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A DECENT MEAL

One of our recommended books is A Decent Meal by Michael Carolan

A poignant look at empathetic encounters between staunch ideological rivals, all centered around our common need for food.

While America’s new reality appears to be a deeply divided body politic, many are wondering how we can or should move forward from here. Can political or social divisiveness be healed? Is empathy among people with very little ideological common ground possible? In A Decent Meal, Michael Carolan finds answers to these fundamental questions in a series of unexpected places: around our dinner tables, along the aisles of our supermarkets, and in the fields growing our fruits and vegetables.

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GRACELAND, AT LAST

One of our recommended books is Graceland, At Last by Margaret Renkl

For the past four years, Margaret Renkl’s columns have offered readers of the New York Times a weekly dose of natural beauty, human decency, and persistent hope from her home in Nashville. Now more than sixty of those pieces have been brought together in this sparkling new collection.

“People have often asked me how it feels to be the ‘voice of the South,’” writes Renkl in her introduction. “But I’m not the voice of the South, and no one else is, either.” There are many Souths—red and blue, rural and urban, mountain and coast,

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VOLUNTEERS

One of our recommended books is Volunteers by Jerad W. Alexander

As a child, Jerad Alexander lay in bed listening to the fighter jets take off outside his window and was desperate to be airborne. As a teenager at an American base in Japan, he immersed himself in war games, war movies, and pulpy novels about Vietnam. Obsessed with all things military, he grew up playing with guns, joined the Civil Air Patrol for the uniform, and reveled in the closed and safe life “inside the castle,” within the embrace of the armed forces, the only world he knew or could imagine. Most of all, he dreamed of enlisting—like his mother,

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THE LEAST OF US

One of our recommended books is The Least of Us by Sam Quinones

From the New York Times bestselling author of Dreamland, a searing follow-up that explores the terrifying next stages of the opioid epidemic and the quiet yet ardent stories of community repair.

Sam Quinones traveled from Mexico to main streets across the U.S. to create Dreamland, a groundbreaking portrait of the opioid epidemic that awakened the nation. As the nation struggled to put back the pieces, Quinones was among the first to see the dangers that lay ahead: synthetic drugs and a new generation of kingpins whose product could be made in Magic Bullet blenders.

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REAL ESTATE

One of our recommended books is Real Estate by Deborah Levy

Real Estate is the third and final installment in three-time Booker Prize nominated Deborah Levy’s Living Autobiography series: an exhilarating, thought-provoking and boldly intimate meditation on home and the specters that haunt it in our patriarchal society.

“Three bicycles. Seven ghosts. A crumbling apartment block on the hill. Fame. Tenderness. The statue of Peter Pan. Silk. Melancholy. The banana tree. A love story.”

Virginia Woolf wrote that in order to be a writer, a woman needs a room of one’s own. Now, in Real Estate, acclaimed author Deborah Levy concludes her ground-breaking trilogy of living autobiographies with an exhilarating,

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THE REDEMPTION OF BOBBY LOVE

One of our recommended books is The Redemption of Bobby Love by Bobby and Cheryl Love

The inspiring, dramatic, and heartwarming true account of an escaped convict and his wife of thirty-five plus years who never knew his secret, which captured the imaginations of millions on Humans of New York.

Bobby and Cheryl Love were living in Brooklyn, happily married for decades, when the FBI and NYPD appeared at their door and demanded to know from Bobby, in front of his shocked wife and children: “What is your name? No, what’s your real name?”

Bobby’s thirty-eight-year secret was out. As a Black child in the Jim Crow South,

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