February 2021
Welcome to February, a month loaded with holidays and observances. For such a wee month, it really packs a punch. As I pinch hit for Chris in this edition of the newsletter, I’ll suggest some mid-winter reading to harmonize with who and what we acknowledge in February.

Speaking of pinch hitting, who isn’t thinking about spring training? People actually practice baseball in February in faraway lands like Florida and Arizona. A new biography, The Bona Fide Legend of Cool Papa Bell: Speed, Grace, and the Negro Leagues by Lonnie Wheeler, is a welcome addition to our baseball collection. I also recommend Howard Bryant's excellent biography of my favorite ballplayer of all time, The Last Hero: A Life of Henry Aaron.

As we celebrate Black History Month, I would underscore Mike Hare's high recommendation for Four Hundred Souls below. Two additional books of importance we will feature this month are The Black Church: This is Our Story, This is Our Song by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Three Mothers: How the Mothers of Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, and James Baldwin Shaped a Nation by Anna Malaika Tubbs. 

Two presidents blow out the candles this month. If you already got your heavy lifting in on last fall's Abe, consider The Crooked Path to Abolition: Abraham Lincoln and the Antislavery Constitution by James Oakes. And POTUS #1 gets a proper demythologizing in You Never Forget Your First: A Biography of George Washington by Alexis Coe, just out in paperback.

For any day of the year including February 14, Letters of Note: Love compiled by Shaun Usher, is a lovely collection of letters by artists and writers who had a way with expressing matters of the heart.

Thanks as always for your support,
Stan Hynds
Virtual Events from Northshire Bookstore
For a complete schedule, click here

Northshire Live Virtual Events are ticketed. If the cost of an event ticket is prohibitive for you, e-mail us at events@northshire.com to inquire about a scholarship.
Join former US Ambassador to the UN Samantha Power and Academy Award-winning actress Laura Dern for a wide-ranging conversation to mark the paperback release of Power’s critically acclaimed, best-selling memoir The Education of an Idealist.
Join us for the launch of The New Heirloom Garden: Designs, Recipes, and Heirloom Plants for Cooks Who Love to Garden the beautiful new book from Manchester author and garden lecturer Ellen Ecker Ogden who was inspired to preserve the diversity of plants that are slipping away after learning that we have lost over 85% of the plant world in the last century to extinction.
Join us for the launch of Landslide a "spectacular" novel about a family on the brink from Susan Conley, the critically acclaimed author of Elsey Come Home. Joining us for this literary conversation is Northshire staff favorite Sarah Blake, author of The Guest Book.
Northshire Bookstore and Saratoga Book Festival welcome comedian, actor, and author Michael Ian Black for a special virtual conversation about his latest book A Better Man: A (Mostly Serious) Letter to My Son with Skidmore College professor Beck Krefting.
Celebrate the publication of Being Ram Dass, the posthumous memoir of America's best-known and beloved spiritual teacher Ram Dass, in a virtual conversation with coauthor Rameshwar Das and Mirabai Bush founder and director of the Center for Contemplative Mind in Society.
February Featured Release

A chorus of extraordinary voices comes together to tell one of history’s great epics: the four-hundred-year journey of African Americans from 1619 to the present—edited by Ibram X. Kendi, author of How to Be an Antiracist, and Keisha N. Blain, author of Set the World on Fire.

"Four centuries of combustible Black American history distilled into explosive, bite-sized bits. Eighty short essays by eighty writers detail the long, violent reach of racism, and the persistent backlash, consistently and now formally waged under the rubric Black Lives Matter." ~Reviewed by Mike Hare

Pre-order Highlight

"The still unnamed central character in the author's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Sympathizer, has fled Vietnam for Paris, but he finds himself enmeshed in many of the same turmoils that he endured in his home country. Convoluted political allegiances, social stigmas, deception, drugs, and violence undermine his attempts to build a new life. He is still tormented by memories of his experiences in a "reeducation camp" at the hands of a man he once regarded as a mentor and has reluctantly agreed to help his embittered friend, Bon, exact a murderous revenge. Although the story unfolds on a personal level, the culpability of France and the United States for the traumas inflicted on Vietnam haunt the pages of this engrossing and important novel like a ghoulish specter in a graveyard." ~ Reviewed by Alden Graves

New Fiction on our Shelves
New Nonfiction on our Shelves
New Paperbacks on our Shelves
From our own Shires Press

Richard Lechthaler moved to Vermont in 1968 after a career in Manhattan. Over the years, he enjoyed hearing Vermont stories, embraced the idea of citizen government, and took part in whatever seasonal and community events he could. One story stuck with him, that of Vermont farmer Romaine Tenney, who refused to leave his land when it was confiscated for the building of I-91. In Just Compensation, Lechthaler has created a fictional character and town to address the broader questions at the heart of Tenney's refusal - can a government ever truly compensate someone for the loss of his property, his livelihood, his place in the world. Lechthaler also reconstructs the stories of a vanished Vermont, one in which it was not unusual for hill farmers to milk by hand, for rural homes to not have electricity, and for communities to be more like families, facing change and difficulty, both close to home and far away, together. This novel will make you ache for that quieter time while realizing that it, too, could not have lasted forever as the planet and Vermont itself became more populated and more complex. For such is life...but the life and lives of this fictional community remain something worth remembering and honoring.

A not quite cosmopolitan but not quite clueless, hotdog eating yoga teacher shares memories of folly, foolishness, and forgiveness, beginning in the ’60s in a small town in southern Vermont.

"Once I picked up Virtuous Sinner I didn’t want to put it down. Alexandra Langstaff charms you with her honesty, humor, self-awareness, and joyful insights. Langstaff invites you into her family, community, and life with the kind of generosity that is usually reserved for old friends. Reading this memoir felt like having a conversation at a dinner party that I never wanted to end!"— Katie McKenna, author of How to Get Run Over by a Truck

New Releases from our Children's Department
Order online at www.northshire.com
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