Happy Women’s History Month! Today’s book rec is These Truths: A History of the United States by Jill Lepore. This is a pretty comprehensive one-volume history of the US, and it’s beautifully written and pays a lot of attention to the methods and effects of mass communication in creating and…

Happy Women’s History Month! Today’s book rec is all about isolation: Queen of the Sea by Dylan Meconis. This is a graphic novel by my favorite comic artist (I previously recommended Bite Me! by her awhile back, who knows how long ago), and it’s an alternate history version of the exile of Queen Elizabeth. It takes place on a tiny British island, where the protagonist lives in a convent with a bunch of nuns who are, she discovers later, actually political prisoners. Our heroine discovers she’s actually a daughter of the late king, who secretly married someone before his death and sent the baby to the island for her safety/secrecy, so she’s got a legitimate claim to the throne. Will her loyalty to her new friend/sister and her convent outweigh her fear of being charged for treason for assisting Elizabeth? Read to find out!

Happy Women’s History Month! Today’s book rec is In a Lonely Place by Dorothy B. Hughes. This is a great piece of noir mystery fiction, written right after WWII. A pilot, Dix Steele, moves to LA and happens to run into a former pilot friend, who is now a detective…

Happy Women’s History Month! Today’s book rec is something lighthearted and funny because times are tough out there at the moment. Any Duchess Will Do by Tessa Dare is basically everything you want in a historical romance: about a playboy duke (check!) whose mother wants him to get married and…

Happy Women’s History Month! Today’s book rec is Assata by Assata Shakur. I went into this book knowing basically nothing about Shakur and it was a fascinating read. It starts with her being arrested after a deadly confrontation with a New Jersey state highway patrolman and being chained to the…

Happy Black History Month! Today’s book rec is A Perilous Path: Talking Race, Inequality, and the Law. This is a transcript of a discussion between Sherilynn Ifill (from the NAACP Legal Defense Fund), Loretta Lynch (the former US Attorney General), Bryan Stevenson (a death penalty criminal defense lawyer), and Anthony C. Thompson, a law professor. It’s a fascinating conversation about the challenges of fighting for racial justice within the legal system, and how to address things like protecting civil rights, and fighting against poverty, discrimination, the outright racism of the (then newly elected) Trump administration, and how to reclaim the narrative from anti-public, anti-Black, anti-poor viewpoints that currently dominate. These are some of the smartest people working in law just talking about their experiences and their beliefs and their ideas, and it’s a great read for anyone interested in using the legal apparatus to move society forward.

Happy Black History Month! Today’s book rec is No Crystal Stair: A Documentary Novel of the Life and Work of Lewis Michaux, Harlem Bookseller by Vaunda Michaux Nelson. Lewis Michaux opened the African National Memorial Bookstore on Seventh Avenue up in Harlem in 1932 with just five books to sell…

Happy Black History Month! Today is the day that Frederick Douglass chose as his birthday, since he didn’t know his date of birth. In honor of this bona-fide American hero, today’s book rec is Frederick Douglass in Brooklyn, edited by Theodore Hamm. It’s a collection of speeches Douglass gave at…

Happy Black History Month! Today’s book rec is Life Doesn’t Frighten Me by Maya Angelou, with paintings by Jean-Michel Basquiat acting as illustrations. It’s not a story for kids as much as a mantra or an affirmation, a declaration of courage and willpower. The paintings seem like an organic extension of the poem, complementing them very well. I don’t know much about Basquiat, but his work has a contagious vitality and energy, and I want to see more of it.