
Front Table

On this week’s Front Table, revisit a 1970s New York band that defined experimental rock, explore masculinity’s unraveling through the roles of Michael Douglas in Hollywood, and see shame reimagined as a tool for change. The, witness America through the lens of photography, hear a chorus of voices from a fractured Irish town, and follow a queer writer’s coming-of-age in 1960s Finland. Finally, meet a professional weeper in a world starved of feeling, until a stranger with no past changes everything, and everyone. Find these titles and more at semcoop.com.
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How to Save the Amazon: A journalist’s fatal quest for answers
(Chelsea Green)
Dom Phillips

On this week’s Front Table, discover the time-honored practice of tattooing within Indigenous communities, and follow a journalist turned bookseller as he begrudgingly navigates a new career. Explore microbials that eke out a living in Earth's most extreme locales, join an unnamed narrator as he hunts down a past love through an icy tundra, and "journey-in-place" with a poet during quarantine in Northeastern Ontario. Finally, consider how actions can shape the future and the liberatory possibilities of embracing uncertainty, and confront the challenges of the unhoused community through a priest's activism in her own churchyard.
The Golden Road: How Ancient India Transformed the World
(Bloomsbury Publishing)...
On Muscle: The Stuff That Moves Us and Why It Matters
(Algonquin Books)
Bonnie Tsui
In On Muscle, Bonnie Tsui brings her signature blend of science, culture, immersive reporting, and personal...