Do Not Sell at Any Price
The Wild, Obsessive Hunt for the World’s Rarest 78 rpm Records
by Amanda Petrusich (Scribner)
Collecting songs doesn’t take much effort now, with the likes of Spotify and iTunes. But if you were interested in, say, getting your hands on a 1931 Paramount recording of Skip James’ “Devil Got My Woman,” well, that’s a different story. And one that Pitchfork writer Petrusich lovingly tells. She brings us inside the world of the oddball obsessives who track rare 78s as if they were the Holy Grail. She introduces us to characters, music — blues, jazz, gospel, folk — and a piece of Americana.
Land of Love and Drowning
by Tiphanie Yanique (Riverhead Books)
Brooklyn author Yanique’s debut novel is a multigenerational epic that starts in the early 1900s, as American rule begins in the Virgin Island and two sisters with magical island powers are orphaned in a shipwreck in the Caribbean Sea. It’s sink or swim for the orphans, as the book follows them and their families through the next 60 years and three generations.
Renegade Revolutionary
The Life of General Charles Lee
by Phillip Papas (NYU Press)
Meet the strangest hero of the American Revolution. Gen. Charles Lee, Papas writes, was a manic-depressive who was more comfortable around dogs than people, but he was also an early advocate of US independence, human rights and education for women. Court-martialed after some spectacular blunders in the Battle of Monmouth, the oft-overlooked Lee was both more radical and more cosmopolitan than his contemporaries.
Just My Typo
From ‘Sinning With the Choir’ to ‘The Untied States’
compiled by Drummond Moir (Three Rivers Press)
“Passengers must stay with their luggage at all times or they will be taken away and destroyed.” This sign really existed in London’s Paddington Station. Moir’s collection of typos turns the mistakes that everyone makes into an art form of sorts, organizing errors into categories such as media: “Germans are so small that there may be as many as one billion, seven hundred million of them in a drop of water”; and travel abroad: ”Welcome to Hotel Cosy, where no one’s stranger.”
Organic
A Journalist’s Quest to Discover the Truth Behind Food Labeling
by Peter Laufer (Lyons Press)
The organic-food industry is ripe with opportunity — for fraud. That’s what author Laufer realized when he saw that his “organic” walnuts from Trader Joe’s came from Kazakhstan. As a former investigative reporter in the former Soviet republic, Laufer was suspicious of the country’s ability to support a regulated organic food industry. After traveling to Europe and South America for research, he writes about the loopholes and possibilities for deception within this multibillion-dollar business, including some suggestions on how to fix it.