Based on dozens of interviews and abundant archival sources, scholar and author Kaplan’s book offers a perceptive, sympathetic biography of activist, unabashed communist, and muckraker Jessica Mitford (1917-1996). Jessica, known as Decca, was defiant even as a child—unlike her sisters Nancy, who became a well-known novelist; Nazi sympathizers Diana and Unity; Deborah, who married a […]
Preszler, professor of practice at Cornell University and director of the Henry David Thoreau Foundation’s Planetary Solutions Initiative, opens with a paean to Christmas trees. Introduced by 19th-century German immigrants, they’ve become a symbol of peace and goodwill for the religious and unreligious alike. They’re also disappearing. Since realistic plastic models appeared in the 1980s, […]
Aria Nguyen is barely staying afloat, balancing college classes in Washington, D.C., with caring for her ailing Aunt Thu and managing the mounting medical bills. As the anniversary of her mother’s disappearance approaches, Aria receives a voicemail from the Les Eaux Police Department with new information, turning her longing into anxiety. By contrast, Aria’s identical […]
Twenty-two-year-old Vera is living with her adoptive parents, the proprietors of the George and Pilgrims Hotel in Glastonbury, and grieving the loss of her love, Vincent, whom she met two years earlier at university in Bristol. (Their blissful life together ended when he was killed four months ago in a car crash.) When a stranger […]
With an introductory reference to severe flooding in South Asia, Schroeder notes the increasing incidence of natural disasters across the world, including in areas with no prior history of them. She explains the impact of growing amounts of greenhouse gases released into the atmosphere since the Industrial Revolution, connecting the dots between the resulting rise […]
There are four kinds of Orha in the Queendom of Nenamor: Mudmouths, Sparkmouths, Gustmouths, and Floodmouths, like Corith and her best friend, Zennia. They’re wards of the state, destined at age 18 for a mandatory service placement. A month ago, Zennia was sent to be the Floodmouth at House Shearwater, which like all noble houses […]
Sixteen-year-old Ida Campbell picks the wrong time to start school at St. Anne’s. Not that there ever seems to be a right time; the building, set on a cliff overlooking the English Channel, “looked as if it had been caught in the act of falling down, and was now doing its best to hold itself […]
Plants make rain, writes ecologist Gaudet, author of The Pharaoh’s Treasure: The Origin of Paper and the Rise of Western Civilization (2018). Forty percent or more of precipitation over land originates through evaporation from plants and trees. When vegetation is cleared, evaporation plummets, seasons come later, temperatures rise, and rainfall diminishes. Ten thousand years ago, […]
Margo and Matilda, the Halifax twins, have been turning heads and causing whispers since the day they debuted. There’s not a man in London who wouldn’t recognize their red hair, and Margo has enjoyed the company of several, but the twins are too notorious for anyone to court them conventionally. Margo starts to think they […]
Playwright Okuni ranges through Shakespeare’s oeuvre for lesser-known snippets of dialogue, which he reshapes into sonnet-like stanzas of 11 or 12 lines. The poems play very loosely on classic Shakespearean themes, prominent among them being the travails and traps of (especially royal) power. “My Crown” features lines from Henry VI, in which a furious Queen […]