Author: Alice Burton

Part of the middle grade “I, Witness” series, this entry covers Freshta Tori Jan, who was persecuted by the Taliban as a schoolgirl in Afghanistan, as her friends were murdered and her school was shut down. She immigrated to the United States where she now mentors youth and shares her story. This young woman is TWENTY years old. Goodness.

This is about the disappearance of an American backpacker in the Himalayas — more specifically, the Parvati Valley in northern India, which the Wiki entry describes in part as “the thick, coniferous forest gradually [that] makes way for patches of meadowland scattered with boulders.” Thank you, descriptive writer, I appreciate this. The backpacker was a man who worked at a tech startup and quit his job to go on a spiritual quest, I guess. It’s like Eat, Pray, Love, only he seems to not have found temporary romance with a man in Italy (is that what happens? I have not read that book), because this is about his disappearance.

It is a graphic history of Asian Americans from the last three decades, i.e. the ’90s to the 2020s! BTS! The popularity of sushi! Crazy Rich Asians! It’s a “guided tour through the pop-cultural touchstones and sociopolitical shifts” of this specific timespan, and I think this looks like a total delight. It’s got graphics, charts, essays, what else do you NEED in a book? Probably nothing. Maybe a woman writer, but I’ll just wait for that in volume 2.

JAN 18. I love boarding school books, and this is nonfiction! Even better. James was the first African American legacy student to graduate from The Taft School (I looked it up! it is in Connecticut and looks like where a British country house murder would take place). She became an admissions officer specializing in diversity recruitment. This position “forced her to reflect on her own elite education experience, and to realize how disillusioned she had become with America’s inequitable system.” She covers her own time at Taft as well as the experience of working there. LOOKS GREAT.

FEB 1. Maybe this is because I love opera AND Victorian lit, but I feel like I’ve heard just so much about tuberculosis and how much it has ravaged the world. So this looks v interesting. The publisher is calling it the “definitive social history of tuberculosis.” Krishnan looks at the slums of nineteenth century New York to current-day Mumbai and how, while tuberculosis has been seen as a disease of the past, “the cure was never available to black and brown nations.” Also, now there is an antibiotic-resistant version of TB, so there is that. This also looks really good!

FEB 15. Hahahaha sometimes I pick a book just for me. Legler left her busy life to live on a farm in rural Maine with her partner Ruth. That sentence is a delight. They befriend wildlife just like Snow White and barter with neighbors, which I would just love to do, because it sounds extremely fun (“really, Steve? I offer you a chicken and you give me this watering can? This chicken is worth at least three watering cans and you are very aware of that”). Also I love this cover. And it’s a university press book! What! So fun.

It’s so good! Broome tells the story of his growing up in less than ideal circumstances, including when he burned down his house, and what it has been like being a queer Black man who feels tremendous isolation. The book is centered around the Gwendolyn Brooks poem “We Real Cool” and is excellent and everyone should read it.

This book just makes me want to pull out my Breyer horses and start drawing them like I did in fifth grade. It’s a collection of essays written by self-professed horse girls, including Carmen Maria Machado, Jane Smiley, and Sarah Enelow-Snyder— who writes about growing up as a Black barrel racer in central Texas. So many horse-related career and hobby options!

This graphic memoir and history of women-led slave revolts rejects the popularly-held idea that slave revolts were solely led by men. Hall, the granddaughter of enslaved people, combs through “old court records, slave ship captain’s logs, crumbling correspondence, and even the forensic evidence from the bones of enslaved women from the ‘negro burying ground’ uncovered in Manhattan.” Deeply researched AND illustrated AND about a little-known women-centered topic.

You know how sometimes, someone is such a nerd about something that it just grabs you? Ok yes, this might be connected to the horse girls book in terms of passionate nerdery, but THIS time, it is about life in the treetops, or “the eighth continent” as Lowman will have. She’s a “tree-top scientist” and goes from Australian rainforests to the Scottish highlands, and shares what life is like up in the trees. So cool.

This is one of several books about white feminism that came out this year! Others include Against White Feminism and The Trouble with White Women. Koa Beck’s looks at how popular feminism has historically centered white women (predominantly those in the middle-to-upper classes) and the issues central to them. This is important to know about! Especially if you are a white lady like me. This one came out in January, so if you get it for your 2022 reading, you can read it on its one year birthday. Exciting.

I listened to this on a road trip with my wife and sister-in-law, and it’s hilarious, but also starkly sobering. Amber Ruffin’s sister Lacey has to deal with a huge number of microaggressions on a daily basis, and having them laid out in story after story (some are macro, just as a side note) is extremely impactful. This sticks out as one of the books from 2021 that will stay with me the most.

SHEEP. Sheep and their wool have had a tremendous impact on civilization and this book is here to tell you all about it. The number of times I started thinking about the properties of wool after this book, I cannot tell you. This is for if you want a nice relaxing book that’s just here to tell you some sheep facts. That’s its whole aim. I love it. More animal fact books, please.

Obviously I am highlighting the queer people with their cats book. Look, we’ve got Alison Bechdel, we’ve got James Baldwin, Marlene Dietrich, JUJUBEE (see: cover). It has “amewsing” anecdotes and “impawtent” moments, language I would probably have found insufferable before I adopted my cats, and now I am completely charmed by it. This is clearly a perfect book for any queer person you know who is v into cats.

BALLROOM. The “underground subculture founded over a century ago by LGBTQ African American and Latinx men and women of Harlem,” now occasionally referenced on RuPaul’s Drag Race, but here laid out in all its fascinating glory. Tucker splits the chapters up into “categories,” like Vogue, Realness, Body — i.e. Ballroom categories — and features an interview with Ballroom members. Read this and watch Paris Is Burning. Sounds like an excellent weekend.

Remember when someone found Maier’s photographs in a Chicago storage locker? They went viral in 2009, which I remember because Chicago especially went bonkers over them. The history museum had an exhibit where you could wander through giant versions of the photographs, and she’s just so good. Maier worked as a nanny for apps. 40 years and took over 150,000 photos during that time. And now there is a biography of her!

Oh man, what’s better than a book on Juana of Austria, someone we definitely all know about? A book of ESSAYS on Juana of Austria. Ok yeah, I definitely did not know who this was, but #womenshistory. If anyone knows about Philip II of Spain being Elizabeth I’s brother-in-law and then later sending the Spanish Armada after her — ok, so this is his sister. She became Princess of Portugal, a very fun title. “Wait, why is she ‘of Austria'” you might very rightly ask. It’s because the Habsburgs interbred TOO MUCH, and with her other titles, she was “Archduchess of Austria, Infanta of Castile and of Aragon, and princess of Burgundy.” THIS IS WHY YOUR JAWS ARE LIKE THAT. Anyway, she was smart and a good ruler (according to Wikipedia) and this looks like a delight.

Did you know Greta Garbo stopped making films at age 36? Just like that, her reputation — solidified. If I stopped doing my stuff now, people would be like “oh yeah, didn’t she say something funny once about some person from history? Oh, that was Sarah Vowell, nm.” But GARBO. She came to Hollywood from Sweden at nineteen and did her Garbo thing and made an extremely great impression and everyone loved her and now she’s mainly known for “I vant to be alone,” which is real relatable for 2021. GARBO.

Sirisena is an English professor who was born in Sri Lanka but grew up in North Carolina. In her essay collection, she looks at the places where personal identity meets history, including “the 1961 plane crash that left a nuclear warhead buried near her North Carolina hometown, juxtaposed with reflections on her father’s stroke,” her coming to grips with her queer identity while in Chicago, and “the ways that the permanent aftereffects of a severe eye injury have shaped her thinking about disability and self-worth.” This looks really, really good, and side note: I love the cover.

Williams is a Canadian poet and author of fiction and nonfiction, as well as a professor at the University of British Columbia. I know I just said I loved the cover of the previous new release, but I love this one too! Excellent job, designers. Williams was “[s]purred by the police killings and street protests of 2020” and here “offers a perspective that is distinct from that of U.S. writers addressing similar themes. Williams has lived in Trinidad (where he was never the only Black person in the room), in Canada (where he often was), and in the United States (where as a Black man from the Caribbean, he was a different kind of ‘only’).” These experiences all lend to his views on living life as a Black man in different environments.

Yeah, like I’m not gonna include an obscure history new release in this list. Elizabeth Stuart was the daughter of James VI and I, the first monarch to reign over a united England and Scotland. She married someone who became King of Bohemia, but only for a year, garnering her the nickname “the Winter Queen” due to her husband’s reign lasting one winter (harsh but fair). Anyway, this is a bio of her, so if that’s your sort of thing, have at it!

It’s a collection of BIPOC writers from Minnesota! Such a cool project. Indigenous, Black, and writers of color share essays and poems focused on the year 2020, from the pandemic to the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis by police officers. Contributors include people from an array of cultures, including “Indigenous Dakota and Anishinaabe, African American, Hmong, Somali, Afghani, Lebanese, Korean, Vietnamese, Japanese, Puerto Rican, Colombian, Mexican, transracial adoptees, mixed race, and LGBTQ+ perspectives.”

Love nonfiction aimed at kids. This is for children ages 9-12, and focuses on twenty-six contemporary artists from Africa and of African descent. These include “American artists Kerry James Marshall, Faith Ringgold, portraitist to Michelle Obama Amy Sherald, and Kehinde Wiley; British Turner Prize–winning painters Lubaina Himid and Chris Ofili; renowned South African visual activist and photographer Zanele Muholi; Nigerian sound artist Emeka Ogboh” and more. Are there amazing images of the art? Yes, there are.

Part of Melville House’s Last Interview series, this (short!) book contains interviews of civil rights activist and decades-long congressman John Lewis. Honestly, this feels like an amazing end of year read: “From a young activist testifying in the aftermath of Bloody Sunday to recounting the violence he met as a Freedom Rider to an elder statesman inspired by today’s civil rights activists, this collection forms a portrait of a man whose life was spent fighting for a better world and never lost hope.” It’s the right kind of inspiration to end 2021 with.

Professor Abdur-Rahman’s parents were both Black Power–era converts to Islam, who left their mosque when they divorced in her adolescent years. Her memoir recounts her father’s history and her own, going from “the Christian righteousness of Adam Clayton Powell Jr.’s 1950s Harlem, through the Malcolm X–inspired college activism of the late 1960s, to the unfulfilled potential of the early 1970s Black American Muslim movement.” A look at the Black Power movement and American Muslims from the mid-20th century to today.

I talked about this in the nonfiction preview for 2021 and it’s now out! Jessup White is the Public Relations & Community Engagement Officer at Thomas Jefferson’s home, Monticello. In her book, she talks about her discovery that she was related to both Jefferson and Hemings and “explores America’s racial reckoning through the prism of her ancestors—both the enslaver and the enslaved.”

To find out how and why Americans eat the way they do, Fielding-Singh — a sociologist and ethnographer — looks at dozens of families, and does a deep dive into four: “the Bakers, a Black family living below the federal poverty line; the Williamses, a working-class white family just above it; the Ortegas, a middle-class Latinx family; and the Cains, an affluent white family.” What is the meaning of food and how does it change depending on your context? Really excited about this one; I haven’t seen a lot of books like it.

Until two years ago, I had seen no Supernatural. Then I had a really gay moment on Tumblr where I saw a gifset of Ruth Connell who plays the season ten witch Rowena, and I decided to just watch all the way through to get to her. So I have now seen ten seasons of this show. Which is still only 67% because the show ran for fifteen seasons whattt. This history goes through the show’s “predecessors, characters, major storylines, and fan activism.” This show and its fandom are something else, and if you like it, you’ll probably like this.

Did you know that in 1969, the Black Panther Party was feeding more children every day than the state of California? And in the early ’60s in Mississippi, a woman named Aylene Quin provided her restaurant to fellow civil rights activists (like members of SNCC) for their necessarily secret meetings. Cope’s book illustrates “how food was used by women as a potent and necessary ideological tool in both the rural south and urban north to create lasting social and political change.” So cool.

The story of Elizabeth Chudleigh, Duchess of Kingston, Countess of Bristol, who in 1776 (yes, that 1776), went on trial for bigamy. The case drew an immense amount of public interest during a time when America was pretty sure it was supposed to be the most popular topic in the UK.

Chinese artist and activist Ai Weiwei writes about growing up in “Little Siberia,” where his father (acclaimed poet Ai Qing) had been sent in exile by former friend Mao Zedong. Ai went to America to study art, where he met cultural figures of the ’60s like Allen Ginsberg and Andy Warhol. His political activism “has long made him a target of the Chinese authorities, which culminated in months of secret detention without charge in 2011.” Check it out if you’re interested in art, freedom of expression, or activist history.

The Women’s Professional Football League existed from 1965-1973, originally conceived as a publicity stunt by a businessman from Cleveland. The story is set “against the backdrop of second-wave feminism and the passage of Title IX, these athletes broke new barriers and showed adoring crowds what women were capable of physically.” Like A League of Their Own! But in the ’60s and with football. Yay.

Howard professor Harrison looks at the role enslaved Black men and women played in creating the United States. Harrison argues for a national memorial to honor “enslaved, Black-bodied people” and discusses those forced to build historic buildings like Jefferson’s home Monticello and Washington’s Mount Vernon. History!

I feel like we’re getting more and more culinary history these days, and I am here for it. I don’t even cook! But, y’know. I eat. So it feels relevant and interesting. Sen covers the 1940s to today, looking at seven immigrant women “who left an indelible mark on the way Americans eat today.” These women include “Mexican-born Elena Zelayeta, a blind chef; Marcella Hazan, the deity of Italian cuisine; and Norma Shirley, a champion of Jamaican dishes.” I love the phrase “the deity of Italian cuisine.” Well done, people.

Jerusalem is so old! And so much has happened there! Also, there are so many things under the ground everywhere that we don’t know about, which is fascinating, and here is a book about the stuff under one particular location. Lawler’s book “takes readers into the tombs, tunnels, and trenches of the Holy City” and “brings to life the indelible characters who have investigated this subterranean landscape.” Super neat.