“The Good Immigrant” 305.8009 Go

The good immigrant brings together 15 emerging British black, Asian and minority ethnic writers, poets, journalists and artists share powerful personal stories of living between cultures and languages while struggling to figure out who they are and where they belong. Thru turns of heartbreak and hilarious, trouble and uplifting essays which come together to create a provocative multivocal portrait of America.

Kotlowitz, Alex. “An American Summer. Love and Death in Chicago.”364.15 Ko.

The main characters are diverse. One man who was a gang member for years and still struggles to cope with his actions; a mother who refuses to hate her son’s killer and battles to make people understand individuals are more than their worst acts are just a couple of the stories which are threaded into the classic narrative of violence and the City of Chicago. A common theme in the stories is the publicness of the violence, which is witnessed by many children and adults. Kotlowitz develops a nuanced understanding of the stories of those left behind within the violence thru a presentation of the human side of tragedy, the stories of those left behind.

Wallace-Wells, David. The Uninhabitable Earth; Life after Warming. 304.28 Wa. The book expands on a virtual article called “The Uninhabitable Earth, which Wallace-Wells published in New York in the summer of 2017. This reflection narrative provides a clear glimpse of what climates await for humanity in the future which will reshape the globe. Society has tools to stop transformative climate change but lack the political or economic will to push for expanded climate change.

Wilson-Lee, Edward. “The Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books: Christopher Columbus, His Son, and the Quest to Build the World’s Greatest Library.” 970.015 Wi. Hernando Colon is the center of this autobiography on the illegitimate son of Christopher Columbus. Colon spent many years and a vast fortune buying up everything he could get his hands on, on some trips returning with over a thousand books. Of particular interest and importance is the fact that he was especially interested in what we now call ephemera broadsheets, ballads, musical items, publications that almost no one else was interested in. It is in large part thanks to the young Columbus that we even know that some of these items existed. As his library increased in size, he then obsessed over how to organize it, how to make it manageable, how to know what he had and where. This led to him creating various cataloguing systems that would be recognizable to most librarians today, although his unique system or blueprint for the whole library, kept on thousands of scraps of paper (an early form of file cards), each bearing a different hieroglyphic symbol, would have defeated most of them. There is no doubt that the modern reader and book collector owes a massive debt to the pioneering work of Hernando Colon, as he shaped the way we read and the ways we try to organize the world.

By Diana Menhennick

Adult Services/References