Marina

Although better known for his fiction, hipsterati Lethem's book of essays are actually more in depth, relevant and personal. This may be because the central thesis of this book is the way in which a young person makes art personal to avoid the loneliness of urban family life. Chronicling things such as growing up near the Brooklyn subway station that filmed the original
'Taking of Pelham 1, 2, 3' and the cult classic 'The Warriors,' or losing childhood friends to arguments over the return of Jack Kirby to Marvel Comics, Lethem finds that  'In the end, the disappointment artist was me.'

An in depth and fun to read look at our modern food industry. Did you know that farmers consider 'Big
Corn' to be a welfare queen and that the corn lobby is behind the creation of genetically engineered corn eating fish? Did you know that the man who invented both synthetic nitrogen and Zyklon B, the death gas used at Auschwitz, was Jewish? This book could have been titled better and no one from the midwest calls it 'America's Middle West' but despite his Berkeley foibles, Pollan is definitely one of the best food writers around because in the end he is writing about everything but food.

In 1975, St. Louis native Shange invented a new
medium, the chloreopoem, to describe her play about six different women trying to find their way in a world that does not see them as human. One of them is a young St. Louis girl who wins a children's reading contest at the library only to be stripped of her title when one of the books she read was an adult book about Touissant L'Overture. So she decides to go to Haiti to find him.