Welcome back!

This time around, we have a romance and three non-fiction options. All of the non-fiction titles are quite different too!

Get any good recommendations lately? Drop them in the comments!

Black-Owned

For all my bookish nonfiction fans! This looks at the history of Black-owned bookstores, especially as hubs for political activism. Also a great gift book if it fits for anyone on your list.

Longtime NBC News reporter Char Adams writes a deeply compelling and rigorously reported history of Black political movements told through the lens of Black-owned bookstores, which have been centers for organizing from abolition to the Civil Rights Movement to Black Lives Matter.

In Black-Owned, Char Adams celebrates the living history of Black bookstores. Packed with stories of activism, espionage, violence, community, and perseverance, Black-Owned starts with the first Black-owned bookstore, which an abolitionist opened in New York in 1834, and after the bookshop’s violent demise, Black book-lovers carried on its cause. In the twentieth century, civil rights and Black Power activists started a Black bookstore boom nationwide. Malcolm X gave speeches in front of the National Memorial African Book Store in Harlem—a place dubbed “Speakers’ Corner”—and later, Black bookstores became targets of FBI agents, police, and racist vigilantes. Still, stores continued to fuel Black political movements.

Amid these struggles, bookshops were also places of celebration: Eartha Kitt and Langston Hughes held autograph parties at their local Black-owned bookstores. Maya Angelou became the face of National Black Bookstore Week. And today a new generation of Black activists is joining the radical bookstore tradition, with rapper Noname opening her Radical Hood Library in Los Angeles and several stores making national headlines when they were overwhelmed with demand in the Black Lives Matter era. As Adams makes clear, in an time of increasing repression, Black bookstores are needed now more than ever.

Full of vibrant characters and written with cinematic flair, Black-Owned is an enlightening story of community, resistance, and joy.

[Add to Goodreads To-Read List →](http://www.goodreads.com/search?q=Black-Owned Char Adams)

The End of Summer

A woman discovers the man who fired her moonlights as a dancer/stripper for bachelorette parties. I think this one does a good job embodying the feel of a summer romance with staying power. (I mean as a fling over the summer, not something marketed as a beach read.)

Gretchen Andrews is a homegrown Cape Cod lifer. She’s just a regular girl studying to be a teacher, making ends meet by waitressing at the Diamond Excelsior Resort.

At least, that was the case before Memorial Day weekend.

Brady Hawthorne is the Assistant Manager at the Diamond Excelsior’s main restaurant. That is, until Gretchen comes along and takes down his summer plans in one fell swoop. Lesson Never ask a girl who can’t walk in heels to be your lead server in private dining…unless you want to lose your job when she inevitably dumps a tray of hot seafood in a celebrity’s lap.

Now in the height of tourist season, Gretchen and Brady find themselves wageless with mounting bills and few options for traditional employment. As the job search becomes dire, Gretchen seizes an opportunity working at the Cape’s premier, underground bachelorette-party destination, a place where she never expects to find the boss who fired her wearing next to nothing while dollars rain down around him Niagara-style.

When the owner skips town and leaves Gretchen to manage the (probably illegal) operation for the unforeseeable future, she enlists help from the only person she knows who understands that desperate times call for desperate measures. Gretchen and Brady begrudgingly bump and grind their way from enemies to partners-in-crime in a matter of weeks. Gretchen puts it all on the line – her family, her new love-interest, and her professional future – by two-stepping into a spotlight that was never meant for her.

[Add to Goodreads To-Read List →](http://www.goodreads.com/search?q=The End of Summer KJ Micciche)

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Enshittification

We’ve talked about Doctorow’s term “enshittification” before and now there’s a whole book dedicated to the concept.

Enshittification: it’s not just you—the internet sucks now. Here’s why, and here’s how we can disenshittify it.

We’re living through the Enshittocene, the Great Enshittening, a time in which the services that matter to us, that we rely on, are turning into giant piles of shit. It’s frustrating. Demoralizing. Even terrifying.

Enshittification identifies the problem and proposes a solution.

When Cory Doctorow coined the term enshittification, he was not just finding a funner way to say “things are getting worse.” He was making a specific diagnosis about the state of the digital world and how it is affecting all of our lives (and not for the better).

The once-glorious internet was colonized by platforms that made all-but-magical promises to their users—and, at least initially, seemed to deliver on them. But once users were locked in, the platforms turned on them to make their business customers happy. Then the platforms turned to abusing their business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. In the end, the platforms die.

Doctorow’s argument clearly resonated. Once named, it became obvious that enshittification is everywhere, so much so that the American Dialect Society named it its 2023 Word of the Year, and was cited as an inspiration for the 2025 season of Black Mirror.

Here, now, in Enshittification the book, Doctorow moves the conversation beyond the overwhelming sense of our inevitably enshittified fate. He shows us the specific decisions that led us here, who made them, and—most important—how they can be undone.

[Add to Goodreads To-Read List →](http://www.goodreads.com/search?q=Enshittification Cory Doctorow)

No More Tears

I may have recommended *Empire of Pain *in this column before about the Sackler family. This reminds me a lot of that.

An incendiary, deeply reported exposé of Johnson & Johnson, one of America’s oldest and most trusted pharmaceutical companies—from award-winning investigative journalist Gardiner Harris

One day in 2004, Gardiner Harris, early for a flight, sat down at an airport bar and started talking to the woman on the bar stool beside him. She was a drug sales rep for Johnson & Johnson, and her horrific story about unethical sales practices and the devastating impact they’d had on her family fundamentally changed the nature of how Harris covered the company—and the entire pharmaceutical industry—for The New York Times. His subsequent investigations and ongoing research since that conversation led to new federal laws and ultimately to No More Tears, a blistering exposé of a trusted American institution and the largest healthcare conglomerate in the world.

Harris takes us light years away from the company’s image as the child-friendly “baby company” as he uncovers reams of evidence showing decades of deceitful and dangerous corporate practices that have threatened the lives of millions. He covers multiple disasters: lies and cover-ups regarding baby powder’s link to cancer; the surprising dangers of Tylenol; a criminal campaign to sell dangerous anti-psychotics to children; a popular drug for cancer patients that increases the risk of tumor growth. Deceptive marketing efforts that accelerated opioid addictions rival even those of the Sacklers and Purdue Pharma. All told, Johnson & Johnson’s products have helped cause drug crises that have contributed to the deaths of as many as two million people and counting.

Filled with shocking, infuriating, but utterly necessary revelations, No More Tears is a landmark work of investigative journalism that lays bare the deeply rooted corruption behind the image of babies bathing with a smile.

[Add to Goodreads To-Read List →](http://www.goodreads.com/search?q=No More Tears Gardiner Harris)

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