Books: 761

Legacy: A Black Physician Reckons with Racism in Medicine
Uché Blackstock, MD
Viking
$28

Raised by their physician mom, Uché and twin sister Oni expected to become doctors–and did. After Harvard, they attended Harvard Medical School. Their vigorous, athletic mother died early of leukemia at 47. The daughters launched medical careers. This memoir is a tribute to her mother, Dr. Dale Gloria Blackstock, and to explain the urgency of her current role as physician and thought leader on bias and racism in health care;  founder and CEO of Advancing Heath Equity. Her mother wrote, “In looking back, I believe that many of my negative experiences were as a result of race, not sexism,” and while neither dismisses the “sluggishness” of women’s progress, Blackstock examines the ongoing cycle of racism and the losses incurred by both physicians and patients.

On the Move: The Overheating Earth and the Uprooting of America
Abrahm Lustgarten
FSG
$30

The numbers have been coming in for some time; former sun-seeker home owners in our own country are home-bound during lengthier rising summer temps. Many poor, unable to move outdoor workers or in climate-vulnerable occupations–face immediate risk. Rising, lengthier heat spells affect farming and agriculture, lowering yields, killing some crops altogether. Current and coming trends are the migration of peoples, industries and crops to hold sustainability. It’s a matter of economics at bottom; who can afford to relocate, what happens to those who can’t; are some northern destinations (eg. Duluth) already getting warmer. Lustgarten predicts the next 30 years will see 13-100 million Americans potentially moving. And, there’s the rest of the globe, and the world population that just keeps expanding. Already too late?

The Road to Dalton
Shannon Bowring
Europa
$18

If you read Where the Forest Meets the River first (I reviewed it here first) you won’t be disappointed to go back now to the origin stories in The Road to Dalton. So many nuances become clear, so many outcomes are foreshadowed, others left in suspense. Bowring’s ability to make the citizens of this small Maine town come to life as the results of a minor accident on an icy night play out through all the community. Two older married ladies and their special relationship, a young boy torn between conflicting desires, self-medicating with food, a widower attracted to an abused young mother. A rescue from an icy river. Tensions, passions run high, but all is solidly based on the importance of communication and love.

A Place of Our Own: Six Spaces that Shaped Queer Women’s Culture
June Thomas
Seal Press
$30

Thomas, a co-host of Slate’s Working podcast, has appeared in the Washington Post, New York Times’s T Magazine, Advocate, and Marie Claire. Here she explores six iconic spaces that lesbians created over the years which include rural communes, vacation areas, sex-toy boutiques and bookstores, among the latter of which was Minneapolis’s Amazon, and its struggles with the rapacious Amazon we know today. Another interesting chapter, “The Softball Diamond,” involves the engagements, athletic and amatory of that sport. Along with the many and detailed interviews, Thomas shares her own experiences which offer a broad-band view over decades illustrating numerous changes between exclusive women’s spaces of the 1970s that evolved into today’s more inclusive LGBTQ+ communities. Thomas’s personal involvement makes for a highly readable and informative history.