Miriam’s Nonfiction Staff Picks

Miriam says, “In Echoes of Eden, environmental activist Dax Dasilva invites readers to join him on a journey to some of the most remote and vulnerable places on Earth (from the Amazon rainforest to Haiti and Madagascar) and meet changemakers fighting on the frontlines of conservation.“

About the book:
Told with an urgency sharpened by experience, Echoes from Eden asks us to see the world as it is: beautiful, brutal, and slipping through our fingers. This isn’t a plea for awareness—it’s a battle cry.

The time to act isn’t tomorrow. It’s now.

Miriam says, “All Consuming is a well-researched, enlightening, and delightfully entertaining collection of essays about food culture and how it is shaped by economy, history, technology, and changing social currents.“

About the book:
How, in the space of a few decades, has food gone from fact of life to national past time; something to be thought about—and talked about—24/7? In this startlingly original, deeply irreverent cultural history, Ruby Tandoh traces that transformation, exposing how cult cookbooks, bad TV, visionary restaurants, and new social media have all wildly overhauled our appetites.

Miriam says, “According to the London-based Ukrainian chef Olia Hercules, cooking is both an act of love and resistance. And in her blazing memoir, she compellingly chronicles four generations of family stories, while reflecting on culture, identity, war, and survival.“

About the book:
Strong Roots is the story of a century in Ukraine told through four generations of one extraordinary family. It brims with hope and fear. It lays bare the compromises and betrayals of generations struggling and surviving through war, peace, invasion and exile. It is an uplifting reminder of how much the human spirit can endure when born from a land rich with strong roots.

Miriam says, “Dynamically chronicling the significant cultural and economic shifts in 1980s New York, Jonathan Mahler asserts: “Power in New York had once been held by public officials and labor bosses. But with its working-class population shrinking and the government giving way to private industry, a new breed of power brokers was rising.” I can’t wait to hear the author  discuss his new book with novelist Amor Towles live at New York Public Library’s Stavros Niarchos Foundation Library later this month.

About the book:
A sweeping chronicle of four tumultuous years in 1980s New York that changed the city forever—and anticipated the forces that would soon divide the nation—from the bestselling author of Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bronx Is Burning.