This week, I’ve been thinking quite a lot about a book I read – Art Works: How Organizers and Artists are Creating a Better World Together by Ken Grossinger (New York: The New Press, 2023). It is a short, richly researched book about – as the title suggests – the integration of arts and music …
For the next while, I am not going to write and post book reviews. I have written at least a little bit about at least a subset of the books I’ve read, at some points just for my own eyes and at others for public consumption in different ways, for more than 25 years. For …
YA contemporary. Hani and Ishu are Bengali-Irish teens living in Dublin. They are among the only desi girls in their school, are very different people, and are not friends. But when Hani is trying to figure out how to stop her white Irish friends from their quite aggressive refusal to accept her identification as bi, …
By a professor of history and African American studies at Yale, this book examines the history of urban rebellions – often called ‘riots’ by official sources – in US cities from the mid-1960s to the present day. Though today we most often remember only the highly publicized uprisings in the largest cities in the mid-to-late …
YA speculative fiction. A prequel to Emezi’s wonderful book Pet. That one is set in a city that is a generation past a revolution won under abolitionist politics (though that language is never used), while this one is set in the midst of that revolution. The protagonist of Bitter, after whom the book is named, …
A collection of writings by Egyptian activist Alaa Abd El-Fattah. He first became known beyond Egypt for his role in the revolution of 2011, but he was active well before that and he comes from a longstanding leftist family – his father had been a political prisoner in his youth and went on to become …
Literary fiction. Follows a semi-pro wrestler in Nebraska whose life is, relatively speaking, good – he is pretty sure he’s about to hit the big time, he is in a solid long-term relationship, he has a decent day job as a school janitor, and he knows who he is and what he wants. This book …
There is practically an entire industry devoted to churning out think-pieces, studies, books, and articles expressing concern about the impacts of social media and the broader spectrum of information technology of which it is a part on our lives and our world. It comes in lots of flavours, many neither convincing nor useful, some downright …
Science fiction, or maybe science fantasy. Set in a future world built in part out of elements drawn from Chinese history. The China-ish realm is besieged by giant aliens which can only be fought off by equally giant transforming mechs, each piloted by one man and one woman, the latter of whom often ends up …
I have read several books by this author before, all middle-grade, and really, really liked them, so there was no way I wasn’t going to read this one, her first book aimed at adults. The titular Delilah, a big-city photographer who doesn’t do relationships, goes back to the small town where she grew up to …