Rachel Baack

Summary: Tolly Driver is a normal teenager—a near nobody, really, to everyone except his best friend Amber—living in Lamesa, Texas in 1989. It isn’t until a string of violent murders takes place the summer before his senior year that Tolly becomes someone that Lamesa can’t help but note, and not in a way that Tolly ever would have asked for. As Tolly is transformed, Amber investigates and illuminates to him the ways he’s being pulled into the slasher genre against his will.

Summary: It’s December 1985 in Ireland, and Bill Furlong, a hardworking, kindhearted father of five girls, makes a distressing discovery while delivering coal to the local convent. This revelation points to deeper, longstanding issues surrounding the convent’s activities and the town’s willingness to turn a blind eye to them.

This book is a short but poignant one, addressing a historical abuse perpetrated in Ireland between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries and offering readers a vision of hope and integrity in the face of injustices committed by the powerful.

Summary: Piero Martin explains in as close to layman’s terms as one can get the history, applications, and current definitions of the seven units included in the International System of Units (SI) of measurement. He also includes related anecdotes and observations from history and science.

This is a very readable and interesting book that not only helps make incredibly complex concepts accessible to the general public but also explores the way these concepts connect to deeper aspects of our humanity. To put another way Martin’s approach to communicating with his audience (and to quote the friend who recommended the book to me), “This is an author who you can tell really likes other humans.”

Summary: Cyrus Shams is a 28-year-old poet, the son of a mother whose plane was shot out of the sky when he was still an infant and a father whose subsequent emigration from Iran to the United States landed him in an exhausting job at a chicken plant. After recovering from a years-long substance addiction, the young poet becomes fascinated by the concept of martyrs and dying a meaningful death. When Cyrus learns about an artist with terminal cancer who is spending her final days in the Brooklyn Museum talking to patrons, he decides, after some encouragement from his friends Sad James and Zee, the latter of whom accompanies him on the journey, that he has to go see her. Although unsure of his expectations as he approaches conversations with the artist, what Cyrus learns will nonetheless surprise him and, inevitably, readers of his story.

Something I loved about this book was that the author frequently wrote in acknowledgement of confusion or lack of understanding from his characters when other characters made profound, metaphor-laden statements, thus inviting readers to feel comfortable with confusion on their own part. This author, it seems, understands that figurative language, especially when being used to describe highly unique and personal experiences, may be difficult to understand, and that’s not necessarily due to a deficiency of the listener’s or reader’s intelligence.

Summary: Cyrus Shams is a 28-year-old poet, the son of a mother whose plane was shot out of the sky when he was still an infant and a father whose subsequent emigration from Iran to the United States landed him in an exhausting job at a chicken plant. After recovering from a years-long substance addiction, the young poet becomes fascinated by the concept of martyrs and dying a meaningful death. When Cyrus learns about an artist with terminal cancer who is spending her final days in the Brooklyn Museum talking to patrons, he decides, after some encouragement from his friends Sad James and Zee, the latter of whom accompanies him on the journey, that he has to go see her. Although unsure of his expectations as he approaches conversations with the artist, what Cyrus learns will nonetheless surprise him and, inevitably, readers of his story.

Summary: In this work, social scientist Mark Robert Rank explains what he calls the structural vulnerability approach to understanding poverty in the United States. According to this approach, American poverty can be understood by looking at both individual characteristics that make it more likely that any given person will experience poverty (characteristics such as education, race, gender, parents’ socioeconomic status, etc.) and broader structural realities (especially a lack of jobs that would keep families above the poverty line) that make it so that some people will inevitably fall into poverty. Rank then offers a set of solutions that would allow the US to tackle poverty on both the individual and structural levels.

As someone with no background in economics or social policy, I found this book easy to understand and the evidence that Rank offered to support his claims well laid out.

Summary: In 1961, six-year-old Bear Van Laar disappeared on his family’s property. Now, fourteen years later, the second Van Laar child, thirteen-year-old Barbara, has gone missing from her cabin at Camp Emerson, the summer camp owned by her family and hosted on the property adjacent to their estate. As the search for Barbara unfolds, law enforcement, locals, and camp staff and attendees alike begin to ask the inevitable question: Could these two disappearances be connected? And if so, could it be the Van Laars themselves that have something to hide?

Summary: In five stories the author refers to as “work[s] of fiction based on real events,” readers are introduced to several world-renowned scientists, most of whom lived and worked during the time of the World Wars. What the author imagines for his readers are the inner thoughts, and at times, dialogue and select events in these individuals’ lives, all of which reveal the dangers—whether physical, social, emotional, or existential—associated with scientific discovery and absorption in it.

Summary: This is a highly readable book tracing the history of Indigenous nations in North America from antiquity to the present, highlighting their sovereignty and purposeful decision-making. DuVall dispels myths about Native weakness and ignorance in the face of European colonization and centers Indigenous power and self-determination.