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Nonfiction Views: One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, plus new nonfiction [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2025-02-25
After a couple weeks of reviewing nonpolitical books to offer us a brief escape from these dire times, tonight we;re jumping back into the fire. Novelist/journalist Omar El Akkad’s One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, published today, hits you in the pit of the stomach from its very first pages. A tough book to read in these days of having that sick feeling in the pit of your stomach with every turn of the Trump/Musk news cycle, but a moving, beautiful and necessary book nonetheless.
It opens with a scene of his young daughter coming up to him at his computer with a spelling question. He is researching the destruction of Gaza, and has twenty tabs open with “footage of a girl not much older than my daughter, pulled out of the rubble after an Israeli airstrike. In another is a recording of a girl begging for help, shortly before her execution at the hands of Israeli snipers.” He quickly closes his computer. He wants to protect her.
From there, his mind goes back to his own childhood in Egypt. It was 1982, and the country was under martial law. You couldn’t be outside at night without a formal reason. Military checkpoints were everywhere in the streets of Cairo. His father worked in the tourism industry, vital to Egypt’s economy, and so in theory was allowed nighttime travel. But the young soldiers manning the checkpoints didn’t care about that (All quotes from the book are from the advance reading copy. There may be differences in the final, published book.)
One of them stopped my father. Your papers, he said. My father pulled out his paperwork. Without reading it, the soldier tore it in half and threw it on the floor. Your papers, he repeated…. In the forty or so years since that day, I have thought about this moment more than anything else in the stories my father told me. I’ve thought about it while shuffling my passport across the counter at border crossings; while running from RPG attacks in the dead of night; while sitting in a guesthouse in Kandhar listening to two Taliban officials explain, with utmost confidence, how the world should be run; while sitting in a courtroom in Guantánamo Bay watching highly educated men and women assign legitimacy they know is unearned to an ad hoc, hopelessly compromised legal system. It has been, for as long as I can remember, the memory that anchors my overarching view of political malice: an ephemeral relationship with both law and principle. Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power. Otherwise, they, like all else, are expendable.
It was this incident that made his father decide it was time to leave the country; his father, “who loved Egypt, who had marinated in its music and poetry and knew every street. every alley, who as a child had sat under the tables at Hagg El Feshawy’s coffee shop in El Hussein and listened to Naguib Mahfouz hold court decades before the Nobel, decided he needed to get out.”
Can you feel it in the pit of your stomach, reading these words? That the country that is your beloved home is sliding towards a lawless police state, that there may come a time when it has become so threatening that there is no choice but to try and escape?
Maybe we aren’t there yet in the United States, though it feels like the dismantling of the legal system, the military hierarchy, the intelligence services, and the government expertise that underpins the safe functioning of much of the infrastructure of our daily lives, and replacing it with incompetence and loyalty to leader over country, is setting the stage for that future.
Omar El Akkad, born in Egypt, living in Canada and the United States for decades now, takes us to many places where that possible future is already a reality, and begs us to believe that, as he wrote in a tweet just three weeks after Israel’s bombardment of Gaza began, a tweet viewed over 10 million times, “One day, when it’s safe, when there’s no personal downside to calling a thing what it is, when it’s too late to hold anyone accountable, everyone will have always been against this.”
But El Akkad aims to take us deeper that this fear of seeing our own country slide towards losing its founding principles, of becoming a just another police state. He wants us to look squarely at how every generation has betrayed those founding principles when it comes to other nations, when we wage war or look away from genocide “in the form of toppled governments and coups over oil revenue and villages that had to be burned to the ground to save them from some otherwise terrible fate.” Western nations always face a time when they must choose to set aside their principles in order to preserve their power. “And at every moment of arrival the details and the body count may differ, but in the marrow there is always a commonality; an ambitious, upright, pragmatic voice saying, Just for a moment, for the greater good, cease to believe that this particular group of people, from whose experience we are already so safely distanced, are human.”
The book arose from the author’s horror over Gaza, where a heinous attack by Hamas provoked wholesale destruction, expulsion and and extermination upon the people of Gaza and the places they called home, where they lived and worked and decorated their homes with their memories, only to find it all destroyed in a rain of explosions. It is, he says, one of the largest killing sprees of Muslims in recent histoy. He considers this to be the current generation’s moment to face the reality of what will be cast aside in the name of the preservation of power.
But if Gaza is at the beating hearty of this book, El Akkad brings his experiences of other recent historical trauma to the story as well, from his reporting on Afghanistan, on the prisoners of Guantánamo Bay. on the police response to Black Lives Matter protests. He writes movingly of his good experiences of the West. He discusses his teenage years in Canada, when he reveled at being able to read without feat of arrest all sorts of books from the library, or to see the movie Titanic at its full length, rather than the 90 minute censored-beyond-recognition movie the government of Qatar permitted. He speaks of the relative safety of living in a country from which missiles are launched rather than on at which they are aimed. When his daughter becomes seriously ill, he is grateful for the medical care and the insurance to pay for it.
He writes of living in a country that he knows will never fully accept him. He writes of the “hierarchy of migration,” where Westerners who move to other countries are termed ‘expats’ while those who move from the rest of the world to the West are illegals and aliens or at best immigrants; where Westerners working in countries like Qatar cocoon themselves behind gated communities to insulate themselves from the unpleasant realities of the the country, a behavior, the same sort of behavior used to criticize immigrants to Western countries: “We simply do not do enough to learn the language, the culture. We stubbornly refuse to assimilate.”
In reality, it doesn’t much matter what or how vigorously I condemn. I am of an ethnicity and a religion and a place in the caste ordering of the Western world for which there exists no such thing as enough condemnation. This is what we do, always and to the exclusion of all else: condemn, apologize for, retreat into silence about any atrocity committed by anyone other than those to whom we are perpetually assumed allegiant. It is not sufficient to say I despise Hamas for the same reasons I despise almost every governing entity in the Middle East—entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.
It is a difficult, heartfelt book, an amazing reading experience, a blending of personal and political. It is a book that presents us with a seemingly endless ledger of cruelty and atrocity, and asks us to face the contagion of violence fully. But in the end, he asks us to use that knowledge to keep believing in a better world, to have the courage to work toward it.
It is not so hard to believe, even during the worst of things, that courage is the more potent contagion. That there are more invested in solidarity than annihilation. That just as it has always been possible to look away, it is always possible to stop looking away. None of this evil was ever necessary. Some carriages are gilded and others laquered in blood but the same engine pulls us all. We dismantle it now, build another thing entirely, or we hurtle toward the cliff, safe in the cettainty that, when the time comes, we’ll learn to lay tracks on air.
THIS WEEK’S NOTABLE NEW NONFICTION
All or Nothing: How Trump Recaptured America, by Michael Wolff . All or Nothing takes readers on a journey accompanying Donald Trump on his return to power as only Michael Wolff, the foremost chronicler of the Trump era, can do it. As Trump cruelly and swiftly dispatches his opponents, heaps fire and fury on the prosecutors and judges who are pursuing him, and mocks and belittles anyone in his way, including the president of the United States, this becomes not just another election but perhaps, both sides say, the last election. The stakes could not be clearer: Either the establishment destroys Donald Trump, or he destroys the establishment.
What soon emerges is a split-screen reality: On one side, a picture that could not be worse for Trump: an inescapable, perhaps mortal legal quagmire; on the other side, an entirely positive political outlook: overwhelming support within his party, ever-rising polling numbers, and lackluster opposition. Through personal access to Trump’s inner circle, Wolff details a behind-the-scenes, revealing landscape of Trumpworld and its unlikely cast of primary players as well as the candidate himself, the most successful figure in American politics since, arguably, Roosevelt, but who might easily seem to be raving mad.
All or Nothing Righting Wrongs: Three Decades on the Front Lines Battling Abusive Governments, by Kenneth Roth . In three decades under the leadership of Kenneth Roth, Human Rights Watch grew to a staff of more than 500, conducting investigations in 100 countries to uncover abuses—and pressuring offending governments to stop them. Roth has grappled with the worst of humanity, taken on the biggest villains of our time, and persuaded leaders from around the globe to stand up to their repressive counterparts.
He has traveled the world to meet cruelty and injustice on its home turf: he arrived in Rwanda shortly after the Genocide; scrutinized the impact of Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait; investigated and condemned Israel’s mistreatment of Palestinians. He directed efforts to curtail the Chinese government’s persecution of Uyghur Muslims, to bring Myanmar’s officials to justice after the ethnic cleansing of Rohingya Muslims, to halt Russian war crimes in Ukraine, even to reign in the U.S. government. Roth’s many innovations and strategies included the deployment of a concept as old as mankind—the powerful tool of “shaming”—and here he illustrates its surprising effectiveness against evildoers. “A remarkable book that will restore your faith in human beings. Brimming with wisdom, passion, resilience, and courage, Righting Wrongs gives us a powerful antidote to autocracy, an antidote to apathy. One of the most important books of the year, if not of the next decade.” —Elif Shafak, author of There Are Rivers in the Sky
In three decades under the leadership of Kenneth Roth, Human Rights Watch grew to a staff of more than 500, conducting investigations in 100 countries to uncover abuses—and pressuring offending governments to stop them. Roth has grappled with the worst of humanity, taken on the biggest villains of our time, and persuaded leaders from around the globe to stand up to their repressive counterparts. He has traveled the world to meet cruelty and injustice on its home turf: he arrived in Rwanda shortly after the Genocide; scrutinized the impact of Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait; investigated and condemned Israel’s mistreatment of Palestinians. He directed efforts to curtail the Chinese government’s persecution of Uyghur Muslims, to bring Myanmar’s officials to justice after the ethnic cleansing of Rohingya Muslims, to halt Russian war crimes in Ukraine, even to reign in the U.S. government. Roth’s many innovations and strategies included the deployment of a concept as old as mankind—the powerful tool of “shaming”—and here he illustrates its surprising effectiveness against evildoers. Righting Wrongs The Folly of Realism: How the West Deceived Itself About Russia and Betrayed Ukraine, by Alexander Vindman . After the collapse of the Soviet Union, six US presidential administrations of both parties pursued policies for Russia, Ukraine, and Eurasia that emboldened Russia, playing into its imperialist, centuries-long mythos of regional hegemony. The result: military aggression and full-scale invasion. It was all too foreseeable.
In The Folly of Realism, leading national security expert and bestselling author Alexander Vindman argues that America’s mistakes in Eastern Europe result from policymakers’ fixation on immediate, short-term problem-solving and misplaced hopes and fears. He proposes a new long-term, values-based approach that insists on the fundamentals of liberal democracy and a rules-based world order. Enlivened by firsthand accounts and behind-the-scenes interviews with leading Washington and international policymakers and culminating in the shocking brutality of Putin’s invasions of Ukraine, the book exposes the follies of western foreign policymaking, sources of the dangerous return of Russian imperialism, and proscribes how it can be contained. “Vindman combines intricate analysis with personal observations…to make a spirited riposte to ‘realists’ who argue America has no vital interests in Ukraine. It’s a penetrating take on American foreign relations.”— Publishers Weekly
Chokepoints: American Power in the Age of Economic Warfare, by Edward Fishman . In Chokepoints , Edward Fishman, a former top State Department sanctions official, takes us deep into the back rooms of power to reveal the untold history of the last two decades of U.S. foreign policy, in which America renounced the gospel of globalization and waged a new kind of economic war. As Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, and Ayatollah Khamenei wreaked havoc on the world stage, mavericks within the U.S. government built a fearsome new arsenal of economic weapons, exploiting America’s dominance in global finance and technology. Successive U.S. presidents have relied on these unconventional weapons to address the most pressing national-security threats, for good and for ill. “This peerless contemporary history of American sanctions, grounded in personal experience and thorough research, will guide all who wish to address global problems through the responsible and effective use of economic power." — Timothy Snyder, Professor of History at Yale University and author of On Tyranny and Bloodlands
Chokepoints “This peerless contemporary history of American sanctions, grounded in personal experience and thorough research, will guide all who wish to address global problems through the responsible and effective use of economic power." Waste Wars: The Wild Afterlife of Your Trash, by Alexander Clapp . Dumps and landfills around the world are overflowing. Disputes about what to do with the millions of tons of garbage generated every day have given rise to waste wars waged almost everywhere you look. Some are border skirmishes. Others hustle trash across thousands of miles and multiple oceans. But no matter the scale, one thing is true about almost all of them: few people have any idea they're happening.
Journalist Alexander Clapp spent two years roaming five continents to report deep inside the world of Javanese recycling gangsters, cruise ship dismantlers in the Aegean, Tanzanian plastic pickers, whistle-blowing environmentalists throughout the jungles of Guatemala, and a community of Ghanaian boys who burn Western cellphones and televisions for cents an hour, to tell readers what he has figured out: While some trash gets tossed onto roadsides or buried underground, much of it actually lives a secret hot potato second life, getting shipped, sold, re-sold, or smuggled from one country to another, often with devastating consequences for the poorest nations of the world. “Waste Wars is an infuriating, eye-opening and spell-binding account of the globally uneven and unjust politics of trash. Clapp shows how the rubbish the affluent people of rich countries produce travels to poorer countries for processing, creating mountains of toxic waste in the global South, or whirlpools of plastic in our oceans. A must-read for those concerned with the health and hygiene not only of the planet, but also of the people who populate it!”— Laleh Khalili, author of Sinews of War and Trade
Dumps and landfills around the world are overflowing. Disputes about what to do with the millions of tons of garbage generated every day have given rise to waste wars waged almost everywhere you look. Some are border skirmishes. Others hustle trash across thousands of miles and multiple oceans. But no matter the scale, one thing is true about almost all of them: few people have any idea they're happening. Journalist Alexander Clapp spent two years roaming five continents to report deep inside the world of Javanese recycling gangsters, cruise ship dismantlers in the Aegean, Tanzanian plastic pickers, whistle-blowing environmentalists throughout the jungles of Guatemala, and a community of Ghanaian boys who burn Western cellphones and televisions for cents an hour, to tell readers what he has figured out: While some trash gets tossed onto roadsides or buried underground, much of it actually lives a secret hot potato second life, getting shipped, sold, re-sold, or smuggled from one country to another, often with devastating consequences for the poorest nations of the world. “Waste Wars is an infuriating, eye-opening and spell-binding account of the globally uneven and unjust politics of trash. Clapp shows how the rubbish the affluent people of rich countries produce travels to poorer countries for processing, creating mountains of toxic waste in the global South, or whirlpools of plastic in our oceans. A must-read for those concerned with the health and hygiene not only of the planet, but also of the people who populate it!”— Air-Borne: The Hidden History of the Life We Breathe, by Carl Zimmer . Every day we draw in two thousand gallons of air—and thousands of living things. From the ground to the stratosphere, the air teems with invisible life. This last great biological frontier remains so mysterious that it took over two years for scientists to finally agree that the Covid pandemic was caused by an airborne virus.
In Air-Borne, Carl Zimmer leads us on an odyssey through the living atmosphere and through the history of its discovery. We travel to the tops of mountain glaciers, where Louis Pasteur caught germs from the air, and follow Amelia Earhart and Charles Lindbergh above the clouds, where they conducted groundbreaking experiments. We meet the long-forgotten pioneers of aerobiology including William and Mildred Wells, who tried for decades to warn the world about airborne infections, only to die in obscurity.
Air-Borne chronicles the dark side of aerobiology with gripping accounts of how the United States and the Soviet Union clandestinely built arsenals of airborne biological weapons designed to spread anthrax, smallpox, and an array of other pathogens. Air-Borne also leaves readers looking at the world with new eyes—as a place where the oceans and forests loft trillions of cells into the air, where microbes eat clouds, and where life soars thousands of miles on the wind. “Through his signature in-depth reporting and lively narrative stories, he shows us what a dynamic force our air is, profoundly shaping our health and evolutionary history. Air-Borne is also an urgent call to understand the invisible species floating around us, so that we don't make the same mistakes in the next public-health crisis that we face.” —Sam Kean, author of Caesar's Last Breath
Every day we draw in two thousand gallons of air—and thousands of living things. From the ground to the stratosphere, the air teems with invisible life. This last great biological frontier remains so mysterious that it took over two years for scientists to finally agree that the Covid pandemic was caused by an airborne virus. In Air-Borne, Carl Zimmer leads us on an odyssey through the living atmosphere and through the history of its discovery. We travel to the tops of mountain glaciers, where Louis Pasteur caught germs from the air, and follow Amelia Earhart and Charles Lindbergh above the clouds, where they conducted groundbreaking experiments. We meet the long-forgotten pioneers of aerobiology including William and Mildred Wells, who tried for decades to warn the world about airborne infections, only to die in obscurity. Air-Borne chronicles the dark side of aerobiology with gripping accounts of how the United States and the Soviet Union clandestinely built arsenals of airborne biological weapons designed to spread anthrax, smallpox, and an array of other pathogens. Air-Borne also leaves readers looking at the world with new eyes—as a place where the oceans and forests loft trillions of cells into the air, where microbes eat clouds, and where life soars thousands of miles on the wind. “Through his signature in-depth reporting and lively narrative stories, he shows us what a dynamic force our air is, profoundly shaping our health and evolutionary history. Air-Borne is also an urgent call to understand the invisible species floating around us, so that we don't make the same mistakes in the next public-health crisis that we face.” Secret Servants of the Crown: The Forgotten Women of British Intelligence, by Claire Hubbard-Hall . To the undiscerning eye, they were secretaries, typists, personal assistants, and telephonists. But those innocuous job titles provided the perfect cover for what were in reality a range of complex technical, clerical, and occupational roles. Often overlooked and underestimated by outsiders, the women of British intelligence encoded, decoded, and translated enemy messages, wrote propaganda, and oversaw agents, performing duties as diverse as they were indispensable.
One of those women was Kathleen Pettigrew, super-secretary to three consecutive Chiefs of MI6, the secret foreign intelligence service of the United Kingdom, and widely regarded as the inspiration for author Ian Fleming’s Miss Moneypenny. Serving her county loyally for four decades, Kathleen amassed a formidable knowledge of people and events. From the surprise apprehension of World War I courtesan spy Mata Hari to the unmasking of MI6 officer Kim Philby, the ‘Third Man’ of the Cambridge spy ring, Kathleen created, organized, and archived an empire of top-secret information.
Though most women toiled in offices and backrooms, there were also agent-runners and agents, prized for their ability to hide in plain sight. Drawing on extensive research and unique access to family archives, Claire portrays many of these remarkable figures—including the brilliant, multi-lingual Lunn sisters, glamorous spy Olga Gray; and Jane Sissmore, MI5’s first female officer— and reconsiders the priceless contributions they made.
The Rebel Empresses: Elisabeth of Austria and Eugénie of France, Power and Glamour in the Struggle for Europe, by Nancy Goldstone . When they married Emperors Franz Joseph and Napoleon III, respectively, Elisabeth of Austria and Eugénie of France became two of the most famous women on the planet. Young and beautiful—becoming cultural and fashion icons of their time—they also played a pivotal role in ruling their realms during a tempestuous era characterized by unprecedented political and technological change.
Fearless, adventurous, and independent, Elisabeth and Eugénie represented a new kind of empress—one who rebelled against tradition and anticipated and embraced modern values. Yet both women endured hardship in their private and public lives. Elisabeth was plagued by a mother-in-law who snatched her infant children away and undermined her authority at court. Eugénie’s husband was an infamous philanderer who could not match the military prowess of his namesake. Between them, Elisabeth and Eugénie were personally involved in every major international confrontation in their turbulent century, which witnessed thrilling technological advances as well as revolutions, assassinations, and wars.
All the Parts We Exile, by Roza Nozari . From a queer Muslim woman and artist, a generous, heartfelt and insightful memoir about family and finding the path to one's truest self. “Thought-provoking and meditative, All the Parts We Exile brings the plight of strong willed daughters, immigrant parents and their personal histories into clear empathetic light. Nozari’s prose is nuanced and wrought with imagery, vivid and eloquent all at once. The memoir is symphonic in scope: orchestrating excruciating rites of familial identity, radical self-acceptance, loss, and personal growth. A talented writer and artist, Nozari deftly charts a moving history that is both complex and mesmerizing, sweeping across timelines and through the queer spaces of Toronto and Iran. A dazzling opus of what it means to be a person grasping for answers of belonging and emerging transformed. Nozari’s journey invites readers to rethink the immigrant family narrative.” — Lindsay Wong, author of The Woo-Woo and Tell Me Pleasant Things about Immortality
From a queer Muslim woman and artist, a generous, heartfelt and insightful memoir about family and finding the path to one's truest self. All the Parts We Exile To Those Who Have Confused You to Be a Person: Words as Violence and Stories of Women's Resistance Online, by Alia Dastagir . When Alia Dastagir published a story for USA Today as part of an investigation into child sexual abuse, she became the target of an online mob launched by QAnon and encouraged by Donald Trump, Jr. While female journalists, politicians, academics, and influencers receive a disproportionate amount of online attacks because of the nature of their professions, all women online experience hate, creating profound harms for individual women and society. In To Those Who Have Confused You to Be a Person, Dastagir uses critical analysis from psychologists, sociologists, neuroscientists, technologists, and philosophers to offer a uniquely deep and intimate look at what women experience during online abuse, as well as how they cope and make meaning out of violence. “An astonishing, brilliant, and timely book, Dastagir’s To Those Who Have Confused You to Be a Person sheds more light on misogynistic online culture and what women face today as a result than any other book I have read. A courageous, moving, and vital piece of reporting that I want to press into the hands of every person with an Internet connection.” —Kate Manne, author of Unshrinking
When Alia Dastagir published a story for USA Today as part of an investigation into child sexual abuse, she became the target of an online mob launched by QAnon and encouraged by Donald Trump, Jr. While female journalists, politicians, academics, and influencers receive a disproportionate amount of online attacks because of the nature of their professions, all women online experience hate, creating profound harms for individual women and society. The Cost of Fear: Why Most Safety Advice Is Sexist and How We Can Stop Gender-Based Violence, by Meg Stone. Questionable advice to avoid violence, like “don’t go shopping alone,” comes mostly from the police or other men in authority. But gender-based violence is often enacted in the most intimate spheres of our lives, not when we’re out grocery shopping. To stop this violence, we need strategies that are just as intimate.
In The Cost of Fear , nationally recognized violence prevention expert Meg Stone helps readers separate fact from fiction. It’s full of practical, research-based strategies that readers can use to keep themselves and their communities safer. Increased safety comes from developing the skills to resist coercive control, especially from people we know or people in authority, not from complying with rigid rules or avoiding homeless people on the street.
The Cost of Fear Dust and Light: On the Art of Fact in Fiction, by Andrea Barrett . Hailed as a "genius-enchantress" (Karen Russell) and winner of the MacArthur Fellowship, the celebrated novelist Andrea Barrett has for decades reached backward to find inspiration from the past and written acclaimed and prizewinning works of historical fiction. In Dust and Light, the first work of nonfiction of her extraordinary career, Barrett draws from that deep well of experience to explore the mysteries, methods, and delights of the form. Inspiration found in the past, she argues, can illuminate fiction, just as dust scatters light and makes the unseen visible. Barrett writes of lessons gleaned from the classic work of some of her guiding lights (Willa Cather, Henry James, Leo Tolstoy, Virginia Woolf), as well as the work of such contemporary masters as Hilary Mantel, Toni Morrison, Colm Tóibín, and Jesmyn Ward. She reveals how she created some of her own beloved works, taking readers on a fascinating journey into some of the largest questions in the genre: How does a writer find meaningful subject matter beyond the confines of their life? How are scraps of history found, used, misused, manipulated, and transformed into a fully formed narrative? And what are the perils as well as the potential of this process?
Hailed as a "genius-enchantress" (Karen Russell) and winner of the MacArthur Fellowship, the celebrated novelist Andrea Barrett has for decades reached backward to find inspiration from the past and written acclaimed and prizewinning works of historical fiction. In Dust and Light, the first work of nonfiction of her extraordinary career, Barrett draws from that deep well of experience to explore the mysteries, methods, and delights of the form. Song So Wild and Blue: A Life with the Music of Joni Mitchell, by Paul Lisicky . From the moment Paul Lisicky heard Joni Mitchell while growing up in New Jersey, he recognized she was that rarity among musicians—a talent whose combination of introspection, liberation, and deep musicality set her apart from any other artist of the time. As a young man, Paul was a budding songwriter who took his cues from Mitchell’s mysteries and idiosyncrasies. But as he matured, he set his guitar aside and turned to prose, a practice that would eventually take him to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and into the professional world of letters. As the decades passed, Paul’s connection to Mitchell’s artistry only deepened. Joni’s music was a constant, a guide to life and an artist’s manual in one. As Paul navigated love and heartbreak and imaginative struggles and the vicissitudes of a creative career, he would return again and again to the lessons found in Joni’s songs, to the solace and challenges that only her musicianship could give.
When the Earth Was Green: Plants, Animals, and Evolution's Greatest Romance, by Riley Black. Fossil plants allow us to touch the lost worlds from billions of years of evolutionary backstory. Each petrified leaf and root show us that dinosaurs, saber-toothed cats, and even humans would not exist without the evolutionary efforts of their leafy counterparts. It has been the constant growth of plants that have allowed so many of our favorite, fascinating prehistoric creatures to evolve, oxygenating the atmosphere, coaxing animals onto land, and forming the forests that shaped our ancestors’ anatomy. It is impossible to understand our history without them. Or, our future. Riley Black brings readers back in time to prehistoric seas, swamps, forests, and savannas where critical moments in plant evolution unfolded. Each chapter stars plants and animals alike, underscoring how the interactions between species have helped shape the world we call home.
All book links in this diary are to my online bookstore The Literate Lizard. If you already have a favorite indie bookstore, please keep supporting them, but If you’re able to throw a little business my way, that would be truly appreciated. I would love to be considered ‘The Official Bookstore of Daily Kos.’ Use the coupon code DAILYKOS for 15% off your order, in gratitude for your support (an ever-changing smattering of new releases are already discounted 20% each week). I’m busily adding new content every day, and will have lots more dedicated subject pages and curated booklists as it grows. I want it to be full of book-lined rabbit holes to lose yourself in (and maybe throw some of those books into a shopping cart as well.)
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