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Powell's Staff:
Five Book Friday: In Memoriam
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Every year, the booksellers at Powell’s submit their Top Fives: their five favorite books that were released in 2023. It’s a list that, when put together, shows just how varied and interesting the book tastes of Powell’s booksellers are. I highly recommend digging into the recommendations — we would never lead you astray — but today...
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Brontez Purnell:
Powell’s Q&A: Brontez Purnell, author of ‘Ten Bridges I’ve Burnt’
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Rachael P.:
Starter Pack: Where to Begin with Ursula K. Le Guin
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Customer Comments
Kavita has commented on (5) products
Odetta A Life in Music & Protest
by
Ian Zack
Kavita
, April 21, 2020
A complete disappointment. I pre-ordered the book in hopes of learning more about Odetta, whose voice and politics resonated in the bones of my generation. I find Ian Zack’s writing smarmy, condescending toward Odetta, and lacking eloquence, but what is most offensive is that as a white man, he feels entitled to judge the accuracy of her opinions about who and what was racist. If Odetta says her manager Al Grossman was racist and “built his business on my back," I believe her. Ian Zack spends several pages defending Grossman. Zack interviews a number of people, including one whose claim to authenticity is that he was a white man married to a black woman, to prove Odetta wrong about Grossman. And that’s just one example. The book is peppered with Zack’s disrespect for Odetta’s understanding of racism and all the ways that it affected her career. He doesn't mention her connection with New Orleans and her good friend Mike Stark. He completely fails to grasp her sexual fluidity and assumes that because she had love affairs with men, she was heterosexual. He misses her spirituality and her artistic genius. Odetta was much larger than Ian Zack can conceive. I call him on his white privilege, his thinly-disguised belief in his own superiority, his desire to cash in on her legacy. He doesn't have it in him to perceive her integrity and her power.
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Junos Swans
by
Tamsen Wolff
Kavita
, November 05, 2018
“Listen, I like a love story,” Nina begins, sounding like a female Holden Caulfield. “And this would be a love story except that Sarah wrecked it.” It’s the tale of a love-crazed fool, the fool in each of us, so obsessed and self-absorbed that we exhaust and alienate our sane friends. We, the once(or-serially) love-struck, recognize ourselves; we are embarrassed; and we laugh. “That Sarah doesn’t want or need me or care, that she didn’t choose me, is like having a long thin sword in my chest. Like a good two feet of flat skinny blade sticking out of my chest, so that movement--just walking or standing up even--makes that protruding blade twang and reverberate through my heart and all the way to my guts.” Kissing another girl, Nina yearns to tell the sour-faced girls in her theatre group, “will break your world open.... You have no idea. There will be a before and after like no other.” Not anguished about sexual identity, Nina is spellbound by her own prettiness--and Sarah’s. That these are two girls in love is not incidental, but neither is it titillating. Wolff accurately describes the minds of the love-obsessed, but she holds no truck with voyeurs. Juno’s Swans is about the varieties of love. Unconditional love: Nina’s grandparents, facing encroaching dementia, are archetypes, the grandfather’s “majestic bulk”, the “elegant stem” of the grandmother. Friendship: Nina comes to wisdom through the grounded and sardonic counterpoint of her sidekick Titch. Love for art: Wolff, a theatre professor, knows how coaches and directors can exploit the minds and bodies of actors for “truth” in representation. But above all, this is a comedy: an unflinching and uproarious dissection of the love that drives us mad.
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Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America
by
Ibram X. Kendi
Kavita
, May 29, 2018
The most engaging and brilliant book I've read in years. Not since Warmth of Other Suns, by Isabel Wilkerson, have I been so riveted to the page by a combination of spine-tingling writing and meticulous research. He examines three currents of thought about race: segregationist, assimilationist, and anti-racist. All three are deeply rooted in American culture--and indeed in global culture. He examines the history of racist thought by investigating five world-famous, unforgettable individuals--and in telling their stories, he reaches back to the ancient African cultures, to Greek and Roman thought, and to the particular manifestation of capitalism that has developed in the USA, built on genocide and slavery. Despite the grim history, it is an upbeat book because it becomes clear that every one of us can--if we wish--develop our anti-racist thinking, and we can lean on our anti-racist ancestors of all colors to support us in that.
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Orange Is the New Black One Year in a Womens Prison
by
Piper Kerman
Kavita
, January 03, 2011
Piper Kerman had a charmed life. She was the happy product of a functional family, brilliant, privileged, lucky, and much-loved. She looked like a Barbi Doll, she graduated from Smith College, she had a few wild adventures, and then suddenly she was behind bars. Instead of the Why Me whine you might expect from a woman ill-prepared to meet adversity, Kerman writes a love song to the women in orange who taught her what class is, how it works, who has voice and who doesn't, and what it means to wake up. There are several heroines in this book, and Kerman isn't one of them, but she tells an unforgettable story of the courage of ordinary poor women trapped between hard circumstances and harder choices. If you've never been to prison, read this book. If you've been there, you might find yourself in it.
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Weight
by
Jeanette Winterson
Kavita
, January 03, 2011
Poetic prose, every page cut like a gem. Winterson re-tells the story of Atlas, who holds the weight of the world on his shoulders, and his dicey dealings with Heracles, "a bastard and a blagger, but the only man alive who could relieve Atlas of his burden." In and around their story weaves a little dog named Laika, rescued from a Russian satellite, a few golden apples, and various gods, goddesses, and mortals. The question is, What would it be like to lay down our burdens? What would happen if those among us who think the weight rests on us should just quietly walk away?
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