|
|
|
|
When Trees Testify: Science, Wisdom, History, and America's Black Botanical Legacy
by Beronda L. Montgomery
The histories of trees in America are also the histories of Black Americans. Pecan trees were domesticated by an enslaved African named Antoine; sycamore trees were both havens and signposts for people trying to escape enslavement; poplar trees are historically associated with lynching; and willow bark has offered the gift of medicine. These trees, and others, testify not only to the complexity of the Black American narrative but also to a heritage of Black botanical expertise that, like Native American traditions, predates the United States entirely. In When Trees Testify, award-winning plant biologist Beronda L. Montgomery combines the wisdom of science and history with stories from her own path to botany.
|
|
|
|
Chain of Ideas: The Origins of Our Authoritarian Age
by Ibram X. Kendi
The National Book Award-winning author of Stamped from the Beginning charts how great replacement theory has become a dominant political idea of our time and ushered in an antidemocratic age. In Chain of Ideas, Ibram X. Kendi offers an unsettling but indispensable global history of how great replacement theory brought humanity into this authoritarian age--and how we can free ourselves from it.
|
|
|
|
The Mixed Marriage Project: A Memoir of Love, Race, and Family
by Dorothy Roberts
From Dorothy Roberts, author of Killing the Black Body, comes a spirited and riveting memoir of growing up in an interracial family in deeply segregated 1960s Chicago and a daughter's journey to understand her parents' marriage--and her own identity. In The Mixed Marriage Project, Roberts invites us into the everyday lives of interracial couples in Chicago over four decades by turning her attention to her own father's research, which was never published but was a deep dive into studying interracial marriage--an object of study that became personal when he, a white anthropologist, married a Black Jamaican woman who joined him in his work. Grounded in her parents' research, The Mixed Marriage Project is a deeply moving meditation on family, race, identity, and love that blurs the boundaries between the political and the personal, between memoir and history.
|
|
|
|
The Flower Bearers
by Rachel Eliza Griffiths
On September 24, 2021, Rachel Eliza Griffiths married her husband, the novelist Salman Rushdie. On the same day, hundreds of miles away, Griffiths' closest friend and chosen sister, the poet Kamilah Aisha Moon, died suddenly. Eleven months later, a brutal attack nearly killed her husband. As trauma compounded trauma, Griffiths realized that in order to survive her grief, she would need to mourn not only her friend, but the woman she had been on her wedding day, a woman who had also died that day. In the process of rebuilding a self, Griffiths chronicles her friendship with Moon and their shared fight to embrace themselves as poets, artists, and Black women. Alongside this unbreakable bond, Griffiths weaves the story of her relationship with Rushdie, of the challenges they have faced and the unshakeable devotion that endures. In The Flower Bearers, Griffiths inscribes the trajectories of two transformational relationships with grace and honesty, chronicling the beauty and pain that comes with opening oneself fully to love.
|
|
|
|
Burn Down Master's House
by Clay Cane
A searing portrayal of resistance for readers of Colson Whitehead, Jesmyn Ward, and Percival Everett, from Clay Cane, award-winning journalist and New York Times bestselling author of The Grift. Sparked by individual acts of resistance among those enslaved across the American South, their seemingly disparate rebellions fuel a singular inferno of justice, connecting them in ways quiet at times, explosive at others. As these flames rise, so will they. Burn Down Master's House is a singular tour de force of a novel--breathtaking in scope, compassion, and a timeliness that speaks powerfully to our present era.
|
|
|
|
Kin: Oprah's Book Club
by Tayari Jones
Vernice and Annie, two motherless daughters raised in Honeysuckle, Louisiana, have been best friends and neighbors since earliest childhood but are fated to live starkly different lives. Raised by a fierce aunt determined to give her a stable home in the wake of her mother's death, Vernice leaves Honeysuckle at eighteen for Spelman College, where she joins a sisterhood of powerfully connected Black women and discovers a world of affluence, manners, aspiration, and inequality. Annie, abandoned by her mother as a child and fixated on the idea of finding her and filling the bottomless hole left by her absence, sets off on a journey that will take her into a world of peril and adversity, as well as love and adventure, culminating in a battle for her life. A novel about mothers and daughters, friendship and sisterhood, and the complexities of being a woman in the American South, Kin is an exuberant, emotionally rich, unforgettable work.
|
|
|
|
Trigger Warning
by Jacinda Townsend
Early in life, Ruth survived a series of devastating events. After her father is murdered, she changes her name and moves to Kentucky, marries, has a child, and, after two decades, she is, by outside measures, living a good life. When her marriage comes to a sudden end, their house burns down in the middle of the night, and she learns that her estranged sister has been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, Ruth runs back to her home state of California, with her nonbinary teenager in tow, perhaps ready at last to face her pain and retrieve her former self. Searing, surprisingly witty, and deeply human, Trigger Warning is a novel about the durational aftermath of anti-Black police violence, divorce and desire, the heartbreaking brevity of parenting, the push and pull of old friendships, and the possibility, after incredible trauma, of reconnecting to what makes us feel alive.
|
|
|
|
Leave Your Mess at Home
by Tolani Akinola
When the four semi-estranged, struggling Longe siblings find themselves together again at their Nigerian immigrant parents' Thanksgiving table, a decade's worth of secrets and a lifetime of resentments explode to the fore. In the wreckage of their fateful reunion, each Longe is forced to reckon with the past, take stock of what really matters, and find a way back to each other. Big-hearted, hilarious, and poignant, Leave Your Mess At Home is an insightful debut about forgiveness, unconditional love, and becoming who you want to be, asking the question: what do we owe to our families, and what do we owe to ourselves?
|
|
To discover these titles and more, visit www.forsythlibrary.org or your local library branch! |
|
|
Forsyth County Public Library
660 W. Fifth St., Winston-Salem, NC 27101
336-703-2665forsythlibrary.org |
|
|
|