What do Brazil, rubber, and Henry Ford all have in common? How are tobacco, globalization, and earthworms all connected? How do mosquitoes, the climate of Africa, and indigenous biology all influence the beginning of the American slave trade? These are just some of the connections historian Charles C. Mann traces in his expansive, interwoven, and…
Category: Book Review
Shawn Driscoll, a doctoral research fellow at UMASS Lowell, recently reached out to our store to sell his book (co-authored/edited with Linda Hixon, Christian Farren, and Theodore Racicot) about the 1918 Pandemic and its effects in our very own Worcester, MA. There was something surreal about being sold a book about a pandemic in Worcester…
COVID-19 has drastically altered the landscape of publishers, authors, and booksellers. The large clearing houses have pushed back many titles until fall, effectively crunching together a few seasons worth of titles into one large cluster of releases beginning this September. Authors, most notably local or self-published writers, have had their main source of publicity cut…
Note: As we come up on the 50th Anniversary of the Pentagon Papers, and with the recent release of the Afghanistan Papers, we felt it was timely to look back at the conflict in Vietnam. Over the next few months, I am doing an examination of several Vietnam-era historical works that examine both sides of…
“To live is essentially to live the life of another: to live in and through the life that others have been able to construct or invent.” The French philosopher Emanuele Coccia begins his book The Life of Plants: A Metaphysics of Mixture with these words, following a similar thread of symbiotic speculation throughout the pages….
The aptly titled Convenience Store Woman is Japanese novelist Sayaka Murata’s tenth novel, and the first to be translated into English. The story focuses on Keiko Furukura, a thirty-six year old single woman who works at a ‘Smile Mart’ Tokyo convenience store. Furukura is not only content, but happy with her life as a convenience…
The word “Commonwealth” has a particular place in Massachusetts vernacular. It’s common to find the word used as political branding, “The Commonwealth of Massachusetts” as an obvious example. But beyond sounding nostalgic, orderly, and constitutional, “Commonwealth” literally means, well-being—wealth, shared by all—common: Commonwealth. This reminder begins Jedidiah Purdy’s newest book, This Land is Our Land:…
Note: As we come up on the 50th Anniversary of the Pentagon Papers, and with the recent release of the Afghanistan Papers, we felt it was timely to look back at the conflict in Vietnam. Over the next month, I am doing an examination of several Vietnam-era historical works that examine both sides of the…
What do Cold War Bunkers in South Dakota, real estate transactions in New Zealand, Elon Musk at a conference in LA, the Chernobyl wasteland, and a wilderness retreat in Scotland all have in common? For Mark O’Connell in Notes From an Apocalypse, all these places are at the center of how humans are handling anxieties…
Progress is a funny little word. As we have trudged forth with our comprehension of “other” United States history – that is a sort of bottom-up, from the margins view of those that have been discriminated and oppressed, we have uncovered uncomfortable truths and perspectives. These views have widened our focus on the American story…