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.
- Read a July 2019 interview with her in Sun Magazine.
- 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.
- Approached Chelsea Green and Freedom Farmer’s Market about doing a gardening and sustainability themed book stall in March of 2020. Thumbs up.
- Year hiatus because of COVID-19.
- 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.