Tag Archives: Books

In My Hands Today…

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Heartstrong – Ellidy Pullin, Alley Pascoe

‘If not with you, then for you.’

‘It was a perfect Wednesday morning when Alex ‘Chumpy’ Pullin kissed his partner, Ellidy, goodbye to go spearfishing. Most days Ellidy would go to the beach too, but that day she didn’t. Later, there was a knock at the door. A man had been found unconscious on the ocean floor. It was Chumpy.

From that moment, Ellidy’s world stopped. There was deep grief, disbelief and then the gradual realisation that this was real. Life was forever changed. Ellidy’s partner of eight years, a World Champion snowboarder, a man of energy and music, was gone. And so was the life they had built together and the dream of the child they had been trying for. In the hours that followed a suggestion was made, did Ellidy want to harvest Chumpy’s sperm and try for the baby they both wanted so deeply? There was a ticking clock and the need to speak to family and friends. They had thirty-six hours before it would be too late. Family, friends, lawyers and doctors helped to give Ellidy the chance to keep a small part of Chumpy alive.

Sorrow meant it took Ellidy a number of months to be strong enough to start IVF. The first round didn’t work. But the second did.

In My Hands Today…

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The Many Lives of Mama Love: A Memoir of Lying, Stealing, Writing, and Healing – Lara Love Hardin

No one expects the police to knock on the million-dollar, two-story home of the perfect cul-de-sac housewife. But soccer mom Lara Love Hardin has been hiding a shady secret: She is funding her heroin addiction by stealing her neighbors’ credit cards.

Lara is convicted of thirty-two felonies and becomes inmate S32179. She learns jail is a class system with a power structure somewhere between an adolescent sleepover party and Lord of the Flies. Furniture is made from tampon boxes, and Snickers bars are currency. But Lara quickly finds the rules and brings love and healing to her fellow inmates as she climbs the social ladder to become the “shot caller,” showing that jailhouse politics aren’t that different from the PTA meetings she used to attend.

When she’s released, she reinvents herself as a ghostwriter. Now, she’s legally co-opting other people’s identities and getting to meet Oprah, meditate with The Dalai Lama, and have dinner with Archbishop Desmond Tutu. But the shadow of her past follows her. Shame is a poison worse than heroin—there is no way to detox. She must learn to forgive herself and others, navigate life as a felon on probation, prove to herself that she is more good than bad, and much more.

In My Hands Today…

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The Furies: Women, Vengeance, and Justice – Elizabeth Flock

In The Furies, Elizabeth Flock examines how three real-life women have used violence to fight back, and how views of women who defend their lives are often distorted by their depictions in media and pop culture. These three immersive narratives follow Brittany Smith, a young woman from Stevenson, Alabama, who killed a man she said raped her but was denied the protection of the Stand-Your-Ground law; Angoori Dahariya, leader of a gang in Uttar Pradesh, India, dedicated to avenging victims of domestic abuse; and Cicek Mustafa Zibo, a fighter in a thousands-strong all-female militia that battled ISIS in Syria. Each woman chose to use lethal force to gain power, safety, and freedom when the institutions meant to protect them—government, police, courts—utterly failed to do so. Each woman has been criticized for their actions by those who believe that violence is never the answer.

Through Flock’s propulsive prose and remarkable research on the ground—embedded with families, communities, and organizations in America, India, and Syria—The Furies examines, with exquisite nuance, whether the fight for women’s safety is fully possible without force. Do these women’s acts of vengeance help or hurt them, and ultimately, all women? Did they create lasting change in entrenched misogynistic and paternalistic systems? And ultimately, what would societies in which women have real power look like?

Across mythologies and throughout history, the stories of women’s lives frequently end with their bodies as sites of violence. But there are also celebrated tales of women, real and fictional, who have fought back. The novelistic accounts of these three women provoke questions about how to achieve true gender equality, and offer profound insights in the quest for answers.

In My Hands Today…

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The Hungry Season: A Journey of War, Love, and Survival – Lisa M. Hamilton

As combat rages across the lush highlands of Vietnam and Laos, a child is born.

Ia Moua enters life at the bottom of her world’s social order, both because she is part of Laos’s Hmong minority and because she is female. But when brutal communist rule upends her life and strips Ia of all she loves, this young girl resolves to chart her own defiant path.

With ceaseless ambition and an indestructible spirit, Ia builds a new life for herself and, before long, for her children, first in the refugee camps of Thailand and then in the industrial heartland of California’s San Joaquin Valley.

At the root of her success is a simple growing rice just as her ancestors did. When she gains power and independence, however, Ia must confront all that she left behind—and find a place in her heart for those who left her.

Meticulously reported over seven years and written with the intimacy of a novel, The Hungry Season is an unforgettable tale about hard-won survival and the nourishment that matters most.

In My Hands Today…

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Invitation to a Banquet: The Story of Chinese Food – Fuchsia Dunlop

Chinese was the earliest truly global cuisine.

When the first Chinese laborers began to settle abroad, restaurants appeared in their wake. Yet Chinese has the curious distinction of being both one of the world’s best-loved culinary traditions and one of the least understood.

For more than a century, the overwhelming dominance of a simplified form of Cantonese cooking ensured that few foreigners experienced anything of its richness and sophistication, but today that is beginning to change.

In Invitation to a Banquet, award-winning cook and writer Fuchsia Dunlop explores the history, philosophy, and techniques of Chinese culinary culture. In each chapter, she examines a classic dish, from mapo tofu to Dongpo pork, knife-scraped noodles to braised pomelo pith, to reveal a distinctive aspect of Chinese gastronomy, whether it’s the importance of the soybean, the lure of exotic ingredients, or the history of Buddhist vegetarian cuisine.

Meeting food producers, chefs, gourmets, and home cooks as she tastes her way across the country, Fuchsia invites readers to join her on an unforgettable journey into Chinese food as it is cooked, eaten, and considered in its homeland. Weaving together history, mouthwatering descriptions of food, and on-the-ground research conducted over the course of three decades, Invitation to a Banquet is a lively, landmark tribute to the pleasures and mysteries of Chinese cuisine.