Welcome back everyone! If you’re in the States and had a yummy dinner, I hope it went smoothly! I made my family’s stuffing and I forgot how much it rules, and why the hell do I make it only once a year?!
We’re gearing up for the holiday season and this is my plug to shop local or buy from small businesses. For many, a bulk of their sales happen during this time of year!
I have more non-fiction, plus a beautiful, illustrated book and witchy urban fantasy.
Are there any books you’d love to recommend? Let us know!
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Against Technoableism
This is the first of two activism-centric titles of I today. This one was recommended to me at work; one of our research groups works heavily with amputees and put this on my radar.
A manifesto exploding what we think we know about disability, and arguing that disabled people are the real experts when it comes to technology and disability.
When bioethicist and professor Ashley Shew became a self-described “hard-of-hearing chemobrained amputee with Crohn’s disease and tinnitus,” there was no returning to “normal.” Suddenly well-meaning people called her an “inspiration” while grocery shopping, or viewed her as a needy recipient of technological wizardry. Most disabled people don’t want what the abled assume they want—nor are they generally asked. Why do abled people frame disability as an individual problem that calls for technological solutions, rather than a social one?
In a warm, feisty, opinionated voice and vibrant prose, Shew shows how we can create better narratives and more accessible futures by drawing from the insights of the cross-disability community. For the future is surely disabled—whether through changing climate, new diseases, or even through space travel. It’s time we looked closely at how we all think about disability technologies and learn to envision disabilities not as liabilities, but as skill sets enabling all of us to navigate a challenging world.
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The Bodies Keep Coming
This one is more memoir with a focus on racism and racial injustice in the healthcare system. I’ve recommended this to a few people in my personal life already who are already really interest in the topic.
A tour de force that diagnoses the structural root of the violence that plagues us all
Trauma surgeon and professor Dr. Brian H. Williams has seen it all, from gunshot wounds to stabbings to traumatic brain injuries. In The Bodies Keep Coming, Williams ushers us into the trauma bay, where the wounds of a national emergency amass. As a Harvard-trained physician, he learned to keep his head down and his scalpel ready. As a Black man, he learned to swallow the rage when patients told him to take out the trash.
Just days after the tragic police shootings of two Black men, Williams tried to save the lives of police officers shot in Dallas in the deadliest incident for U.S. law enforcement since 9/11. Thrust into the spotlight in a nation that loves feel-good stories about heroism more than hard truths about racism, Williams came to rethink everything he thought he knew about medicine, injustice, and what true healing looks like.
Now, in raw and intimate detail, Williams narrates not only the events of that night in 2016, but the grief and anger of a Black doctor on the front lines of trauma care. Working in the physician-writer tradition of Atul Gawande and Damon Tweedy, Williams diagnoses the roots of the violence that plagues us. He draws a through-line between white supremacy, gun violence, and the bodies he tries to revive, and he trains his surgeon’s eye on the structural ills that manifest themselves in the bodies of his patients.
What if racism is a feature of our healthcare system, not a bug? What if profiting from racial inequality is exactly what it was designed to do? Black and brown bodies will continue to be wracked by all types of violence, Williams argues, until something changes. Until we transform policy and law with compassion and care, the bodies will keep coming.
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Godfather Death
Looking for a quirky and beautiful picture book for all ages? The illustration style reminds me a little of The Thief and the Cobbler, which I loved and just learned thanks to Wikipedia, that it was never fully finished.
A soul-stirring reimagined Grimm tale by award-winning author Sally Nicholls and hauntingly illustrated by Júlia Sardà which will spellbind and thrill readers of all ages.
When a poor fisherman chooses Death to be godfather to his son, he’s sure he’s made a good choice – for surely there’s no man more honest than Death? At the christening, Death gives the fisherman a gift that seems at first to be the key to the family’s fortune, but when greed overcomes the fisherman, he learns that nobody can truly cheat Death . . .
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One for My Enemy
I have such fond feelings for Kat Howard’s An Unkindness of Magicians, so anything with witches in a power struggle in modern NYC hits a lot of my buttons. And perhaps yours too!
From New York Times bestselling author of The Atlas Six comes a tale of two rival witch families in modern day New York City, fighting to maintain control of their respective criminal ventures.
On one side of the conflict are the Antonova sisters, each one beautiful, cunning, and ruthless, and their mother, the elusive supplier of premium intoxicants known only as Baba Yaga. On the other side, the influential Fedorov brothers serve their father, the crime boss known as Koschei the Deathless, whose community extortion ventures dominate the shadows of magical Manhattan.
After twelve years of tenuous coexistence, a change in one family’s interests causes a rift in the existing stalemate. When bad blood brings both families to the precipice of disaster, fate intervenes with a chance encounter, and in the aftershocks of a resurrected conflict, everyone must choose a side. As each of the siblings struggles to stake their claim, fraying loyalties threaten to rot each side from the inside out.
If, that is, the enmity between empires doesn’t destroy them first.
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As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases.
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our posts, as well. Thanks!
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