Book of the Day Roundup: January 16-20, 2023
Sundressed
Natural Fabrics and the Future of Clothing
Lucianne Tonti
Island Press
Hardcover $29.00 (212pp)
978-1-64283-271-6
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
Lucianne Tonti’s Sundressed is a sustainable living book that reenvisions people’s relationships with their clothes.
In the age of mass production of cheap clothes, this book aims to reconnect people with the origins of what they wear. The result is a beautiful ode to the earth, the fibers it produces, and the people who cultivate and wear those fibers. It peeks behind buzzwords (sustainable, eco, and natural) to rediscover the true beauty of natural fibers, including cotton, wool, linen, and silk. And it reveals stark realities—like how much plastic from clothes ends up in the water, impacting the animals who live there.
Traveling a global path from farm to garment, the book introduces both luxury designers and earthy farmers. It encourages being selective about clothes, taking better care of them, and wearing them for the long haul—even as long as a decade. While this necessitates decreasing “our appetite for newness,” the approach results in beauty, quality, and comfort that fast fashion cannot match.
The book introduces transformative concepts like regenerative agriculture, which moves beyond chemical-free organic to improve the ecosystem. Each concept is explained succinctly, showing its depth and value. These ideas showcase the problem with the status quo and provide wisdom and hope for a solution.
The prose is rich and compelling. It blends bits of personal narrative—such as discussing beloved garments—with broader stories of fiber and textile production and the cultures and artisans behind what people wear. The voice is smooth and inviting, devoid of judgment and full of wonder, making it both informative and delightful to read. The book has elegant diction and imagery, as of “a shirt made of flowers,” that infuse its ideas with beauty and purpose.
Sundressed is a sustainable living guide with a heart for people and the earth.
MELISSA WUSKE (December 27, 2022)
Karma of the Sun
Brandon Ying Kit Boey
CamCat Books
Hardcover $25.99 (352pp)
978-0-7443-0760-3
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
In the aftermath of six nuclear explosions, the world is in a state of devastation. In Brandon Ying Kit Boey’s science fiction novel Karma of the Sun, the threat of a seventh explosion looms—unless the reincarnated Lama child can be found in the shattered Himalayas. To find him, a man navigates the space between a prophecy, uncertainty, and his grief.
Karma—the son of a sherpa thought to be a liar and betrayer—is an outcast in his village. After bandits bring chaos to the village, Karma is persuaded by its rescuers to retrace his father’s footsteps and find the one remaining mountain in the Himalayas. The key to saving the world from nuclear annihilation is rumored to wait therein.
Hounded by the nighttime cries of ghosts, Karma sets out from his village, but he does not know who to trust: the military men that claimed to have rescued him, the outlaws helping fellow refugees, or the Buddhist monks who also seek the prophesied savior. Teaming up with Nima, Karma tries to figure out how to honor his father’s heritage while also doing what he can to save the world.
The inevitability of the seventh explosion, said to be the final blow that will destroy the earth, weighs on each person in the book. Violence and brutality blossom on most of its pages. Karma is captured, beaten, and almost killed, but he never gives up hope that he may yet contribute to the quest to save the planet. His explorations uncover secrets about his family and truths about the spiritual world that promise to change everyone’s lives forever.
Karma of the Sun is a gripping, prescient science fiction take on the apocalypse, blending Buddhism with an irresistible adventure.
JEANA JORGENSEN (December 23, 2022)
The Kudzu Queen
Mimi Herman
Regal House Publishing
Hardcover $19.95 (320pp)
978-1-64603-310-2
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
In Mimi Herman’s lush historical novel The Kudzu Queen, a clever Southern teenager’s sense of justice inspires her to expose the truth about a magnetic newcomer.
Mattie is fifteen and feeling eager for change when she and the rest of the town meet Mr. Cullowee. He’s a blonde smooth-talker who promises that kudzu is a “miracle” cash crop that’s sure to replace cotton and that one of the local girls will be crowned as the Kudzu Queen. People are naïve about the vine; they believe that it can prevent soil erosion.
Inspired by Mr. Cullowee, Mattie and her brother plant kudzu cuttings. Meanwhile, their community is abuzz about the showy soothsayer. As Mattie’s crush on him grows, she longs to win his favor. She is both precocious and innocent; her everyday concerns include her friendships and a deportment class. But despite her active imagination and her tendency to be persuaded, she develops doubts about Mr. Cullowee’s true nature. Tragedies force her to mature and to act with purpose.
Here, growth can be insidious, which is true both for Mattie and when it comes to kudzu. As the crop overruns its surroundings, Mr. Cullowee’s big personality and lack of boundaries come into further question. Rational people are less eager than Mr. Cullowee’s converts to accept what they hear. There are background suggestions of covered-up secrets, too. But the town’s mother-daughter relationships offer reprieve from these goings-on, and general strength and selflessness help to reorient people toward what’s right.
The Kudzu Queen is a fascinating historical novel in which an ambitious charlatan faces comeuppance thanks to a girl who loves her home and neighbors.
KAREN RIGBY (December 27, 2022)
Are We Free Yet?
The Black Queer Guide to Divorcing America
Tina Strawn
Row House Publishing
Softcover $18.99 (256pp)
978-1-955905-05-3
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
Part personal reflection, part interactive call for action, Tina Strawn’s Are We Free Yet? follows the queer Black activist’s search for freedom and details practical methods for self-reflection and healing.
The book’s four parts examine different aspects of the Black liberation movement, showing how they impacted Strawn’s relationship with the US as a queer woman of color. Strawn draws on her two divorces, struggles with mental and sexual health, and personal “Blaxit” (Black exit) to Costa Rica as examples of both Black grief and joy. Each chapter is concise, ranging from small paragraphs to a few pages at most. Poems, curated song playlists, directed questions, and journal prompts are interspersed throughout, encouraging unique interactive engagement.
The focus on Strawn’s personal experience as an activist results in a more casual, accessible conversation about systematic racism, if with an absence of research and scholarly sources to back it. Less of a structured analysis than it is a compilation of short vignettes, the text still makes for fast reading with a moment-by-moment sensibility. Indeed, Strawn ends many chapters with journal prompts and activities relating to the chapter’s content—useful for those in the activism space. Many “artifacts” are also interspersed throughout; some (including the book’s poems and song playlists) are creative breaks; others (as with full legal bills) are more esoteric.
In her personalized text Are We Free Yet?, Tina Strawn goes beyond attempting to “solve” racism to make space for a healing, self-reflective analysis of big-picture questions, including those of race, class, gender, sexuality, and politics.
ALLISON JANICKI (December 27, 2022)
Shirley Chisholm
Champion of Black Feminist Power Politics
Anastasia C. Curwood
The University of North Carolina Press
Hardcover $35.00 (472pp)
978-1-4696-7117-8
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
Anastasia C. Curwood’s vibrant biography of Shirley Chisholm reveals a tenacious congresswoman and presidential candidate.
Curwood writes that Chisholm, the daughter of Caribbean immigrants and a Democratic party trailblazer, possessed a “willingness to speak plainly, take risks, and make provocative decisions.” Her parents valued hard work, education, and the potential of the American Dream, despite the racial disparities they faced. After college, Chisholm pursued a teaching career; her later entry into politics was motivated by her desire to help the disenfranchised members of her Brooklyn community.
The book details Chisholm’s rise from the New York State Assembly to becoming the first Black woman elected to the House of Representatives. During her seven terms in Washington, Chisholm often encountered more sexism than racism, including resentment from her Black male colleagues. By 1972, Chisholm had published a memoir, Unbought and Unbossed, and entered the presidential race. Though she didn’t win the Democratic nomination, her groundbreaking, progressive campaign put her in the national spotlight.
Chisholm’s agenda included feminism, economic equity, civil rights, and LGBTQ+ rights. She opposed the Vietnam War, and her ability to speak Spanish impressed the Puerto Rican voters in her district. And, despite her “Fighting Shirley” nickname, Chisholm advocated for coalition politics, stressing the need to negotiate beyond party lines.
Curwood captures Chisholm’s complexities, from her sharp wit and sharper mind to her unique fashion sense. Chisholm was a political dynamo, yet she valued her privacy and personal relationships. After her retirement from Congress and until her death in 2005, she led a quieter life; she taught and lectured at colleges, and she described herself in later years as a “couch potato” who had lost interest in politics.
A vivid biographical assessment of a remarkable woman, Shirley Chisholm reminds us of Chisholm’s legacy and makes her absence on the current political scene seem even more profound.
MEG NOLA (December 27, 2022)
Barbara Hodge
