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Nonfiction Views: Wild Chocolate, by Rowan Jacobsen, plus the week's notable new nonfiction [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2025-05-06
If you are a chocolate lover, it’s going to be getting more expensive than ever to indulge in that pleasure. Last year cacao prices surged due to excessive rainfall and diseases like Black Pod and the swollen shoot virus. Just when prices had begun to stabilize towards the end of 2024, along came Trump and his tariffs to drive prices up anew. And if it’s that boutique, handcrafted chocolate created by a growing number of small businesses devoted to themselves to create, it’s not just the higher prices you have to contend with. Trump’s tariffs may very well drive them out of business.
Uncommon Cacao, a specialty trader based in Colorado, buys from 17 countries and sells mainly to small U.S. businesses that make chocolate from scratch. “We’re safe for a couple containers that are on the water, but everything else for the rest of the year, we’re expecting to be tariffed,” says CEO Emily Stone. After Mr. Trump’s reciprocal tariff announcement, she was bracing for a 46% tax on Vietnam, 36% on Thailand, and 17% on the Philippines. Such levies would have walloped Fruition, too. Ms. Graham says she uses organic, all-natural cocoa butter, and she paid $16.90 a kilo last September, up from $10 in April 2024. After Mr. Trump’s reciprocal tariffs, a supplier quoted $39, a price that once would have been in the realm of pure imagination.
It may be a small consolation, but at least you can feast on Wild Chocolate: Across the Americas in Search of Cacao's Soul, by Rowan Jacobsen, published last October. It’s a delightful read, both for the travel writing and the deep dive into the art of chocolate and its recent resurrection from simple “a delicious bulk ingredient to be mixed with sugar and vanilla” to a boutique chocolatiers searching the world for the best single-source growers.
He points to the French chocolate maker Raymond Bonnat as giving the initial push to the industry. Bonnat had long been an aficionado of searching the world for exceptional sources of the cacao bean, and for the company’s centennial in 1984, he decided to share his enthusiasm with the public by creating eight limited-edition extra-dark bars sourced from eight specific sources around the world. They were such an unexpected hit that his competitors soon jumped in with their own gourmet bars. Now, here in the United Staes, you can find boutique chocolate in specialty grocers and farmers market stands, and even creeping onto supermarket shelves.
Cacao beans are grown in the tropical regions withing 20 degrees latitude on either side of the Equator. This isn’t an industry that tariff his way into forcing it to relocate to Nebraska. I is grown in that region around the world, in Africa, Asia and Latin America. It is the Americas that are the focus of this book.
Like wine, cacao can come in multiple varieties, and regional variations of soil and weather can produce very specialized products. There was a time when cacao had become rather homogenous worldwide, with three varieties supplying the vast majority of production. But new technologies in analyzing genomes became available in 2008, and a study by the US Department of Agriculture categorized thousands of different cultivars. Alas, the ability of the US government to perform such research is yet another thing the Trump administration has destroyed.
The book offers many wonderful vignettes of travel, nature and history...and not only about chocolate. One region that has become renowned as a source of cacao is the Beni region of Bolivia. And the discovery of the wonderful chocolate there came thanks to the Brazil nut:
Walk the rainforest near the Bolivian-Brazil border, peer up through the canopy, and you will see giants towering overhead. Rising more than one hundred feet into the sky, these powerful trees, some more than five centuries old, produce a crop of coconuts the size of bocce balls clustered near the top. Do not let one of these five-pound cannonballs drop on your head. Do find the ones already on the ground and break them open. Inside, you will discover a dozen or so wedge-shaped nuts, packed like orange slices. These are Brazil nuts. Most people know Brazil nuts as the gargantuan standouts in cans of mixed nuts. Unfortunately, the stale nuts in those cans can do nothing to highlight the amazing qualities of Bertholletia excelsa. When harvested fresh, they are one of the great treats of the rainforest. And the trees can only be found there, along the borders of Bolivia, Brazil and Peru. They can’t be cultivated. For pollination, they depend on wild orchid bees, and the bees in turn depend on orchids for their mating ritual, which involves the males smearing themselves in juice from the orchid flowers to get the attention of the ladies….so the bees need the orchids, which grow only in pristine rainforest, and the trees need the bees, as well as an extremely wet tropical climate. And that means they are limited to the last healthy stands of Amazonia.
Brazil nuts helped preserve this section of Amazonia, which is now a national park. The nonprofit Nature Conservancy persuaded the Bolivian government to halt logging there in exchange for a carbon-credits scheme. But there still remained the need to find alternative work for the people living there. The idea of marketing Brazil nuts was just the beginning. Soon came the idea of the nuts coated in delicious locally sourced chocolate. It was a long and complicated search, going from a Jewish man who was the lone boutique chocolate maker in La Paz, Bolivia, to the tropical regions, sifting through cacao in markets that “tasted like smoky ham, others like blue cheese and stinky feet,” searching for the perfect product to marry with the perfect technique.
You’ll meet people like Luisa Abram, who was determined to become the Willy Wonka of Brazil. Sourcing was an issue; most Brazilian cacao is mediocre product, but she found a source of excellent chocolate just across the border in Ecuador. But there was a problem: in the late 1980s and early 1990s, a bioterrorist deliberately introduced witches broom, a fungus which destroys cacao plants, into the heart of the cacao plantations of the Bahia region, devastating it. Brazil afterward implemented strict import controls on cacao. Luisa was stymied until discovering an tiny cacao farm deep in the jungle, and her dream of creating premium chocolate took off.
It’s a fun book. No replacement for eating chocolate, but it does help pass the time.
THIS WEEK’S NOTABLE NEW NONFICTION
Warhol's Muses: The Artists, Misfits, and Superstars Destroyed by the Factory Fame Machine, by Laurence Leamer . “Now and then, someone would accuse me of being evil,” Andy Warhol confessed, “of letting people destroy themselves while I watched, just so I could film them.” Obsessed with celebrity, the silver-wigged artistic icon created an ever-evolving entourage of stunning women he dubbed his “Superstars”—Baby Jane Holzer, Edie Sedgwick, Nico, Ultra Violet, Viva, Brigid Berlin, Ingrid Superstar, International Velvet, Mary Woronov, and Candy Darling. He gave several of them new names and manipulated their beauty and talent for his art and social status with no regard for their safety, their dignity, or their lives. “Captivating, vivid portraits of the fascinating women exploited by Andy Warhol—written by the premier biographer of America’s entitled rich. Laurence Leamer brilliantly evokes the Sixties, its wildness, but also its seediness and pathos. A stunning achievement—and just a damn good read.”—Kai Bird, Pulitzer Prize–winning coauthor of American Prometheus. You may also be interested in this recent biography of one of Warhol's superstars, the transgender Candy Darling: Dreamer, Icon, Superstar, by Cynthia Carr, now available in paperback.
“Now and then, someone would accuse me of being evil,” Andy Warhol confessed, “of letting people destroy themselves while I watched, just so I could film them.” Obsessed with celebrity, the silver-wigged artistic icon created an ever-evolving entourage of stunning women he dubbed his “Superstars”—Baby Jane Holzer, Edie Sedgwick, Nico, Ultra Violet, Viva, Brigid Berlin, Ingrid Superstar, International Velvet, Mary Woronov, and Candy Darling. He gave several of them new names and manipulated their beauty and talent for his art and social status with no regard for their safety, their dignity, or their lives. “Captivating, vivid portraits of the fascinating women exploited by Andy Warhol—written by the premier biographer of America’s entitled rich. Laurence Leamer brilliantly evokes the Sixties, its wildness, but also its seediness and pathos. A stunning achievement—and just a damn good read.”—Kai Bird, Pulitzer Prize–winning coauthor of American Prometheus. You may also be interested in this recent biography of one of Warhol's superstars, the transgender Candy Darling: Dreamer, Icon, Superstar, by Cynthia Carr, now available in paperback. Scorched Earth: A Global History of World War II, by Paul Thomas Chamberlin . In popular memory, the Second World War was an unalloyed victory for freedom over totalitarianism, marking the demise of the age of empires and the triumph of an American-led democratic order.
In Scorched Earth, historian Paul Thomas Chamberlin dispatches the myth of World War II as a good war. Instead, he depicts the conflict as it truly was: a massive battle beset by vicious racial atrocities, fought between rival empires across huge stretches of Asia and Europe. The war was sparked by German and Japanese invasions that threatened the old powers’ dominance, not by Allied opposition to fascism. The Allies achieved victory not through pluck and democratic idealism but through savage firebombing raids on civilian targets and the slaughter of millions of Soviet soldiers. The Soviet Union and the United States emerged as hyper-militarized new imperial powers, each laying claim to former Axis holdings across the globe before turning on one another and triggering a new forever war. “In a sweeping and vivid narrative, Scorched Earth challenges us to abandon the simplistic hero myths that have blinded us to World War II's devastating and continuing impact on our own time."— Drew Gilpin Faust, author of This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War
In popular memory, the Second World War was an unalloyed victory for freedom over totalitarianism, marking the demise of the age of empires and the triumph of an American-led democratic order. In Scorched Earth, historian Paul Thomas Chamberlin dispatches the myth of World War II as a good war. Instead, he depicts the conflict as it truly was: a massive battle beset by vicious racial atrocities, fought between rival empires across huge stretches of Asia and Europe. The war was sparked by German and Japanese invasions that threatened the old powers’ dominance, not by Allied opposition to fascism. The Allies achieved victory not through pluck and democratic idealism but through savage firebombing raids on civilian targets and the slaughter of millions of Soviet soldiers. The Soviet Union and the United States emerged as hyper-militarized new imperial powers, each laying claim to former Axis holdings across the globe before turning on one another and triggering a new forever war. “In a sweeping and vivid narrative, Scorched Earth challenges us to abandon the simplistic hero myths that have blinded us to World War II's devastating and continuing impact on our own time."— The Nazi Mind: Twelve Warnings from History, by Laurence Rees. How could the SS have committed the crimes they did? How were the killers who shot Jews at close quarters able to perpetrate this horror? Why did commandants of concentration and death camps willingly—and often enthusiastically—oversee mass murder? How could ordinary Germans have tolerated the removal of the Jews?
In The Nazi Mind, bestselling historian Laurence Rees seeks answers to some of the most perplexing questions surrounding the Second World War and the Holocaust. Ultimately, he delves into the darkness to explain how and why these people were capable of committing the worst crimes in the history of the world. Using previously unpublished testimony from former Nazis and those who grew up in the Nazi system, and in-depth insights based on the latest research of psychologists, The Nazi Mind brings fresh understanding to one of the most appalling regimes in history. “The making of 'the Nazi mind' from 1919 to 1945 is both enthralling and chilling on its own terms. As a ‘warning from history’ in the age of Trump 2.0, it’s compulsive reading.”— Independent (London)
How could the SS have committed the crimes they did? How were the killers who shot Jews at close quarters able to perpetrate this horror? Why did commandants of concentration and death camps willingly—and often enthusiastically—oversee mass murder? How could ordinary Germans have tolerated the removal of the Jews? In The Nazi Mind, bestselling historian Laurence Rees seeks answers to some of the most perplexing questions surrounding the Second World War and the Holocaust. Ultimately, he delves into the darkness to explain how and why these people were capable of committing the worst crimes in the history of the world. Using previously unpublished testimony from former Nazis and those who grew up in the Nazi system, and in-depth insights based on the latest research of psychologists, The Nazi Mind brings fresh understanding to one of the most appalling regimes in history. “The making of 'the Nazi mind' from 1919 to 1945 is both enthralling and chilling on its own terms. As a ‘warning from history’ in the age of Trump 2.0, it’s compulsive reading.”— Apocalypse: How Catastrophe Transformed Our World and Can Forge New Futures, by Lizzie Wade . A drought lasts for decades, a disease rips through a city, a civilization collapses. When we finally uncover the ruins, we ask: What happened? The good news is, we’ve been here before. History is long, and people have already confronted just about every apocalypse we’re facing today. But these days, archaeologists are getting better at seeing stories of survival, transformation, and even progress hidden within those histories of collapse and destruction. Perhaps, we begin to see, apocalypses do not destroy worlds, but create them anew. Apocalypse offers a new way of understanding human history, reframing it as a series of crises and cataclysms that we survived, moments of choice in an evolution of humanity that has never been predetermined or even linear. Here Lizzie Wade asks us to reckon with our long-held narratives of these events, from the end of Old Kingdom Egypt, the collapse of the Classic Maya, to the Black Death, and shows us how people lived through and beyond them—and even considered what a new world could look like in their wake. “This book upended my understanding of the ancient world. Wade renders our deep past in vivid prose, showing us that times of great rupture also bring great possibilities for new ways of living, if we let them. Apocalypse is the best kind of history book: vibrant and vital.” — Zoë Schlanger, author of The Light Eaters
A drought lasts for decades, a disease rips through a city, a civilization collapses. When we finally uncover the ruins, we ask: What happened? The good news is, we’ve been here before. History is long, and people have already confronted just about every apocalypse we’re facing today. But these days, archaeologists are getting better at seeing stories of survival, transformation, and even progress hidden within those histories of collapse and destruction. Perhaps, we begin to see, apocalypses do not destroy worlds, but create them anew. They Poisoned the World: Life and Death in the Age of Forever Chemicals, by Mariah Blake . In 2014, after losing several friends and relatives to cancer, an unassuming insurance underwriter in Hoosick Falls, New York, began to suspect that the local water supply was polluted. When he tested his tap water, he discovered dangerous levels of forever chemicals. This set off a chain of events that led to 100 million Americans learning their drinking water was tainted. Although the discovery came as a shock to most, the U.S. government and the manufacturers of these toxic chemicals—used in everything from lipstick and cookware to children’s clothing—had known about their hazards for decades.
In They Poisoned the World, investigative journalist Mariah Blake tells the astonishing story of this cover-up, tracing its roots back to the Manhattan Project and through the postwar years, as industry scientists discovered that these chemicals refused to break down and were saturating the blood of virtually every human being. By the 1980s, manufacturers were secretly testing their workers and finding links to birth defects, cancer, and other serious diseases. At every step, the industry’s deceptions were aided by our government’s appallingly lax regulatory system—a system that has made us all guinea pigs in a vast, uncontrolled chemistry experiment. “Impeccably researched and outrageous both in the scope of [corporate] malfeasance and the efforts of those who support it, the narrative never strays from its relentless documentation of the generational price paid for our decades of lax regulation. A must-read.”— Booklist, starred review
Words for My Comrades: A Political History of Tupac Shakur, by Dean Van Nguyen . Before his murder at age twenty-five, Tupac Shakur rose to staggering artistic heights as the preeminent storyteller of the 1990s, building, in the process, one of the most iconic public personas of the last half century. He recorded no fewer than ten platinum albums, starred in major films, and became an activist and political hero known the world over. In this cultural history, journalist Van Nguyen reckons with Tupac’s coming of age, fame, and cultural capital, and how the political machinations that shaped him as a boy have since buoyed his legacy as a revolutionary following the George Floyd uprisings. Words for My Comrades engages—crucially—with the influence of Tupac’s mother, Afeni, whose role in the Black Panther Party and dedication to dismantling American imperialism and combating police brutality informed Tupac’s art. Tupac’s childhood as a son of the Panthers, coupled with the influence of his stepfather’s Marxist beliefs, informed his own riveting code of ethics that helped audiences grapple with America’s inherent injustices. “In a time in which having a rich relationship with the truth is especially vital, here comes Dean Van Nguyen. History is either a tool of the state or an outside screaming for freedom. Words for My Comrades is about freedom—it is freedom at work.” —Saeed Jones, award-winning author of How We Fight For Our Lives
How Things Are Made: A Journey Through the Hidden World of Manufacturing, by Tim Minshall . We live in a manufactured world. Unless you are floating naked through space, you are right now in direct contact with multiple manufactured products, including furniture, technology, clothing, and even food. And yet the processes by which these things appear in our lives are virtually invisible. How often do we stop to think: Where do the things we buy actually come from? How are they made, and how do they make their way into our hands?
The answers can be found in How Things Are Made, which traces the surprising paths taken by everyday items to reach consumers, from design to creation to delivery. Innovation expert Tim Minshall takes us on a journey through the manufacturing world, from the smallest job shops to mega-factories, from global shipping hubs to local delivery at your door, revealing the inner workings of the system that runs 24-7-365 to make and deliver the things we need—or want—to live our daily lives. A timely guide to both using our purchasing choices to guide the way to a more sustainable economy, and to understand why tariffs will disrupt the flow of good of every type.
We live in a manufactured world. Unless you are floating naked through space, you are right now in direct contact with multiple manufactured products, including furniture, technology, clothing, and even food. And yet the processes by which these things appear in our lives are virtually invisible. How often do we stop to think: Where do the things we buy actually come from? How are they made, and how do they make their way into our hands? The answers can be found in How Things Are Made, which traces the surprising paths taken by everyday items to reach consumers, from design to creation to delivery. Innovation expert Tim Minshall takes us on a journey through the manufacturing world, from the smallest job shops to mega-factories, from global shipping hubs to local delivery at your door, revealing the inner workings of the system that runs 24-7-365 to make and deliver the things we need—or want—to live our daily lives. A timely guide to both using our purchasing choices to guide the way to a more sustainable economy, and to understand why tariffs will disrupt the flow of good of every type. Empty Vessel: The Story of the Global Economy in One Barge, by Ian Kumekawa . What do a barracks for British troops in the Falklands War, a floating jail off the Bronx, and temporary housing for VW factory workers in Germany have in common? The Balder Scapa: a single barge that served all three roles. Though the name would eventually change to Finnboda 12. And then to Safe Esperia. And later on, to the Bibby Resolution. And after that . . . in short, a vessel with so many names, and so many fates, that to keep it in our sights—as the protagonist of this fascinating economic parable—Ian Kumekawa has no choice but to call it, simply, the Vessel. Despite its sturdy steel structure, weighing 9,500 deadweight tons, the Vessel is a figure as elusive and abstract as the offshore market it comes to embody: a world of island tax havens, exploited labor forces, free banking zones, Thatcherism, Reaganomics, and mass incarceration, where even the prisoners are held offshore. “By focusing on something small and very local he allows us to see something big and very global: the forging of new inequalities, the retooling of global economic hierarchies, the refashioning of trade and industry, the feverish burning of fossil fuels and the violence and coercions embedded into the neoliberal order supervised by a powerful but recast state. The many-headed hydra of neoliberalism has found its chronicler." —Sven Beckert, author of Empire of Cotton
Little Bosses Everywhere: How the Pyramid Scheme Shaped America, by Bridget Read . Companies like Amway, Mary Kay, and Herbalife advertise the world’s greatest opportunity: the chance to be your own boss via an enigmatic business model called multilevel marketing, or MLM. They offer a world of pink Cadillacs, white-columned mansions, tropical vacations, and—most precious of all—financial freedom. If, that is, you’re willing to shell out for expensive products and recruit everyone you know to buy them, and if they recruit everyone they know, too, thus creating the “multiple levels” of MLM. Overwhelming evidence suggests that most people lose money in multilevel marketing, and that many MLM companies are pyramid schemes. Yet the industry’s origins, tied to right-wing ideologues like Ronald Reagan, have escaped public scrutiny. MLM has slithered in the wake of every economic crisis of the last century, from the Depression to the pandemic, ensnaring laid-off workers, stay-at-home moms, and teachers—anyone who has been left behind by rising inequality. “Read is unsparing in her deeply reported examination of how multilevel marketing is an American disease billed as a cure, hooking Americans (especially women) seeking stability and purpose with hollow promises of fast money. Grounded in history and a biting structural critique of country and capitalism, Little Bosses Everywhere is enraging and elucidating; it’s also a terrific and entertaining story. This is an important book.” —Rebecca Traister, New York Times bestselling author of Good and Mad
Spitfires: The American Women Who Flew in the Face of Danger During World War II, by Becky Aikman . They were crop dusters and debutantes, college girls and performers in flying circuses-all of them trained as pilots. Because they were women, they were denied the opportunity to fly for their country when the United States entered the Second World War. But Great Britain, desperately fighting for survival, would let anyone-even Americans, even women-transport warplanes. Thus, twenty-five daring young aviators bolted for England in 1942, becoming the first American women to command military aircraft. In a faraway land, these “spitfires” lived like women decades ahead of their time. Risking their lives in one of the deadliest jobs of the war, they ferried new, barely tested fighters and bombers to air bases and returned shot-up wrecks for repair, never knowing what might go wrong until they were high in the sky. Many ferry pilots died in crashes or made spectacular saves. It was exciting, often terrifying work. The pilots broke new ground off duty as well, shocking their hosts with thoroughly modern behavior. “Aikman's amazing account brings the 'Atta-Girls' boldly to life. The star-crossed affairs and marriages, the gossip and the drama, the death-defying near-crashes and the heartbreaking fatal ones, the blackout partying in blacked-out London-if these fierce heroines don't show up on a limited series soon, we'll eat our hats.” — Oprah Daily
Tequila Wars: José Cuervo and the Bloody Struggle for the Spirit of Mexico, by Ted Genoways. At the dawn of the twentieth century, José Cuervo inherited his family’s humble distillery, La Rojeña, in the Tequila Valley. Within a decade, he had transformed it into a complex national enterprise that would become Mexico’s leading producer of tequila. Cuervo grew his kingdom of agave by acquiring thousands of acres of estates throughout the valley; he brought electricity and a railroad line to Tequila, so he could reach drinkers across the country. But when the Mexican Revolution erupted, a charge of treason and a death threat against him by Pancho Villa forced Cuervo to flee. His disappearance turned him into an obscure, shadowy historical figure—despite having one of the most famous names in Mexican history. In Tequila Wars, award-winning author Ted Genoways restores Cuervo to his place as a key player in Mexico’s formative period. Before the revolution, Cuervo’s acclaim spread worldwide, and once war broke out, Cuervo remained an impresario, kingmaker, and cultural force. In the face of his own government’s corruption and the nationalism of his northern neighbors, Cuervo reached American drinkers by establishing Mexico’s covert form of cross-border commerce with the United States. “The comprehensive story of a liquor empire built during a pivotal period in Mexican history… This rich, edifying book remedies a striking gap in the historical record.“ — Kirkus Reviews
x #CincoDeMayo is drawing to a close. Here's a hangover cure for you: the new book Tequila Wars: José Cuervo and the Bloody Struggle for the Spirit of Mexico, by @genoways.bsky.social. Learn about the Cuervo and Sauza families' roles in Mexican history. theliteratelizard.com/book/9780393... #BookSky — The Literate Lizard (@theliteratelizard.bsky.social) 2025-05-06T03:46:43.256Z
Bad Friend: How Women Revolutionized Modern Friendship, by Tiffany Watt Smith . Our culture today is inundated with narratives about the strength of female friendship, whether through images of girl power, BFFs, or work wives. Yet cultural historian Tiffany Watt Smith has always found her own life much messier. She has had dramatic friend breakups, friendships that felt like too much or not enough, friendships that drifted into silence, and friendships built on convenience rather than a meeting of minds. And there are older cultural scripts to contend with: the competitive rival, the jealous backstabber, the underminer, the fair-weather friend. We have all been bad friends. It’s impossible to be a perfect one; as Watt Smith points out, women’s friendships have long been magnified, scrutinized, praised, and admonished, creating a legacy of impossible ideals. In Bad Friend, Watt Smith reflects on her own experience and thoroughly mines the rich cultural history of female friendship to look for a new paradigm that might encompass the struggles along with the joy.
Alive Day: A Memoir, by Karie Fugett . Karie Fugett is living out of her car in a Kmart parking lot when her boyfriend, Cleve, suggests, “Maybe we could get married or somethin’.” Karie says yes out of love but also out of convenience. As a twenty-year-old high school dropout who ran away from her family and recently lost her job, Karie has nowhere else to turn. Just months after they elope, Cleve’s Marine unit is deployed to Iraq. It isn’t long before Karie gets the call: Cleve’s Humvee has been hit by an IED, and he’s suffered severe injuries. Karie rushes to Walter Reed, where she’s told it’s a miracle that her husband has survived. “Happy Alive Day, man,” a fellow vet says to Cleve, explaining that this will always be the day when he was given a second chance at life. Newlyweds barely out of their teens, Karie and Cleve are thrust into utterly foreign roles. Karie tries to adapt to her job as a caregiver, navigating the labyrinthine system of veterans affairs, hospital bureaucracies, and doctors who do little more than shrug when she raises concerns about Cleve’s dependency on painkillers. It is clear to Karie that Cleve is using opiates to dull a pain that is more than physical. She catches his first overdose, but what if she can’t save him a second time? Will she still be able to save herself? “An essential, urgent reminder of the cost of war and a savage, gritty, and romantic monument to those who pay it . . . Karie Fugett’s memoir is deeply felt and disturbingly funny. I hope it pisses you off. We should be pissed off.” —Lauren Hough, author of Leaving Isn’t the Hardest Thing
Karie Fugett is living out of her car in a Kmart parking lot when her boyfriend, Cleve, suggests, “Maybe we could get married or somethin’.” Karie says yes out of love but also out of convenience. As a twenty-year-old high school dropout who ran away from her family and recently lost her job, Karie has nowhere else to turn. Just months after they elope, Cleve’s Marine unit is deployed to Iraq. It isn’t long before Karie gets the call: Cleve’s Humvee has been hit by an IED, and he’s suffered severe injuries. Dirty Kitchen: A Memoir of Food and Family, by Jill Damatac . Filmmaker Jill Damatac blends memoir, food writing, and colonial history as she cooks her way through recipes from her native-born Philippines and shares stories of her undocumented family in America. Jill Damatac left the United States in 2015 after living there as an undocumented immigrant with her family for twenty-two years. America was the only home she knew, where invisibility had become her identity and where poverty, domestic violence, ill health, and xenophobia were everyday experiences. First traveling to her native Philippines, Damatac eventually settled in London, England, where she was free to pursue an education at the University of Cambridge, fully investigate her roots, and process what happened to her and her family. After nine years, she was granted British citizenship, and returned to the United States, for the first time without fear of deportation or retribution. Damatac weaves together forgotten colonial history and long-buried Indigenous tradition, taking us through her time in America, and cooking her way through Filipino recipes in her kitchen as she searches for a sense of self and renewed possibility. With emotional intelligence, clarity, and grace, Dirty Kitchen explores fractured memories to ask questions of identity, colonialism, immigration, and belonging, and to find ways in which the ritual, tradition, and comfort of food can answer them.
Things Become Other Things: A Walking Memoir, by Craig Mod . Photographer and essayist Craig Mod is a veteran of long solo walks. But in 2021, during the pandemic shutdown of Japan’s borders, one particular walk around the Kumano Kodō routes—the ancient pilgrimage paths of Japan’s southern Kii Peninsula—took on an unexpectedly personal new significance. Tracing a 300-mile-long journey, Things Become Other Things folds together history, literature, poetry, Shinto and Buddhist spirituality, and contemporary rural life in Japan via dozens of conversations with aging fishermen, multi-generational inn owners, farmers, and kissaten cafe “mamas.” Along the way, Mod communes with mountain fauna, marvels over evidence of bears and boars, and hopscotches around leeches. He encounters whispering priests and foul-mouthed little kids who ask him, “Just what the heck are you, anyway?” Through sharp prose and his curious archive of photographs, he records evidence of floods and tsunamis, the disappearance of village life on the peninsula, and the capricious fecundity of nature.
Dickens the Enchanter: Inside the Explosive Imagination of the Great Storyteller, by Peter Conrad . See Dickens as never before in this creative biography, which delves into his novels, journalistic essays and letters to reveal his strange, hilarious but obsessive personal character and the audacity of a mind that set out, as he said, to rearrange the universe. Peter Conrad's bold rediscovery of Dickens suggests that he alone rivals Shakespeare and in some ways betters him. As well as re-examining the great novels, Conrad's book probes the journalism in which Dickens reports on his risky ventures into the urban underworld. It also describes the celebrated but dangerously over-intense public readings in which, as at a seance, he allowed his most terrifying characters to take possession of him. Ultimately it
reveals how the forces of creation and destruction come together in Dickens, who despite his reputation for jollity and effusive sentiment found it increasingly hard to control the madness and violence of his own self-destructive genius.
Speaking in Tongues, by J. M. Coetzee and Mariana Dimópulos . In this provocative dialogue, a Nobel laureate novelist and a leading translator investigate the nature of language and the challenges of translation. Language, historically speaking, has always been slippery. Two dictionaries provide two different maps of the universe: which one is true, or are both false? Speaking in Tongues--taking the form of a dialogue between Nobel laureate novelist J. M. Coetzee and eminent translator Mariana Dimâopulos--examines some of the most pressing linguistic issues that plague writers and translators well into the twenty-first century. The authors address questions that we must answer in order to understand contemporary society. They inquire if one can truly love an acquired language, and they question why certain languages, like Spanish, have gender differences built into them. They examine the threat of monolingualism and ask how we can counter, if at all, the global spread of the English language, which seems to maraud like a colonial power. They question whether it should be the duty of the translator to remove morally objectionable, misogynistic, or racist language. And in the conclusion, Coetzee even speculates whether it's only mathematics that can tell the truth about everything. Drawing from decades of experience in the craft of language, both Dimâopulos and Coetzee face the reality, as did Walter Benjamin over a century ago in his seminal essay 'The Task of the Translator, ' that when it comes to self-expression, some things will always get lost in translation.
Death of a Racehorse: An American Story, by Katie Bo Lillis. In this deeply reported and propulsive narrative, CNN reporter Katie Bo Lillis shows how two high-profile cases lay bare the ills facing the sport: the abrupt, industry-rocking indictments of top trainers Jason Servis and Jorge Navarro, and the untold story of Bob Baffert, the most successful and recognizable horse trainer in modern history, and the allegations he faced after a string of mysterious horse deaths and the high-profile disqualification of his latest Kentucky Derby winner for a failed drug test. Death of a Racehorse delves deep into the horse racing world, offering intimate access to dozens of top trainers, owners, breeders, veterinarians, lab specialists, and more. The mainstream perception has been that rampant drug use is forcing these horses to run past their natural ability, resulting in heart attacks and broken legs. But this doesn’t paint the full picture. That picture is driven by class tension between the affluent old stables and an ambitious new guard. The privileged few, determined to save the sport, seem to hold a powerful suspicion that the sport’s brash, pioneering working class could not possibly be doing so well on their own.
x It's #KentuckyDerby Day. Here are pics I took while attending back in 1976. I was in the 'cheap seats': the infield the track goes around rather than in the stands. Bold Forbes was the winner; I didn't have a winning bet. A smoke bomb was thrown onto the track during the race. See 3rd pic alt-text. — The Literate Lizard (@theliteratelizard.bsky.social) 2025-05-03T17:23:35.393Z
x Not to put a harsh on your #KentuckyDerby Day--and hey, I even posted earlier about my 1976 visit--but next week brings Death of a Racehorse, by Katie Bo Lillis, about bad business and dying horses in modern horseracing. Read more and order: theliteratelizard.com/book/9781668... #BookSky — The Literate Lizard (@theliteratelizard.bsky.social) 2025-05-04T01:42:51.025Z
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.)
We also partner Libro.fm for audiobooks. Libro.fm is similar to Amazon’s Audible, with a la carte audiobooks, or a $14.99 monthly membership which includes the audiobook of your choice and 20% off subsequent purchases during the month. Note that the DAILYKOS coupon code is only for the bookstore, not for the audiobook affiliate.
I’m adding more books every week to my RESIST! 20% off promotion. The coupon code RESIST gets you 20% off any of the books featured there.
READERS & BOOK LOVERS SERIES SCHEDULE
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