Laura Hutson Hunter

There have been other iterations of The 1619 Project, the groundbreaking reframing of American history that centers the Black experience. It was first a series of essays published in the New York Times Magazine in 2019, and it’s also been a podcast, an anthology, a children’s picture book and a documentary TV series. With The 1619 Project: A Visual Experience, the project’s original editor, Nikole Hannah-Jones, presents its definitive version. This new volume combines seven powerful essays from the original series with visual elements that deepen their message and, as Hannah-Jones writes in the preface, create “an experience for the reader, a wanting to reflect, to sit in both the discomfort and the joy, to contemplate what a nation owes a people who have contributed so much and yet received so little, and maybe even, to act.” 

It’s one thing to read about the slave trade, for example, but another to see a high-resolution photograph labeled “A child’s iron shackles” with this stark explainer: “Because governments determined by the ton how many people could be fitted onto a slave ship, enslavers considered children especially advantageous: they could fill the boat’s small spaces, allowing more human capital in the cargo hold.” A chapter titled “Fear” includes an essay co-written by historian Leslie Alexander and her sister, The New Jim Crow author Michelle Alexander, that reframes police brutality as a result of the same white fear that can be traced back to the very beginnings of American history. The essay is intercut with various photographs from demonstrations, including photojournalist Robert Cohen’s shot of a Black man in a stars-and-stripes shirt throwing a container of tear gas back at the police in Ferguson, Missouri. Woven throughout the book’s 288 pages are 13 original artworks from celebrated visual artists like Carrie Mae Weems, multiple archival photographs of happy Black families and a vibrant spread of a Beyoncé concert. This visual history is an invaluable addition to a revelatory project and an essential selection for any American classroom or family library.

The 1619 Project: A Visual Experience complements the storied New York Times series with visual art and photography that deepens our understanding of how slavery has profoundly shaped American life.

The Story of Perfume: A Lavishly Illustrated Guide successfully pulls off one of my favorite literary tricks: It takes something extremely specific—in this case, perfume—and gets so immersed in it that all manner of connections among seemingly disparate worlds begin to take shape. From ancient Greek mythology to traditional Indian medicine, from the French Revolution to the sexual revolution, from Salvador Dali to Christian Dior, perfume was there through it all. And although fragrance is an area of study that is traditionally skipped by scholarly treatment, historian Élisabeth de Feydeau takes her subject seriously. The Story of Perfume is much more scholastic than you might expect. For example, the chapter “The First Iconic Perfumes” includes an entry about the 16th-century French king Francis I, whose edict to treat gunshot wounds with an elixir made from aromatic plants became so popular among the general public that it helped forge a path for legendary perfume house Guerlain. The stories Feydeau tells are fascinating, and they’re matched with a slew of equally compelling visual elements, like an ancient Roman fresco that depicts a seated woman decanting perfume, photographs of fragrant herbs and more elaborately detailed glass bottles than I was able to count. This is a great reference for fragrance lovers, but might also be an unexpected supplement for students of history—from ancient times through the Industrial Revolution, in particular.

The Story of Perfume is a sumptuous reference for fragrance lovers and an unexpected supplement for students of history.

James Beard Award-winning author Alexander Smalls includes 120 recipes from 33 chefs, restaurateurs, caterers, cooks and writers in The Contemporary African Kitchen: Home Cooking Recipes From the Leading Chefs of Africa. It’s a massive undertaking that spans an entire continent filled with innumerable culinary styles. But that breadth is important to Smalls, who writes in the book’s foreword that “our culture has been kept alive in great part through our culinary currency and traditions.” The book is organized into broad geographic segments: Northern, Eastern, Central, Southern and Western Africa are all represented. The Northern African section includes a particularly interesting recipe for Egyptian okra stew, which is loaded with garlic, basil, cilantro and mint and looks at once lush and hearty. In his description of the stew, chef Mostafa Seif writes, “Some foods are as much for nourishment as they are a tool for showing off.” He goes on to describe how people would hang okra from their balconies on the days that it was on the menu as a kind of demonstration of abundance. This book is great for adventurous eaters from all backgrounds, but that’s not to say an experimental palette is a prerequisite; if you’re more comfortable with traditionally American fare, you may be surprised by how familiar some of these dishes are: from Ethiopian deviled eggs and a chocolate cake recipe from Uganda to a buttery, garlicky recipe for South African mashed potatoes with spinach.

 

James Beard Award-winning author Alexander Smalls’ The Contemporary African Kitchen collects recipes that span an entire continent filled with innumerable culinary styles and traditions.

Amy Sall’s The African Gaze: Photography, Cinema and Power began as a university course Sall developed at New York City’s The New School. An undercurrent of academic rigor flows throughout the volume, which functions as an introduction to African photography and film as well as a collective biography of some of its most influential players. In her preface, writer and archivist Sall distills her thoughts on the subjects she spent so many years studying, and each sentence is packed with authoritative insight. The photography section begins with self-portraits by Ghanaian Felicia Abban, who also happens to be one of the few “named and known” women photographers in Africa. Many of the book’s other highlights involve female subjects: a striking studio portrait of three women by Augustt Azaglo Cornélius Yawo; a candid shot of four young women seated around a table at a party by Jean Depara; and a woman posing seated with a single high-heeled sandal that’s been placed atop her oversized skirt by Seydou Keita. Cinema is more difficult to capture in still images, and so the Filmmakers section relies on the breadth of its subjects, which includes artists working in documentary and animation in addition to scripted dramas. Particularly evocative are images of the two protagonists of Djibril Diop Mambéty’s Touki Bouki, or the stunning close-up of the main character in Ousmane Sembene’s Black Girl. The African Gaze is an essential, encyclopedic study of African image-makers, and reading through it in its entirety made me feel like I’d actually enrolled in Sall’s course.

Amy Sall’s The African Gaze is an essential, encyclopedic study of African photographers and filmmakers that’s packed with insight and images.

As Gillian Anderson prepared for her role as a sex therapist in the British TV show Sex Education (which this writer quickly added to her Netflix queue), she read the 1973 cult classic My Secret Garden, a compendium of fantasies collected by novelist Nancy Friday. In Friday’s book, Anderson writes, it was revealed that “. . . for some of us, the sex we have in our head may be more stimulating than the physical nuts and bolts of any coupling, no matter how hot. Unconstrained by assumed social conventions, self-consciousness, or perhaps the fear of making our partner uncomfortable, in our imagination we can indulge in our deepest, most transgressive desires.”

Inspired by Friday, Anderson put out an invitation for women and genderqueer people to write down their own fantasies and send them to her. She soon began amassing a “torrent of unbridled passion from around the world.” The result is Want: Sexual Fantasies by Anonymous, an extensive series of writings—some less than a page long, but most a page or two—detailing a multitude of diverse fantasies. What began as a platform for women to anonymously share fantasies has turned into something like a calling.

The polyvocality of Want means there’s something for everyone, but it also means that you’ll probably come across a fantasy you’ve never considered, as with Anderson, who writes that she was fascinated by the number of women with dreams of being milked like a cow. “The human imagination has few limits and our sexual desires and fantasies are no different, yet are still treated as taboo,” she writes in the book’s introduction. “Is everyone ashamed and pretending not to be?”

Anderson herself is among the anonymous writers here. There’s no hint at which of the many fantasies is hers; the only identity markers at the end of every essay are nationality, income, religion, sexual orientation, relationship status and whether the writer has children. “I was terrified of putting my fantasy down on paper,” she writes, “lest someone was able to discern which was mine.” But after reading more than 1,000 others, she finds that “sexual liberation must mean freedom to enjoy sex on our terms, to say what we want, not what we are pressured or believe we are expected to want.”

With luck, this provocative, original volume will help women and genderqueer people feel more empowered and less ashamed.

Gillian Anderson asked women to send her their sexual fantasies. The result is a provocative, original volume that will help women and genderqueer people feel more empowered and less ashamed.

In her introduction to Great Women Sculptors, curator and scholar Lisa Le Feuvre doesn’t use the term “woman” until well into the essay. Even then, it is included only to highlight a historical lack of institutional support, rather than anything inherently female about a particular artwork, subject matter or medium. Instead, the sole commonality of the artists collected in Great Women Sculptors is that they made art while being marginalized by structural misogyny. “Rather than expanding the canon, this book is an index that ruptures the received account of sculpture,” Le Feuvre explains. That distinction is important, because even as Great Women Sculptors brings together more than 300 artists throughout 500 years of art history, women artists are still marginalized; the patriarchy didn’t just shrivel up, much as we’d wanted it to, after Linda Nochlin published the seminal essay “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” in 1971. This encyclopedic volume includes entries on established artists like Eva Hesse and Louise Bourgeois alongside a younger generation of stars like Lauren Halsey. Even the most well-read art scholars will find something new—or old, as in Baroque-era Spanish sculptor Luisa Roldán. The breadth of the book’s coverage is tempered by its focus on a single work per artist, an image of which is printed beautifully on heavy-duty paper and fully contextualized by a slate of 46 art experts. 

The beautifully printed, encyclopedic Great Women Sculptors brings together more than 300 artists who have been excluded from institutions and canons on the basis of gender.

A pet cemetery can be much more than fodder for horror stories and Ramones songs. It can also be a way to dig deep (pardon the pun) into the ways that people live and grieve. Paul Koudounaris’ thoroughly researched book, Faithful Unto Death: Pet Cemeteries, Animal Graves & Eternal Devotion, is an investigation into the bonds between pets and their owners. It begins by explaining that, although people have kept animals close since ancient times, the modern conception of a pet is fairly contemporary. As people left rural areas in the wake of 19th-century industrialization, they brought their animals with them. In these new, smaller quarters, they grew ever more intimate. Faithful Unto Death is as much about how people love their pets as it is about how they mourn them. For a book that’s ostensibly about death, it’s not overly macabre: Passages about grief and Edna Clyne’s famous “Rainbow Bridge” poem are interspersed with images of a dog named Ah Fuk and a tomb for a beagle named Tippy, “the Elvis dog,” who was sung to by The King himself in her puppyhood. With archival photos and illustrations featured alongside Koudounaris’ portraits of headstones and informal altars, Faithful Unto Death will appeal to those interested in cultural rituals and the human-animal bond; what’s more, readers who have lost their own pets will feel acknowledged in their grief. 

 

Faithful Unto Death is a thoughtful investigation into the bonds of pets and their owners that chronicles the ways in which we grieve and remember the animals we love.

Eerie Legends: An Illustrated Exploration of Creepy Creatures, the Paranormal, and Folklore From Around the World arrives like Halloween candy, just in time for the spookiest season of the year. Austin, Texas-based artist Ricardo Diseño’s bold, offbeat illustrations don’t simply complement these spine-tingling stories, they lead the way. Each chapter blends elements of fiction and nonfiction, and includes a corresponding full-page illustration that stands on its own as a fully realized piece of art. The horror elements here are plenty scary, but skew toward the creature-feature end of the spectrum—think Universal Studio monsters, or even Troma’s The Toxic Avenger. The chapter on Krampus details the yuletide terror’s appearance with frightening specificity: “Part man, part goat, and part devil. . . . His tongue is red, forked, creepy, and always whipping around.” Diseño’s hoofed monster, straight out of the Blumhouse cinematic universe, is shown in the midst of abducting a child. Each chapter ends with a campfire-style tale about the designated monster, written with Lovecraftian zeal by Steve Mockus. As an added incentive, the cover glows in the dark—a feature I hadn’t noticed until after I fell asleep with it on my bedside table. Talk about eerie.

 

Bold, offbeat illustrations by Ricardo Diseño lead the way in the spooky-fun Eerie Legends.

Pastry chef and social activist Paola Velez describes herself as a nerd from the Bronx who truly felt seen for the first time while watching Steve Urkel on Family Matters. In a heartfelt introduction that practically begs for a longer memoir, she calls her debut cookbook, Bodega Bakes: Recipes for Sweets and Treats Inspired by My Corner Store, “a mix of my classical training and love of Americana filtered through the Bronx and the islands of the Caribbean.” Velez promises that you can find most of the ingredients for her recipes inside a bodega, a place she defines as “a densely inhabited mini market where Jarritos, Cap’n Crunch, shampoo, gossip, and chopped cheeses peacefully coexist.” The book’s first section is dedicated to cookies, most importantly, her popular Thick’ems. The OG Chocolate Chip Thick’em, which Velez once sold to raise money so that disadvantaged Brooklyn girls could buy period products, uses few ingredients to great effect. (“Makes 8 Thiiiiiick cookies,” she writes.) The OGs are followed by recipes for Triple Chocolate Noir Thick’ems, Tres Leches Thick’ems and more. Velez’s casual writing is as fun to read as a cookbook gets. For example, when describing the blending process for the Matcha Thick’ems, Velez instructs readers to “pulse the mixer on and off, almost like you’re trying to jump-start a car.” Bodega Bakes also features 13(!) ways to make flan, a beginner’s guide to Dominican cakes, freezer desserts (sweet plantain gelato, anyone?) and plenty more morsels that will demand second helpings. 

 

In the personable Bodega Bakes, pastry chef Paola Velez presents just that: sweets that can be made solely from the ingredients found at a corner store.

Mushroom Gastronomy: The Art of Cooking With Mushrooms is part cookbook, part encyclopedia. But because of its laser-focused attention to a single ingredient—the protean mushroom—it never feels overwhelming in its scope. In fact, I put down Mushroom Gastronomy with a determination to learn even more about the ever-fascinating fungus, which historically has somehow seemed delicate and dangerous, delicious and repugnant all at once. Let’s start with the delicious, as author Krista Towns does. Her fascination with mushrooms is apparent from the first pages, where she describes a childhood spent digging into dirt in the woods of rural Ohio, fascinated by all the things she saw. Chapters like “The Mushroom Pantry,” “Cooking Methods” and “Preservation” equip readers with a brief but thorough education while showcasing Towns’ talent as a photographer. She shot the book’s photos, which are in turn fascinating (as in her shot of the Lion’s Mane variety, which looks a little like the Tribbles from that episode of Star Trek) and mouth-watering (I could practically taste the Maitake Philly cheesesteak). The recipes are organized around types of mushrooms, so if you happen to love morels, you can thumb straight to chicken-stuffed morels with Marsala sauce, as I did. The majority of the recipes included in Mushroom Gastronomy come from regions that embrace mushrooms—mainly Spain, Italy, France and Asia. That allows Towns to throw a fairly wide culinary net. You’ll find recipes for stroganoff, chantilly potatoes, omelets, a croque monsieur and more, all with a unique mushroom-centric approach. A treat for vegetarians and meat-eaters alike, Mushroom Gastronomy even includes a spin on beef Wellington that incorporates goat cheese and portobellos wrapped in puff pastry that’s enough to make even the most carnivorous among us consider a plant-based (fungi-based?) lifestyle. 

Mushroom Gastronomy’s part cookbook, part encyclopedia approach to the ever-fascinating fungus is as educational as it is mouthwatering.

Reading through Diane Keaton’s Fashion First is a little like seeing a legacy band on tour. Sure, there’s some time spent on looks that followed outdated trends and brief experimental phases—in Keaton’s case, these are almost always hair-related—but that’s overshadowed by the sheer number of hits. The key moment falls around halfway through the book, when a set of twin images shows Keaton in the tomboyish Ralph Lauren suiting that would soon become her signature style. It’s like hearing the first few bars of “Gimme Shelter”—you know the roof’s about to get blown off. What makes Fashion First all the more exciting is that you can see what it took to get there and the fun Keaton has had along the way. The book is organized like a photo album with a loose chronological structure, beginning with a handful of baby photos, including prescient snaps of a toddler Keaton wearing a bowler hat. The “1960” chapter delves into Keaton’s entrance into theater, never downplaying her interest in costumes first, acting second. If anything, Keaton’s insistence that style matters makes sense when you consider that her most iconic roles are known for their stylishness, from Annie Hall to Baby Boom to Book Club. Handwritten captions add moments of intimacy to a glossy, photo-heavy tome. Still, because this is Diane Keaton we’re talking about, she maintains a self-effacing charm throughout, including several misses alongside her greatest hits. One particular shot from the “1980” chapter shows Keaton in a long-sleeved ankle-length dress, which she’s paired with a very high-collared blouse and loafers, thick wooly socks and layers of pearls. In the caption, she confesses that she was on vacation “somewhere tropical—and no, I am not kidding.” The undercurrent of humor elevates the book from mere fashion bible (although it is that) to an essential record of how to be cool.

Beloved actress Diane Keaton’s Fashion First is both a style bible and an essential record of how to be cool.

The colorful, flavorful Belly Full: Exploring Caribbean Cuisine through 11 Fundamental Ingredients and over 100 Recipes accomplishes what might appear to be a daunting task—distilling a multifaceted culture’s cuisine into a 256-page book. Luckily, Brooklyn-based author Lesley Enston understands that challenge, and has chosen to make Belly Full a playful, not overwhelming, read. She organizes the book into fundamental ingredients: beans, calabaza, cassava, chayote, coconut, cornmeal, okra, plantains, rice, salted cod and Scotch bonnet peppers. Beyond that, she describes additional common ingredients—such as culantro, which is similar to but not exactly like cilantro—so that newbies to Caribbean cuisine have an informed approach. Enston grew up in a half-Trinidadian, half-Canadian household in Toronto, and often attended Trinidadian family functions. “We never talked much about the origins of these dishes,” she writes, “but the pride that went into preparing and serving them was clear.” In keeping with its Caribbean subject matter, Belly Full is filled with saturated colors and vibrant photography from Marc Baptiste. Enston’s Trini chow mein is particularly appealing, with its kitchen-sink approach to the traditional Asian dish. It’s also a fun portal into the culture: “This is a clear example of the influence of the Chinese indentured servants brought to Trinidad by British colonists after the abolition of slavery in the region,” she writes. An even deeper dive into cultural distinction is that the dish uses lo mein, not chow mein, noodles. “Why it’s called chow mein when you use lo mein noodles is beyond me,” Enston writes. “I chalk it up to the joy we seem to get from mixing names up.”

 

Belly Full is a charming, playful cookbook that uses 11 fundamental ingredients to distill the multifaceted cuisine of the Caribbean.

British author and critic Hettie Judah’s Acts of Creation: On Art and Motherhood is an essential art history. With 150 color illustrations and a scope that encompasses prehistory to the present moment, this exceptional book reframes motherhood as an important position from which to make and understand art. Judah’s tight prose moves gracefully from poetic to intense to straightforward. From her first sentence, this gifted writer tackles her subject with intellectual and artistic vigor: “A monstrous child is blocking my view and has carved a nest in the soft darkness of my head,” she writes in the book’s introduction. It’s inspiring to read along as she tackles the long overlooked cultural figure of the artist-mother with gravitas. A chapter titled “Creation” investigates the analogy of creativity and childbearing, noting the irony of the artist-mother’s place throughout the ages: “For much of art’s history, this literal process of baby-making and nurture invalidated a woman’s status as an artist.” Contemporary art enthusiasts will be especially taken with Acts of Creation, which includes insight into heavyweights like Judy Chicago, Louise Bourgeois, Carrie Mae Weems and more. But like any good curator, Judah has filled these pages with more obscure and under-the-radar artists, so there’s plenty to discover no matter your familiarity with art, feminism or motherhood. In a chapter called “Mothering,” Judah, with a hat-tip to the writer and activist Alexis Pauline Gumbs, speaks to “the radical potential of mothering as a form of expanded care,” regardless of gender or social privilege.

Hettie Judah’s insightful Acts of Creation gives motherhood its due, honoring it as an important position from which to make and understand art.

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