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Book cover for "How the word is passed"
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Average Rating:
3.8 stars
Description:
Clint Smith's revealing, contemporary portrait of America as a slave owning nation. Beginning in his own hometown of New Orleans, Smith leads the reader through an unforgettable tour of monuments and landmarks - those that are honest about the past and those that are not - that offer an intergenerational story of how slavery has been central in shaping our nations collective history, and ourselves. It is the story of the Monticello Plantation in...
Book cover for "Didion & Babitz"
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Average Rating:
4 stars
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"Eve Babitz died on December 17, 2021. Found in a closet in the back of an apartment full of wrack, ruin, and filth was a stack of boxes packed by her mother decades before. These boxes were pristine, the seals of duct tape unbroken. Inside: journals, photos, scrapbooks, manuscripts, letters. No: inside a lost world. This world turned for a certain number of years in the late sixties and early seventies, and was centered on a two-story house rented...
Book cover for "There's Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension"
Star rating for There's Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension
Average Rating:
1 stars
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"While Hanif Abdurraqib is an acclaimed author, a gifted poet, and one of our culture's most insightful music critics, he is most of all, at heart, an Ohioan. Growing up in Columbus in the '90s, Abdurraqib witnessed a golden era of basketball, one in which legends like LeBron were forged, and countless others weren't. His lifelong love of the game leads Abdurraqib into a lyrical, historical, and emotionally rich exploration of what it means to make...
Book cover for "How to tell when we will die"
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"The long-awaited essay collection from one of the most influential voices in disability activism that detonates a bomb in our collective understanding of care and illness, showing us that sickness is a fact of life. In the wake of the 2014 Ferguson riots, and sick with a chronic condition that rendered them housebound, Johanna Hedva turned to the page to ask: How do you throw a brick through the window of a bank if you can't get out of bed? It was...

5. Bluets

Book cover for "Bluets"
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A lyrical, philosophical, and often explicit exploration of personal suffering and the limitations of vision and love, as refracted through the color blue.
Book cover for "South and west"
Star rating for South and west
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Average Rating:
4.5 stars
Description:
Two excerpts from never-before-seen notebooks offer insights into the author's literary mind and process and includes notes on her Sacramento upbringing, her life in the Gulf states, her views on prominent locals and her experiences during a formative "Rolling Stone" assignment.
Book cover for "Just kids"
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Average Rating:
3.9 stars
Description:
In this memoir, singer-songwriter Patti Smith shares tales of New York City : the denizens of Max's Kansas City, the Hotel Chelsea, Scribner's, Brentano's and Strand bookstores and her new life in Brooklyn with a young man named Robert Mapplethorpe--the man who changed her life with his love, friendship, and genius.
Book cover for "Meditations"
Star rating for Meditations
Average Rating:
2.5 stars
Description:
"Meditations, by Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius, is one of the definitive texts on Stoicism. In Meditations Taken from A.S.L Farquharson’s Translation. Aurelius shares his thoughts about the importance of logic over emotion and helps you to start training your mind to think rationally. By following Stoic teachings, you can live with purpose and die with dignity. Meditations shows how to become more self-disciplined, stop caring what people think,...
Book cover for "The year of magical thinking"
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Average Rating:
4.6 stars
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""Life changes fast. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends." These were among the first words Joan Didion wrote in January 2004. Her daughter was lying unconscious in an intensive care unit, a victim of pneumonia and septic shock. Her husband, John Gregory Dunne, was dead. The night before New Year's Eve, while they were sitting down to dinner, he suffered a massive and fatal coronary. The two had lived and worked side by side for nearly...
Book cover for "The five"
Star rating for The five
Average Rating:
4.3 stars
Description:
Winner of the Baillie Gifford Prize for Nonfiction and of the Goodreads Choice Award for History & Biography
The award-winning, best-selling book that changes the narrative of the "Ripper" murders forever

Polly, Annie, Elisabeth, Catherine, and Mary Jane are famous for the same thing, though they never met. They came from some of London's wealthiest and poorest neighborhoods, from the factory towns of middle England,...
Book cover for "Midnight in Chernobyl"
Star rating for Midnight in Chernobyl
Average Rating:
4.8 stars
Description:
In the thirty years since a reactor at the Atomic Energy Station exploded, triggering history’s worst nuclear disaster, Chernobyl has become shorthand for the spectral horrors of radiation poisoning, for a dangerous technology slipping its leash, for ecological fragility, and for what can happen when a dishonest and careless state endangers its citizens and the entire world. Drawing on interviews, letters, unpublished memoirs, and documents from...
Book cover for "Know my name"
Star rating for Know my name
Average Rating:
4.8 stars
Description:
She was known to the world as Emily Doe when she stunned millions with a letter. Brock Turner had been sentenced to just six months in county jail after he was found sexually assaulting her on Stanford's campus. Her victim impact statement was posted on BuzzFeed, where it instantly went viral--viewed by almost eleven million people within four days, it was translated globally and read on the floor of Congress; it inspired changes in California law...
Book cover for "Braiding sweetgrass"
Star rating for Braiding sweetgrass
Average Rating:
4.4 stars
Description:
An inspired weaving of indigenous knowledge, plant science, and personal narrative from a distinguished professor of science and a Native American whose previous book, Gathering Moss, was awarded the John Burroughs Medal for outstanding nature writing. As a botanist and professor of plant ecology, Robin Wall Kimmerer has spent a career learning how to ask questions of nature using the tools of science. As a Potawatomi woman, she learned from elders,...
Book cover for "I'm glad my mom died"
Star rating for I'm glad my mom died
Average Rating:
4.3 stars
Description:
A heartbreaking and hilarious memoir by iCarly and Sam & Cat star Jennette McCurdy about her struggles as a former child actor -- including eating disorders, addiction, and a complicated relationship with her overbearing mother -- and how she retook control of her life.
Book cover for "Having and being had"
Star rating for Having and being had
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Average Rating:
3 stars
Description:
"Having just purchased her first home, the author embarks on a self-audit of the value system she has bought into. The essays in this volume offer an interrogation of work, leisure, and the lived experience of capitalism"--
Book cover for "The shock doctrine"
Star rating for The shock doctrine
Average Rating:
3.7 stars
Description:
Journalist Klein introduced the term "disaster capitalism." Whether covering Baghdad after the U.S. occupation, Sri Lanka after the tsunami, or New Orleans post-Katrina, she witnessed remarkably similar events: people still reeling were hit again, this time with economic "shock treatment," losing their land and homes to corporate makeovers. This book retells the story of Milton Friedman's free-market economic revolution. In contrast to the myth of...
Book cover for "Viral Justice"
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"Winner of the Stowe Prize, Harriet Beecher Stowe Center" "Longlisted for the Porchlight Business Book Awards, Personal Development & Human Behavior Category" "A NationSwell Book of the Year" "Finalist for the C. Wright Mills Award, Society for the Study of Social Problems" "Shortlisted for the getAbstract International Book Award 2023, Business Impact Category" Ruha Benjamin is an internationally recognized writer, speaker, and professor of African...
Book cover for "The great displacement"
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Average Rating:
5 stars
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"The untold story of climate migration-the personal stories of those experiencing displacement, the portraits of communities being torn apart by disaster, and the implications for all of us as we confront a changing future"--
Book cover for "Doppelganger"
Star rating for Doppelganger
Average Rating:
3 stars
Description:
"What if you woke up one morning and found you’d acquired another self -- a double who was almost you and yet not you at all? What if that double shared many of your preoccupations but, in a twisted, upside-down way, furthered the very causes you’d devoted your life to fighting against? Not long ago, the celebrated activist and public intellectual Naomi Klein had just such an experience -- she was confronted with a doppelganger whose views she...
Book cover for "How far the light reaches"
Star rating for How far the light reaches
Average Rating:
4 stars
Description:
"Sabrina Imbler has always been drawn to the mystery of life in the sea, and particularly to creatures living in hostile or remote environments. Each essay in their debut collection profiles one such creature: the female octopus who starves herself while watching over her eggs, the Chinese sturgeon whose migration route has been decimated by pollution and dams, the terrifying Bobbitt worm (named after Lorena) and other uncanny creatures lurking in...