Thought Process
RECENT RELEASES
Sound and Vision
Books MEMOIR
Lessons and Carols: A Meditation on Recovery John West ’12 EERDMANS
In a book that upends expectations of how memoirs are structured, Wall Street Journal data journalist John West considers how loss and joy intertwine. In high school and college, he developed a dependence on alcohol that landed him in rehab and a halfway house, and he watched friends lose their battles with substance use disorder. Using brief, lyrical passages that crisscross time, West invokes music, religion, and philosophy to honor old companions and his own experience of parenting a new baby: “Fear and love knot together. When I pull on one, I tighten the other.” —Karen Sandstrom YA FICTION
Always the Almost Edward Underhill ’09 WEDNESDAY BOOKS
This buoyant, warm-
16
hearted young adult novel from writer and composer Edward Underhill centers on 16-year-old Miles Jacobson, a competitive pianist and a high school kid in Wisconsin negotiating life after having just come out as trans. His romance with the star football player has fizzled out, and Miles just wants his boyfriend back—and to beat a rival pianist in a big competition. Then Miles develops an attraction to the new kid in town, and complications ensue. Always the Almost earned a coveted starred review in Publishers Weekly. —KS
food, and sowing a marijuana patch—and provided Neidhardt a childhood filled with the exploration of nature. “My world was turning on one leaf, bug, conversation and toy at a time, like lights coming on at dusk,” she writes. Neidhardt girds this gorgeously written memoir, which includes a connection to (and blurb from) David Orr, Oberlin's Paul Sears Distinguished Professor of Environmental Studies and Politics Emeritus, with research, meaning the book examines both the magical memories and the long-range impact of choosing poverty. —KS
MEMOIR
Twenty Acres: A Seventies Childhood in the Woods Sarah Neidhardt ’99 UNIVERSITY OF ARKANSAS
In 1973, Sarah Neidhardt's parents traded upper-class living in California for life in the Arkansas Ozarks. There, the adults chased a back-to-the-land ideal— chopping wood, building shelter, raising their own
POETRY
Other Customs and Practices Leah Falk ’07 GLASS LYRE
In the early 20th century, Russian writer, playwright, and ethnographer S. An-sky developed more than 2,000 questions to explore and document the customs of Jews living in the Pale of Settlement in Imperial
Russia. Leah Falk uses selections from his questionnaire to build an exquisite collection about motherhood and Jewish ancestry. In one poem titled after a question regarding customs around pregnancy, Falk writes of a conversation about eating with the hope of protecting the fetus—“Each bite a brick in some structure she believed would keep me, fort of fiber and starch.” The poems here grow richer with every reading. —KS
Weber explores the history of the government's regulation of crime abroad and connects it to today's domestic system of mass incarceration. “Usually treated as distinct areas, penology and foreign policy actually share a set of foundational theories,” Weber writes. Examining how these policies were developed and implemented, he adds, is “essential to understanding prison imperialism's long career.” —KS
NONFICTION
FICTION
American Purgatory: Prison Imperialism and the Rise of Mass Incarceration
The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store
Benjamin D. Weber ’07 THE NEW PRESS
In Catholicism, purgatory is where the dead expiate their sins before rising to heaven. In Benjamin Weber's American Purgatory, purgatory is the system of incarceration that has gone on throughout U.S. history in service of colonial ambitions. A scholar at the University of California, Davis,
James McBride ’79 RIVERHEAD BOOKS
National Book Award winner James McBride has received extensive plaudits for his new book, The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store, with NPR’s Fresh Air calling it “one of the best novels I've read this year.” The praise is well-deserved: Already a New York Times Best Seller, the spellbinding novel tells the stories of the residents of Chicken