“You are about to read the story of a culinary revolution,” Koreaworld: A Cookbook proclaims as it launches into a frenetic exploration of Korean and Korean-inspired food spanning from Jeju Island to North Virginia. After focusing on more traditional offerings in its first half, this animated celebration jumps to new interpretations of Korean food, such as banana milk cake and Shin Ramyun with pita chips. Authors Deuki Hong and Matt Rodbard provide their own musings on different preparation styles—using 7UP to flavor pickles, for example—while peppering in cultural history and modern context. The authors spotlight chefs throughout Korea and the U.S. and all their various influences, which span a bevy of cuisines, from Jewish to Chinese.
The sheer volume of restaurants and people profiled causes the book to meander in a fashion that sometimes feels scattered, but the abundance of eclectic detail will appeal strongly to diehard Korean food enthusiasts. Hong and Rodbard’s familiar rapport with many of their subjects lends a personal feeling to Koreaworld that is accentuated by Alex Lau’s stylish, energetic photography. Anyone interested in exploring the wild, exciting new frontiers of Korean food will find this book a fresh delight.
Anyone interested in exploring the wild, exciting new frontiers of Korean food will find Koreaworld a fresh delight.
In The Dead Don’t Need Reminding, Chicago poet Julian Randall braids memoir, history and cultural criticism, revealing himself to be a gifted storyteller.
In a time of rising anti-Asian hate and a renewal of anti-Black racism, Black and brown solidarity is of critical importance. Political pundits and activists alike have emphasized the urgency of financial, political and even ecological unity among these various ethnic and cultural groups. But in The Way You Make Me Feel: Love in Black and Brown, Nina Sharma calls for another type of Afro-Asian solidarity. In 16 bold, rich essays, Sharma unfurls the chronicle of her love affair with a Black man named Quincy. (Some readers will immediately recognize the dreadlocked man as Quincy Scott Jones, author of poetry collection The T-Bone Series.) Here, we journey to the center of a love story that is as much about romance as it is about Sharma’s Indian identity and wrestling with anti-Blackness.
Sharma adds color and nuance to her essays by braiding TV reviews with cultural commentary and memoir. In the powerful “Not Dead,” she discusses her experience watching “The Walking Dead” and analyzes one particular episode—the one in which the only Asian character in the series, a Korean American father-to-be named Glenn, is killed. She writes of her emotional journey following that episode, how she struggled to eat the meal Quincy lovingly made: “Our Sunday ritual. It wasn’t that my hunger was gone. I’d just had enough.” The episode made her think about another murdered Asian American man, real-life Vincent Chin, who was bludgeoned to death in Detroit in 1982. With grace and grit, she enters the narratives of these two individuals, and uses them to consider her own mortality as a South Asian American.
But in the main, this is a book about love. Sharma shows us that she’s got range, moving seamlessly from a discussion about racism on a national scale to making out with Quincy, for example. Readers will appreciate Sharma’s diaristic recounting of their lovers’ spats and her reflections on the central tension in their relationship: that in the American caste system, a Black man and Indian woman simply do not fit any accepted narrative.
With writing that is at once humorous and profound, The Way You Make Me Feel confronts the paradoxical realities of race and the family, and calls for greater solidarity by way of love.
With writing that is at once humorous and profound, Nina Sharma’s memoir unfurls the chronicle of her love affair and calls for greater unity among Asian and Black Americans.
Couldn't get enough of Challengers, director Luca Guadagnino's sophisticated and steamy story of a tennis pro love triangle? We've got some reading material for you.
The Internet of Animals: Discovering the Collective Intelligence of Life on Earth is a bonkers, delightful read if you are interested in any of the following: space and satellites, animal migration and behavior, analog versus digital technology, and the many complications that come from following through on the whiff of a very good idea.
Scientist Martin Wikelski had such an idea decades ago: Tag large numbers of animals and track them digitally via satellite. He envisioned a global community of animal researchers all pursuing projects using the same satellite and tracking technology, and making some portion of the reams of resulting data public. In a moment of either brilliance or dark insight into the troubles ahead, he dubbed the project ICARUS: International Cooperation for Animal Research Using Space. From the beginning, this was a project that aimed to fly near the sun and see the world anew.
But like the mythic story of Icarus, there were unforeseen complications: identifying the technology needed to create a satellite, fine-tuning the technology needed to tag the animals effectively, and finding global collaborators. This story of scientific advancement is also, like so many others, tied up in cultural differences, funding, politicking and geopolitics. A project that Wikelski thought would take only a few years has taken decades, and it’s still unfolding. Still, his good idea remains as captivating as ever.
Wikelski probes the mysteries of the animal world and shares vivid anecdotes of field research, from unusually sociable rice rats in the Galapagos Islands, to a wandering egret who made friends with a family in Bavaria (when he was supposed to be migrating to a different continent). Wikelski situates these stories within the big questions about animals and how they live on Earth—what they know innately and what they could tell us, if they only had a way. He convincingly argues that these questions should animate us all, and his vision of creating a way for animals to communicate what they are remains a vital, galvanizing example of how human ingenuity and persistence can make a difference in how we understand the world around us.
The bonkers and delightful The Internet of Animals tells the story of author-scientist Martin Wikelski’s efforts to connect animal researchers across the globe, and understand animals anew.
There’s no such thing as a spoiler alert when a story’s subject is taught in most every American history class across the country. Injecting hold-your-breath suspense into a narrative history, particularly one in which we already know the story’s ending, is a task that Erik Larson has mastered. In the Garden of the Beasts took on Nazi Germany on the cusp of war; The Splendid and the Vile explored Winston Churchill’s stewardship of under-siege England. In his new book, The Demon of Unrest: A Saga of Hubris, Heartbreak, and Heroism at the Dawn of the Civil War, Larson turns his attention to the immediate aftermath of the election of Abraham Lincoln and the unlanced boil where the war began: Fort Sumter.
Larson covers just a few months of American history—but perhaps the most consequential few months. Lincoln, Jefferson Davis and other well-known figures from the period play key roles, but so too do a British journalist on assignment, a young private stuck in the besieged fort and a Southern society woman watching the events unfold. They aren’t key characters in the grand arc of the Civil War or the country’s history, but they did write a lot down. Their accounts help Larson propel the narrative without relying entirely on the stories of people who have already been the subject of hundreds or thousands of other books.
There are obvious parallels to the current moment: a refusal to accept the results of a presidential election, threats to march on the Capitol, a tendency toward civility and appeasement in the face of existential threat and other more subtle links to the present. Some of the connections are unavoidable and necessary; others, Larson perhaps injects as a result of recency bias.
Even after a century and a half of books about the subject, it remains remarkably unclear what course of action key figures should or could have taken to avoid America’s bloodiest war. Maybe we’ll never figure that out, but The Demon of Unrest is a damn good read.
In The Demon of Unrest, Erik Laron crafts a tale of hold-your-breath suspense about the crucial three months leading up to the Civil War.
When anthropologist and Stanford University professor Angela Garcia went to Mexico City to study a new urban development, she instead discovered families threatened by the violence of the drug war committing themselves or their family members to anexos, coercive drug rehab programs run out of private homes. There, staff members inflict beatings and emotional abuse unironically called “treatment.”
The chance that you’ve heard of an anexos is slim; a quick Google search elicits few results, the top result of which is an academic paper by Garcia herself. In her new book, The Way That Leads Among the Lost: Life, Death, and Hope in Mexico City’s Anexos, she studies these complicated places and the social forces that have created them. Based on direct observation and interviews with people living in several such run-down centers, Garcia shows the diverse experiences that brought them there: A trans woman named Sheila self-admitted and becomes a den mother to young teen residents; an introverted 14-year-old with the nickname Catorce was dropped off by his mother before she left town; and teenage Daniel was violently apprehended after his desperate mother called an anexos for help about his drug addiction.
The stories of anexados vary, but the essential reason the centers exist is the same: The violence inside the walls of an anexos is less frequent and severe than that outside. As Garcia observes life in these makeshift drug rehab centers, she reckons with her own past abandonments, familial addiction and homelessness. Garcia is careful not to run a straight line from the violence of these programs to the healing of their participants. More often than not, people either spend long periods of time living in the anexos, or they are in and out of them as they vacillate between safety and danger, flush and broke.
Yet anexos serve a purpose to many in the communities where they exist. Garcia reflects on the pain many parents feel sending their children to anexos, knowing they’ll suffer violence within, but otherwise unable to keep them from the threat posed by the drug war in their neighborhoods. The Way That Leads Among the Lost is both a heavy and enlightening history of how anexos came to be, and a compassionate look into the lives of those impacted.
Correction, April 23, 2024: This review previously misstated the name of author Angela Garcia.
The Way That Leads Among the Lost investigates the heavy yet enlightening history of anexos, clandestine Mexico City drug recovery centers.
Aarathi Prasad’s entertaining and enlightening history of silk brims with story and scientific detail, revealing a surprising history well worth knowing.
When biologist and writer Aarathi Prasad learned that a piece of fabric woven from threads produced by a Mediterranean mollusk called Pinna nobilis had been found outside Budapest in a tomb of a woman mummified in the style of the ancient Egyptians, she got on a plane.
The museum holding the remains and most of the documentation of the discovery had been destroyed in a Nazi bombing during the 1940s, but she was undeterred. “I called the museum,” says Prasad, “and asked, Is there any chance you have anything? They said, Yes, yes, come and see. . . . My daughter asked, ‘Are you some kind of spy?’ I landed in Budapest and went directly to the museum. It was closed. They let me into the basement. [The mummified woman] was wrapped in hemp, very well preserved, they said. But did you find any silk? [I asked.] They said yes, when the sarcophagus was opened there was very fine fabric covering her. But it disappeared as soon as the lid was lifted.”
The unusual, hermaphroditic Pinna nobilis mollusks anchor themselves to rocks using distinct, transparent threads that spawned a regional weaving culture likely dating back to before the Phoenicians. The mollusks themselves had been a robust part of local diets until human-induced sea warming resulted in massive die-offs and imposed harvesting limits. That’s just one example in hundreds of fascinating facts and stories Prasad relates in her illuminating Silk: A World History, a book born out of her own obsessive pursuit of knowledge. “I have heard it said that scientific study can take away a sense of wonder because science reduces a miraculous organism into mere mechanical parts,” she writes. “I have never found that to be true. Perhaps I find miracles in mechanisms.”
“Traditional science books often feel like textbooks. Human stories bring them alive.”
Prasad devotes much of the lively middle of her book to the biology, culture and elusive history of Pinna nobilis silk, seeking to resolve how long people have been weaving mollusk silk fabric. “It’s so intriguing,” she says. “Chances are this fabric was widely used around the Mediterranean. It existed. Then for a while no one knew it existed, and now we are trying to prove it existed. In the meantime, the animals these threads come from are critically endangered because of human activities. There’s a big metaphor about life somewhere in that.”
Normally Prasad’s research is not so dramatic. She is now an honorary researcher at University College London, and her current project is as a geneticist on archaeological digs in Rome and Pompeii. She raised her daughter, Tara, now in her early 20s, as a single parent while holding down academic and research jobs. Employment and parenting meant she usually worked on Silk and her two previous books, one on Indian medicine and the other on how science is altering conception, in the early mornings and late evenings. Tara has traveled with her on many research forays, to India and “into different, difficult situations,” Prasad says with a hint of pride, “so that she now tells people trying to advise her on her studies, ‘Oh, I’ve never let school get in the way of my education.’” Tara has also dismissed her mother’s experimental efforts to grow silkworms herself. “They poop a lot,” Prasad admits. “My daughter was disgusted.”
Prasad’s interest in silk arose first “through science, through the application of silk in regenerative medicine, creating new parts for the heart or applying it to rebuilding the body in a more organic, less invasive way.” Her book profiles the contemporary scientists working at the cutting edge of bioengineering animals like goats (so far unsuccessfully) to produce silk with the strength of a strand of a spider’s web, or experimenting with ways to incorporate silk into biomedicine or even as alternatives to plastics. “I was surprised in talking to these scientists to discover that they found the environmental impact more interesting than the surgical or biological applications,” Prasad says. “Because to them it’s a material that could and should be applied to planetary sustainability.”
That outlook is the almost polar opposite of the attitudes of many of the Western scientists Prasad profiles in the opening section of Silk. Curious, eccentric and sometimes obsessed, these were men (and some women) of their times: the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries. As such, their interests reflected a colonizer’s point of view.
“European science has actually been quite extractive,” says Prasad. “So I fell down this rabbit hole of colonial history. I learned this from my India book [In the Bonesetter’s Waiting Room] as well. Countries colonized by the British and the French had their own systems of knowledge cut off. The British asked their military men and doctors to do etymology on the side. They said, essentially, go out and find the coal, go find the trees, go find the animals and plants. That’s how they made their money. There was a lot of abusive behavior, not even mentioning slavery. And how would scientists from Europe know about plants and animals in another country? By speaking to local people. But it is impossible to know who those people were because they were never named.”
Prasad’s awareness of cultural appropriation and the dismissal of Indigenous expertise percolates through the book, adding voltage to her depiction of the pursuit of knowledge about silkworms. The most common silkworm, Bombyx mori, was at the center of global trade. “The fact that it was bred for so long in homes and factories specifically for its silken cocoons,” Prasad writes, “made this caterpillar so docile, prevalent, and immobile that it would also become the focus of intense scientific study.” As described in magnificent detail here, Bombyx mori would become one of the first insects to be analyzed in precise anatomical detail in the 17th century by Marcello Malpighi. Silkworm studies also led an early researcher to propose a germ theory of disease before Louis Pasteur’s widely known discoveries. Later researchers would discover that the patterns on silk moths and other moths absorb sound energy from predatory bats using echolocation to hunt. The moths mimic the sound waves, allowing them to create a cloak against detection.
“I was astonished to find so many women who were natural historians. Why has hardly anyone ever heard of them?”
“Traditional science books often feel like textbooks. Human stories bring them alive,” Prasad says, explaining her decision to nest the science in her early chapters within miniature biographies of the researchers and their cultures. “I grew up in the Caribbean and came to England as a teenager. I loved history but I had to choose at some point between history and science, and I chose science. In England I learned about the Normandy landings in the Second World War—not that there were Indians and Africans fighting in the war. Just the European perspective. Whereas in Trinidad, I learned about slavery and the Aztecs and all of these cultures that weren’t ours. Sometimes we have to educate ourselves because what we’re taught in schools is not necessarily going to give us the full story.”
She adds, “In writing the book, I was astonished to find so many women who were natural historians. Why has hardly anyone ever heard of them? Their work was used but rarely acknowledged.”
Prasad found one of these women, Maria Sibylla Merian, particularly captivating. A 17th-century Dutch illustrator and naturalist, her drawings were used by Linneaus to classify more than 100 species. But her observations were often dismissed by male scientists. “She got on a ship and sailed with her daughter across the Atlantic,” Prasad says. “She was the first person to go to study nature as a scientist. Other people went for other reasons. Darwin went as a doctor. She went for science and nothing else. . . . She was a single mother too, and she wanted to see with her own eyes.”
Maria Ressa’s book is a political history of the Philippines and an intimate memoir, but it’s also a warning to democracies everywhere: Authoritarianism is a threat to us all.
