Destination: Books

Searching for Hope

Just because we are in the mid-winter of dormancy with our pop-up tent into storage, it doesn’t mean that that Destination: Books isn’t preparing for warmer days ahead sans Omicron. During this time, we are bringing in new books to evaluate, which has an optimistic vibe like scouring  seed catalogs (like this one from High Mowing Organic Seeds).  Thumbing through pictures of tomatoes, peas, and cucumbers is like browsing through book covers— an activity full of color and promise.

One such book is All We Can Save: Truth, Courage, and Solutions for the Climate Crisis (2021) edited by Ayana Elizabeth Johnson and Katherine K. Wilkinson. A customer at our December 4 popup at the Carter Center Freedom Farmer’s Market recommended it. Published last year, All We Can Save features the work of 60 women writers and poets reflecting a wide range of climate related issues. 

Some of essays and arguments will sound familiar but still bear repeating. What sets All We Can Save apart are essays such as:

• “Wakanda Doesn’t Have Suburbs.” Kenda Pierre-Lewis uses the blockbuster movie Black Panther to provide a vision what a metropolis not surrounded by environmentally unfriendly suburban sprawl would look like.
• “Heaven or High Water.” Sarah Miller poses as potential buyer of a luxury condo in Miami Beach so she can ask real estate agents about the rising sea level that will flood the city. One agent reassures her, “The scientists, economists, and environmentalists that are saying this stuff; they don’t realize what a wealthy area this is.” The skeptical Miller comments on the illogic, “There were just too many millionaires and billionaires here for disaster on a great scale to be allowed to take place.”

• “Under the Weather.” Ash Sanders deep dives into the language of global warming. My favorite new word is “eco-pooper,” which is a person who brings a depressing environmental thing every time you talk.
• "The Adaptive Mind." Susanne Moser writes about climate advocacy burnout and what one can do to take care of oneself. Eco-poopers, take note.

Reading All We Can Save can become overwhelming but inspirational as well with stories of how citizens have organized to put up major legal resistance along with new solutions (e.g., regenerative ocean farming) that you may never have heard of.  The passion of these writers and poets is infectious, but as we know. hope isn’t necessarily enough.

As the pastor’s wife in Heather McTear Toney essay, “Collards Are Just as Good as Kale” says:

“You can pray and believe all you want but without action ain’t nothing gonna happen. You’re just wasting the Lord’s sweet precious time.”

Click to Order from Destination: Books

 

Another for source for this eco-anthology is All We Can Save Project website. 

Prepare for Winter

How are you preparing for the days after the holidays? Isn't it time to "gather and nourish?"

Are you the type of person who is going to bury themselves in a thick book of speculative fiction about our climate future and hibernate?

Learn some new appreciation of the natural world. Fungi? Earthworms? Birding perhaps?

Or take advantage of the opportunity to expand your knowledge on some special topic e.g., mushrooms?

Or is it time to investigate some new foods that you have been wanting to try?

Whatever your plans Destination: Books will have tables full of ideas at its next (and final) pop-up of the year at the Freedom Farmer's Market at the Carter Center on Saturday morning, December 4th.  Be sure and the get the book you want to start out 2022. 

A Year End Review of Destination Favorites

As we wrap up the first year of our book popup at the Carter Center Freedom Farmer’s Market on December 4, 2021, there have been several books that have stood out from the many that have filled our tables. They are not necessarily the best sellers or the ones with the most buzz, or the prettiest covers, but rather books that we have blogged about, and have enjoyed chatting about with market browsers. Books that are little stories on their own.

How Fungi Make Our Worlds

Merlin Sheldrake's Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change our Minds & Shape our Futures is one such book. In an interview in Sun Magazine, Sheldrake, who has a PhD in tropical ecology explains the invaluable role that fungi play in the plant world as 90 percent of plants depend on the symbiotic, mutually beneficial relationship between plant and fungi. This book further illuminates this amazing, often hidden, and important world. People often point at the book and rave about it. Others say you’ll never be the same after you read it.

The Earth Moved

Amy Stewart’s The Earth Moved: On the Remarkable Achievements of Earthworms is an appreciation on how earthworms including the red wigglers or Eisenia fetida (as I now call them) work their magic on nematodes, coffee grounds, manure, bacteria, and fungi. 

Folded in throughout the book are interviews with researchers and “field trips” to places such an experimental sewage treatment plant in Pacifica, California where earthworms are part of the process of turning human waste into usable biosolids for agriculture. Along the way, Stewart never loses her light-hearted anecdotal style that makes the book such a pleasure.

Stewart's book inspired me to upgrade my functional plastic tub (shown here) and to a multi-story worm tower.

Braiding Sweetgrass

Destination: Books works closely with Emory University’s Carlos Museum Bookshop in selecting books for the pop-ups. One of their favorite books is Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants by Robin Wall Kimmerer. The school turned the book into a seminar that sold out immediately, but you can still read Kimmerer’s memoir that meshes her experiences as an Indigenous woman and a botanist.

 Ministry for the Future

Kim Stanley Robinson’s novel has crossover appeal, because its plot directly addresses the problem of “Can somebody give us hope for averting the oncoming climate catastrophe?”

Set in the next decade, The Ministry for the Future (2020) begins brutal heat wave has killed ten million people in a matter of weeks, an international organization affiliated with the Paris accord known as the Ministry for the Future, is partially empowered to advocate for future generations. A team of international experts, led by the novel’s protagonist Mary Murphy begins to untie the Gordian knot. This includes addressing income inequality, eliminating fossil fuels, (which includes sequestration of carbon), developing technologies to slow the melting of the polar ice caps and getting the global financial powers-that-be on board. 

Robinson intersperses small chapters in the main story explaining how these different technologies and strategies would need to work. Toward the end of the novel Robinson offers a glimpse of what that changed world would be like. There is plenty of work to be done to make it a livable planet in the years ahead.

Children’s Books

Speaking of the future, these two children’s books Wangari Maathai: The Woman Who Planted Millions of Trees and We Are the Water Protectors inspired by their messages and gorgeous illustrations. No one who likes children’s books can resist looking through this while at the booth.

Potlickers and Ripe Figs

Books on food culture can range widely in taste and scope. Yasmin Khan’s Ripe Figs, which includes delicious recipes and stories from the Eastern Mediterranean while John T. Edge’s The Potlicker Papers: A Food History of the Modern South strikes closer to home. We have trouble keeping both these books in our “pop-up pantry”.

Farming While Black

Leah Penniman's  Farming While Black Soul Fire Farm's Practical Guide to Liberation on the Land completes the list. This book is a rare mix of the history of black farming, community activism, and how to grow better veggies. This book also played a major part in this history of Destination: Books. Here is the progression.

1. Read a July 2019 interview with her in Sun Magazine.
2. Got a copy of Farming While Black at the public library. Not only did the book help me with my own community garden plot, but it put the publisher Chelsea Green on my radar.
3. Approached Chelsea Green and Freedom Farmer’s Market about doing a gardening and sustainability themed book stall in March of 2020. Thumbs up.
4. Year hiatus because of COVID-19.
5. Wrapping up a year (2021) where we did eight book popups at the Freedom Farmer’s Market at the Carter Center in 2021.

 We will have these books and more at our final popup of the year on December 4, 2021. (You can still order all these books online at our bookshop portal, but delivery times are a little iffy for holiday gift giving.) Thanks to all of you for your support rain or shine.

Pepper Place, Birmingham, September, 2021

 

Freedom Farmers Mkt, August 2021

'Tis the End of the Gardening Season

This is the time of year that Destination: Books is kind of like my plot at the community garden.  I am in the midst of assessing what went right gardening-wise (eggplant and peas), what didn’t go so well (broccoli and cucumbers)  and starting to make plans for the following Spring.

The same is true with our pop-up booth scheduled for Saturday morning, October 30^th at the Freedom Farmers Market at the Carter Center in Atlanta. (The weather won't be ideal, but we will be there.)

Certain books on Okra, Edible Landscaping, or Braiding Sweetgrass do consistently well, but books that feature someone’s personal story about sustainability or gardening don’t necessarily get a lot of attention. But during this downtime I was able to look at a couple of  books of this kind in more depth.

One was The Ecological Gardener: How to Create Beauty and Biodiversity From the Soil Up by Matt Rees-Warren. This gorgeously printed book waxes poetic about re-thinking one's garden but he also takes the time out explain techniques ( e.g. building a vermi-compost stack house, selecting plants, or adding a pond) that can transform a lawn space into a more sustainable and tranquil environment. He’s not that into vegetables, but author Carol Deppe The Tao of Vegetable Gardening: Cultivating Tomatoes, Greens, Peas, Beans, Squash, Joy and Serenity certainly is. Deppe concentrates of the more popular vegetables, and she has chapter on developing your own seeds and another chapter called “Nurturing and Weeding” which is a positive way to look at that necessary chore.

We also have books on worms, indoor gardening and mushrooms. This is the time to spend some time honing your gardening and sustainability skills. Before you know it will be Spring -- the busiest time of year.

And one final note, many of our gardening books will be on sale.

At the Freedom Farmers' Market

The Destination: Books popup book stall will be at the Freedom Farmers' Market at the Carter Center on Saturday morning, September 25, 2021 with tables of books on gardening, sustainability, food culture and more. Details on our planned inventory are listed here.

 

Destination Books on the Road to Birmingham

Weather permitting, Destination: Books will be taking its pop-up book shop to Birmingham, Alabama on Saturday morning, September 18, 2021. We feature books about gardening, sustainability and food culture. We are a guest of Bonnybee Designs at The Market at Pepper Place.

We return to the Freedom Farmer's Market at the Carter Center in Atlanta on September 25, 2021.

Goals for Booksellers

Though at first glance booksellers don’t seem to be a competitive lot, underneath their calm masked demeanor burns a desire to sell. What often makes it different is that sometimes the challenge is not quantitative in terms of sales, but qualitative. Naturally, Destination: Books stocks books that we think potential buyers are likely interested in, (e.g. books on okra and mushrooms), but sometimes we become a more adventuresome seller intentionally offering something that is more of an outlier or quirky. “It is an article of faith that such a book can be the lid to somebody's pot,” says one of our staffers.

For example, throughout the summer we have carried in our Destination: Books popup booth Freedom Farmers Market at the Carter Center in Atlanta two books about the melodic pawpaw fruit. Though the Asimina triloba is more prevalent north of here (ranging from Arkansas to Virginia and northern Alabama to southern Michigan) its southern-most habitat does include Georgia. There are pawpaw trees, I am told,  planted on grounds of the Carter Center.

One such offering is Pawpaw: In Search of America’s Forgotten Fruit by Andrew Moore. The title alone tells you that the pawpaw—though the largest edible fruit in North America—has long suffered an image problem. Some say it tastes like a cross between a mango and a banana. Others say, “a pawpaw is to a mango and as quince is to an apple.” Though his travels throughout the Southeast, Moore provides a detailed cultural history of the fruit going back centuries.

Another pawpaw-flavored book is Pawpaws: The Complete Growing and Marketing Guide by Blake Cothron, which like the Moore book gives some background about the fruit. What separates this book from the Moore book is that there are instructions on how to grow your own pawpaws either commercially or for personal consumption.

Other Possibilities

There are a couple other new “long shot” additions which have been and a source of discussion in pre-booth staff meetings. One is Jonathan Franzen’s book of essays, The End of the End of the Earth, which we wrote about last month here in the blog and the other is science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson’s hefty novel, The Ministry for the Future, which was written about recently in the short piece “Speculating on the Future,” recently posted on our companion blog.

Both authors have name recognition and a sizeable following but would not necessarily expect to see their books on the tables of a Farmer’s Market. However, both writers creatively tackle the question of what hope looks like in the face of cataclysmic climate change.

Will these books leave the display table at our next popup appearance on Saturday morning, August 28, 2021? Should we really be surprised if they do?  After all our motto says: Destination: Books “for the adventurous.”

Georgia Pollinator Census and Bee Books

The third annual Georgia Pollinator Census is coming up on August 20 and 21, 2021 -- an event coordinated by the University of Georgia Extension Service. The goal of the project is three-fold:

• To create or add sustainable or pollinator habitat across Georgia
• To increase entomological literacy
• To generate useful data about pollinator populations (a citizen science project)

It's easy to do and on the Georgia Pollinator website there is a downloadable guide to identification and a worksheet that you can take with you while you do your counting.

More Books

At The Destination: Books online store (through bookshop.org). We've put together a short list of books including three field guide favorites from Becky Griffin who is the UGA coordinator for the census. 

Destination: Books' next pop-up book stall is scheduled for Saturday morning, August 28th at the Carter Center Freedom Farmer's Market. 

A Rare Combination

Jonathan Franzen’s book of essays, The End of the End of the Earth (2018) reflects the intersection of the type of books Destination: Books offers: gardening-sustainability, travel, and a touch of the literary.

Franzen is most well-known as the author of the Pulitzer Prize winning The Corrections, and somewhat as a pugilist with run-ins over the years with Oprah Winfrey and bestselling author Jodi Picoult.  He was the keynote speaker at the 201o Decatur Book Festival with his less than memorable reading of his new novel Freedom. More about this in our companion blog The Book Shopper.

But in addition to being a novelist and a misanthrope, Franzen is also an essayist and an avid bird watcher, the latter which is one of the major themes of this collection.

“To my shame, I am in the world of birding call a lister. It’s not that I don’t like birds for their own sake. I go birding to their beauty and diversity, learn more about their behavior and the ecosystems they belong to, and take long attentive walks in new places. But I also keep way too many lists. I count not only the species I have seen worldwide, but the ones I have seen in every country and every U.S. state I have birded in. Also at various other sites, including my backyard, and in every calendar year since 2003. I can rationalize my compulsive counting as an extra little game I play within the context of my passion. But I really am compulsive. This makes me morally inferior to birders who bird exclusively for the joy of it.”

The quote above does a good job summing up the majority of these essays. Franzen— traveling around the world ( Ghana, Egypt, Jamaica, St. Lucia, islands off the coast of California, and Antarctica) — adding to his list of birds (African cuckoo-hawk,  ringed plover, crested quail dove, black finch,  Farrion murres, and the Emperor Penguin, —while commenting on the dire circumstances of shrinking habitats.  He doesn’t blame everything on climate change (one criticism of book when it was first published was that he was a skeptic), but he can be witheringly critical of organizations and corporations.  Fortunately, he reports on successful conservation stories as well.

As a misanthrope, Franzen does not spare himself while he investigates his own self-centeredness. In the book’s title essay while on a Lindblad cruise to Antarctica, it's Franzen, who first sees the elusive Emperor Penguin and alerts the staff naturalist, which allows others to see the reclusive “star” of the documentary  March of the Penguins. At dinner that night the captain singles out Franzen for his efforts. The following day Franzen receives even more kudos. He writes:

“All day long passengers I hadn’t even met had stopped me in the hallway to thank me or cheer me for finding the penguin. I finally had an inkling of how it must feel to be a high school athlete and come to the school after scoring a season-saving touchdown. For forty years, in large social groups, I’d accustomed myself to feeling like the problem. To be a group’s game-winning hero, if only for a day was a complete, disorienting novelty. I wondered if, all my life, in my refusal to be a joiner, I’d missed out on some essential human thing.”

In the final two essays of the book (the last one was a response to early criticism that the hardback edition was too tolerant about climate change), Franzen addresses the question that lingers “How do we find meaning in our actions when the world seems to be coming to an end?” His answers are provocative, insightful, and not as dour as you might think. Pure Franzen.

Note: Destination: Books' next pop-up book stall will be at the Carter Center's Freedom Farmer's Market on Saturday morning, July 31st. 

Mushroom Variety

A farmer's market in Ljubljana, Slovenia, 2019

Since book shoppers who visit the Destination: Books booth like to chat about mushrooms, we are always examining  new and different books on the topic. Here’s a brief rundown of what we will be serving on our book table at the Freedom Farmer’s Market on Saturday, June 26, 2021.

 Merlin Sheldrake's Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change our Minds & Shape our Futures. In a recent interview in Sun Magazine, Sheldrake, who has a PhD in tropical ecology explains the invaluable role that fungi play in the plant world as 90 percent of plants depend on the symbiotic, mutually beneficial relationship between plant and fungi. This book further explains this amazing, often hidden, and important world. People often point at the book and rave about it.

Doug Bierend’s In Search of Mycrotopia: Citizen Science, Fungi Fanatics and the Untapped Potential of Mushrooms. Bierend’s book begins with an explanation of what fungi are and how they have been viewed by the mainstream culture. He then deep dives into the rise of the underground mycelium culture, which is having significant impact (like carrying multiple mushroom books at farmer’s markets).

Tradd Cotter’s Organic Mushroom Farming and Mycroremediation: Simple to Advanced Techniques for Indoor and Outdoor Cultivation. Cotter who heads a laboratory and research space near Greenville, South Carolina has written a comprehensive how-to book to take you from mushroom eater to a mushroom grower. This gorgeously printed book is deep in detail with many illustrations and photographs.

Mike Jay’s Mescaline: A Global History of the First Psychedelic. Although mescaline is cactus-based and not a fungus-based psychedelic like psilocybin, this book from Yale University Press gives a cultural history of these psychedelics which are becoming more and more prevalent because of the rising possibilities of their medicinal value especially in treating mental health problems. We will also have a copy of Michael Pollan's How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depressions and Transcendence.

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 Mushroom market photography by Destination's Denise Casey.