Librarian's Pick
Here's what our librarians are reading lately.Librarian’s Pick: The Genius Of Women – Janice Kaplan
“Even in this time of rethinking women’s roles, we define genius almost exclusively through male achievement. When asked to name a genius, people mention Albert Einstein, Leonardo da Vinci, and Steve Jobs. As for great women? In one survey, the only female genius anyone listed was Marie Curie.
Janice Kaplan, the New York Times bestselling author of The Gratitude Diaries, set out to determine why the extraordinary work of so many women has been brushed aside. Using her unique mix of memoir, narrative, and inspiration, she makes surprising discoveries about women geniuses now and throughout history, in fields from music to robotics. Through interviews with neuroscientists, psychologists, and dozens of women geniuses at work in the world today—including Nobel Prize winner Frances Arnold and AI expert Fei-Fei Li—she proves that genius isn’t just about talent. It’s about having that talent recognized, nurtured, and celebrated.
Across the generations, even when they face less-than-perfect circumstances, women geniuses have created brilliant and original work. In The Genius of Women, you’ll learn how they ignored obstacles and broke down seemingly unshakable barriers. The geniuses in this moving, powerful, and very entertaining book provide more than inspiration—they offer a clear blueprint to everyone who wants to find her own path and move forward with passion.”
Librarian’s Pick: Hitting A Straight Lick With A Crooked Stick
“Over the past 50 years, Zora Neale Hurston has been restored from nearly forgotten to a canonical writer, in no small part due to the efforts of Alice Walker and Toni Morrison. One of the seminal writers of the Harlem Renaissance, Hurston is most known today for her novel Their Eyes Were Watching God and for her nonfiction works of black history and folklore. But before she published those books, she honed her craft by writing short stories.
Between 1921 and 1937, Hurston published 21 stories, some widely anthologized but many virtually lost—until now. Hitting a Straight Lick With a Crooked Stick collects all 21, including eight “lost” stories, for the first time in one volume.
Editor Genevieve West located the recovered stories in periodicals and as unpublished manuscripts, and the hallmarks of Hurston’s distinctive writing are on full display: her use of rural black dialect, the wickedly sly humor she finds in day-to-day life, the folkloric underpinnings of her many tales. The world Hurston re-creates is a circumscribed African American world, where white characters are relegated to the sidelines and rarely figure into the consequences of plot, if they appear at all. The agency that Hurston affords her community is one of the defining delights of her art, which explores identity, class and gender within the African American experience.
Many of Hurston’s stories take place among the denizens of rural Eatonville, Florida, also the setting of Their Eyes Were Watching God and the actual community where Hurston grew up. Other stories are set among urban landscapes, particularly in Harlem, where the fledgling writer moved in 1924.
West points to “The Back Room,” one of the recovered stories, as unique among Hurston’s work for its depiction of what she calls “New Negro” life during the Harlem Renaissance. “The Conversion of Sam,” another found story, is an early effort written before Hurston’s own move to New York. It has a less defined urban setting but nonetheless depicts a migrant’s experience and explores familiar Hurston themes of sexual attraction, courtship and the interplay between men and women.
As with any collection of stories, quality varies greatly, but these narratives comprise a rich tapestry of Hurston’s matchless vision and talent. After this period as a short story writer, Hurston mostly turned her attention to novels and to the indelible folklore collections she assembled. These would prove the bedrock of her literary reputation, but these early stories are also a welcome and illuminating component of her legacy.”
Librarian’s Pick: Yellow Bird – Sierra Crane Murdoch
![Yellow Bird: Oil, Murder, and a Woman's Search for Justice in Indian Country by [Crane Murdoch, Sierra]](https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/41v0E4tMPoL.jpg)
“When Lissa Yellow Bird was released from prison in 2009, she found her home, the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation in North Dakota, transformed by the Bakken oil boom. In her absence, the landscape had been altered beyond recognition, her tribal government swayed by corporate interests, and her community burdened by a surge in violence and addiction. Three years later, when Lissa learned that a young white oil worker, Kristopher “KC” Clarke, had disappeared from his reservation worksite, she became particularly concerned. No one knew where Clarke had gone, and few people were actively looking for him.
Yellow Bird traces Lissa’s steps as she obsessively hunts for clues to Clarke’s disappearance. She navigates two worlds—that of her own tribe, changed by its newfound wealth, and that of the non-Native oilmen, down on their luck, who have come to find work on the heels of the economic recession. Her pursuit of Clarke is also a pursuit of redemption, as Lissa atones for her own crimes and reckons with generations of trauma. Yellow Bird is an exquisitely written, masterfully reported story about a search for justice and a remarkable portrait of a complex woman who is smart, funny, eloquent, compassionate, and—when it serves her cause—manipulative. Drawing on eight years of immersive investigation, Sierra Crane Murdoch has produced a profound examination of the legacy of systematic violence inflicted on a tribal nation and a tale of extraordinary healing.”
Librarian’s Pick: Rebel Cinderella – Adam Hochschild
“Rose Pastor arrived in New York City in 1903, a Jewish refugee from Russia who had worked in cigar factories since the age of eleven. Two years later, she captured headlines across the globe when she married James Graham Phelps Stokes, scion of one of the legendary 400 families of New York high society. Together, this unusual couple joined the burgeoning Socialist Party and, over the next dozen years, moved among the liveliest group of activists and dreamers this country has ever seen. Their friends and houseguests included Emma Goldman, Big Bill Haywood, Eugene V. Debs, John Reed, Margaret Sanger, Jack London, and W.E.B. Du Bois. Rose stirred audiences to tears and led strikes of restaurant waiters and garment workers. She campaigned alongside the country’s earliest feminists to publicly defy laws against distributing information about birth control, earning her notoriety as “one of the dangerous influences of the country” from President Woodrow Wilson. But in a way no one foresaw, her too-short life would end in the same abject poverty with which it began.”
Librarian’s Pick: The Authenticity Project – Clare Pooley
“Julian Jessop, an eccentric, lonely artist and septuagenarian believes that most people aren’t really honest with each other. But what if they were? And so he writes–in a plain, green journal–the truth about his own life and leaves it in his local café. It’s run by the incredibly tidy and efficient Monica, who furtively adds her own entry and leaves the book in the wine bar across the street. Before long, the others who find the green notebook add the truths about their own deepest selves–and soon find each other In Real Life at Monica’s Café.
The Authenticity Project‘s cast of characters–including Hazard, the charming addict who makes a vow to get sober; Alice, the fabulous mommy Instagrammer whose real life is a lot less perfect than it looks online; and their other new friends–is by turns quirky and funny, heartbreakingly sad and painfully true-to-life. It’s a story about being brave and putting your real self forward–and finding out that it’s not as scary as it seems. In fact, it looks a lot like happiness.
The Authenticity Project is just the tonic for our times that readers are clamoring for–and one they will take to their hearts and read with unabashed pleasure.”
Librarian’s Pick: Oona Out Of Order – Margarita Montimore
” It’s New Year’s Eve 1982, and Oona Lockhart has her whole life before her. Should she go to London to study economics, or remain at home in Brooklyn to pursue her passion for music and be with her boyfriend? As the countdown begins, Oona faints and awakens thirty-two years in the future in her fifty-one-year-old body. Greeted by a friendly stranger in a beautiful house she’s told is her own, Oona learns that with each passing year she will leap to another age at random.”
Librarian’s Pick: The Janes – Louisa Luna
“The similarly determined Alice Vega of Louise Luna’s The Janes is a former bounty hunter, now private investigator, known for her skills in locating missing people and her relentless drive to find answers no matter the method (which readers will remember from Luna’s first Vega novel, Two Girls Down).
When two Latinx teen girls are found dead near the Mexican border, a commander from the San Diego police department hires Vega to identify the victims and find any other girls who might be missing as part of a sex-trafficking operation. What made him think of Alice? Well, her aforementioned skills, her willingness to stay out of the spotlight—and the fact that one of the girls had a piece of paper in her hand with Vega’s name written on it.
Vega calls Max “Cap” Caplan, whom she worked with in Two Girls Down, and offers him $10,000 to help her. He’s a calm and thoughtful retired detective who trusts her completely, even when things get (more than) a little wild. Together, the two make an intelligent, innovative team that gets results, whether using the serial numbers on IUDs to track down sex-trafficking perpetrators or intuitively and masterfully improvising when interviewing wary criminals.
That’s why it’s decidedly odd that, once they go to the commander with suspects and theories about the workings of the crime ring, he tells them to back off—he’ll update the DEA and SDPD, and handle it from there. Not surprisingly, Vega and Cap do the opposite of backing off. Instead, they push even harder, diving into dangerous situations with glee (Vega) and reluctant optimism (Cap), determined to roust the bad guys and expose wrongdoing no matter where it lives.
Luna skillfully balances tragedy and humor throughout, via blood-pressure-raising fight scenes and stressful suspense, plus hints of romantic tension between Vega and Cap. She also offers a fascinating and disturbing look at how a criminal enterprise might work, pulling in various complex threads while crafting a story that’s wholly believable and sad.
The Janes is a superbly entertaining read, especially for readers who are already fans of the amazing Vega, whose Jack Reacher-esque sense of justice offers reassurance that, no matter how long it takes, no bad deed will go unpunished.”
Librarian’s Pick: When Time Stopped – Ariana Neumann
“In 1941, the first Neumann family member was taken by the Nazis, arrested in German-occupied Czechoslovakia for bathing in a stretch of river forbidden to Jews. He was transported to Auschwitz. Eighteen days later his prisoner number was entered into the morgue book.
Of thirty-four Neumann family members, twenty-five were murdered by the Nazis. One of the survivors was Hans Neumann, who, to escape the German death net, traveled to Berlin and hid in plain sight under the Gestapo’s eyes. What Hans experienced was so unspeakable that, when he built an industrial empire in Venezuela, he couldn’t bring himself to talk about it. All his daughter Ariana knew was that something terrible had happened.
When Hans died, he left Ariana a small box filled with letters, diary entries, and other memorabilia. Ten years later Ariana finally summoned the courage to have the letters translated, and she began reading. What she discovered launched her on a worldwide search that would deliver indelible portraits of a family loving, finding meaning, and trying to survive amid the worst that can be imagined.
When Time Stopped is an unputdownable detective story and an epic family memoir, spanning nearly ninety years and crossing oceans. Neumann brings each relative to vivid life. In uncovering her father’s story after all these years, she discovers nuance and depth to her own history and liberates poignant and thought-provoking truths about the threads of humanity that connect us all.”
Librarian’s Pick: A Longer Fall – Charlaine Harris
“A Longer Fall, Charlaine Harris’ sequel to An Easy Death, is just as gritty as its predecessor. Harris’ prose is blunt and uncomplicated, matching Lizbeth’s general sensibility, and lending the novel a welcome readability. This straightforward style meshes well with the first-person narration, implying that the protagonist is relating events in her own words as she remembers them. Each character is filtered through Lizbeth’s biases, resulting in a refreshingly direct story, albeit one in which everyone uses roughly the same cadence and vocabulary and some of the plot twists are foreshadowed into predictability.”
Librarian’s Pick: The Regrets – Amy Bonnaffons
