Good evening, everyone. The publishing industry has entered its end of the year doldrums. They have already released most of their top titles of the Fall season, with hopes of selling lots of copies for the holidays. There are still new books coming out, but fewer until the Spring season kicks in next year. Printing capacity is now dedicated to churning out reprints of successful recent titles to maximize holiday sales. Even so, many of the most popular titles will sell out, and will remain backordered until January. Mailing deadlines are in mid-December for holiday arrival. Get your books now!
My Literate Lizard Online Bookstore has a holiday 20% off promo with my selection of over a hundred recent titles. We also have the entire American Bookseller Association catalog of the Best Children’s Books of 2025 discounted 20%. And don’t forget: we also offer e-giftcards you can use as gifts. You choose the amount, write a personalize message, and choose the date you want us to email it to your recipients. On Black Friday weekend, November 27th through December 1st we’ll be offering 20% off all full-price books. Books already discounted are excluded, as are textbooks and certain self-publishing small press books. I will apply this discount manually to any eligible books before finalizing your payment. It might look like you are being charged full price at first, but withing 24 hours your credit card charge will reflect the discounts.
And since this is Thanksgiving Week, I thought I’d feature a number of recent books that look into our food chain industry and other aspects of what and how we eat.
A NONFICTION THANKSGIVING
- Barn Gothic: Three Generations and the Death of the Family Dairy Farm, by Ryan Dennis. When Ryan Dennis’s father was crushed by heavy machinery on their New York dairy farm, both men accepted the accident as a risk of agricultural life. But it was harder to comprehend being crushed by low milk prices, big banks, and the policies that destroyed America’s family farms. Beautifully told with a farmer’s restraint and a poet’s grace, it is a story of personal loss amid corporate corruption and of finding a way forward when everything you know disappears. Published November 12th.
- The Last Supper: How to Overcome the Coming Food Crisis, by Sam Kass. A former senior food policy advisor to President Obama breaks down how changing the way we eat can help fix the climate crisis, from rethinking daily habits to investing in new technology. Kass shares everything he’s learned, simplifying it all down to what he calls “The Core Principle”: Maximize nutrient production while minimizing environmental damage. He lays out an accessible, action-based plan to save the environment, and in turn, ourselves. Published October 10th.
- Reaping What She Sows: How Women Are Rebuilding Our Broken Food System, by Nancy Matsumoto. With in-depth, on-the-ground reporting, Nancy Matsumoto introduces readers to the women changemakers who are building local and regional supply chains, from the maverick farmers, millers, and bakers bringing back local grain economies; the brewers, distillers, and winemakers who are regenerating land and ecosystems; indigenous and diasporic seed savers, and many more changemakers. Reaping What She Sows offers a blueprint for what eating enjoyably, sustainably, and ethically looks like today. Essential for those who are concerned about climate change, their own health, and the lack of choice and transparency in the global food supply chain. Published October 28th.
- The Accidental Seed Heroes: Growing a Delicious Food Future for All of Us, by Adam Alexander. Across the world, chefs, farmers, plant scientists and backyard growers are doing something extraordinary: creating new generations of fruit, vegetables and cereals, all bred specifically to flourish locally, taste delicious, and contribute to our food future. Adam believes these new varieties of fruits, vegetables and even grains will not just offer us all nutritious and delicious food but also be part of the solution to combating climate change and returning fertility to our soils and biodiversity to our land. Published September 1st.
- Voices from the Kitchen: Personal Narratives from New York's Immigrant Restaurant Workers, edited by Marc Meyer. Immigrants play an essential role in the growth, resiliency, and overall success of the food industry. In an age of rising anti-immigrant rhetoric, their voices must be heard.
- The Anthony Bourdain Reader: New, Classic, and Rediscovered Writing, by Anthony Bourdain. Anthony Bourdain represented many things to many people—and he had many sides. But no part of his identity was more important to him, and more long-lasting, than that of a writer. The Anthony Bourdain Reader is a collection of his best and most fascinating writing, and touches on his many pursuits and passions, from restaurant life to family life to the “low life,” from TV to travel through places like Vietnam, Buenos Aires, Paris, and Shanghai. Published October 27th.
- The Heart-Shaped Tin: Love, Loss, and Kitchen Objects, by Bee Wilson. One August day, months after her marriage abruptly ended, a heart-shaped baking tin fell at Bee Wilson’s feet: the same one she had used to bake her wedding cake twenty-three years prior. This discovery struck a wave of emotions that propelled her search for others who have attached magical and personal properties to the objects in their kitchens.
- The Bottomless Cup: A Memoir of Secrets, Restaurants, and Forgiveness, by Kevin Boehm. James Beard Award-winning restaurateur Kevin Boehm has opened 40 restaurants in his 30-year career. He's worked with hard-core line cooks and celebrity chefs, suffered embarrassing setbacks, and won Michelin stars. Today his Boka Group is one of the most successful restaurant companies in the world. But Boehm's path was a complicated one. A turbulent family life and a shocking revelation about his father drove him out into the world in search of a home. He found one in restaurants. Amidst other gifted and damaged people, he discovered the magic of hospitality and the thrill of a dining room on the edge of chaos. The Bottomless Cup is Boehm's vibrant, funny and frank account of a life in and out of restaurants. Published November 4th.
- For middle school readers, Farming Is Female: Twenty Women Shaking Up the Field (A Community, Food, and Climate Book for Kids), by Rachel Sarah. Who grew the food you're eating for dinner? Most people don't know. Through interviews with more than twenty women farmers, climate journalist Rachel Sarah shares how modern farmers are changing the way we think about food production. Their stories include the struggles of undocumented workers, the shortage of fresh produce in low-income neighborhoods, and the food justice advocates who are feeding communities. Published September 30th.
- And to round off all this nonfiction, here’s a fiction anthology from Canada: Devouring Tomorrow: Fiction from the Future of Food, edited by Jeff Dupuis and A. G. Pasquella. Devouring Tomorrow explores this strange new menu through the eyes and palates of some of Canada's most exciting authors. See a world with no bees left to pollinate our crops. Encounter lab-grown meat so advanced that it becomes sentient. Visit a land where diseases wipe out a common fruit and the society of a nation changes around its loss. This is not the world of the distant future - this is tomorrow. Published April 21st.
Published last year in hardcover but now available in paperback: Life and Death of the American Worker: The Immigrants Taking on America's Largest Meatpacking Company, by Alice Driver; Barons: Money, Power, and the Corruption of America's Food Industry, by Austin Frerick;
THIS WEEK’S NOTABLE NEW NONFICTION
- Capitalism: A Global History, by Sven Beckert. Capitalism, argues Beckert, was born global. Emerging from trading communities across Asia, Africa, and Europe, capitalism’s radical recasting of economic life rooted itself only gradually. But then it burst onto the world scene, as a powerful alliance between European states and merchants propelled them, and their economic logic, across the oceans. This, Beckert shows, was modern capitalism’s big bang, and one of its epicenters was the slave labor camps of the Caribbean. This system, with its hierarchies that haunt us still, provided the liftoff for the radical transformations of the Industrial Revolution. Fueled by vast productivity increases along with coal and oil, capitalism pulled down old ways of life to crown itself the defining force of the modern world. This epic drama, shaped by state-backed institutions and imperial expansion, corresponded at no point to an idealized dream of free markets.
Drawing on archives on six continents, Capitalism locates important modes of agency, resistance, innovation, and ruthless coercion everywhere in the world, opening the aperture from heads of state to rural cultivators. Beckert shows that despite the dependence on expansion, there always have been, and are still, areas of human life that the capitalist revolution has yet to reach.
By chronicling capitalism’s global history, Beckert exposes the reality of the system that now seems simply “natural.” It is said that people can more easily imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. If there is one ultimate lesson in this extraordinary book, it’s how to leave that behind.
- Troublemaker: The Fierce, Unruly Life of Jessica Mitford, by Carla Kaplan. Who could predict that a British aristocrat would so energize American antifascist and civil rights struggles that Time magazine would crown her “Queen of the Muckrakers”? Jessica Mitford, always known as Decca, was brought up by an eccentric English family to marry well and reproduce her wealth and privilege, not to advocate for the rights of others. Her beautiful sisters have been subjects of books and movies dedicated to their naughty, glamorous lives. Decca ran away to America to forge a rebel’s life. As this richly researched book details, Decca broke the Mitford mold. Instead of settling for life as a professional Beauty, she fought fascism in the Spanish Civil War, became an American Communist and pioneered witty, hugely popular journalism, including her 1963 blockbuster The American Way of Death. Decca dedicated her life to social justice and proved herself an immensely effective ally, but she also injected laughter into all her political work, annoying some activists with her relentless antics but encouraging many others to find joy in the struggle. From famed baby doctor Benjamin Spock to best friend Maya Angelou, her anti-authoritarian irreverence had a profound impact on American culture. "A remarkable book about a remarkable woman. If you don’t know a lot about Mitford (and her exceptionally weird family), you’re in for a treat. If you think you already know a lot about her, think again: you’re in for a bracing helping of shock and awe. Because Kaplan’s research is so impressively deep, and her prose so pleasingly fleet, her complicated and compelling subject now has the biography she has long deserved." - Daniel Okrent, author of The Guarded Gate: Bigotry, Eugenics, and the Law That Kept Two Generations of Jews, Italians, and Other European Immigrants Out of America
- Across the Universe: The Past, Present, and Future of the Crossword Puzzle, by Natan Last. From Wordle to Spelling Bee, we live in a time of word game mania. Crosswords in particular gained renewed popularity during the COVID-19 lockdown, when games became another kind of refuge. Today, 36 million Americans solve crosswords once a week or more, and nearly 23 million solve them daily. Yet, as longtime New Yorker crossword contributor Natan Last will tell you, the seemingly apolitical puzzle has never been more controversial—or more interesting.
A surprisingly ubiquitous influence in the worlds of art, literature, and technology, as Last demonstrates, the puzzle and its most popular purveyors—including publications such as The New York Times, still the gold standard for word games—have in recent years been challenged for the way they prioritize certain cultures and perspectives as the norm, demoting others to obscurity. Across the Universe interrogates all the ways words—and the games we make using those words—change our culture, while bringing us into the world of those pushing for the crossword's much-needed evolution. “Short of decoding the Rosetta stone, is there anything more satisfying than filling in a crossword grid? Gird yourself for a punster's paradise as you meet the people behind the clues in this engrossing history. Warning: This book is highly contagious.”—Mary Norris, author of Between You & Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen
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Fawlty Towers: Fawlts and All: A 50th anniversary celebration of the nation's beloved sitcom, by John Cleese. Fifty years ago Fawlty Towers hit British TV screens for the first time, becoming an instant classic. Now for the first time John Cleese tells his stories from behind the scenes of his favourite moments. From writing scripts that were so carefully planned they were double the length of similar shows', to casting, lighting, how the show was almost cancelled before it started, and other production shenanigans, these are your favourite moments from Fawlty Towers as you've never seen them before. Exploring the how and why of creating classic comedy, there is a laugh on every page, and a dose of nostalgia for vintage TV fans. With gorgeous commissioned illustration and archival imagery, the book revisits such iconic scenes as Basil thrashing his car, a rat appearing in a box of cheese biscuits, and Basil goose-stepping across the dining room to an audience of horrified guests.
All book links in this diary are to my online bookstore The Literate Lizard. If you already have a favorite indie bookstore, please keep supporting them, but if you’re able to throw a little business my way, that would be truly appreciated. I would love to be considered ‘The Official Bookstore of Daily Kos.’ Use the coupon code DAILYKOS for 15% off your order, in gratitude for your support (an ever-changing smattering of new releases are already discounted 20% each week). I’m busily adding new content every day, and will have lots more dedicated subject pages and curated booklists as it grows. I want it to be full of book-lined rabbit holes to lose yourself in (and maybe throw some of those books into a shopping cart as well.)
We also partner Libro.fm for audiobooks. Libro.fm is similar to Amazon’s Audible, with a la carte audiobooks, or a $14.99 monthly membership which includes the audiobook of your choice and 20% off subsequent purchases during the month. Note that the DAILYKOS coupon code is only for the bookstore, not for the audiobook affiliate.
I’m adding more books every week to my RESIST! 20% off promotion. The coupon code RESIST gets you 20% off any of the books featured there.
READERS & BOOK LOVERS SERIES SCHEDULE
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