was published a mere two weeks before her husband left her. After her own mother’s sudden death Lila finds herself an unexpected single mom with her health-nut stepfather Bill for a roommate. When her long-absent actor father Gene moves in things go from crowded to chaotic. When Gene isn’t talking about his memories of starring on a Star Trek–like television show he’s starting fights with Bill. Perhaps the worst part is that Lila’s supposed to produce a new book about the unexpected direction her life has taken. She quickly finds that writing about her real-life romantic exploits (including the kind gardener Bill hired and the sexy single dad she lusts after at school pick-up) and the actual heartbreak that upended her family is easier said than done. Moyes creates a world that is believable and funny. It’s hilarious to read about the distinct characters in Lila’s life—such as her lentil-loving stepfather and egocentric biological father—interacting with each other. There’s plenty of drama here but none of it feels forced. It all comes from flawed people doing their best to coexist and making plenty of mistakes along the way. Moyes combines the warmth of an Annabel Monaghan rom-com with the humanity of a Catherine Newman novel creating a story that will provoke tears and laughter.


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CAN'T HELP FAKING IN LOVE
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Rich girl Harsha Godbole is trying to make it as a photographer in India’s Silicon Valley without her wealthy parents’ help. But when her movie-industry-raised cousin announces her wedding Harsha lies about her newly single status to save face. Her solution is to pay her local barista to pretend to be her boyfriend for the festivities. Veer Kannan has put his dreams of being an actor on hold so he can support his family with a regular paycheck. Initially taken aback by Harsha’s offer he accepts so he’ll be able to fund his brother’s MBA degree. Hegde places both aspiring artists in an economically elite section of Indian society—people who drink cappuccinos eat charcuterie wear designer brands fly across the country and abroad and drop bucketloads of money on lavish weddings. While Veer is less privileged he has enough to be culturally fluent in Harsha’s circles. Setting the story in this milieu appears to be an attempt to make an Indian romance legible to an American audience. The fake-dating plot doesn’t make much sense since demanding that an unmarried woman have a boyfriend is the opposite of what an Indian family would do even today. If one overlooks the weakness of the premise the hurried nods to anticaste and queer politics and choices like giving a South Indian protagonist the Punjabi name “Veer” some scenes of the couple’s growing connections are pleasant to read.


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THE BOOK OF FLACO
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Flaco a Eurasian eagle-owl escaped from the Central Park Zoo in February 2023 after someone cut open his enclosure. He lived free in and around Central Park—with forays to other parts of the city—eating rats pigeons and other small game that he caught. The zoo tried to recapture him but ceased its efforts after public opinion began to swing in favor of letting the bird remain free. During his year of freedom Flaco became a sort of avian celebrity fascinating people in the city and beyond; many followed his adventures online thanks to bird-watchers who spent their nights tracking him. Those bird-watchers are the primary sources for Gessner an author and journalist who never actually saw Flaco in the flesh. The responses of the birding community are as much the focus of the book as Flaco himself. Two factions emerged: One wanted to spread news of Flaco as widely as possible and the other looked to shield the bird from public scrutiny. Gessner gives both sides a sympathetic portrayal along with those whose interest in birds was much more casual until Flaco appeared. Drawing on his own experience of observing ospreys in the wild while researching an earlier book the author also puts Flaco’s story in the wider context of the ecological movement and looks at whether we can justly make parallels between humans and wild animals.


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THE POET AND THE BEES
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As she mentions in a note Novesky—herself a poet and beekeeper—takes inspiration from Plath’s letters and poetry including several bee-focused poems that conclude the posthumously published collection Ariel. (As Novesky explains she draws from the revised edition that aligns with Plath’s own intended order of the poems rather than her husband Ted Hughes’ arrangement.) In “Spring” Plath’s sleeveless dress and palpable fear during her introduction to her bees derive from her poem “The Bee Meeting.” Novesky’s often-exquisite verse intentionally echoes Plath’s language including thrice-repeated words and phrases. Lines in “Summer” reveal the necessity of Plath’s early-morning writing: “In the blue hour her hour / the poet writes / until the babies wake / just past dawn. / She writes like mad / a poem a poem a poem.” Italicized phrases and lines are pulled directly from Plath’s own writing a fact Novesky doesn’t specifically acknowledge. Love’s muted watercolor-and-ink illustrations imbue the book with a fitting poignancy contrasting practical details—such as the poet caring for her hive or her children—with tender images of flowers seasonal changes bees and jarred honey. The opening and closing illustrations depict snowdrops completing the seasonal cycle. Novesky successfully refocuses the lens from Plath’s tragic death to the poet as artist centering her hopeful ambition and keen relationship with nature.


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MAGIC IN THE AIR
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A staple of postgame shows and social media feeds the slam dunk is omnipresent but the opposite was once true Sielski a Philadelphia sportswriter and Kobe Bryant biographer writes in this informative account. Consider the book’s cover star Julius Erving who wowed fans by leaping from the free-throw line 15 feet from the hoop and slamming the ball home. Born in 1950 “Dr. J” was never more athletic than in the early 1970s but playing in the ABA an upstart league without a national TV contract “he was invisible” a pro basketball executive tells Sielski. At least the ABA let him dunk. While at the University of Massachusetts Erving like every other college player from 1967 to 1976 was prohibited from dunking during games. Sielski shows that race was among the factors behind the purportedly safety-minded rule change. By the late 1960s Black players like UCLA’s Lew Alcindor—he’d later change his name to Kareem Abdul-Jabbar—were dominating the college game. The “Anti-Alcindor Rule” as some called the dunk ban was meant to temper his above-the-rim supremacy and Abdul-Jabbar was among those who said the rule change wouldn’t have been implemented if he were white. Sielski chases a host of historical leads about early dunkers yielding memorable if not always verifiable anecdotes. Joe Fortenberry a college player in Texas dunked in a 1930s game but his coach said “Joe that’s not elegant” and forbade further dunks. Holding two basketballs and tossing a third in the air as he jumped New York City phenom Connie Hawkins could dunk all three before landing. Sielski writes about great recent dunkers but his chapters on Michael Jordan and Ja Morant offer little that will be new to fans.


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ALLIGATOR TEARS
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“I was the person who got expelled from high school who mopped up lube at the sex club and some­how I’d stumbled into this alternate universe where I was also the person who lived with his boyfriend in New York (albeit in a fake room) had a book soon-to-be out and an inbox full of journalists asking me about my ‘process.’” In a follow-up to his much-awarded debut memoir of growing up gay between Florida and Nicaragua High-Risk Homosexual Gomez gives a book-length answer to the question of his process. Though his 30-something years may seem few for two memoirs this time he tells the story largely in terms of work: a meticulously evoked and darkly comic series of jobs in bars restaurants retail (readers may find the Flip Flop Shop taking up a permanent coconut-scented place in their minds) and briefly sex work. Through it all he clung ferociously to the idea that he was a writer. “‘People like you get to make art too!’ I'd hype myself up in the shower.” His fierce love for his mother a beloved barista at the airport Starbucks again shines through the pages and in a section that will mean a lot to aspiring memoirists he recalls how the joy of his first publication was laced with terror that she would read the book whose evolution he hid from her. He continues to contend with the legacy of the Pulse nightclub massacre with homophobia and with racism but he also comes to a heartening conclusion: “In fact it was a privilege to be gay.…It was because of my queerness that I was able to see how the paths set out for me weren’t enough pushing me to leave home in search of more.”


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THE STAINED GLASS WINDOW
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In this epic telling Lewis the distinguished historian examines the intersection of history with his ancestors in the South of slavery Jim Crow and the dawn of the Civil Rights Movement. The titular window stands in an Atlanta church whose pictorial rendering of the Gospels was “twinned with illustrations of the Negro’s emancipation and rise.” That rise Lewis demonstrates was long in coming. In his graceful narrative interwoven with historical detail Lewis pores over old census records to locate lost ancestors hidden away in the rolls of “one of the South’s grandest slaveholding dynasties” one of the outposts of a system of enslavement that “functioned as a vast concentration camp from which flowed the enormous wealth that made the industrial North possible.” In that setting Lewis relates meaningful stories of resistance such as the mass suicide of a shipload of kidnapped Ibo warriors in 1803 an event sealed in the memory of the Gullah people in the Georgia isles but “quickly forgotten by white people at the time for its bizarreness.” The event speaks to the terrible irony of Georgia’s one-time short-lived stance as the only Southern colony without slavery thanks to the abolitionist views of Gov. James Edward Oglethorpe: after him Georgia jumped full tilt into slavery developing a culture in which racial mixing was prevalent but unspoken even as the “one-drop rule” was enshrined. “The antebellum South kept its sexual history secret by enforcing the illiteracy of all but 3 or 4 percent of its almost four million enslaved people” Lewis writes but many of the photographs herein break that silence. Elsewhere Lewis writes of his family’s pioneering roles in education and commerce always requiring resistance to white supremacist power and “apartheid reality” that Lewis makes clear is ongoing.


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THE PLUNDER OF BLACK AMERICA
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As Arizona State University historian Schermerhorn notes “The typical African American family has about one-sixth the wealth of the typical white family.” This is an improvement over the year of the Emancipation Proclamation when “the typical Black family had less than two cents on the typical white family’s dollar” but the structural reasons for the disparity have remained fairly constant: institutional racism stood in the way of accumulating wealth then and it does so today. Schermerhorn ranges across American history to note that whenever Blacks have made economic advances new impediments arise: a Black household in colonial Virginia was subject to twice the annual tax of a white household of the same composition while the descendants of landholders were legally cheated out of inherited holdings because as a court said of one the heir “was a Negro and by consequence an alyen.” In the newly constituted United States enslaved Blacks were legally classified “as personal property like a horse or wagon” with no property rights of their own. Schermerhorn finds broad discrepancies in New Deal programs with Social Security for instance initially denied to farmworkers and domestic workers—a large portion that is of the Black workforce—while post–WWII GI Bill programs were so tilted that in 1947 “just two of 3229 VA-backed loans in thirteen Mississippi cities went to Black veterans.” Housing covenants in the Phoenix and Los Angeles of the 1950s and ’60s confined Blacks to the inner city and low housing values impeding the accumulation of wealth. Schermerhorn closes with a call to redress four centuries of economic damage with “targeted restorative justice initiatives” that include reparations.


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woman-stock-portrait "Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten."G.K. Chesterton.

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