Book of the Day Roundup: March 27-31, 2023
Shopomania
Our Obsession with Possession
Paul Berton
Douglas & McIntyre
Hardcover $28.95 (320pp)
978-1-77162-334-6
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
Shopomania is Paul Berton’s satirical dive into the history and psychology of modern consumerism.
Making the case that people’s innate desire to obtain more land, food, and materials is the main driver of human advancement, Shopomania examines the origins and evolution of the word “shop,” suggesting some new terms for understanding how people shop today. These terms include misshop (to overpay for an inferior product), shoponomics (the economics of shopping), and pseudoshop (the act of browsing instead of buying items).
Berton explores every aspect of shopping culture, from initial purchases to regrettable spending choices and efforts to sell products. The book includes examples of prominent people who embody these ideas. Comedian Ellen DeGeneres, for instance, is noted as a perpetual “reshopper” for continuing to buy and sell homes with her wife Portia de Rossi, failing to ever be satisfied with a purchase. Still, though it is often cynical in its view of human behavior, the book includes ideas for how people can engage in shopping in a way that is beneficial to humanity and the planet.
Shopomania is a reasoned examination of the culture of shopping that uses humor and incisive criticisms to encourage more thoughtful approaches to consumerism.
GAIL HOFFER-LOIBL (February 27, 2023)
Women Without Kids
The Revolutionary Rise of an Unsung Sisterhood
Ruby Warrington
Sounds True
Hardcover $28.99 (208pp)
978-1-68364-927-4
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
Part memoir, part feminist manifesto, Ruby Warrington’s Women Without Kids concerns the reality of being childless today.
After years of fielding the question of when she’d have kids, Warrington started digging into the social norms that dictate the pipeline from girlhood to puberty and motherhood. Her book addresses the crux of the matter from cultural and environmental lenses; it examines each angle of motherhood and childlessness alongside current and historical touchpoints on the subject. It discusses the “Motherhood Spectrum,” the line that childbearing people land on from “affirmative yes” to “affirmative no,” with a list of questions to determine an individual’s own position. It shows how origin stories—and the generational trauma of mothers along one’s family tree—influence the decision of whether to have children. And it dives into evolving ideas of gender, sexual, and reproductive identities, showing how recent revolutions helped people to eschew the common notion of a mother. Its final, most powerful point is that of legacy: children aren’t all that we leave behind.
Each chapter opens with quotes from childless women and nonbinary people around the world who answered Warrington’s survey about their decisions on motherhood. Some never wanted children, while others had the decision made for them by biology or circumstance. Warrington shares her own story, too, discussing her divorced parents, her disabled younger brother, and the realities of climate change. And mixed throughout the chapters are thought-provoking questions, such as “Which choices, big and small, have you made for your life that have influenced your reproductive outcomes?” to guide people in making their own decisions about motherhood.
Women Without Kids is a feminist exploration of being child-free, treating that decision as one of empowerment.
ASHLEY HOLSTROM (February 27, 2023)
The Tree and the River
Aaron Becker
Candlewick Press
Hardcover $18.99 (32pp)
978-1-5362-2329-3
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
On the banks of a winding river sprouts a civilization: one home with a thatched roof at first; then an outpost with armaments; then contraptions flying toward a busy future. A tree flourishes through it all. When the river is rerouted, though, the tree wilts. Waiting humans out, it maintains just enough life to start again. Whole societies are encompassed in the fixed panels of Aaron Becker’s latest wondrous wordless picture book, proffering awesome reminders of both the impacts and impermanence of human progress.
MICHELLE ANNE SCHINGLER (February 27, 2023)
American Gospel
Miah Jeffra
Black Lawrence Press
Hardcover $25.95 (433pp)
978-1-62557-043-7
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
In Miah Jeffra’s novel American Gospel, the gentrification of Baltimore, Maryland, is witnessed through alternating points of view—those of the people affecting it, and those of the people who are affected by it.
When plans for Crabtown, a project aiming to replace a poor neighborhood with a Baltimore-themed amusement park, are approved by city hall, the people of Baltimore are divided. Some will lose their homes to Crabtown; others will profit from it. Among those concerned is Ruth, who attempts to rebuild a stable life in the soon-to-be-demolished neighborhood after running away from her abusive husband; Peter, her son, who attends a good Catholic school on a scholarship and has a bright future, but who struggles with his sexuality and his feelings for a fellow student; Thomas, who is confronted with the loss of the mother who abandoned him as a child and the fact of her remaining property; MacAllister, the developer of Crabtown; and the neighbors who plan to protest Crabtown.
Introducing Baltimore in terms of its architecture, people, and politics, the book includes beautiful descriptions of buildings and characters who hold deep convictions about their town—convictions that often clash with those of others. The city’s diversity has an enlivening effect. Still, people’s threads don’t always intersect: Ruth and Peter are largely unaffected by the planned demolition, more concerned with their own loves, losses, and fears than with eviction notices. The lives of their protesting neighbors are less explored. Thomas gets involved with an occupant of the threatened neighborhood, but the grave consequences of Crabtown’s existence for the people of Baltimore are otherwise hazy.
Still, American Gospel is a serious literary novel set in a contemporary American city that’s troubled by its intersections of politics, race, and class.
MICHAEL ELIAS (February 27, 2023)
Radical by Nature
The Revolutionary Life of Alfred Russel Wallace
James T. Costa
Princeton University Press
Hardcover $39.95 (552pp)
978-0-691-23379-6
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
Though Charles Darwin is the more celebrated founder of theories of evolution and natural selection, his brilliant colleague Alfred Russel Wallace worked out these ideas, too. James T. Costa’s entertaining illustrated biography marks the bicentennial of Wallace’s birth and describes the peripatetic naturalist’s mental and physical strides across geography and time in delicious detail.
How Darwin and Wallace came to their independent discoveries and shook up Victorian science is fascinating. The dichotomy of their backgrounds could not have been more disparate: wealthy, university-educated Darwin had automatic entree to scientific circles, whereas impecunious, energetic Wallace parlayed his voracious reading and gregarious nature into securing free passage and valuable letters of introduction to colonial gatekeepers in the far reaches of the Amazon and the Malay archipelago. Decades of fieldwork securing natural history specimens and ethnological artifacts and a stream of letters and essays about his observations secured his place among the scientific elite.
The lush descriptions of indefatigable Wallace’s expeditions are intense and enjoyable. The rigors of his travels, including malaria, ferocious insects, shipwrecks, and the devastating loss of thousands of specimens and notebooks on the journey home from Brazil are vivid. Costa underscores how these travails were shared by local assistants who did harder work hunting, carrying provisions, and lugging boats upriver and through the dangerous surf.
Crisp storytelling portrays an autodidact with boundless curiosity and empathy. Wallace was a staunch socialist and proponent of land reform, spiritualism, and seances, which exasperated his scientific champions and hindered his career and finances. Costa also plumbs newly available correspondence to document Wallace’s graciousness in ceding glory to and defending Darwin in their shared achievements.
Radical by Nature uncovers fresh details about a remarkable, idiosyncratic scientist and social activist, showing how humans’ understanding of the world was fundamentally altered by his ideas.
RACHEL JAGARESKI (February 27, 2023)
Barbara Hodge
