Sponsored by Annalee Newitz's Four Lost Cities
In Four Lost Cities, acclaimed science journalist Annalee Newitz takes readers on an entertaining and mind-bending adventure into the deep history of urban life. Investigating across the centuries and around the world, Newitz explores the rise and fall of four ancient cities. Four Lost Cities is a journey into the forgotten past, but, foreseeing a future in which the majority of people on Earth will be living in cities, it may also reveal something of our own fate.
If you read the Friday newsletter, you know that I was wondering why there aren’t many books with a green cover. One reader messaged me that someone right here at Book Riot has researched this issue! This article by L.L. Wohlwend is awesome and should be read: Judging a Book Cover By Its Color. And yes! Green is mentioned as something designers are told doesn’t sell well. Interesting.
I recently moved and am feeling literally boxed in by all my books, but that doesn’t stop me from coveting new releases as always. Here’re your highlights for this week:
The Whiteness of Wealth: How the Tax System Impoverishes Black Americans–and How We Can Fix It by Dorothy A. Brown
What if you used your knowledge of tax law to fight evil? Brown was doing her parents’ tax returns one day and realized they were paying a weirdly high amount for their jobs. Then when she became a law professor, she started researching why that happened. Surprise, turns out “American tax law rewards the preferences and practices of white people while pushing black people further behind” for things from going to college to buying a home.
Horizontal Vertigo : A City Called Mexico by Juan Villoro
I love a travel and history book. Sociologist and novelist Villoro walks Mexico City, recounting its history from indigenous antiquity to the Aztecs, the Spanish conquistadors, and modern day. Mexico City is the largest Spanish-speaking city in the world, built on a tectonically-active plateau and growing at a tremendous rate.
Intelligent Love: The Story of Clara Park, Her Autistic Daughter, and the Myth of the Refrigerator Mother by Marga Vicedo
In the 1960s, Clara Park’s daughter three-year-old daughter Jessy was diagnosed with autism, and Clara was blamed for it. At the time, the idea of the “refrigerator mother” was huge: “a cold, intellectual parent who starved her children of the natural affection they needed to develop properly.” Clara decided to document her daughter’s development and challenge this myth. This biography tells the story of how Clara and others “fought against medical and popular attitudes toward autism while presenting a rich account of major scientific developments in the history of autism in the US.”
The Nation of Plants by Stefano Mancuso
Did you know a plant neurobiologist was a thing? I definitely did not. Mancuso states that in the last three hundred thousand years, humans have wreaked chaos in the plant world. He responds to this by writing a plant constitution. Yes, it’s a constitution written on behalf of plants, presenting “eight fundamental pillars on which the life of plants—and by extension, humans—rests.”
For more nonfiction new releases, check out the For Real podcast which I co-host with the excellent Kim here at Book Riot. If you have any questions/comments/book suggestions, you can find me on social media @itsalicetime. Until next time, enjoy those facts, fellow nerds.