Staff Picks

Omar El Akkad writes with a strong sense of moral clarity about the fight to maintain one's humanity in the face of state-sanctioned violence. His background as a writer shines through each meticulously crafted sentence. The blend of memoir, journalism, and call to action gives the reader a sense of urgency to do what's right when it counts. This book is upsetting, yes, but also moving. It gives the courage to find hope amid so much loss.

Publisher's Description:
From award-winning novelist and journalist Omar El Akkad comes a powerful reckoning with what it means to live in the heart of an empire that doesn't consider you fully human. On October 25th, 2023, after just three weeks of the bombardment of Gaza, Omar El Akkad put out a tweet: "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." This tweet was viewed more than ten million times. One Day Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This chronicles the deep fracture that has occurred for Black, brown, Indigenous Americans, as well as the upcoming generation, many of whom had clung to a thread of faith in Western ideals, in the idea that their countries, or the countries of their adoption, actually attempted to live up to the values they espouse.

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This book was my introduction to Toews' work and I'm hooked. Her memoir is a response (or non-response) to the prompt "Why do I write?" It is powerful, exquisitely detailed, and takes you on a journey through loss and tragedy with lots of humor. I also learned a lot about wind. You must read it for yourself! For anyone who has lost someone close to them and is working through it...

Publisher description:
Why do you write? the organizer of a literary event in Mexico City asks Miriam Toews. Each attempted answer from Toews-all of them unsatisfactory to the organizer-surfaces new layers of grief, guilt, and futility connected to her sister's suicide. She has been keeping up, she realizes, a decades-old internal correspondence, filling a silence she barely understands. And we, her readers, come to see that the question is as impossible to answer as deciding whether to live life as a comedy or a tragedy. Marking the first time Toews has written her own life in nonfiction, 'A Truce That Is Not Peace' explores the uneasy pact a writer makes with memory. Wildly inventive yet masterfully controlled; slyly casual yet momentous; wrenching and joyful; hilarious and humane -- this is Miriam Toews at her dazzling best, remaking her world and inventing an astonishing new literary form to contain it.

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If you are someone who loves a great wilderness adventure full of natural dangers, exotic creatures, and human tenacity, then The River of Doubt will thrill you. Twenty-two men from Brazil and the United States, led by the intrepid Carlos Rondon and Theodore Roosevelt, set out to explore a portion of the Amazon River that had yet to be charted by Westerners. Along with the physical trials of the expedition, we learn about Roosvelt's mentality in choosing to take on such a feat.

Publisher’s description:
The River of Doubt' is a black, uncharted tributary of the Amazon that snakes through one of the most treacherous jungles in the world. Indians armed with poison-tipped arrows haunt its shadows; piranhas glide through its waters; boulder-strewn rapids turn the river into a roiling cauldron. After his humiliating election defeat in 1912, Roosevelt set his sights on the most punishing physical challenge he could find, the first descent of an unmapped, rapids-choked tributary of the Amazon. Together with his son Kermit and Brazil's most famous explorer, Candido Mariano da Silva Rondon, Roosevelt accomplished a feat so great that many at the time refused to believe it. In the process, he changed the map of the western hemisphere forever. Along the way, Roosevelt and his men faced an unbelievable series of hardships, losing their canoes and supplies to punishing whitewater rapids, and enduring starvation, Indian attack, disease, drowning, and a murder within their own ranks. Three men died, and Roosevelt was brought to the brink of suicide. 'The River of Doubt' brings alive these extraordinary events in a powerful nonfiction narrative thriller that happens to feature one of the most famous Americans who ever lived.

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