A pleasing, succulent mix of storytelling and mouthwatering recipes.
A celebration of Black Appalachian cuisine and folkways.
“People are always surprised that Black people reside in the hills of Appalachia,” writes Wilkinson, former poet laureate of Kentucky. Indeed, she adds, Appalachia is widely thought of as the domain of Scots-Irish immigrants who “were mostly poor and therefore couldn’t own slaves”—a view that’s incorrect in several dimensions. Following emancipation, some Black Appalachians took up industrial work, but most remained smallholder farmers. While no strangers to scarcity, the author’s family had access to the wild game and plants of the mountains and the abundant fruit trees and berry bushes that grew around their homes. From the rusty metal recipe box that she calls “my finest family heirloom,” Wilkinson “conjures up the kitchen ghosts of my rural homeland.” That recipe box serves as an inspiration and gentle guide, but its recipes aren’t heavy on ironclad, inviolable instructions. Writing about cooked greens, Wilkinson notes that while they so often tend to be boiled down to mushiness, she prefers some crispness to them—as do many aficionados of traditional Southern cuisine. There was even a time, she allows, when she decided that she was going to be a vegetarian and thus rejected the pork-laced greens and casseroles from her grandmother’s kitchen. “A little bit of meat ain’t gonna hurt you,” her bewildered grandmother urged. It took decades for pork to return to the author’s table, however—and now that it has, readers will want to rush to cook her husband’s recipe for pulled pork (“he’s the meat man”). Other highlights include a tasty plate of pinto beans, a perfectly delicate angel food cake, green beans with new potatoes, plus chicken and dumplings and “a mess o’ greens”—the list goes on, a font of inspiration.
A pleasing, succulent mix of storytelling and mouthwatering recipes.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 2024
ISBN: 9780593236512
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Clarkson Potter
Review Posted Online: Oct. 13, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2023
An eye-opening look at prison life from the point of view of a true warrior for justice.
A memoir on the making of a literal “jailhouse lawyer.”
Wrongfully arrested and convicted of murder in New Orleans, which at the time had “the highest rate of wrongful convictions in the nation, with nearly all the victims being Black men who…grew up poor,” Duncan served for 23 years in Louisiana’s notorious Angola prison and other institutions. He might have done his time at the Orleans Parish Prison, but, he writes, he wanted access to Angola’s more extensive law library. Well before being transferred there, he petitioned the Louisiana Supreme Court for a law book, a motion denied because it had not first been adjudicated in a lower court. A sympathetic judge gave him a copy all the same, and Duncan was off to a career as an inmate advocate, regularly filing petitions and lawsuits on his own behalf and that of his fellow prisoners—the first suit being “over the jail’s failure to provide him with a high-fiber diet,” soon followed by motions to provide mental health treatment, end beatings and arbitrary punishments, and improve medical care. Known as the “Snickers Lawyer” for taking payment in candy, he became a self-taught expert on constitutional issues. Naturally, he recounts, he was targeted by guards and wardens for his legal activism, even as he proved essential to Angola’s population; in time, too, he found a few unlikely allies among the staff. Duncan’s well-told story is full of fraught moments of abuse both physical and judicial, though it has something of a happy ending in that, after earning a law degree after his release, he was exonerated of the crime and has since been fighting for other prisoners to “have meaningful access to the courts.”
An eye-opening look at prison life from the point of view of a true warrior for justice.Pub Date: July 8, 2025
ISBN: 9780593834305
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: April 17, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2025
Everything about Sabathia is larger than life, yet he tells his story with honesty and humility.
One of the best pitchers of his generation—and often the only Black man on his team—shares an extraordinary life in baseball.
A high school star in several sports, Sabathia was being furiously recruited by both colleges and professional teams when the death of his grandmother, whose Social Security checks supported the family, meant that he couldn't go to college even with a full scholarship. He recounts how he learned he had been drafted by the Cleveland Indians in the first round over the PA system at his high school. In 2001, after three seasons in the minor leagues, Sabathia became the youngest player in MLB (age 20). His career took off from there, and in 2008, he signed with the New York Yankees for seven years and $161 million, at the time the largest contract ever for a pitcher. With the help of Vanity Fair contributor Smith, Sabathia tells the entertaining story of his 19 seasons on and off the field. The first 14 ran in tandem with a poorly hidden alcohol problem and a propensity for destructive bar brawls. His high school sweetheart, Amber, who became his wife and the mother of his children, did her best to help him manage his repressed fury and grief about the deaths of two beloved cousins and his father, but Sabathia pursued drinking with the same "till the end" mentality as everything else. Finally, a series of disasters led to a month of rehab in 2015. Leading a sober life was necessary, but it did not tame Sabathia's trademark feistiness. He continued to fiercely rile his opponents and foment the fighting spirit in his teammates until debilitating injuries to his knees and pitching arm led to his retirement in 2019. This book represents an excellent launching point for Jay-Z’s new imprint, Roc Lit 101.
Everything about Sabathia is larger than life, yet he tells his story with honesty and humility.Pub Date: July 6, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-593-13375-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Roc Lit 101
Review Posted Online: May 11, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2021
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