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Becky Libourel Diamond

NonfictionScienceNature

What the Wild Sea Can Be

Review by Becky Libourel Diamond

We are inundated by media updates about global warming, from statistical warnings and satellite images to news and weather reports on the latest storms, fires and floods. These ever-present alerts often focus on what’s happening to the land, but what about threats to the unique ecosystems of our oceans?

This vast water world is the focus of marine biologist and author Helen Scales’ latest book, What the Wild Sea Can Be: The Future of the World’s Ocean. Organized into three sections covering the ocean’s history, vanishing species and habitats, and the ocean’s restoration and future, the book takes a global perspective while also highlighting how specific regions and their wildlife are affected by the changing climate. Statistics drive home the immediacy of the crisis: “Within just the past fifty years, as people have been overexploiting species, destroying habitats, and releasing pollutants, the total mass of vertebrate life in the ocean has halved.”

Scales explores key issues impacting marine life, from warming waters, to disease-causing bacteria and viruses, to plastics contamination, along with striking examples of how these trends play out. For example, whales have a particularly high risk of microplastics consumption due to the shrimp and krill they eat: During migration to the coast of California, blue whales consume more than 10 million of these plastic particles, which can accumulate in tissues and alter expressions of genes, per day. Ecosystem shifts cause invasive migrations that upset the ecological balance, such as that of lionfish; native to the Indian and Pacific Oceans, they are now found along America’s east coast and in the Mediterranean. These invasive lionfish number five times their population in their native waters, and they threaten to consume other species to extinction.

But as the title suggests, the book is not all gloom and doom. In her introduction, Scales encourages readers to take part in “mental time travel” and “keep seeing the glory and feeling wonderment in the ocean.” By offering hopeful scenarios and advice for making “conscious decisions about the future of the earth’s biodiversity,” she provides the reader with a level of positivity not often heard amid the overwhelming climate news that can often make us feel helpless. “I hope this book will offer an antidote to the rising tide of eco-anxiety and fears for the future of the planet,” Scales writes. “Turn that fear into commitment and initiative.” What the Wide Sea Can Be provides a glimmer of light in a darkening world.

Helen Scales’ inspiring What the Wild Sea Can Be addresses climate-caused threats to our oceans, while providing a glimmer of light in a darkening world.
NonfictionPhotographyLifestyles

Wash Day

Review by Becky Libourel Diamond

Hair can instill empowerment and confidence. It can also cause stress and anxiety, especially when it doesn’t fit Eurocentric perceptions of beauty. Tomesha Faxio, a self-taught documentary photographer, sets out to debunk myths about Black women’s natural hair and celebrate the rituals surrounding its care in her loving photo-essay book Wash Day: Passing on the Legacy, Rituals, and Love of Natural Hair.

Combining touching photography of mothers and daughters with a descriptive history of natural hair, Faxio explains how Black women and their hair have been misunderstood and misrepresented for centuries, and how the pressure to straighten and relax naturally curly, textured hair is a symptom of racism. By also focusing on the bonding that occurs on wash day between mothers and daughters, Faxio demonstrates that Black hair and beauty rituals can and should be honored. With its exquisite photography and heartfelt personal messages, the visually stunning Wash Day fills a gap regarding what it means for Black women not just to embrace their natural hair, but their whole selves.

With its exquisite photography and heartfelt profiles, Wash Day celebrates Black women’s natural hair.
NonfictionHistoryCultural History

Tits Up

Review by Becky Libourel Diamond

After author and sociologist Sarah Thornton had a double mastectomy, she opted for breast reconstruction covered by her insurance. But she didn’t get the B-cup “lesbian yoga boobs” she had described to her surgeon. Instead, she got D-cup “silicone aliens” that “didn’t feel female or even human.” She relates this experience with humorous flair, but the result was scholarly: “I now had an overwhelming desire to understand breasts, excavate their meanings, and map out routes to their emancipation.”

Thornton (Seven Days in the Art World) documents her research in the memorably titled Tits Up: What Sex Workers, Milk Bankers, Plastic Surgeons, Bra Designers, and Witches Tell Us About Breasts. Her firsthand insight is woven throughout the book, with chapters focused on the “hardworking tits” of sex workers, “lifesaving jugs” of breast milk donors, “treasured chests” that undergo surgery, “active apexes” of the lingerie industry and “holy mammaries” enshrined in religious mythology.

Many women aren’t satisfied with what nature has given them, or they become disenchanted with the effects of gravity, aging or nursing. Thornton goes into detail about how this view has differed throughout history and in various cultures. As she points out, in Anglo American culture, “saggy is a sin” that often leads to surgical procedures, but in Mali, “‘she whose breasts have fallen’ is a respectful term for an older woman.” 

Thornton’s research and interviews are exhaustive, entertaining and enlightening. There are heartbreaking stories, like one about a mother who lost her baby but donated her breast milk; historical links, like the 1968 bra burning phenomenon; and inside information about how the many different variations in breast sizes and shapes cause conundrums for bra and swimsuit manufacturers. In tandem, Thornton addresses a central question: How is it that we look at breasts so much but reflect on them so little? 

Backed up by research, interviews with experts and plenty of fascinating facts, Tits Up is a revelatory look at many different facets of this oh-so-vital body part. As elucidated by the founder of the “Fool’s Journey” pagan retreat Thornton attends, “Every breast has a story. Let’s work on changing the narrative.” One thing for sure, you’ll never think of boobs in the same way again. 

After reading Sarah Thornton’s revelatory Tits Up, you’ll never look at boobs the same way again.
NonfictionLifestylesCookbooks

Second Helpings

Review by Becky Libourel Diamond

An astonishing 30-40% of food goes to waste in the U.S. “As well as being financially foolish, wasting food damages the planet because it accelerates climate change,” notes food writer and cookbook author Sue Quinn in her latest cookbook, Second Helpings: Delicious Dishes to Transform Your Leftovers, which aims to keep food from our own kitchens out of the trash. Quinn kicks off with a chapter of recipes for base dishes (soup, pasta bake, risotto, to name a few) that teach the reader skills that can be used for everyday meals. She moves to sections on small plates, light meals, main meals, sweet things and bits and bobs, the last of which includes ways to incorporate leftovers such as mashed potatoes, salad greens and the spoonfuls and scrapings left in various types of jarred foods.The book’s structure gives many different options for each recipe, resulting in numerous dishes to use up the items you have on hand. I made the roast dinner enchiladas using some cooked chicken from the night before, sliced peppers and jarred tomatoes, which transformed into an amazing sauce when simmered with Quinn’s suggested mix of spices. Second Helpings is the perfect blueprint for repurposing leftover food into other nutritious, delicious meals.

Second Helpings is the perfect blueprint for repurposing leftover food into other nutritious, delicious meals.
NonfictionMemoir

If You Can’t Take the Heat

Review by Becky Libourel Diamond

Memoirs are expected to be intimate, laying the groundwork for an author’s backstory and how they got to where they are currently. But it is less common for a personal account to be rendered in a way that’s hilarious, clever, profound and poignant at the same time, particularly one with food as its focus.

Geraldine DeRuiter’s If You Can’t Take the Heat: Tales of Food, Feminism, and Fury provides all these elements and more. As the James Beard Award-winning blogger who penned a viral response to celebrity chef Mario Batali’s ill-advised #MeToo “apology” (in which he shared a recipe for cinnamon rolls), DeRuiter is no stranger to writing about culinary escapades. In this meaty series of essays, she travels from her childhood encounters with food to the present day, with many experiences in between that are as entertaining as her gifted voice and knack for description.

Subjects that she covers include religion, teendom, dating and marriage, all the while sharing life lessons that will resonate with many readers. The result is a memoir that is raw, revealing and relatable, with particular attention given to challenges women face in patriarchal society. For example, in a chapter hilariously titled “The Only Thing in My Oven,” she defends her decision not to have children and smartly draws parallels between what others call “maternal instinct” with her desire, since, childhood, to bake. As she explains, “I think a prerequisite to being a parent is that you should want to be one. And there’s a long diatribe here that I could go on about, but simply: parenthood should always be a choice. But baking didn’t feel like a decision. It was a calling.”

Her articulations are sincere and nostalgic, particularly in the story of how she learned about her past and ancestral roots, and how she has processed (and is still processing) what she has discovered. She doesn’t shy away from grappling with childhood trauma, but If You Can’t Take the Heat is by no means depressing. Quite the opposite. DeRuiter’s divulging is comforting and significant to both women and those who have made a similar culinary journey. Readers will find this witty series of vignettes humorous and enlightening.

Geraldine DeRuiter braids her love of food with feminist critique in her hilarious, relatable memoir If You Can’t Take the Heat.
NonfictionAnimals

The Age of Deer

Review by Becky Libourel Diamond

In most parts of the United States, homeowners share the land with herds of deer seen nibbling on garden plants, wandering through neighborhoods and running across highways. They are so ubiquitous that it is difficult to imagine a time when they were not so abundant. But as poet and journalist Erika Howsare explains in The Age of Deer: Trouble and Kinship With Our Wild Neighbors, the clearing of forests and constant unchecked hunting that Europeans wrought upon the land in colonial America began to decimate deer habitats and communities. By the early 20th century, deer populations had “gone down to zero” in many areas, only to rebound as conservation efforts allowed deer to multiply in droves throughout the U.S.   

Through carefully wrought prose and evocative imagery, Howsare depicts how deer and human populations have both relied on and butted up against one another for eons. Traveling through history and culture, she provides insight into the practical, environmental and spiritual “kinship” between our species: Cherokee hunters were mindful of Awi Usdi, a white deer who reminded them to ask each felled deer for forgiveness; villagers in the West Midlands of England celebrate the animal with a centuries-old pagan tradition called the Abbots Bromley Horn Dance; and deer riders abound in mythology, such as the Hindu god Chandra and Slavic hunters called vile, who bewitch men with their beauty. 

The animal, Howsare writes, “perfectly symbolizes the way we live with nature now, and the way we will carry on into whatever weird, paradoxical future awaits.” Her rigorous research, along with personal anecdotes, relates the impact of human intervention on the deer population and the damage that overpopulation wreaks on forests. Howsare rides along on a culling mission with Princeton, New Jersey’s sole animal control officer, and she discusses other methods government and wildlife officials have used to reduce their numbers, like sport hunting and sterilization.

Throughout the book, Howsare returns to a proposition stated in her introduction: “To look at our modern relationship with deer . . . means asking the biggest question of all: How will we live on this planet?” The Age of Deer is a thorough, eye-opening invitation to ponder our own relationships with the natural world, practically and reverently.

Erika Howsare’s The Age of Deer invites us to consider the practical, environmental and spiritual relationships we share with a most ubiquitous species.
NonfictionHistoryCultural History

Eyeliner

Review by Becky Libourel Diamond

Makeup is typically linked to beautification—a palette of products marketed to make us feel more confident, attractive and put-together. This includes eyeliner, often applied in tandem with eyeshadow and mascara to enhance the eyes.

But as Zahra Hankir (Our Women on the Ground: Essays by Arab Women Reporting From the Arab World) explains in her new book, Eyeliner: A Cultural History, eyeliner is so much more than just a beauty tool. Starting with her own Egyptian and Lebanese background and subsequent relationship with kohl (eyeliner made with naturally sourced materials, including ground galena or soot), she describes how women in her family have used this cosmetic for generations as a steadfast support that “protected and empowered my proud lineage,” and fostered a grounding sense of community.

This personal interest in kohl led Hankir to track down and record the historical and cultural significance of eyeliner in various formulations over time. Her research is exhaustive, touching on cultures from the Middle East and Africa to India, Latin America and Japan. Each chapter focuses on a different culture or individual(s) and their relationship to eyeliner, weaving historical and cultural facts with modern-day pop-culture references and cosmetic industry statistics.

The result is a cultural perspective that is eye-opening and surprisingly intimate. Hankir peels back layers of history to reveal how eyeliner became so ingrained in various societies over millennia. She covers its more obvious aesthetic nature, with the steadfast goal “to beautify, enhance, or enlarge the eye,” as well as its role as a form of protection from evil (as believed in ancient Egypt and in some present-day Arab, Asian and African communities), a form of sunblock (as worn throughout the Middle East), rebellion (think The Crown’s Princess Diana speaking of Prince Charles’ infidelity with dark-rimmed eyes on BBC) and expression and identity (such as the signature thick black winged eyeliner worn by late singer Amy Winehouse).

Hankir’s journalism background shines through, as she includes a comprehensive number of interviews and personal stories to back up the facts she references. And her own reflections lend weight to the close-up and personal feeling conveyed throughout. Eyeliner: A Cultural History is a thorough retrospective of a product that has endured over time and continues to play a significant role for cultures around the globe.

Zahra Hankir’s Eyeliner offers an eye-opening and surprisingly intimate cultural perspective on the titular cosmetic.
NonfictionNatureMemoir

Holding Fire

Review by Becky Libourel Diamond

“We’re getting it wrong in this beautiful, ravaged place,” writes author Bryce Andrews (Down From the Mountain) in Holding Fire: A Reckoning With the American West. “Over and over, we find a lovely valley, shoot it through the ecological heart, grind its bones to dust, and pour the foundation of an edifice less interesting than what existed before.” It is his ah-ha moment in this vibrant, candid account of his experiences working as a cowboy in Montana.

Although it’s labeled as a memoir, Holding Fire also has many elements of regional nonfiction, natural history and even social science. As a result, it is structured in a fresh and unpredictable way, with each chapter opening a new window into Andrews’ thoughts, feelings and prior experiences. Framed around the inheritance of his grandfather’s gun, a Smith & Wesson revolver, each reflection focuses on a particular idea that has helped Andrews comprehend the fragility of life and inevitability of death.

As Andrews ruminates on his personal history, he dots his musings with descriptive, emotive prose. “In quiet moments all through childhood,” he writes, “I entertained a Western fantasy in which the sky’s broad dome appeared first, its sun a magnet tugging upward on my heart.” Guns were never a big part of his life until he lived and worked on a ranch, where he had to hunt and keep critters at bay. These encounters provided life lessons and new proficiencies, particularly when hunting with fellow rancher Roger, whom he calls “the lodge’s wrangler and outfitter.” But the more Andrews lived with the gun, the more it led him to realize the destruction caused by violence. He eventually forged the gun into a useful gardening tool, learning blacksmithing in the process.

Holding Fire is a meditation on the past, present and future of not only Andrews’ own life but also the lives of all mortal creatures.

Bryce Andrews’ vibrant, candid account of working as a cowboy in Montana provides a moving meditation on the fragility of life and inevitability of death.
NonfictionSelf-HelpFamily & Relationships

The Origins of You

Review by Becky Libourel Diamond

Behaviors and beliefs are often perpetuated throughout families, when what we learned as children continues to show up in our families and relationships as adults. Sometimes these behaviors stem from childhood wounds that have led to negative repeating patterns.

In The Origins of You: How Breaking Family Patterns Can Liberate the Way We Live and Love, therapist and relationship expert Vienna Pharaon explains how to tap into the origin stories of these wounds in a productive way. Although naming the wounds we received during our upbringings can be a difficult and painful process, Pharaon writes that it is the “first step toward your healing.” The book is divided into four parts: our roots, our wounds and their origins, changing your relationship behaviors, and your reclamation. There’s an emphasis throughout on “origin healing work,” which is “an integration of family systems work and psychodynamic theory.”

By digging into her backlog of over 20,000 hours of work as a therapist and her Instagram community of over 600,000 followers, Pharaon puts feelings such as unworthiness and an inability to trust in context—along with these feelings’ subsequent destructive behaviors, such as being self-critical, not living authentically and avoiding honest communication. However, no client confidentiality is breached. Clients’ identities are disguised, and sometimes several clients are combined to emphasize a point. She also uses her own story as an example, referring back to her journey and growth time and again. These reality checks help the reader understand that they are not alone in their pain and show how addressing these origin wounds can be healing and transformative.

Thoughtful self-help exercises with suggestions on how to best read, process and digest this information are woven throughout The Origins of You, and Pharaon feels like a cheerleader and confidant as she offers honest, straightforward advice. “What if . . . digging into your origin story,” she asks, “could yield the relief and the exact answers you’ve been looking for all along?”

Therapist Vienna Pharaon is a cheerleader and confidant throughout The Origins of You, helping readers break negative family patterns and find healing.
NonfictionScienceHistory

Egg

Review by Becky Libourel Diamond

Eggs are the ubiquitous breakfast food, served up every day in kitchens and restaurants around the world. They are also a cornerstone for many savory dishes and added to baked goods to provide richness and leavening. But have you ever considered the egg’s importance beyond its vast utility as a food source?

In Egg: A Dozen Ovatures, author Lizzie Stark (Pandora’s DNA) dishes up 12 ways eggs have affected and benefited humans. Blending fascinating factoids, historical tales and her own personal stories, Stark highlights the remarkable, the unusual and the extreme.

Each chapter focuses on a different topic, describing how eggs have been treasured as artistic objects, hunted by eccentric egg collectors, traded as a precious commodity, used in scientific cures and even sent to the moon. Throughout, Stark fills readers in on related practices and definitions, such as egg candling, “a technique used since ancient times, [that] employs light—a candle in the early days, and later electric lamps—to reveal what’s under the shell.” Such historical and scientific facts are combined with contemporary cultural touchstones in a style that is witty, engaging and descriptive.

Stark also adds moments from her own personal history, which provides a perfect balance to the data points and statistics. From egg experiments with her dad and decorating Ukrainian pysanky eggs with her mom, to her decision to have her ovaries removed to stave off the high likelihood of developing ovarian cancer due to an inherited gene mutation, Stark is skilled at making connections between eggs’ symbolic meaning and real-life significance. Egg is surprising, revealing and entertaining. After reading this delightful book, you will never look at an egg the same way again.

Blending fascinating factoids, historical tales and her own personal stories, Lizzie Stark uncovers the remarkable, unusual and extreme cultural history of the egg.
NonfictionEssays

The Ugly History of Beautiful Things

Review by Becky Libourel Diamond

“Beauty is in the eye of the beholder,” as the saying goes. This expression celebrates acceptance, affirming that the appearance of a person or object doesn’t have to align with beauty norms to be lovely. It’s a refreshing theme that runs throughout The Ugly History of Beautiful Things: Essays on Desire and Consumption by art, design, nature and science writer Katy Kelleher.

A frequent contributor to The Paris Review, where she formerly authored a column on color called Hue’s Hue, Kelleher writes candidly about her personal experiences as a home and design writer, which involved crafting descriptive write-ups of “beautiful things and their various charms.” But during this journey, she discovered that no matter which glittering objects she wrote about, the ugliness of animal cruelty, worker exploitation, toxic chemicals and other grisly realities still filtered through the beauty. “I came to accept that desire and repulsion exist in tandem,” she writes, “and that the most poignant beauties are interthread with ugliness.”

Divided into 10 thought-provoking chapters focusing on subjects such as flowers, gemstones, silk, perfume, china and even glass, Kelleher skillfully dissects many kinds of things that humans have found desirable over the years. She intertwines these discussions with her personal definition of beauty and reminds readers that beautiful things can be useful for more than their looks. For example, fine dishes are for gathering, feeding and sharing, not just display.

Combining elements of science, history, consumerism and mysticism, Kelleher’s prose is lively, informative and, at times, humorous. Her personal attachment to the concept of beauty turns what could have been a dry, aesthetic exploration into something soul-cleansing and restorative. Ultimately, her hope is that The Ugly History of Beautiful Things “will help you open your eyes to the beauty that already surrounds you, beauty that already exists in your cities and homes and backyards.”

Katy Kelleher skillfully illuminates the ugly shadows cast by some of our world’s most beautiful objects, including flowers, gemstones and silk.
NonfictionHistoryFood & DrinkCultural HistoryAmerican History

Ice

Review by Becky Libourel Diamond

Ice might not be the first thing that comes to mind when you think of coveted “luxury” goods. In fact, many Americans take ice for granted as a now-ubiquitous product that is dispensed out of their refrigerators and can be purchased in bags from nearly every grocery store, convenience store and gas station.

But as Amy Brady (co-editor of The World as We Knew It) explains in her new book, Ice: From Mixed Drinks to Skating Rinks—a Cool History of a Hot Commodity, ice has indeed been a very “hot commodity” throughout history. Flash forward to today on our rapidly warming planet, and ice is in even higher demand. This paradox was not lost on Brady. As she writes, “The irony lay in the fact that I was driven to seek out and consume ice because of a phenomenon that’s eliminating ice on the planet.”

Amy Brady, author of ‘Ice,’ recounts the lost history of the doctor who invented the ice machine.

Brady found ice to be an untapped subject and did enormous amounts of research to fill in the gaps in its history. Divided into four parts that each focuses on an aspect of ice—obsession, food and drink, ice sports, and the future—Ice outlines how frozen water “profoundly has shaped the nation’s history and culture.” Commentary from food writers, scientists, physicians and historians are interspersed with historic resources such as newspaper articles, diaries and journals, creating unique connections between the past and present.

Historical facts and statistics help contextualize the important role ice has played in events like Prohibition, when breweries pivoted to other business ventures that would make use of their existing ice cellars. (Yuengling opened a dairy, Anheuser-Busch made infant formula and Pabst sold cheese.) Another especially interesting chapter covers ice’s use as a medical treatment for injuries, chronic ailments and even cancer. Throughout the book, Brady uses timelines to help illustrate the trajectory of ice’s journey from an amenity to an everyday item, emphasizing how quickly it became mainstream. Taken all together, Ice makes an important case for securing the future of those freezing cold cubes in a warming world.

Amy Brady uses commentary from food writers, scientists and physicians to illuminate how something as commonplace as ice came to shape America’s history and culture.
NonfictionPop CultureHumor

The Theory of Everything Else

Review by Becky Libourel Diamond

Humans are fascinated with weird and unusual phenomena—hence the popularity of books, magazines, television shows and podcasts focusing on “unexplained” subjects such as Bigfoot, the Loch Ness monster, UFOs and the Bermuda Triangle. 

In The Theory of Everything Else: A Voyage Into the World of the Weird, comedian and co-host of the “No Such Thing as a Fish” podcast Dan Schreiber takes peculiar theories about some of life’s greatest mysteries and spins them into nonstop hilarity. Many of the ideas presented here are so implausible—such as the hypothesis that time travelers sank the Titanic—that Schreiber starts with a disclaimer, a suggestion that readers should “let the ideas alter your universe for a few seconds . . . but for God’s sake, don’t believe in a single one of them.” In fact, he uses the word batshit over and over to describe these unconventional beliefs and bizarre encounters, while also demonstrating that investigating such baffling notions (whether to solve them, prove them or disprove them) is often what leads people to discover something closer to the truth.

Schreiber divides the book into three main sections that cover the importance of unconventional thought, scientific theories that have been “rejected” and eccentric beliefs that are woven throughout our daily lives. His research is extensive, covering all areas of the globe and a variety of cultures as he considers the possibility of a hollow Earth, the extinction of pubic lice, the chance that reptilian aliens walk among us and many more far-fetched and otherwise wacky notions. There are connections to famous people such as Ringo Starr (whose grandmother was known as “the voodoo queen of Liverpool”), tennis player Novak Djokovic (who believes there are ancient lost pyramids in Bosnia) and the British royal family (yes, Prince Philip harbored an interest in UFOs). Several scientists who made groundbreaking discoveries are included as well, since they also embraced unusual theories or beliefs.

Humorous illustrations are featured side by side with historic photographs, and each “batshit” story or theory is counterbalanced with a reality check of facts and statistics. As Schreiber sums up, “Whether we like it or not, many of these alternative thinkers have shaped the world we live in today.” The Theory of Everything Else is a wild, witty, entertaining ride into the funhouse of the unexplained and the unexplainable. Hop on and enjoy the trip.

The existence of ghosts, aliens and cryptids will seem like tame notions by the time you finish Dan Schreiber’s hilarious book about life’s greatest mysteries and most peculiar theories.

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