A happy Wednesday to you and does anyone else do birthday books? My wife and I started a tradition a few years ago where we buy a book for the other on their birthday, and I just love it. This year I made her buy me a Lincoln biography, because despite reading seven (eight?) books on Lincoln this year, none of them have been a biography.
We’ve got some neat stuff this week! Let’s start off by looking at some wax melts:
Rosemary Sage & Lavender Nonfiction Wax Melts
What does nonfiction smell like? I guess this! Now I have not always been aware what wax melts are, but they’re basically a way to make a room smell nice. Through wax! And also fire. They are “Inspired by a genre that makes you philosophize about what life is really about.” INDEED.
New Releases
All the Ways Our Dead Still Speak: A Funeral Director on Life, Death, and the Hereafter by Caleb Wilde
If you’re thinking,’Wow, that cover looks familiar,’ I had the same thought! It’s v similar to the original cover of Furious Hours. Only this one has a coffin shape in the middle, which is fitting, given the subject matter. Wilde previously wrote Confessions of a Funeral Director. In this entry, he writes about what we know of the afterlife, examining cultural ideas and the science behind what we currently think we know. Among all this is also his work during the pandemic and how his business has been impacted by it.
Borderland Blacks: Two Cities in the Niagara Region during the Final Decades of Slavery by dann j. Broyld
This focuses on Rochester, New York and St. Catharines in Canada’s Niagara Region.These cities were the last stops on their section of the Underground Railroad, and both were home to large communities of free Black citizens, including luminaries like Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman. Historian Broyld “investigates how the times and terms of emancipation affected Blacks on each side of the border, including their use of political agency to pit the United States and British Canada against one another for the best possible outcomes.”
Riot Recommendations
Looking for Lorraine: The Radical and Radiant Life of Lorraine Hansberry by Imani Perry
We’re looking at PEN biography winners! Two to be exact, and this bio of Lorraine Hansberry is the 2019 winner (it also won a bunch of other awards, but we’re focusing on PEN today!). Playwright and social justice activist Lorraine Hansberry is best known for A Raisin in the Sun, but in her brief time (Hansberry died at 34), she lived a remarkable life — particularly remarkable given when she lived it.
Sisters and Rebels: A Struggle for the Soul of America by Jacquelyn Dowd Hall
The 2020 winner is about “three sisters from the South” who “wrestle with orthodoxies of race, sexuality, and privilege.” These women were descendants of a slaveholding family in Georgia, and all grew up to take different paths. One clung to generations of racist family beliefs, one became a writer of proletariat literature, and one worked against racism and prejudice in her home region.
Don’t forget you can get three free audiobooks at Audiobooks.com with a free trial!