For a runaway slave in the 1840s south, life on the run can be just as dangerous as life under a sadistic Massa. That’s what fifteen-year-old Naomi learns after she escapes the brutal confines of life on an Alabama plantation. Striking out on her own, she must leave behind her beloved Momma and sister Hazel and take refuge in a Georgia brothel run by a freewheeling, gun-toting Jewish madam named Cynthia. There, amidst a revolving door of gamblers, prostitutes, and drunks, Naomi falls into a star-crossed love affair with a smooth-talking white man named Jeremy who frequents the brothel’s dice tables too often.
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What if labor does not end with pregnancy but continues into a mother’s postpartum life? How can the fiercest love for your child and the deepest wells of grief coexist in the same moment? How has society neglected honest conversation around the significant physical changes new mothers experience? Could real healing occur if generations of women were fluent in the language of their bodies?
Molly Caro May grapples with these questions as she undergoes several unexpected health issues―pelvic-floor dysfunction, incontinence, hormonal imbalance―after the birth of her first child, Eula. While she and her husband navigate the ups and downs of new parenthood,
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Forgetfulness is a book about modern culture and its profound rejection of the past. It traces the emergence in recent history of the idea that what is important in human life and work is what will happen in the future.
Francis O’Gorman shows how capitalism embraced forgetting as a requirement for modern existence and how modern education, as well as life with fast-moving technology, further disconnect us from our pasts. But he also examines the cultural narratives and contemporary preoccupations that are against the grain of our collective amnesia. O’Gorman argues that such narratives, in rich but oblique ways,
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Through vivid stories of devoted pigs, two-timing magpies, and scheming roosters, The Inner Life of Animals weaves the latest scientific research into how animals interact with the world with Peter Wohlleben’s personal experiences in forests and fields.
Horses feel shame, deer grieve, and goats discipline their kids. Ravens call their friends by name, rats regret bad choices, and butterflies choose the very best places for their children to grow up.
In this, his latest book, Peter Wohlleben follows the hugely successful The Hidden Life of Trees with insightful stories into the emotions,
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As firsthand survivors of many of the twentieth century’s most monumental events—the Holocaust, Hiroshima, the Killing Fields—begin to pass away, Survivor Café addresses urgent questions: How do we carry those stories forward? How do we collectively ensure that the horrors of the past are not forgotten?
Elizabeth Rosner organizes her book around three trips with her father to Buchenwald concentration camp—in 1983, in 1995, and in 2015—each journey an experience in which personal history confronts both commemoration and memorialization. She explores the echoes of similar legacies among descendants of African American slaves, descendants of Cambodian survivors of the Killing Fields,
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Evelyn is a Creole woman who comes of age in New Orleans at the height of World War II. Her family inhabits the upper echelon of Black society, and when she falls for no-account Renard, she is forced to choose between her life of privilege and the man she loves.
In 1982, Evelyn’s daughter, Jackie, is a frazzled single mother grappling with her absent husband’s drug addiction. Just as she comes to terms with his abandoning the family, he returns, ready to resume their old life.
Jackie’s son, T.C., loves the creative process of growing marijuana more than the weed itself.
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