Adults

One of the founding forces behind the 1970s feminist art movement, Judy Chicago became widely known for The Dinner Party, a massive installation turning women's traditional household-bound role on its head by setting a feast for thirty-nine remarkable women to shine a spotlight on women's contributions to history. Like much of her work that would follow, The Dinner Party received massive popular acclaim while being harshly dismissed for its subject matter and embrace of "feminine" craft. For decades, Chicago operated on the margins of the art world, her work shunned by most critics and institutions, but she never stopped creating. Employing a vast array of mediums from textiles to painting to pyrotechnics Chicago is always willing to tackle the most urgent human questions. Judy Chicago: In the Making accompanies the first exhibition to offer a thorough overview of Chicago's career. It traces the artist's practice back to its roots, revealing her unique working process and the origins of the formal and conceptual strategies she has applied throughout her oeuvre. Bringing together a selection drawn from every major series of her work, it also reproduces sketchbooks, journals, and preparatory drawings that document her extensive process of research and development.

Edited by Kate 

A long-awaited photographic memoir from basketball superstar Dwyane Wade of the Miami Heat, beautifully designed with more than 100 all new photos from Wade's life on and off the court

For more than 15 years, Dwyane Wade has dazzled basketball fans with his on-court artistry and has built his personal brand into one of the most powerful ones in sports. In this beautiful 4-color memoir, featuring more than 100 never-before-seen photos from Bob Metelus, who has been documenting Wade's career for more than a decade, Wade takes readers inside his fascinating life and career.

The Making of Dwyane Wade moves from Wade's challenging upbringing on the South Side of Chicago through his college career at Marquette, where he went from unheralded recruit to one of college basketball's greatest stars, to his extraordinary years with the Miami Heat, with whom he won three NBA championships and was named an All-Star 13 times. The book is centered on the essential principles that have guided Wade throughout his career: being an exceptional teammate and leader. As Wade details, while talent can make you a star, becoming a champion entails sacrifice: putting the broader team goals before your own ego. Wade has lived this credo, from his days playing alongside Shaq (with whom he won his first championship), to the "Big 3" with Lebron and Bosh, up through the 2018-19 season, when he mentored the Heat's promising yet young roster in his final year as a player. Off the court, too, these same values have shaped his private life, helping him be a supportive husband and partner to Gabrielle Union and an exemplary role model for his children.

The Making of Dwyane Wade is a deep dive into the mind and heart of one of the most compelling basketball players of all time. It is the definitive inside look at the life and career of one of the sport's biggest stars.

Edited by Kate 

An intimate, impertinent, and incisive collection about race, progress, and hypocrisy from Jill Louise Busby, aka Jillisblack.

Jill Louise Busby spent years in the nonprofit sector specializing in Diversity & Inclusion. She spoke at academic institutions, businesses, and detention centers on the topics of Race, Power, and Privilege and delivered over two-hundred workshops to nonprofit organizations all over the California Bay Area.

In 2016, fed up with what passed as progressive in the Pacific Northwest, Busby uploaded a one-minute video about race, white institutions, and faux liberalism to Instagram. The video received millions of views across social platforms. As her pithy persona Jillisblack became an "it-voice" weighing in on all things race-based, Jill began to notice parallels between her performance of "diversity" in the white corporate world and her performance of "wokeness" for her followers. Both, she realized, were scripted.

Unfollow Me is a memoir-in-essays about these scripts; it's about tokenism, micro-fame, and inhabiting spaces-real and virtual, black and white-where complicity is the price of entry. Busby's social commentary manages to be both wryly funny and achingly open-hearted as she recounts her shape-shifting moves among the subtle hierarchies of progressive communities. Unfollow Me is a sharply personal and self-questioning critique of white fragility (and other words for racism), respectability politics (and other words for shame), and all the places where fear masquerades as progress.

Edited by Kate 

In recent times, many of us have spent more time at home than ever before. Creating a home that instills a sense of calm will cocoon and protect us from the outside world, create a sense of wellbeing and make us feel truly nurtured.

Calm will help you create a restful, restorative interior that draws you in and makes your shoulders drop the moment you walk through the door. Sally Denning first explores the essential foundations of a tranquil, comforting home: calming and harmonious colors, textiles, patterns, lighting, and decorative elements. She goes on to explore a mix of accessible real-life homes, ranging from city homes to country houses, new builds, apartments, beach houses, and more. The spaces may be different, but they all share one thing: a timeless, soothing, and restful atmosphere that is a pleasure to come home to.

Edited by Kate 

Centuries ago, the principle of Occam's razor changed our world by showing simpler answers to be preferable and more often true. In Life Is Simple, scientist Johnjoe McFadden traces centuries of discoveries, taking us from a geocentric cosmos to quantum mechanics and DNA, arguing that simplicity has revealed profound answers to the greatest mysteries. This is no coincidence. From the laws that keep a ball in motion to those that govern evolution, simplicity, he claims, has shaped the universe itself. And in McFadden's view, life could only have emerged by embracing maximal simplicity, making the fundamental law of the universe a cosmic form of natural selection that favors survival of the simplest. Recasting both the history of science and our universe's origins, McFadden transforms our understanding of ourselves and our world.

Edited by Kate

Author of the cult-favorite Cooking for Artists, Mina Stone, returns with a collection of 80 new recipes inspired by her traditional Greek heritage and her years cooking for some of New York's most innovative artists.

Growing up in a close-knit Greek-American household, Mina Stone learned to cook from her Yiayia, who taught her that food doesn't have to be complicated to be delicious--and that almost any dish can be improved with judicious amounts of lemon, olive oil, and salt. In this deeply personal cookbook, Stone celebrates her grandmother and the other influences that have shaped her life, her career, and her culinary tastes and expertise. Lemon, Love & Olive Oil weaves together more than 80 Mediterranean-style dishes with the stories that inspired them.
 

Stone offers home cooks a taste of her heritage with healthy, flavorful, and uncomplicated dishes such as Syrian Bulgur and Yogurt with Brown Butter Pine Nuts; Persian Figs with Cardamom and Rosewater; Baby Lettuces with Toasted Sesame Seeds, Mint, and Meyer Lemon Yogurt; and Braised Chickpeas with Orange Zest and Garlic Bread Crumbs. These recipes use fresh, flavorful ingredients to create elegantly simple dishes, complemented by beautiful, minimalist photography and original art throughout.
 

A fresh and unconventional fusion of art and food, Lemon, Love & Olive Oil is an engaging (and delicious!) cultural and culinary tour, all complimented by the design of world-renowned artist Urs Fischer.
 

Edited by Kate

An authoritative history of the race to unravel DNA's structure, by one of our most prominent medical historians.

James Watson and Francis Crick's 1953 discovery of the double helix structure of DNA is the foundation of virtually every advance in our modern understanding of genetics and molecular biology. But how did Watson and Crick do it--and why were they the ones who succeeded?

In truth, the discovery of DNA's structure is the story of five towering minds in pursuit of the advancement of science, and for almost all of them, the prospect of fame and immortality: Watson, Crick, Rosalind Franklin, Maurice Wilkins, and Linus Pauling. Each was fascinating and brilliant, with strong personalities that often clashed. Howard Markel skillfully re-creates the intense intellectual journey, and fraught personal relationships, that ultimately led to a spectacular breakthrough. But it is Rosalind Franklin--fiercely determined, relentless, and an outsider at Cambridge and the University of London in the 1950s, as the lone Jewish woman among young male scientists--who becomes a focal point for Markel.

The Secret of Life is a story of genius and perseverance, but also a saga of cronyism, misogyny, anti-Semitism, and misconduct. Drawing on voluminous archival research, including interviews with James Watson and with Franklin's sister, Jenifer Glynn, Markel provides a fascinating look at how science is done, how reputations are undone, and how history is written, and revised.

A vibrant evocation of Cambridge in the 1950s, Markel also provides colorful depictions of Watson and Crick--their competitiveness, idiosyncrasies, and youthful immaturity--and compelling portraits of Wilkins, Pauling, and most cogently, Rosalind Franklin. The Secret of Life is a lively and sweeping narrative of this landmark discovery, one that finally gives the woman at the center of this drama her due.

Edited by Kate 

Look At This If You Love Great Art is a must read for anyone with a passion for exceptional art. Featuring 100 of the best artworks ever produced, inside is a collection of insightful summaries on just what it is that makes each one so vital.

Art writer Chloë Ashby talks you through the pieces that resonate with her, revealing the fascinating stories behind them and offering her considered take on why each work should be regarded as a pinnacle of artistic endeavor. With entries curated to offer a unique juxtaposition of styles, mediums and schools of art, expect a contemporary take on classic artworks, where titans of art history cross paths with under-appreciated examples from outside the traditional canon, and where rebellious visionaries blaze trails that still influence today’s cutting-edge artists.

Covering all the most important genres of art –Abstraction, Pop Art, Surrealism, Renaissance art, Impressionism and more – this engaging summary only deals with artworks that really matter and the reasons why you have to see them.

Edited by Kate 
 

A leading medical ethnobotanist tells us the story of her quest to develop new ways to fight illness and disease through the healing powers of plants in this uplifting and adventure-filled memoir.

Plants are the basis for an array of lifesaving and health-improving medicines we all now take for granted. Ever taken an aspirin? Thank a willow tree for that. What about life-saving medicines for malaria? Some of those are derived from cinchona and wormwood.

In today's world of synthetic pharmaceuticals, scientists and laypeople alike have lost this connection to the natural world. But by ignoring the potential of medicinal plants, we are losing out on the opportunity to discover new life-saving medicines needed in the fight against the greatest medical challenge of this century: the rise of the post-antibiotic era. Antibiotic-resistant microbes plague us all. Each year, 700,000 people die due to these untreatable infections; by 2050, 10 million annual deaths are expected unless we act now.
 
No one understands this better than Dr. Cassandra Quave, whose groundbreaking research as a leading medical ethnobotanist--someone who identifies and studies plants that may be able to treat antimicrobial resistance and other threatening illnesses--is helping to provide clues for the next generation of advanced medicines. In The Plant Hunter, Dr. Quave weaves together science, botany, and memoir to tell us the extraordinary story of her own journey. Traveling by canoe, ATV, mule, airboat, and on foot, she has conducted field research in the flooded forests of the remote Amazon, the murky swamps of southern Florida, the rolling hills of central Italy, isolated mountaintops in Albania and Kosovo, and volcanic isles arising out of the Mediterranean—all in search of natural compounds, long-known to traditional healers, that could help save us all from the looming crisis of untreatable superbugs. And as a person born with multiple congenital defects of her skeletal system, she's done it all with just one leg. Filled with grit, tragedy, triumph, awe, and scientific discovery, her story illuminates how the path forward for medical discovery may be found in nature's oldest remedies.

Edited by Kate

A lively, entertaining, wide-ranging oral history of the golden age of the rock concert based on over ninety interviews with musicians, promoters, stagehands, and others who contributed to the huge cultural phenomenon that is live rock

Decades after the rise of rock music in the 1950s, the rock concert retains its allure and its power as a unifying experience--and as an influential multi-billion-dollar industry. In Rock Concert, acclaimed interviewer Marc Myers sets out to uncover the history of this compelling phenomenon, weaving together ground-breaking accounts from the people who were there.

Myers combines the tales of icons like Joan Baez, Ian Anderson, Alice Cooper, Steve Miller, Roger Waters, and Angus Young with figures such as the disc jockeys who first began playing rock on the radio, like Alan Freed in Cleveland and New York; the audio engineers that developed new technologies to accommodate ever-growing rock audiences; music journalists, like Rolling Stone's Cameron Crowe; and the promoters who organized it all, like Michael Lang, co-founder of Woodstock, to create a rounded and vivid account of live rock's stratospheric rise.

Rock Concert provides a fascinating, immediate look at the evolution of rock 'n' roll through the lens of live performances --spanning from the rise of R&B in the 1950s, through the hippie gatherings of the '60s, to the growing arena tours of the '70s and '80s. Elvis Presley's gyrating hips, the British Invasion that brought the Beatles in the '60s, the Grateful Dead's free flowing jams, and Pink Floyd's The Wall are just a few of the defining musical acts that drive this rich narrative. Featuring dozens of key players in the history of rock and filled with colorful anecdotes, Rock Concert will speak to anyone who has experienced the transcendence of live rock.

Edited by Kate

Martín Espada is a poet who stirs in us an undeniable social consciousness, says Richard Blanco. Floaters offers exuberant odes and defiant elegies, songs of protest and songs of love from one of the essential voices in American poetry.

Floaters takes its title from a term used by certain Border Patrol agents to describe migrants who drown trying to cross over. The title poem responds to the viral photograph of Óscar and Valeria, a Salvadoran father and daughter who drowned in the Río Grande, and allegations posted in the I'm 10-15 Border Patrol Facebook group that the photo was faked. Espada bears eloquent witness to confrontations with anti-immigrant bigotry as a tenant lawyer years ago, and now sings the praises of Central American adolescents kicking soccer balls over a barbed wire fence in an internment camp founded on that same bigotry. He also knows that times of hate call for poems of love--even in the voice of a cantankerous Galápagos tortoise.

The collection ranges from historical epic to achingly personal lyrics about growing up, the baseball that drops from the sky and smacks Espada in the eye as he contemplates a girl's gently racist question.

Whether celebrating the visionaries--the fallen dreamers, rebels and poets--or condemning the outrageous governmental neglect of his father's Puerto Rico in the wake of Hurricane María, Espada invokes ferocious, incandescent spirits.

Added by Ann R. 

NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER • A renowned historian traces the life of a single object handed down through three generations of Black women to craft an extraordinary testament to people who are left out of the archives.

“Deeply layered and insightful . . . [a] bold reflection on American history, African American resilience, and the human capacity for love and perseverance in the face of soul-crushing madness.”—The Washington Post

“A history told with brilliance and tenderness and fearlessness.”—Jill Lepore, author of These Truths: A History of the United States
KIRKUS PRIZE FINALIST • NAMED ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY PUBLISHERS WEEKLY

In 1850s South Carolina, an enslaved woman named Rose faced a crisis, the imminent sale of her daughter Ashley. Thinking quickly, she packed a cotton bag with a few precious items as a token of love and to try to ensure Ashley’s survival. Soon after, the nine-year-old girl was separated from her mother and sold.

Decades later, Ashley’s granddaughter Ruth embroidered this family history on the bag in spare yet haunting language—including Rose’s wish that “It be filled with my Love always.” Ruth’s sewn words, the reason we remember Ashley’s sack today, evoke a sweeping family story of loss and of love passed down through generations. Now, in this illuminating, deeply moving book inspired by Rose’s gift to Ashley, historian Tiya Miles carefully unearths these women’s faint presence in archival records to follow the paths of their lives—and the lives of so many women like them—to write a singular and revelatory history of the experience of slavery, and the uncertain freedom afterward, in the United States.

The search to uncover this history is part of the story itself. For where the historical record falls short of capturing Rose’s, Ashley’s, and Ruth’s full lives, Miles turns to objects and to art as equally important sources, assembling a chorus of women’s and families’ stories and critiquing the scant archives that for decades have overlooked so many. The contents of Ashley’s sack—a tattered dress, handfuls of pecans, a braid of hair, “my Love always”—are eloquent evidence of the lives these women lived. As she follows Ashley’s journey, Miles metaphorically unpacks the bag, deepening its emotional resonance and exploring the meanings and significance of everything it contained.

All That She Carried is a poignant story of resilience and of love passed down through generations of women against steep odds. It honors the creativity and fierce resourcefulness of people who preserved family ties even when official systems refused to do so, and it serves as a visionary illustration of how to reconstruct and recount their stories today.

Added by Ann R. 

***2021 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER***

Winner of the 2021 Sir Walter Raleigh Award for Fiction

Longlisted for the 2022 Carnegie Medal Fiction, the 2021 Joyce Carol Oates Prize and the 2021 Aspen Words Literary Prize 

A Read With Jenna Today Show Book Club Pick!  One of Entertainment Weekly's 15 Books you Need to Read This June | On Entertainment Weekly's "Must List" | One of The NY Post's Best Summer Reading books | One of GMA's 27 Books for June | One of USA Today's 5 Books Not to Miss | One of Fortune's 21 Most Anticipated Books Coming out in the Second Half of 2021 | One of The Root's PageTurners: It’s Getting Hot in Here | One of Real Simple's Best New Books to Read in 2021

An astounding work of fiction from a New York Times bestselling author Jason Mott, always deeply honest, at times electrically funny, that goes to the heart of racism, police violence, and the hidden costs exacted upon Black Americans, and America as a whole

In Jason Mott’s Hell of a Book, a Black  author sets out on a cross-country publicity tour to promote his bestselling novel. That storyline drives Hell of a Book and is the scaffolding of something much larger and urgent: since Mott’s novel also tells the story of Soot, a young Black boy living in a rural town in the recent past, and The Kid, a possibly imaginary child who appears to the author on his tour.

As these characters’ stories build and build and converge, they astonish. For while this heartbreaking and magical book entertains and is at once about family, love of parents and children, art and money, it’s also about the nation’s reckoning with a tragic police shooting playing over and over again on the news. And with what it can mean to be Black in America.

Who has been killed? Who is The Kid? Will the author finish his book tour, and what kind of world will he leave behind?  Unforgettably told, with characters who burn into your mind and an electrifying plot ideal for book club discussion, Hell of a Book is the novel Mott has been writing in his head for the last ten years. And in its final twists it truly becomes its title.

Added by Ann R. 

Discover the elemental properties of iconic Marvel Comics characters.

From the volatile gamma-irradiated Hulk to the stable Super-Soldier Captain America, and the technologically enhanced Iron Man to the cosmically charged Silver Surfer, the Marvel Comics Universe boasts a diverse array of heroes and villains. Whether mutants or Asgardians, Celestials or Inhumans, The Periodic Table of Marvel expertly classifies key and lesser known Marvel characters to reveal the properties that bind them, the catalysts that created them, the chain reactions that energize them, and the underlying structures and formulas that underpin the Marvel Universe.

With more than 130 character profiles written by a Marvel expert, beautiful comic book art, and Marvel's seal of approval, The Periodic Table of Marvel reveals the fascinating and surprising connections between the most incredible heroes and villains ever created.

Edited by Kate

From the New York Times bestselling author and his superteam of chefs, this is Ottolenghi, unplugged: 85+ irresistible recipes for relaxed, flexible home cooking that will bring the love to every shelf in your pantry, fridge, and freezer.

Led by Yotam Ottolenghi and Noor Murad, the revered team of chefs at the Ottolenghi Test Kitchen gives everyday home cooks the accessible yet innovative Middle Eastern-inspired recipes they need to put dinner on the table with less stress and less fuss in a convenient, flexibound package. With fit-for-real-life chapters like "The Freezer Is Your Friend," "That One Shelf in the Back of Your Pantry," and "Who Does the Dishes?" (a.k.a. One-Pot Meals), Shelf Love teaches readers how to flex with fewer ingredients, get creative with their pantry staples, and add playful twists to familiar classics.

All the signature Ottolenghi touches fans love are here--big flavors, veggie-forward appeal, diverse influences--but are distilled to maximize ease and creative versatility. These dishes pack all the punch and edge you expect from Ottolenghi, using what you've got to hand--that last can of chickpeas or bag of frozen peas--without extra trips to the grocery store. Humble ingredients and crowd-pleasing recipes abound, including All-the-Herbs Dumplings with Caramelized Onions, Mac and Cheese with Za'atar Pesto, Cacio e Pepe Chickpeas, and Crispy Spaghetti and Chicken.

With accessible recipe features like MIYO (Make It Your Own) that encourage ingredient swaps and a whimsical, lighthearted spirit, the fresh voices of the Ottolenghi Test Kitchen will deliver kitchen confidence and joyful inspiration to new and old fans alike.

Edited by Kate