USING GIFT CARDS: Non-Fiction

Now that The Big Day's come and gone, lots of us have some giftcards, or some actual filthy lucre, to spend. There being no better way to spend that haul than on books, here are some reasonably priced options you might not've thought of to get your story needs met. ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

QUEEN MOTHER: Black Nationalism, Reparations, and the Untold Story of Audley Moore
ASHLEY D. FARMER
Pantheon Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

A LIBRARY JOURNAL BEST BOOK OF 2025

2025 National Book Critics Circle Award finalist for Biography!

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: From an award-winning historian of radical Black politics comes the definitive biography of Queen Mother Audley Moore—foremother of the Black Nationalism movement and trailblazer in the fight for reparations

In the world of radical Black politics, the name Audley Moore commands unquestioned respect. Across the nine decades of her life, Queen Mother Moore distinguished herself as a leading progenitor of Black Nationalism, the founder of the modern reparations movement, and a mentor to some of America's most influential Black activists from her homes in North Philadelphia and Harlem.

And yet, she is far less remembered than many of her peers and protégés—Marcus Garvey, Malcolm X, and Muhammad Ahmad, to name just a few—and the ephemera of her life are either lost or plundered. In Queen Mother, celebrated writer and historian Ashley D. Farmer restores Moore's faded portrait, delivering the first ever definitive account of her life and enduring legacy.

Deeply researched and richly detailed, Queen Mother is more than just the biography of an American icon. It's a narrative history of 20th-century Black radicalism, told through the lens of the woman whose grit and determination sustained the movement.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Listen to the author on the Smarty Pants podcast!

Black nationalism. Reparations for slavery's ongoing horrors. A long lifetime of refusing to sit down and shut up, refusing to be a good girl, declining to accept partial and insincere and less-than sops and stop-gaps. "Queen Mother" is a very good title for Audley Moore and a good character analysis of her.

It pains me I knew little about her until now, until someone pulled together threads her proteges had deliberately unpicked and appropriated. She was truly unforgivable to the PTB within and without the Civil Rights movement because she was that powerless victim, a woman; yet her every act and every word gave the lie to that characterization. No one anywhere ever comes across less like a victim than Audley Moore.

She got done wrong to all the damn time, but that did not make her a victim...an identity she rejected, along with mainstreaming, assimilation, and capitalism. It's no wonder she was ignored by historians of the movement until now. She is guaranteed to scare, offend, and even radicalize the very kind of white guy who will commit racist violence. Since those guys are already doing it, empowered by the kakistocracy presently in government in the US, along comes Author Farmer to be introduced to Queen Mother Audley Moore as a child; galvanized by her Presence, her affect on those around her, Author Farmer became her biographer in due course. Outrage at not finding any records cache or archive of her life, the biographer took her considerable powers of persuasion and of study to pull back together the deliberately unpicked threads of an incredible life.

If you care at all about why, how, and at what our country needs to look honestly at itself, use some of your holiday pilf to procure this excellent, easy-to-read, necessary to understand book. Rescuing a major force from calculated desuetude is the act of a true apostle of truth.

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ENSHITTIFICATION: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It
CORY DOCTOROW
MCD x FSG (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$15.99 ebook, available now

WINNER OF the 2026 Locus Award for NON-FICTION!

A LIBRARY JOURNAL BEST BOOK OF 2025

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: Explaining the process of the “enshittification” of digital platforms over time and what to do about it.

Cory Doctorow's Enshittification takes a witty yet incisive look at the tech landscape, where platforms like TikTok, Facebook, and Google start off great—before they inevitably turn terrible. In this contemporary moment of digital decline, Doctorow explores how tech giants lure users in with convenience and then degrade their services over time, squeezing profit at the cost of user experience. With a mix of sharp humor and deep insight, he unveils the slow creep of "enshittification," turning the online world into a worse place, one algorithm at a time.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Enshittification...it's not just for tech anymore. Popularized by Author Doctorow beginning in 2022, the word appeared online in the teens and identified exactly the capitalist endgame of charging you more and delivering less for it.

The model's simplicity is its strength. It is really down to real, enforced regulation to prevent this appalling greed from costing the users huge sums of money.

As the tech scum were willing to share their stolen good with the regulators, guess what didn't happen. Ever. The current spate of online regulation is hunky-dory by the tech scum because it makes them in an even more powerful position, requiring more and more and more data to be collected...that they can use to surveil you,to extract ever more profit from surveiling you. Ten years ago, I reviewed David Brin's THE TRANSPARENT SOCIETY, his prescient 1999 warning about today's reality: NO PRIVACY only profit.

We weren't listening then, aren't listening to Author Doctorow's blaring klaxon now, and look where it's got us. Right about now is the time to read this book and heed its warning.

Please.

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READ THIS WHEN THINGS FALL APART: Letters to Activists in Crisis
KELLY HAYES (Editor)
AK Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$18.00 all editions, available now

The Independent Press Top 40 Bestsellers: Non-Fiction For the week ending May 18, 2026

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: From the co-author of Let This Radicalize You, a collection of letters to inspire activists to continue the fight

Organizers are well seasoned in defeat. We study movement histories, strategize collectively, and gather strength in direct action, knowing that liberation does not arrive overnight, but that the fight is worth it. But what happens when political and personal crises overlap, and the despair becomes overwhelming? Where do we turn when the process of organizing no longer feels like a site of refuge, but isolating, or even tragic?

Read This When Things Fall Apart is a collection of letters written to organizers in crisis who are struggling with the conflicts, heartbreaks, and catastrophes that activists so often experience. From grief to exhaustion, fractured relationships, state violence and interpersonal violence, the struggle for justice can be tumultuous. Each letter invites the reader to the writer’s particular world in abortion defense, organizing within prison walls, recuperating from state repression after the 2020 uprisings, or as a new parent struggling to find their way in movement spaces, and offers an authentic account of moving through difficult times.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Burnout to burning the candle at both ends, every human one of is hits the wall of what we can do eventually. Oftentimes that spells the end of that person's activism. It's hard to invent solutions to problems in yourself and your personal sphere that you've never faced before, all while trying to fix things The World℠ would prefer you left alone...and also shut up about so "They" don't have to hear it.

So what better self-gift than a collection of letters to you, teetering on the edge of or mired deep in the falling-apart of the world, that show you it's happened before and been overcome? Even if no idea in this book resonates with you...that would surprise me a lot...or you've already done it before, just the reminder that you are not the first to face this and it's been overcome before is hugely valuable. Support, understanding, fellow feeling, commiseration, are all available in these pages. It can do you a world of good just to know others are, were, have been where you are now.

We can not afford to let challenges met and surmounted by those who went on this journey of resistance to illegitimate authority before us halt our gift of energy and effort in bettering the world be snuffed out. We have a long way to go...we'll only get to the better, kinder, fairer world we want to see if we use every tool in the world's chest to make ourselves as capable and as forearmed as we can.

I recommend this read for its tonic properties because they worked on me.

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PERFECT VICTIMS AND THE POLITICS OF APPEAL
MOHAMMED EL-KURD
Haymarket Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$9.99 ebook, available now

The Independent Press Top 40 Bestsellers: Non-Fiction For the week ending June 9, 2026

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: Perfect Victims is an urgent affirmation of the Palestinian condition of resistance and refusal―an ode to the steadfastness of a nation.

Palestine is a microcosm of the on fire, stubborn, fragmented, dignified. While a settler colonial state continues to inflict devastating violence, fundamental truths are deliberately obscured—the perpetrators are coddled while the victims are blamed and placed on trial.

Why must Palestinians prove their humanity? And what are the implications of such an infuriatingly impossible task? With fearless prose and lyrical precision, Mohammed El-Kurd refuses a life spent in cross-examination. Rather than asking the oppressed to perform a perfect victimhood, El-Kurd asks friends and foes alike to look Palestinians in the eye, forgoing both deference and condemnation.

How we see Palestine reveals how we see each other; how we see everything else. Masterfully combining candid testimony, history, and reportage, Perfect Victims presents a powerfully simple dignity for the Palestinian.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Okay, I realize I'm unlikely to win this battle for your Yule gift card money. I'm gonna try because 2026 is not going to be an easy year for any of the warring parts of the world. In writing this book, Author El-Kurd did not use his polite appeaser voice. He does not pretend he is "reasonable" about the genocide being perpetrated on his people. He asks us to interrogate why this heinous act is not more in the foreground of our awareness. It is not the first time genocide has been perpetrated in this century. What allows that to continue?

How are good little capitalist consumers complicit in this media landscape that fails to condemn the crimes being committed? The mere mention of the crime of genocide is too divisive, is not acceptable discourse because...?

Those who dare to support Palestinians having full equal rights in their homeland are canceled, are required to prove they don't mean Israel should suffer consequences for committing this crime against humanity, and we accept it because...? Why is it The System℠ tells us what we may say about this ongoing crime against humanity and we obey?

It is time to interrogate our own (in)action regarding settler colonialism's record of injustices and crimes all over the world. Yes, that includes the US, Canada, Mexico, etc etc. This reckoning with the crimes committed by our ancestors, white people, will come no matter what. Get your mind ready by reading this book's very specific takedowns of the comfy little lies and ugly misdirections that have prevented a reckoning...but are failing at last, ever faster, ever more publicly to keep the cork in the bottle.

It's never a good idea to go into a discussion without any idea what you're discussing. Ignorance, in today's world, is a choice.

A very bad, stupid choice. Educate yourself before knowledge is thrust on you.

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ISRAEL ON THE BRINK: And the Eight Revolutions that Could Lead to Decolonization and Coexistence
ILAN PAPPÉ
Beacon Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$13.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: A renowned Israeli-British historian argues Israel is fracturing, and considers the issues that must be centered for a peaceful future for Palestinians and Jews alike

In this timely book, historian Ilan Pappé argues that with the 2022 election of the most right-wing government in Israel’s history, the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel, and the subsequent Israeli war on Gaza, political fractures inherent in the Jewish state have expanded dangerously—and will potentially lead to Israel's collapse. With the goal of working towards a transition that is as peaceful as possible, Pappé sets out his thoughts about the risks and opportunities emerging from this historical moment.

Eight “mini-revolutions,” he argues, will be necessary for this more hopeful future to emerge, including:

Relocating the Right of Return of the Palestinian refugees to the center of the future vision

Establishing a new definition for the Jewish collective in historical Palestine

Finalizing a plan for the future of the Jewish settlements built in the West Bank since 1967, and

Creating a new strategy for a united Palestinian national movement

Pappé concretely envisions a more just future—a democratic decolonized state for both Palestinians and Israelis—and how we might get there.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Ilan Pappé's PALESTINE IN A WORLD ON FIRE (q.v.) contained temperature-taking interviews with many of the world's eminent progressives on the subject of public perception of Palestine. Now there comes via Beacon Press the proposal for a roadmap out of this quagmire.

Considering more West Bank Jewish settlements were approved this week I don't foresee the proposals herein being enacted or taken seriously by Israeli officials.

Considering the state of the world's opinion of Bibi and his gang of thugs, it feels more like we should be preparing for a collapse of the state.

It is a good idea for honest, morally sound people to get their heads around what eminent and practical thinkers propose as the future course of this extremely troubled part of the world. Much disgusting vitriolic hysteria will be spewed as things change, so have the antidote in your head already so as not to add to the chaos that's coming.

RED FLAG WARNING: Mutual Aid and Survival in California’s Fire Country, a very useful anthology of leaders-by-example

RED FLAG WARNING: Mutual Aid and Survival in California’s Fire Country
DANI BURLISON & MARGARET ELYSIA GARCIA (editors; introduction by Manjula Martin)
AK Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$18.00 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Two survivors of California fires compile a guide for living physically, mentally, and emotionally amid ecological destruction.

When warm temperatures, low humidity, and strong winds combine they produce an increased risk of fire danger called a "red flag warning"—a common event in Northern California. Through essays and interviews, Red Flag Warning sheds light on how wildfire impacts our communities and offers wisdom on living with fire from Indigenous Californians, community organizers, mental health care workers, environmentalists, fire analysts, sustainable loggers, parents, and more.

The collection explores the ways these fires take root and impact rural and urban Northern California, it examines our relationships to place and community and to understand the importance of mutual aid, organizing, community care, land stewardship, and resilience. Red Flag Warning covers the stories not frequently found in the often disaster-porn obsessed media and exposes what is lost in the news written by parachute journalists. Readers are invited to examine what fire can and does mean to them, what it means for us to reimagine the world, to prepare for the worst, and to examine flames through different lenses. Contributors include Manjula Martin, Hiya Swanhuyser, Zeke Lunder, Lasara Firefox Allen, Margo Robbins, Kailea Frederick, Redbird Willie, and more.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: "Victims of climate disaster" is a very effective distancing and Othering way to look at the results of humanity's unbridled greed. It puts the reader, or viewer, outside the horrors enacted for their titillated pity.

This anthology of essays is not about that. It is a series of accounts from the people in the (sometimes literal) trenches; these are the stories that your news source draws from to present its gods'-eye view and enable thereby your hunger for information without the emotional investment of intimacy.

Tear off the bandage, look at the real wound.

We're pretty complacent, us readers. We eagerly feed our heads information. It's the miracle, and I do not use the term lightly, of the internet age. We sit on an IMMENSE information structure, one designed ad hoc. We get to edit what from it we consume, how we consume it...we never need to examine the act of consumption itself. When one consumes a thing it must be processed, broken into needed and not-needed parts, then winnowed to remove the not-needed bits.

Our minds perform this function automatically (thanks to many thousands of hours' training), just like our guts do with sustenance. The main difference is we can train our brains to do different things more readily than our guts. What we put into them is in both cases the determining factor of what we get out.

Consuming more "disaster porn" reportage is not informing you of anything more than some selectively presented bits of fact in a heavy sauce of context, aka distortion. It's not usually done maliciously or with the intent to misinform you, but that is always, inevitably, the effect of choosing an "angle" to report.

This very short anthology, under two hundred pages, is an excellent way to jailbreak your information stream with stories of how people really there, with property at risk and friends/lovers/neighbors to care for, managed the balancing act of keeping themselves safe while taking needed action. What did they lose? Who did they lose? How does the world look to them now? What does taking personal action look like in an overwhelming, immense, uncontrollable apocalypse?

More news coverage will only create a seriously unhelpful sense of remove from what is happening to us. It is not just happening around us. In the voices of those who actually faced this unimaginable horror and still used their learned empathetic response to do something selfless, the essays here give us a gift of example to use and to praise. Not every essay is perfectly polished, or equally carefully thought out; but that's the nature of this format, and they all add their bit to the gestalt: Do something. Help. Serve a greater purpose.

Learn and take inspiration from these stories of what ordinary people, acting on their empathetic promptings, did (and can do) for themselves and each other.

MARGARET KILLJOY'S PAGE: THE SAPLING CAGE, transfem MC wants to save the kingdom; & A COUNTRY OF GHOSTS, queer, anarchist SF

THE SAPLING CAGE (Daughters of the Empty Throne #1)
MARGARET KILLJOY
The Feminist Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$17.95 ebook, availablle now

Rating: 4.5* of five

SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2025 URSULA K. LeGUIN PRIZE! Winner announced on 21 October 2025.

The Publisher Says: In the gripping first novel in the Daughters of the Empty Throne trilogy, author Margaret Killjoy spins a tale of earth magic, power struggle, and self-invention in an own-voices story of trans witchcraft.

Lorel has always dreamed of becoming a witch: learning magic, fighting monsters, and exploring the world beyond the small town where she and her mother run the stables. Even though a strange plague is killing the trees in the Kingdom of Cekon and witches are being blamed for it, Lorel wants nothing more than to join them. There’s only one problem: all witches are women, and she was born a boy.

When the coven comes to claim her best friend, Lorel disguises herself in a dress and joins in her friend’s place, leaving home and her old self behind. She soon discovers the dark powers threatening the kingdom: a magical blight scars the land, and the power-mad Duchess Helte is crushing everything between her and the crown. In spite of these dangers, Lorel makes friends and begins learning magic from the powerful witches in her coven. However, she fears that her new friends and mentors will find out her secret and kick her out of the coven, or worse.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Transfem main character in a fantasy novel? Yes please. What else, one might reasonably ask, would Author Killjoy (transfem herself) write? Short answer: Any-damn-thing she likes. The fantasy universe here is beautifully evoked, the system of magic is well-thought-out, the costs the use of magic exacts on the user are all both disturbing and condign, this is in short the kind of secondary-world fantasy one always hopes to find.

Lorel herself, our PoV character, is carefully delineated to be consistent: born a boy in a world where magic is only wielded by females, transfem Lorel (believably bisexual in desire) is clearly female coded from the off. She does not like violence, but can definitely motivate her aggression in defense of loved ones or in the face of inflicted violence. She's somewhat spottily presented to our mind's eye, in that her deliberate changes of gender presentation aren't detailed. I wasn't sure why someone presented as wearing a dress the last time she was described putting her hair in a man's topknot and passing after that. What happened to the dress? Was a dress a unisex garment? If not why make a point of her wearing one?

These are minor things to me, though, in the face of Lorel's journey into her true nature. Being within her society and still Othered, Lorel's way of observing the anarchist functioning of the witches was far less didactic than A Country of Ghosts (q.v.) It came across as an apprentice learning the ropes, watching the experts for tips and tricks, which is exactly what one expects. A coming-of-age story that's also a very risky coming-out story is a great set-up for a series about a fantasy world. It is, though, a set-up, so this is not a full story. There are, thank goodness, details left to develop...but that isn't always totally satisfying. I've knocked off a half-star for those holes falling too deep at times.

I loved the experience of learning about the magic system. I'm not going to go into it here because the idea is best encountered without early access to the facts. Discover with Lorel what magic is, can do, and exacts from its practitioners...and why.

I'm glad to say that, as book one of a trilogy, this is not full of tension-killing explanations. It will be interesting to see how Lorel, learning to trust herself as a transfem person, reconciles that with her culture's restriction of magical practice to biofem people. What will this do among the witches? Will the immediate consequences turn dire in this supremely cozy world?

Future books will tell!

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A COUNTRY OF GHOSTS
MARGARET KILLJOY
AK Press (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$16.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: An epic political fantasy in the tradition of Tepper and Le Guin that explores the question of what an anarchist community can do to resist the assaults that are sure to come if any such social formation were to exist.

Dimos Horacki is a Borolian journalist and a cynical patriot, his muckraking days behind him. But when his newspaper ships him to the front, he’s embedded in the Imperial Army and the reality of colonial expansion is laid bare before him. His adventures take him from villages and homesteads to the great refugee city of Hronople, built of glass, steel, and stone, all while a war rages around him. The empire fights for coal and iron, but the anarchists of Hron fight for their way of life.

A Country of Ghosts is a novel of utopia besieged and a tale that challenges every premise of contemporary society.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Very much in the same vein as The Dispossesed, a philosophical exploration of anarchy as a means of social organization. The horrors of hypercapitalism bashing into the anarchic anti-hegemony are always fun and interesting to encounter.

Told as a story, these ideas and attitudes make a much more lasting mark on the psyche than do more explanatory ideological works. It's easy to invest in the people Author Killjoy creates, as one might expect from the author of the Danielle Cain novellas.

There's nothing false, or clangorous, in Author Killjoy's work. There is no dumbing-down or slighting of issues that arise from this world's way of functioning. It's true that our ignorant interloper from imperialism needs to be brought up to speed. I don't think this counts as the dreaded infodumping, because the explicit intent of the story is to contrast a high-control system based on coercion crashing into a non-system of personal responsibility and collective action. Armies are fighting, and that should be impossible in anarchy...yet here we are, and Dimos (our stand-in) needs to understand why. He's set up as a muckraking journalist by temperament. He's shown to be an ill-fitting bit of grit in the imperial army's system, someone who is a misfit and outsider.

The way he's educated in anarchist principles of respect, for self, for others, for the natural world as it is absent religious stuff, is inspiring. I enjoyed the way Dimos's struggle to wrap his head around this utterly alien way of thinking is portrayed. After witnessing the imperials committing war crimes, his mind was more flexible and receptive. It made the way the Hron (literally "ghosts") explain their lives to him hit harder:

We are anarchists, and we are immortal. We are the country of ghosts, and we are immortal. We will fight them until we are dead, and our bones will fight them after. The memory of our existence will fight them…in each of their hearts we will brand the memory that those who are free will never yield. Today, let us be ghosts!
–and–
Take care of yourself. No, to hell with that, take care of your friends and let them take care of you. Do stupid things for them.

It's so very much not the way the individualistic empire invading them thinks; Dimos is slowly taking on board this radical reorientation of his worldview. Dimos is a bit of a gender essentialist, though being gay himself he might not have been...that's an authorial lacuna, along with the absence of enby folk among the Hron. I'm not sure he would ever bother to learn not to be, but it did actually clang through my awareness that he was an outsider among the Hron as much as within the empire he was born into.

A book that is so ambitious in its asks of the reader that it startled me how smoothly it went down. Every last one of my four stars was coated in a thick frosting of readerly happiness.

But ostriches? Really?

ABORTION STORIES: DEEP CARE: The Radical Activists Who Provided Abortions, Defied the Law, and Fought to Keep Clinics Open, & WE CHOOSE TO: A Memoir of Providing Abortion Care Before, During, and After Roe

DEEP CARE: The Radical Activists Who Provided Abortions, Defied the Law, and Fought to Keep Clinics Open
ANGELA HUME
AK Press (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$10.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: The story of the radical feminist networks who worked outside the law to defend abortion.

Starting in the 1970s, small groups of feminist activists met regularly to study anatomy, practice pelvic exams on each other, and learn how to safely perform a procedure known as menstrual extraction, which can empty the contents of the uterus in case of pregnancy using equipment that can be easily bought and assembled at home. This “self-help” movement grew into a robust national and international collaboration of activists and health workers determined to ensure access to reproductive healthcare, including abortion, at all costs―to the point of learning how to do the necessary steps themselves.

Even after abortion was legalized in 1973 with Roe v. Wade, activists continued meeting, studying, and teaching these skills, reshaping their strategies alongside decades of changing legal, medical, and cultural landscapes such as the legislative war against abortion rights, the AIDS epidemic, and the rise of anti-abortion domestic terrorism in the 1980s and 90s. The movement’s drive to keep abortion accessible led to the first clinic defense mobilizations against anti-abortion extremists trying to force providers to close their doors. From the self-help movement sprang a constellation of licensed feminist healthcare clinics, community programs to promote reproductive health, even the nation’s first known-donor sperm bank, all while fighting the oppression of racism, poverty, and gender violence.

Deep Care follows generations of activists and clinicians who orbited the Women's Choice clinic in Oakland from the early 1970s until 2010, as they worked underground and above ground, in small cells and broad coalitions and across political movements with grit, conviction, and allegiances of great trust to do what they believed needed to be done―despite the law, when required. Grounded in interviews of activists sharing details of their work for the first time, Angela Hume retells three decades of this critical, if under-recognized story of the radical edge of the abortion movement. These lessons are more pertinent than ever following the Supreme Court’s 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson decision and the devastation to abortion access nationwide.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: By limiting her scope to activists in the Bay Area of California, Author Hume enables herself to dive deeply into the whys, hows, and wherefores of the activists who believed then, and will inspire others now to believe, in the truest expression of "self-help." There is a huge weight of wrongheadedness and immorality bearing down on women's rights. There always has been, of course; patriarchy isn't a new idea, and making up a matriarchal past from evidence so fragmentary as to be useless for tendentious argument is not particularly helpful to resisting the current, powerful, well-funded assault.

Author Hume does not shy away from graphic evocation of the procedures she enumerates the activists providing. It's astonishing to me how very difficult pregnancy is...to start, to finish, to understand in its myriad complexities. It was not always pleasant to encounter this information.

The broader framework of resistance and activism on multiple social fronts in that fifty-years-gone time and place is not skimped. The long-gone groups, their interlocking aims, their interpenetration of membership, wildly proliferate and birth acronym after abbreviation thus are correspondingly difficult to keep track of. As is so often the case among resisters of any facet of the status quo, the vicious internecine fights are hard to read about. I have this wild, unruly desire to scream at the idiots fighting over nonsense to grow up and get a grip! Fight the right-wingers in charge, not each other! It's just handing the rotters victory in their efforts to control and exploit everone for fun and profit to fight among yourselves!

I took long breaks from this read to avoid having more strokes from fury at the dimwits who refuse to accept impure, compromise positions because they are RIGHT and that should be OBVIOUS so everyone should do as they say! Which is, oddly enough, exactly what the right-wingers say.

Funny, that.

The thrust of this book is, as I see it, what worked before can work again. Get your gloves out, the literal healthcare ones and the metaphorical battle ones. The world's going to go into reverse unless we all do a LOT OF RESISTING, at ballot boxes, at clinic-defense events, at community meetings.

It worked before, it can again, but not without personal, individual commitments to show up in the flesh. Slacktivism is helpful to direct the conversation but more is needed to oppose the wave of nightmare invasive evil laws.

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WE CHOOSE TO: A Memoir of Providing Abortion Care Before, During, and After Roe
CURTIS BOYD & GLENNA HALVORSON-BOYD
Disruption Books (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$11.49 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Although the Dallas Fire Department had saved the clinic, we were shaken and heartsick that our son had just spent Christmas Day at a crime scene. I had performed my first abortion in the year Kyle was born, and though he had long supported our work, he now felt worried for us in ways he’d never expressed. As we stood near the ruins, breathing fresh air in gulps, he said, “Do you have to keep doing this work?”

We were both silent for long moments before I simply said, “No. We choose to.”

In this deeply personal account, Dr. Curtis Boyd and Dr. Glenna Halvorson-Boyd reflect on their lives in abortion care, from the childhood experiences that shaped their paths to the Supreme Court decision that forced the closure of their Dallas clinic. Their stories begin in the 1960s, as Curtis opens a clandestine abortion practice while breaking with the beliefs of his Baptist family and Glenna pursues psychology while coming to understand the world of restrictive gender roles. When the two of them meet shortly after abortion is legalized, they bond over a common commitment to women, forming a professional and personal partnership that will weather the coming decades. We Choose To is the story of that partnership, and the staff and patients that have shaped the history of modern abortion.

In these pages, Curtis and Glenna share their holistic, morally rooted approach to their work. Led by a desire to empower patients, they advance abortion and mental health care further than ever even as they find themselves at the center of a controversial new issue in American life. Sweeping, introspective, and deeply honest, We Choose To is a rare portrait of abortion providers and the world in which they work, where abortion is not a talking point in a culture war but a private, even spiritual, act.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: If you're wondering what kind of person is drawn to resist social injustice, read this joint memoir by two powerfully rooted in faith people. They set themselves out to provide care for women who were not being served in their time of need by any system allegedly meant to do so.

I'm strongly anti-religion because people like the authors are far too seldom to be found in the ranks of churchgoers. These people are exemplars of walking the walk while self-awarely not talking the most frquently heard talk from the faith they once shared.

I emerged from this read far more ready to smile about the world's future. These deeply admirable people have raised kids and lived lives of service and, by example, inspired others. What more can one ask?

Thank you both for sharing your motivations and reasons for being genuinely good.

BEGIN THE WORLD OVER, what happens if other hands hold the keys

BEGIN THE WORLD OVER
KUNG LI SUN
AK Press
$17.00 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A revolutionary tale of Black and Indigenous insurrection. History as it should have been.

Begin the World Over is a counterfactual novel about the Founders’ greatest fear—that Black and Indigenous people might join forces to undo the newly formed United States of America—coming true.

In 1793, as revolutionaries in the West Indies take up arms, James Hemings has little interest in joining the fight for liberté—talented and favored, he is careful to protect his relative comforts as Thomas Jefferson’s enslaved chef. But when he meets Denmark Vesey, James is immediately smitten. The formidable first mate persuades James to board his ship, on its way to the revolt in Saint-Domingue. There and on the mainland they join forces with a diverse cast of characters, including a gender nonconforming prophetess, a formerly enslaved jockey, and a Muskogee horse trader. The resulting adventure masterfully mixes real historical figures and events with a riotous retelling of a possible history in which James must decide whether to return to his constrained but composed former life, or join the coalition of Black revolutionaries and Muskogee resistance to fight the American slavers and settlers.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Counterfactual histories like this are my meat and drink in reading life. I love to see well-informed authors play with little things that, had they not happened in *exactly* the way they did, would have resulted in a completely different world than the one we live in. There is, of course, an element of wish fulfillment in this for me. And not just in modern times.

The ways and means of colonial oppression are alive and well in Anglophone literature, French literature...all the colonists' languages...as we can see by the marginalization of works by and about nonwhite peoples around the globe.
Literally everything that went wrong in the wars of Haitian, and Jamaican, liberation went right in this book; and that was sooo satisfying to this reader who find the smugness of US exceptionalism grating. On and on, the litany of "they won" rings its victory bells in my ears and my smiles of pleasure keep getting wider as, on reflection, I contemplate an alternative universe where this is history, not alternative history.

For reasons I'll never really understand, magical realism must be in any alternative history novel. I don't like it but it's going to be there, so be ready for that.

The part of the story where we see same-sex couples and coupling being accepted and acceptable is, for me, the best bit of the book. James Hemings, Jefferson's factual Paris-trained enslaved chef, is here a queer gentleman who provides an important central PoV, and that inclusion means that a LOT of attention is paid to food, and the eating of same, in groups and alone. Our trans and genderqueer siblings are well-represented in indigenous and enslaved quarters. This is something I truly can't praise the author for highly enough, the simple, matter-of-fact inclusion of people that the QUILTBAG community of today does far too little to include and celebrate. What's a harder sell, I think, to most people is that the revolution isn't bloodless and that's very much center stage for good swaths of the story. I am routinely appalled by the violence that many slaveowners enacted on their slaves' bodies. It isn't *better* when they, in their turn, enact that violence on their enslavers...it just reminds me that there are no truly good humans.

Starting our journey with James's PoV and then broadening the scope to include many others' PoVs was, I can see, a necessary way to get this story told. I will note that it felt frustrating because James won me over so completely that I wanted to return to him like a homing pigeon. That broadening does allow for more representation at the expense of depth of characterization. Part of the point of this particular story, as I see it, is to take the reader outside the usual and customary colonial hegemonic individualistic mode of storytelling. We're presented with an organic polyphony of PoVs. It pays to have that need in the reader's mind to get them into the spirit of the rebellion and its aims.

A read I strongly urge on you to understand and perhaps even align with the revolution so eagerly sought by young people and its aims. Younger readers, take heart! You're seen. Your concerns for liberation and justice aren't invisible.