Book of the Day Roundup: September 11-15, 2023
The Future of the Responsible Company
What We’ve Learned from Patagonia’s First 50 Years
Vincent Stanley
Yvon Chouinard
Patagonia
Softcover $22.00 (208pp)
978-1-952338-11-3
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
Vincent Stanley and Yvon Chouinard’s book The Future of the Responsible Company reflects on the first fifty years of the outdoor retailer Patagonia.
Co-written by the company’s founder, the book looks at the purpose-driven California-based company, documenting how it goes beyond mere profit chasing with initiatives like supporting the restoration of the dead Ventura River and supporting a raptor rehabilitation center that nurses injured birds back to health. The recreational clothing retailer is presented as a shining example of what corporate America could be at a time when more young college graduates only want to work for virtuous employers who reflect their values.
Beyond the book’s self-mythologizing elements are candid insights: Patagonia’s publishing wing, an offshoot of a parent company that makes outdoor apparel and gear, helped the company to a much wider market. Thanks, in part, to such efforts, Patagonia rose from an organization made up of a few climbers and surfers into a revered global brand that clears more than a billion in annual revenue. And it does an impressive job of putting its progressive values to work: it was an early childcare adopter and donated 10% of profits to environmental causes.
Patagonia became a foundation-owned business in time; the book shows why that structure advances its values, noting such arrangements have been common in Europe for over a century. It also issues a call for other companies to do their part in saving the earth instead of despoiling it, sharing a clear template for social responsibility. Indeed, its appendixes include checklists for other companies looking to have a positive impact on the world.
The Future of the Responsible Company is rousing as it looks back at Patagonia’s history and considers what it means to be a responsible company in a climate-changing world.
JOSEPH S. PETE (August 27, 2023)
Wild Geese
Soula Emmanuel
The Feminist Press
Softcover $17.95 (248pp)
978-1-55861-013-2
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
A trans woman confronts her uneasy past when her former girlfriend makes an unexpected visit in Soula Emmanuel’s intimate, provocative novel Wild Geese.
Phoebe is a thirty-year-old Irish graduate student in Copenhagen. Halfway through her doctorate program, covering a topic she’s no longer interested in, she feels as though she’s living in a postscript. Then Grace shows up without notice, saying she’s just stopped by “to catch up a bit.” But their relationship ended seven years ago with an agreement “to stop catching up.”
Although wishing Grace gone, Phoebe lets her in. With that simple gesture, she is thrust into confrontations with the past she decided to forget. While taking Grace on an obligatory tour of Copenhagen, the women share stories they’ve never spoken about before. Phoebe (who was assigned “male” at birth) tells Grace about her childhood, including what it was like to stumble about in her mother’s high heels knowing she was different. And Grace reveals the painful reason she broke off their relationship.
The prose is complex, beautiful, and compelling. Phoebe’s inner world shimmers in half-light as she seeks clarity about her place in a transphobic world. She asks intriguing questions about how much is gained and how much is lost in the quest for personal authenticity, confessing that “the whole effort [is] terrifying, but to turn away seemed even more so.” That statement encapsulates the feeling at the book’s close, when Grace has left and Phoebe makes a phone call, the results of which are left unknown.
Wild Geese is a sensitive, thoughtful novel about personal identity, the loss of illusions, and growth into love and wholeness.
KRISTINE MORRIS (August 27, 2023)
Landscapes
Christine Lai
Two Dollar Radio
Hardcover $26.00 (217pp)
978-1-953387-38-7
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
In Christine Lai’s haunting novel Landscapes, a wounded woman contends with memories, artifacts, loss, and hope.
Penelope is an English country estate’s archivist and librarian; she’s been there for twenty-two years. Her partner, Aidan, is an heir to the estate. It’s a place of former splendor, now damaged by climate change extremes, including flooding, heatwaves, droughts, and earthquakes. When the estate’s upkeep becomes overwhelming, it is sold.
Before moving to a new home designed by Aidan, Penelope works to catalog the estate’s extensive collections. Additional stress comes from the impending visit of Aidan’s brother, Julian. Penelope’s once intimate friendship with Julian ended when he assaulted her; he relinquished his share of the estate and moved to New York. Penelope did not report the crime to the police and hasn’t seen Julian since.
Julian is intelligent, obsessive, and violent. He exhibits pathological sensitivity. While traveling back to the estate, he reflects upon his relationship with Daphne, which he ended by sending Daphne an unflattering photograph of herself and a detailed “dossier” of her faults enclosed in a lovely, ribbon-tied box.
As Julian’s arrival approaches, Penelope remembers how she struggled to recover after the brutal rape. She contemplates artworks depicting women being violated and exploited. She recalls a self-drawn map of emotional “landmines,” or places in London that she visited with Julian to which she could no longer return.
The book creates a melancholy division between the arid, uncertain present and the recent past, “when the world was a beautiful blue-green orb that appeared unchanging.” Yet even amid shortages and forced migrations, there is cautious excitement over sudden snowfalls or tiny plants that force their way through fissures.
Ethereal and unsparing, Landscapes is a novel about destruction, endurance, and resilience.
MEG NOLA (August 27, 2023)
The Last Island
Discovery, Defiance, and the Most Elusive Tribe on Earth
Adam Goodheart
Godine
Hardcover $28.95 (272pp)
978-1-56792-682-8
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
Adam Goodheart’s book The Last Island collects compelling and tragic anecdotes about various failed efforts, from the Victorian age to the present, to encounter and establish permanent contact with perhaps the last self-isolated people on Earth—the small tribe on North Sentinel Island, which belongs to the Andaman archipelago in the eastern Indian Ocean.
In the 1990s, a journalism assignment brought Goodheart in contact with the nearby, reclusive Jarawa tribe and near North Sentinel Island’s shore, which set off his lifelong obsession with understanding North Sentinel Island’s people and why they have been persistent (and somewhat successful) in resisting the outside world. Goodheart retraces contacts both accidental (shipwrecks) and deliberate (expeditions, government initiatives) with the tribe, including his own stealthy predawn boat ride to the island. Most encounters were brief; many were deadly for one or both parties. There are stories of kidnappings, murders, infectious diseases, and unsuccessful efforts to introduce the islanders to Western culture.
Goodheart’s research took him to archives in Calcutta and London. His accounts are accompanied by a series of stunning black-and-white portraits of the islanders taken in the late 1800s; these have a timeless, haunting quality.
There is more awe than adventure in the book’s meandering vignettes, and more searching for answers than discovery. Artful metaphors combine with the deft use of seafaring language to propel the narrative. But curiosity lingers. Why, as recently as 2018, would the tribe kill someone coming ashore waving a proverbial white flag (this time a young, zealous would-be Christian missionary from America, John Chau)?
Ultimately, while The Last Island does not provide such answers, it’s a worthy addition to adventure and survival narratives—a satisfying effort to dispel some of the mystery shrouding the last earthly outpost of inhabitants who still live outside of time as many know it.
BRIAN D. HENDERSON (August 27, 2023)
Prince in Comics!
Tony Lourenco
Nicolas Finet
NBM Publishing
Hardcover $27.99 (168pp)
978-1-68112-321-9
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
The life and career of legendary musician and performer Prince is given graphic novel treatment in Prince in Comics!
Prince showed interest in, and aptitude for, music from a young age. He was influenced by his father, a jazz piano player, and his mother, a vocalist. His life as a professional entertainer surged forward with a Warner Brothers record deal signed when he was nineteen; a series of groundbreaking songs followed. And Prince assumed an intriguing, enigmatic persona throughout his career, taking chances with his innovations in music, movies, and marketing.
The book handles much of Prince’s life story in a reportorial style, using his quotes to tell his story too. It also approaches its subject from interesting and oblique angles, recounting the words and impressions of people whose lives intersected with Prince’s, including percussionist Sheila E.; Larry Graham, a musician who introduced Prince to the Jehovah’s Witnesses; and two construction workers at Prince’s Paisley Park studio complex.
The book is illustrated by a variety of artists, giving each chapter a new and exciting look and feel. Each of the twenty sections ends with a two-page text and photograph recapitulation, showing album covers, movie stills, and even a photograph of Prince’s childhood home. A list of recommended albums, films, music videos, and YouTube clips is an invaluable addition, given Prince’s enormous output.
Prince in Comics! is a fascinating pictorial profile of a prodigious talent—the artist forever known as Prince.
PETER DABBENE (August 27, 2023)
Barbara Hodge
