One of the pleasures of getting older is enjoying the professional accomplishments of friends. This year, at least 10 friends wrote books. I’ve only read one so far, but I’m working on it!
Global health — Doomed Interventions: The Failure of Global Responses to AIDS in Africa, by Kim Yi Dionne. Says Rachel Sullivan Robinson: “Dionne uses fascinating cases across a number of sub-Saharan African countries to demonstrate how the mismatch between donor and citizen priorities limits the effectiveness of HIV programming, as does the sheer number of actors involved at multiple levels of governance.”
Economic history — Competition in the Promised Land: Black Migrants in Northern Cities and Labor Markets, by Leah Platt Boustan. Says Amazon: “Traditionally, the Great Black Migration has been lauded as a path to general black economic progress. Leah Boustan challenges this view, arguing instead that the migration produced winners and losers within the black community. Boustan shows that migrants themselves gained tremendously, more than doubling their earnings by moving North. But these new arrivals competed with existing black workers, limiting black–white wage convergence in Northern labor markets and slowing black economic growth.”
Religious history — The Healing Power of the Santuario de Chimayó: America’s Miraculous Church, by Brett Hendrickson. Says Amazon: “Nestled in a valley at the feet of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains of New Mexico, the Santuario de Chimayó has been called the most important Catholic pilgrimage site in America… The book tells the fascinating stories of the Pueblo and Nuevomexicano Catholic origins of the site and the building of the church, the eventual transfer of the property to the Catholic Archdiocese of Santa Fe, and the modern pilgrimage of believers alongside thousands of tourists.”
Poetry — Mother’s Milk: Poems in Search of Heavenly Mother, by Rachel Steenblik. This is a beautiful collection of reflections on the divine feminine.
Novel — Archaeopteryx, by Dan Darling. Says Amazon: “John Stick, zoo
keeper and giant, just wants to sit alone in a dark room with his pet tarantula. However, when ten thousand birds fall dead from the New Mexican sky, the woman he loves, an ornithologist with severe facial deformity, begs him to decipher the cause.”
Memoir — The Black Penguin, by Andrew Evans. My cousin (and good friend!) wrote this account of growing up, coming out, and traveling to Antarctica almost entirely by bus. (I raved more about it here.)
Another memoir — The Burning Point: A Memoir of Addiction, Destruction, Love, Parenting, Survival, and Hope, by Tracy McKay Lamb.
Says Joanna Brooks: “For every woman who makes the heartbreaking but utterly necessary choice to leave, to start over, to make a new home, for her kids, for herself; for every woman who will wake up alone this morning and do by herself the hard work of holding a family together; for every woman who puts one foot in front of the other, this book offers a safe space of wisdom, warmth, and understanding.”
Young adult science fiction — Twists in Time, by Angie Taylor. Says Amazon: “Grant and Ava begin a mysterious journey of love and risk that extend beyond their past and present and possibly into a future that transcends time.”
Bible studies — The Sun Has Burned My Skin: A Modest Paraphrase of Solomon’s Song of Songs, by Adam Miller. Says Amazon: “A loose
paraphrase that aims more for the replication of a certain mood than for the correspondence of particular words and phrases. The songs themselves are a collection of age-old Israelite love songs, searing and intense, sung principally by a young woman who is bold, confident, and only just exposed to the tidal pull of love and sex.”
And a little something else — Parrots of Desire: 3,000 Years of Indian Erotica, by Amrita Narayanan. Says the publisher: “The erotic tradition in India is thousands of years old. In The Parrots of Desire, the modern reader, to whom the anthology is dedicated, will find a wealth of Indian erotic writing—beyond the famously unbridled passages of the Kama Sutra and Koka Shastra.”
David Evans' personal blog 