Hunger - Roxane Gay

Staff Pick
If you want to read an inspirational memoir about weight loss, this is not that book. Something horrible happened to Roxane at age twelve, and her life fractured into “before” and “after" phases. That event transformed her life, and she began her journey as a fat person. Roxane Gay has no answers. What she has are lots of observations. Observations about what it’s like to move through the world as a morbidly obese woman, to try to feel invisible in that world, and how the world reacts to her. This is a memoir of struggle and shame. As she says, “All of us have to be more considerate of the realities of the bodies of others.”
Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body By Roxane Gay Cover Image
$25.99
ISBN: 9780062362599
Availability: Not On Our Shelves—Ships in 1-5 Days
Published: Harper - June 13th, 2017

Daring to Drive - Manal Al-Sharif

Staff Pick

In Manal Al-Sharif’s new book Daring to Drive, we’re reminded that even in the most dire situations, even when your oppressors seek to hide and mutilate who you are, change is possible. Beginning with her preposterous arrest for driving while being a woman in Saudi Arabia, she then tells us the story of her life, from poverty in Mecca to becoming a leader of a movement. You won't want to put down this extraordinary book. Read it and remember change can come a small step at a time or, as Manal put it, “the rain begins with a single drop.”

Daring to Drive: A Saudi Woman's Awakening By Manal al-Sharif Cover Image
$26.00
ISBN: 9781476793023
Availability: Special Order—Subject to Availability
Published: Simon & Schuster - June 13th, 2017

Island Home - Tim Winton

Staff Pick
Winton’s fiction has always featured some of the sharpest nature writing around, and in this collection of autobiographical essays, he goes at it full throttle. Proud and humbled to hail  from “the world’s largest island, “ Winton celebrates Australia’s dazzling biodiversity, its often unsettling scale, and shows how these have shaped his life and work. He takes us by car, plane, and on foot through a variety of landscapes—Perth, Cape Range, Waychinicup—and shows us some of the world’s last remaining wild spots. And also, alas, many places ruined by the “colonialist mindset” of economic exploitation, which turned what Europeans perceived as “wastelands” into the real thing. For Winton, an environmental activist as well as a writer, this memoir is also a manifesto and a call to action; he honors the heroic Indigenous people who have never wavered in their dedication to the land’s intrinsic value, and he discusses the long fight to protect the Great Barrier Reef—at one point slated to become a limestone quarry—and hopes the day will come when Australia no longer has the world’s highest rate of mammal extinction.
Island Home: A Landscape Memoir By Tim Winton Cover Image
$16.00
ISBN: 9781571311245
Availability: Special Order—Subject to Availability
Published: Milkweed Editions - May 9th, 2017

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