Here’s what I shared on WBRC Fox 6 this month. A hot-now cookbook that celebrates grandmothers, brand-new fiction, an older but important book to read right now and a new children’s book about stars. It’s a lot!
In Bibi’s Kitchen by Hawa Hassan with Julia Turshen
The subtitle of this cookbook—The recipes and Stories of Grandmothers from the Eight African Countries that Touch the Indian Ocean—tells readers we are in for a lot of tasty treats and some armchair travel with a side helping of enduring wisdom. Hassan is a Somali chef, and together with renowned food writer Turshen, she gives us 75 home-style recipes and engaging stories gathered from bibis (grandmothers) from Eritrea, Somalia, Kenya, Tanzania, Mozambique, South Africa, Madagascar and Comoros. With personal narratives and beautiful photos shot on location in their homes (some still live in Africa; others left during difficult times and now live in the U.S.), these women share recipes (and the stories behind them) that have been handed down through generations. The easy-to-follow recipes for things like kicha (Eritrean flatbread), matoke (stewed plantains with beans and beef), kachumbari (tomato, cucumber and onion salad) and even straightforward mango chile sauce will expand your culinary horizons, and these women and their stories will touch your heart.
Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro
This brand-new book is the eighth novel published by the Nobel Prize-winning British author of The Remains of the Day. It’s set in a dystopian future where some children are genetically engineered (“lifted”) to excel academically. All learning is online, so to provide social interactions, wealthy parents buy their children an Artificial Friend (AF). This story is narrated by one such AF, Klara, who becomes a friend for a girl named Josie. Klara is very observant and intelligent even though her worldly experience has been limited to what she could see outside the store window. As a solar-powered machine, Klara is always aware of the sun (which she refers to as He and considers a living, conscious entity with the ability to heal). When she realizes that the lifting process is a dangerous one (Josie’s sister, Sal, died and Josie herself is quite sick), Klara decides to enlist the sun’s help to heal her friend. This book is profoundly moving. And it ultimately asks the important questions, “What does it mean to be human?” and “What does it mean to love?” The answers might surprise you.
The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration by Isabel Wilkerson
Isabel Wilkson also is the author of the No. 1 bestselling book Caste: The Origins of our Discounts. In this older (2010), beautifully written and equally important book, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author chronicles the decades-long migration of Black Americans who fled the South for northern and western cities in search of a better life for themselves and their families. From 1915 to 1970, nearly six million people made this journey, and this exodus changed the social and economic face of America. Wilkerson interviewed more than 1,000 people, researched official records and mined new data to bring this important part of our history to light in a way that is dramatic and hard to put down. The story is told, with stunningly intimate detail, through the lives of three people: Ida Mae Gladney, who left sharecropping in Mississippi in the 1930s for Chicago; George Starling, who in 1945 fled the orange groves of a horrifyingly violent Florida for Harlem; and Robert Foster, who, in the early 1950s, left Louisiana for California to pursue a successful medical career (he was the personal physician to Ray Charles. Wilkerson traces their exhausting, frightening journeys across the country and then their lives where they landed—where they and other transplants like them changed those cities with their culture, food, faith, hard work and personal drive for a better life.
The Secret Life of Stars (on sale today, May 4!) by Lisa Harvey-Smith with illustrations by Eirian Chapman
The stars, they are just like us! Stars, nebulae and other deep-space phenomena take on personalities and human-like emotions and frailties in this new book for young readers. The author easily explains, in a fun and engaging way, why the sun produces heat and light, what happens when a star blows up and even the secrets of black holes. It’s astrophysics for everyone; and that’s the book’s subtitle. As Harvey-Smith, an award-winning astronomer, writes, “… we see stable dwarf stars, unpredictable giants and many in between. We see kind stars, devious stars, selfish and just plain weird stars. … Some live in families … yet many destroy their relationships. … During a midlife crisis, a star can disappear completely, or reincarnate in a colorful cloud of gas. Stars are born and they age, just like us, before slowly succumbing to the inevitable, their ashes returned to the cosmos.”
I link to Amazon to show you exactly what book I’m talking about, but I love to shop locally at Church Street Coffee and Books, The Alabama Booksmith, Little Professor Book Center, and I often visit my local library.
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