Books I Recommend

  • Book cover of 'Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America' by Ibram X. Kendi, featuring an abstract, silhouetted side profile with red and black stripes.

    Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America

    The National Book Award winning history of how racist ideas were created, spread, and deeply rooted in American society.

    • Linked bookstore is a Kansas City, Kansas-based, black-owned, woman-owned bookstore. I am not an affiliate.

  • Devil is Fine: A Novel

    Devil is Fine: A Novel

    Vercher deftly blurs the lines between real and imagined, past and present, tragedy and humor, and fathers and sons in this story of discovering and reclaiming a painful past. 

    • Linked bookstore is a black-owned, woman-owned bookstore. I am not an affiliate.

  • Book cover of "Entitled: How Male Privilege Hurts Women" by Kate Manne featuring a ladder against a wall. Below is a description praising the author's work.

    Entitled: How Male Privilege Hurts Women

    In clear, lucid prose, Manne argues that male entitlement can explain a wide array of phenomena, from mansplaining and the undertreatment of women’s pain to mass shootings by incels and the seemingly intractable notion that women are “unelectable.”

    • Linked bookstore is an Overland Park, Kansas-based, woman-owned bookstore. I am not an affiliate.

  • Book cover of "Inciting Joy: Essays" by Ross Gay, featuring illustrated pink flowers and text description of the book's themes.

    Inciting Joy: Essays

    In these gorgeously written and timely pieces, prize-winning poet and author Ross Gay considers the joy we incite when we care for each other, especially during life's inevitable hardships. Throughout Inciting Joy, he explores how we can practice recognizing that connection, and also, crucially, how we expand it.

    • Linked bookstore is a Kansas City, Kansas-based, black-owned, woman-woman-owned bookstore. I am not an affiliate.

  • "The Book of (More) Delights" book cover by Ross Gay, featuring illustrated yellow and blue flowers on a coral background.

    The Books of (More) Delights: Essays

    For Gay, what delights us is what connects us, what gives us meaning, from the joy of hearing a nostalgic song blasting from a passing car to the pleasure of refusing the "ubiquitous, nefarious" scannable QR code menus, from the tiny dog he fell hard for to his mother baking a dozen kinds of cookies for her grandchildren.

    • Linked bookstore is a black-owned, woman-owned bookstore. I am not an affiliate.

  • Book cover of 'The Book of Delights' by Ross Gay, featuring floral designs and text highlighting it as a collection of essays about small joys.

    The Book of Delights: Essays

    In The Book of Delights, one of today’s most original literary voices offers up a genre-defying volume of lyric essays written over one tumultuous year. The first nonfiction book from award-winning poet Ross Gay is a record of the small joys we often overlook in our busy lives.

    • Linked bookstore is a black-owned, woman-owned bookstore. I am not an affiliate.

  • The book cover of The End of Reality

    The End of Reality: How Four Billionaires are Selling a Fantasy Future of the Metaverse, Mars, and Crypto

    A brilliant takedown and exposé of the great con job of the twenty-first century—the metaverse, crypto, space travel, transhumanism—being sold by four billionaires (Peter Thiel, Mark Zuckerberg, Marc Andreesen, Elon Musk), leading to the degeneration and bankruptcy of our society.

    • Linked bookstore is an Overland Park, Kansas-based, woman-owned bookstore. I am not an affiliate.

  • The Tattooist of Auschwitz

    The Tattooist of Auschwitz

    This beautiful, illuminating tale of hope and courage is based on interviews that were conducted with Holocaust survivor and Auschwitz-Birkenau tattooist Ludwig (Lale) Sokolov—an unforgettable love story in the midst of atrocity.

    • Link goes to Amazon.

  • Beloved Book Cover

    Beloved: A Novel

    Staring unflinchingly into the abyss of slavery, this spellbinding New York Times bestseller transforms history into a story as powerful as Exodus and as intimate as a lullaby.

    • Linked bookstore is a Kansas City, Kansas-based, black-owned, woman-owned bookstore. I am not an affiliate

  • White Rage book cover

    White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide

    From the Civil War to our combustible present, acclaimed historian Carol Anderson reframes our continuing conversation about race, chronicling the powerful forces opposed to black progress in America.

    • Linked bookstore is a black-owned, woman-owned bookstore. I am not an affiliate.

  • White Fragility Book

    White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism

    In this “vital, necessary, and beautiful book,” antiracist educator Robin DiAngelo deftly illuminates the phenomenon of white fragility and “allows us to understand racism as a practice not restricted to ‘bad people.’

    • Linked bookstore is an Overland Park, Kansas-based, woman-owned bookstore. I am not an affiliate.

  • Doppelgänger by Naomi Klein

    Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World

    What if you woke up one morning and found you’d acquired another self, a double who was almost you and yet not you at all? What if that double shared many of your preoccupations but, in a twisted, upside-down way, furthered the very causes you’d devoted your life to fighting against?

    • Linked bookstore is an Overland Park, Kansas-based, woman-owned bookstore. I am not an affiliate.

  • Hunger by Roxane Gay

    Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body

    With the bracing candor, vulnerability, and authority that have made her one of the most admired voices of her generation, Roxane explores what it means to be overweight in a time when the bigger you are, the less you are seen. Hunger is a deeply personal memoir from one of our finest writers, and tells a story that hasn't yet been told but needs to be.

    • Linked bookstore is a Kansas City, Kansas-based, black-owned, woman-owned bookstore. I am not an affiliate.

  • Untamed-by-Glennon-Doyle

    Untamed

    In her most revealing and powerful memoir yet, the activist, speaker, bestselling author, and “patron saint of female empowerment” (People) explores the joy and peace we discover when we stop striving to meet others’ expectations and start trusting the voice deep within us.

    • Linked bookstore is an Overland Park, Kansas-based, woman-owned bookstore. I am not an affiliate.