I picked up this book at the bookstore one day on a whim, and I am glad I did!
The Barbizon is the true story about the women who lived in the famed New York hotel during its heyday. If you are looking for some escapist reading from all the madness in the world, this book is for you.
I saw this recipe on YouTube and tried it immediately.
It was fabulous! It’s a great fish option for Thanksgiving too!
It’s the most wonderful time of the year!
Nonfiction bloggers and Booktubers are encouraging readers this month to challenge themselves to read at least one nonfiction book.
If you follow this blog, you already know this is not a hard task for me to do. However, if you find it hard to find nonfiction books you would enjoy, I would highly recommend first checking anything you have watched on Netflix or Hulu lately.
There are a lot of popular movie adaptations of books, including Maid: Hard Work, Low Pay, and a Mother’s Will To Survive by Stephanie Land. This memoir is about the author’s experience of being a single mother struggling against domestic abuse and poverty. I was really struck by the book because most people including the judicial system only think of physical violence when discussing domestic abuse and not necessarily the mental and emotional violence involved. I also appreciated the focus on what it is like to be working poor in America. I highly recommend it and watch the Netflix program.
You can look through my most recent blog posts to see other book recommendations. Here are some other recommended nonfiction reads of the top of my head:
Island People: The Caribbean and the World by Josh Jelly-Schapiro
Caste by Isabel Wilkerson
Color of Water by James McBride
Hood Feminism by Mikki Kendel
How The Word Is Passed by Clint Smith
Tweeting Truth To Power by Cyrus McQueen
“The problem isn’t the word, it’s the way we treat people who we use that word to describe.”
After watching this great segment from the Daily Show the other day, I started thinking more about how some of our everyday language has changed. Homeless people are now referred to as unhoused and the word “retarded” is no longer socially acceptable language when referring to people with intellectual disabilities. Of course, there is also the evolving language used for LGBT folks and people of color.
I had a conversation recently with a friend who works in tenant’s rights advocacy about why saying “the projects” is no longer acceptable when referring to subsidized housing. Instead, she prefers to say “affordable housing” because that is really what it is – affordable housing for low-income folks. “The Projects” unfortunately comes with a lot of historically racist and classist baggage. According to her, saying affordable housing helps to destigmatize and reclarify this type of housing for both residents and non-residents.
I’m still not sure if changing the language around every few years will change how people think or treat people living under those circumstances, but that is just me.