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I love travel. I love maps. And I’m devoted to suffering a great deal of angst over the potential for disaster due to climate

The author’s note that opens No Ordinary Assignment, the new memoir by foreign correspondent  by Jane Ferguson, states:

Soil: The Story of a Black Mother's Garden, by poet and essayist Camille Dungy and published last week, is just a lovely

If you’re expecting to simply kick back and cackle to yourself over the insane conspiracy ravings of MAGA and QAnon adherents, Sarah Kendzior’s They Knew: How a Culture of Conspiracy Keeps America Complacent will disappoint.

I said it in my review back in May of David George Haskell’s Sounds Wild and Broken: Sonic Marvels, Evolution's Creativity, and the Crisis of Sensory Extinction: “I already live on a knife-edge of awe, stunned disbelief and overwhelmed incomprehension when it comes to the natural world we inhabit.”

I haven’t had the pleasure of visiting any of the truly ancient trees of the world. The closest I came was during my boyhood in 1960s San Jose, California, where we would sometimes visit Big Basin State Park, home to some 1800-year-old redwoods. A wildfire ravaged 97% of the park in 2020, destroying the historic structures and altering the landscape...but many of the venerable redwoods survived.

Last week was my 67th birthday, so Last Light: How Six Great Artists Made Old Age a Time of Triumph, by Richard Lacayo and published today, seemed to be a vitalizing choice.

The book gives a quick sweeping overview of artists who have worked to a ripe old age.

I Ain’t the Right Kind of Feminist

by Cheryl West, 1983

First Off I’m too confused

Secondly you know my blackness envelops me

Thirdly my articulateness fails me

When the marching feminists come by

I walk with them for a while

And then I trip over pebbles I didn’t see

My sexist heels are probably too high

I’m stuck in the sidewalk cracks

 

Oh where Oh where has my feminism gone

Race and gender have long been the most common entry points to our socio-political parsing of the human body. Ageism and ableism have also become more common as topics of discussion in recent years. Body Language: Writers on Identity, Physicality, and Making Space for Ourselves, edited by Nicole Chung and Matt Ortile and published last week, seeks to expand the discussion much further.