The Love You Save by Goldie Taylor

*A Zibby’s Most Anticipated Book of 2023*
*One of The Root‘s Most Anticipated Books of January*
*A Good Morning America Best Book of January?*
*An Essence Must Read Book of the Year*
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The Love You Save will console and inspire countless people.”–J.R. Moehringer, New York Times bestselling author of The Tender Bar

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings meets Educated in this harrowing, deeply hopeful memoir of family, faith and the power of books–from acclaimed journalist and human rights activist Goldie Taylor

Aunt Gerald takes in anyone who asks, but the conditions are harsh. For her young niece Goldie Taylor, abandoned by her mother and coping with trauma of her own, life in Gerald’s East St. Louis comes with nothing but a threadbare blanket on the living room floor.

But amid the pain and anguish, Goldie discovers a secret. She can find kinship among writers like James Baldwin and Toni Morrison. She can find hope in a nurturing teacher who helps her find her voice. And books, she realizes, can save her life.

Goldie Taylor’s debut memoir shines a light on the strictures of race, class and gender in a post-Jim Crow America while offering a nuanced, empathetic portrait of a family in a pitched battle for its very soul.

Profoundly moving, exquisitely rendered and ultimately uplifting, The Love You Save is a story about hidden strength, perseverance against unimaginable odds, the beauty and pain of girlhood, and the power of the written word.

Maame by Jessica George

Join award-winning broadcaster Alvin Hall on a journey through America’s haunted racial past, with the legendary Green Book as your guide.

For countless Americans, the open road has long been a place where dangers lurk. In the era of Jim Crow, Black travelers encountered locked doors, hostile police, and potentially violent encounters almost everywhere, in both the South and the North. From 1936 to 1967, millions relied on The Negro Motorist Green Book, the definitive guide to businesses where they could safely rest, eat, or sleep. 

Most Americans only know of the guide from the 2018 Green Book movie or the 2020 Lovecraft Country TV show. Alvin Hall set out to revisit the world of the Green Book to instruct us all on the real history of the guide that saved many lives. With his friend Janée Woods Weber, he drove from New York to Detroit to New Orleans, visiting motels, restaurants, shops, and stores where Black Americans once found a friendly welcome. They explored historical and cultural landmarks, from the theatres and clubs where stars like Duke Ellington and Lena Horne performed to the Lorraine Motel where Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated. Along the way, they gathered memories from some of the last living witnesses for whom the Green Book meant survival—remarkable people who not only endured but rose above the hate, building vibrant Black communities against incredible odds.

Driving the Green Book is a vital work of national history as well as a hopeful chronicle of Black resilience and resistance.

The book contains 25 outstanding black and white photos and ephemera.

Driving the Green Book by Alvin Hall

Join award-winning broadcaster Alvin Hall on a journey through America’s haunted racial past, with the legendary Green Book as your guide.

For countless Americans, the open road has long been a place where dangers lurk. In the era of Jim Crow, Black travelers encountered locked doors, hostile police, and potentially violent encounters almost everywhere, in both the South and the North. From 1936 to 1967, millions relied on The Negro Motorist Green Book, the definitive guide to businesses where they could safely rest, eat, or sleep. 

Most Americans only know of the guide from the 2018 Green Book movie or the 2020 Lovecraft Country TV show. Alvin Hall set out to revisit the world of the Green Book to instruct us all on the real history of the guide that saved many lives. With his friend Janée Woods Weber, he drove from New York to Detroit to New Orleans, visiting motels, restaurants, shops, and stores where Black Americans once found a friendly welcome. They explored historical and cultural landmarks, from the theatres and clubs where stars like Duke Ellington and Lena Horne performed to the Lorraine Motel where Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated. Along the way, they gathered memories from some of the last living witnesses for whom the Green Book meant survival—remarkable people who not only endured but rose above the hate, building vibrant Black communities against incredible odds.

Driving the Green Book is a vital work of national history as well as a hopeful chronicle of Black resilience and resistance.

The book contains 25 outstanding black and white photos and ephemera.

The Faraway World by Patricia Engel

From Patricia Engel, whose novel Infinite Country was a New York Times bestseller and a Reese’s Book Club pick, comes an exquisite collection of ten haunting, award-winning short stories set across the Americas and linked by themes of migration, sacrifice, and moral compromise.

Two Colombian expats meet as strangers on the rainy streets of New York City, both burdened with traumatic pasts. In Cuba, a woman discovers her deceased brother’s bones have been stolen, and the love of her life returns from Ecuador for a one-night visit. A cash-strapped couple hustles in Miami, to life-altering ends.

The Faraway World is a collection of arresting stories from the New York Times bestselling author of Infinite Country, Patricia Engel, “a gifted storyteller whose writing shines even in the darkest corners” (The Washington Post). Intimate and panoramic, these stories bring to life the liminality of regret, the vibrancy of community, and the epic deeds and quiet moments of love.

Pirate Enlightenment by David Graeber

The final posthumous work by the coauthor of the major New York Times bestseller The Dawn of Everything.

Pirates have long lived in the realm of romance and fantasy, symbolizing risk, lawlessness, and radical visions of freedom. But at the root of this mythology is a rich history of pirate societies—vibrant, imaginative experiments in self-governance and alternative social formations at the edges of the European empire.

In graduate school, David Graeber conducted ethnographic field research in Madagascar for his doctoral thesis on the island’s politics and history of slavery and magic. During this time, he encountered the Zana-Malata, an ethnic group of mixed descendants of the many pirates who settled on the island at the beginning of the eighteenth century. Pirate Enlightenment, or the Real Libertalia, Graeber’s final posthumous book, is the outgrowth of this early research and the culmination of ideas that he developed in his classic, bestselling works Debt and The Dawn of Everything (written with the archaeologist David Wengrow). In this lively, incisive exploration, Graeber considers how the protodemocratic, even libertarian practices of the Zana-Malata came to shape the Enlightenment project defined for too long as distinctly European. He illuminates the non-European origins of what we consider to be “Western” thought and endeavors to recover forgotten forms of social and political order that gesture toward new, hopeful possibilities for the future.

This Other Eden by Paul Harding

From the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Tinkers, a novel inspired by the true story of Malaga Island, an isolated island off the coast of Maine that became one of the first racially integrated towns in the Northeast.

In 1792, formerly enslaved Benjamin Honey and his Irish wife, Patience, discover an island where they can make a life together. Over a century later, the Honeys’ descendants and a diverse group of neighbors are desperately poor, isolated, and often hungry, but nevertheless protected from the hostility awaiting them on the mainland.

During the tumultuous summer of 1912, Matthew Diamond, a retired, idealistic but prejudiced schoolteacher-turned-missionary, disrupts the community’s fragile balance through his efforts to educate its children. His presence attracts the attention of authorities on the mainland who, under the influence of the eugenics-thinking popular among progressives of the day, decide to forcibly evacuate the island, institutionalize its residents, and develop the island as a vacation destination. Beginning with a hurricane flood reminiscent of the story of Noah’s Ark, the novel ends with yet another Ark.

In prose of breathtaking beauty and power, Paul Harding brings to life an unforgettable cast of characters: Iris and Violet McDermott, sisters raising three orphaned Penobscot children; Theophilus and Candace Larks and their brood of vagabond children; the prophetic Zachary Hand to God Proverbs, a Civil War veteran who lives in a hollow tree; and more. A spellbinding story of resistance and survival, This Other Eden is an enduring testament to the struggle to preserve human dignity in the face of intolerance and injustice.

Unraveling by Peggy Orenstein

“Orenstein is such a breezy, funny writer, it’s easy to forget she’s an important thinker too.”—People

In this lively, funny memoir, Peggy Orenstein sets out to make a sweater from scratch—shearing, spinning, dyeing wool—and in the process discovers how we find our deepest selves through craft. Orenstein spins a yarn that will appeal to everyone.  

The COVID pandemic propelled many people to change their lives in ways large and small. Some adopted puppies. Others stress-baked. Peggy Orenstein, a lifelong knitter, went just a little further. To keep herself engaged and cope with a series of seismic shifts in family life, she set out to make a garment from the ground up: learning to shear sheep, spin and dye yarn, then knitting herself a sweater.

Orenstein hoped the project would help her process not just wool but her grief over the recent death of her mother and the decline of her dad, the impending departure of her college-bound daughter, and other thorny issues of aging as a woman in a culture that by turns ignores and disdains them. What she didn’t expect was a journey into some of the major issues of our time: climate anxiety, racial justice, women’s rights, the impact of technology, sustainability, and, ultimately, the meaning of home.

With her wry voice, sharp intelligence, and exuberant honesty, Orenstein shares her year-long journey as daughter, wife, mother, writer, and maker—and teaches us all something about creativity and connection. 

February Staff Pick: Picasso’s War

Picasso’s War: How Modern Art Came to America by Hugh Eakin, picked by store co-founder, George Cooper

At the beginning of the 20th Century, America was a cultural backwater, with no sense of the art revolution in Europe. This is a sterling thriller about how a scrappy group of modern art lovers, through two world wars, founded the now iconic MOMA and brought Picasso, Matisse, Van Gogh and the world of modern art to America. And in the process saved countless works from Nazi hands and established this country as the center of the art world. A nonfiction page turner.

~ George Cooper

“[Eakin] has mastered this material. . . . The book soars.” – The New York Times Book Review

A Q&A with Cricket Desmarais

Local mover & shaker Cricket Desmarais is a writer, artist, dancer and scientist. She is also the author of LOVE ON THE ROCK, a compilation of her early 2000’s dating column in the Florida Keys Keynoter. We had a chance to chat with her, in advance of her Feb. 3 event (6:30 in person at Hugh’s View, register here), and find out why now is the time for a second chance for LOVE ON THE ROCK.

Q: If you would, tell us a little bit about LOVE ON THE ROCK?

A: LOVE ON THE ROCK is a compilation of work from my year as a dating columnist for Florida Keys Keynoter in 2005 – 2006. I like to think of it as a “time-capsule laugh” that paints a picture of what it was like (and possibly still is) to date on a tiny island. I spent that year with my dating life under a microscope and connected with other “Singletons” about theirs. I researched our human biological drive and social “norms” to make sense of it all. And I called on my readers to reflect on their own beliefs and behaviors. There’s some obvious humor in that, but there’s also a lot of heart.

Q: What made you decide now was the time to collect and republish a column that originally ran in 2005-2006?

A: I have wanted to do this for over a decade but the “free” time to do so just never seemed to arrive. I made a commitment last year to get several completed projects out of my computer and into the world. This one seemed like the easiest since I knew people had already read the original, lessening any anxiety of putting it out there.

Q: What was it like to reread work you’d written 17 years prior?

A: A little bit cringe but also a bit hopeful. I was reminded that I once had a sense of humor & a pretty active dating life

Q: What was the process of getting the book ready for publication like?

A: Grueling. Being an artist comes with a lot of bootstrapping. In an ideal world, someone else would do all the things. I highly recommend not copy editing your own work. Ever. You’ll regret it when you read teh first print run of you book, I garauntee. Wink.

Q: Did you edit the columns or is this what people would have read in the Keynoter?

A: There was some necessary copy editing and occasional sentence structure shifts or omissions, but it’s pretty much the same and in the same order as they came out. I thought about editing some of it to be more inclusive around gender identity but decided against it. This is a snapshot of life in the mid aughts. History is what it is, & erasing or changing that didn’t sit right.

Q: Give us a teaser. What’s one of your favorite stories from the book?

A: The columns were originally printed in a Keys-wide, family-friendly publication. You can imagine that talking about dating and all that goes with it can get pretty limited when you layer in censorship. I had to be creative and used a lot of innuendos. Midway into the year, my publisher finally gave me the green light to write a piece on sex. I invited people to email me their insights, stories, and secrets to help me write “The Proper Naughty Column” and got an inbox full of – nothing.

That column actually became one of my favorites because I somehow managed to not only come up with a column for that week but also include a fantastic Sharon Olds’ poem (“The Solution”). It starts like this:

Finally, they got the Singles problem under / control, they made it scientific They opened huge/ Sex Centers – you could simply go and state what you / wanted and they would find you someone who wanted that/ too. You would stand under a sign saying I Like To/ Be Touched and Held and when someone came and / stood under the sign saying I Like to Touch and Hold they would send the two of you off together.

It gets more saucy & hilarious after that. Sharon Olds was one of my professors at NYU, so including her felt like an homage to her.

It also references interesting tidbits about the sexual behavior of animals. Because everyone should know that “Australian marsupial mice die of exhaustion from their twelve-hour romps, bat rays are romantics and do it only in the moonlight, and a pig’s big O is said to last half an hour Lucky, lucky.”

Q: What do you hope people will take away from the book?
A: Mostly I just want to give people a laugh & a bit of an escape. If they could take anything away from it, I’d hope for them it would be a sense of humor about their own dating history, an invitation to take the time to explore & enjoy who they truly are without the need for that special “other” while maintaining hope for what’s to come.

Q: How long have you lived in Key West? What originally brought you here and from where?

A: I came to Key West in 1997-1999 from Brooklyn during my grad school summer & winter breaks, working as a mate in the charter boat industry while staying at my mom’s. The creative culture of the City fed me but not as much as the daily connection to the sea I had when here. After I graduated, I came back “for now,” thinking I’d save money to move back to the central coast of California, where I lived prior to NYU. I did move there shortly thereafter but quickly circled back. It’s special there, too, but there’s no place like home.

Q: In addition to being a writer, you’re an artist, a dancer, a yoga practitioner and teacher, as well as a marine scientist. How do your interests come together and feed your writing?

A: I don’t know that they’re ever apart, really. It’s a bit more symbiotic, I think, even though the expression of each is different from one to the other. The common thread is observation—of the self & of the outer world— powered by a discipline of showing up for it, for staying in the moment of what is & keeping an open heart while doing so. Writing a poem, monitoring coral, dancing in the Studios’ window dressed like a wind-up doll – they all evoke a sense of connection & wonder for & in me. All of that informs & influences my life & the expression of it.

Q: What are you reading and recommending these days?
A: I’m reading Life on the Rocks: Building a Future for Coral Reefs by Juli Berwald. It’s a gorgeous and relatable blend of science writing & memoir – coral ecology & restoration & her daughter’s mental health struggle— that explores hope and healing against all odds.