Front Table 11/11/2022

On this week's Front Table, find masterfully combined voices that create seamless stories, from an account of hip-hop's rise told in the voices of the DJs, producers, and artists who made it happen to the complex history of the world's oldest trees told in the voices of Indigenous peoples, religious figures, and contemporary scientists who study elderflora in crisis. Find the following and more at semcoop.com

Black Voices on Britain
(Macmillan Collector's Library)
Hakim Adi

A compelling anthology of Black voices from England, America, Africa and the Caribbean, from people who lived, worked, campaigned and traveled in Britain from the eighteenth to the early twentieth century. Part of the Macmillan Collector's Library; a series of stunning, clothbound, pocket sized classics with gold foiled edges and ribbon markers. These beautiful books make perfect gifts or a treat for any book lover. Professor Hakim Adi draws on a variety of published works, all of which describe powerful experiences: James Gronniosaw and his family endure poverty, illness and unemployment; Mary Prince is driven out by her cruel owners and turns to London charities for help; Frederick Douglass, on a lecture tour around Britain, reveals how the Christian clergy built churches with slave-owners' money; and William Wells Brown gives his impressions of England as he travels around a country which welcomes him more readily than America. These and other voices offer a fascinating and thought-provoking portrayal of Black experiences in Britain.


The Come Up: An Oral History of the Rise of Hip-Hop
(Crown)
Jonathan Abrams

The music that would come to be known as hip-hop was born at a party in the Bronx in the summer of 1973. Now, fifty years later, it's the most popular music genre in America. Now, in The Come Up, the New York Times bestselling author Jonathan Abrams offers a comprehensive account of hip-hop's rise, told in the voices of the people who made it happen. In more than three hundred interviews conducted over three years, Abrams has captured the stories of the DJs, executives, producers, and artists who both witnessed and themselves forged the history of hip-hop. Masterfully combining these voices into a seamless symphonic narrative, Abrams traces how the genre grew out of the resourcefulness of a neglected population in the South Bronx, and from there how it flowed into New York City's other boroughs, and beyond--from electrifying live gatherings, then on to radio and vinyl, below to the Mason-Dixon Line, west to Los Angeles through gangster rap and G-funk, and then across generations. Throughout, Abrams conveys with singular vividness the drive, the stakes, and the relentless creativity that ignited one of the greatest revolutions in modern music. The Come Up is an exhilarating behind-the-scenes account of how hip-hop came to rule the world--and an essential contribution to music history.

Elderflora
(Basic Books)
Jared Farmer

Humans have always revered long-lived trees. But as historian Jared Farmer reveals in Elderflora, our veneration took a modern turn in the eighteenth century, when naturalists embarked on a quest to locate and precisely date the oldest living things on earth. The new science of tree time prompted travelers to visit ancient specimens and conservationists to protect sacred groves. Exploitation accompanied sanctification, as old-growth forests succumbed to imperial expansion and the industrial revolution. Taking us from Lebanon to New Zealand to California, Farmer surveys the complex history of the world's oldest trees, including voices of Indigenous peoples, religious figures, and contemporary scientists who study elderflora in crisis. In a changing climate, a long future is still possible, Farmer shows, but only if we give care to young things that might grow old.

Growing Up Human: The Evolution of Childhood
(Bloomsbury Sigma)
Brenna Hassett

Tracking deep into our evolutionary history, anthropological science has begun to unravel one particular feature that sets us apart from the many, many animals that came before us - our uniquely long childhoods. Growing Up Human looks at how we have diverged from our ancestral roots to stay 'forever young' - or at least what seems like forever - and how the evolution of childhood is a critical part of the human story. Beginning with a look at the ways animals invest in their offspring, the book moves through the many steps of making a baby, from pair-bonding to hidden ovulation, points where our species has repeatedly stepped off the standard primate path. Using observations of our closest primate relatives, the tiny relics of childhood that come to us from the archaeological record, and the bones and teeth of our ancestors, science has started to unravel the evolution of our childhood right down the fossil record. In our species investment doesn't stop at birth, and as Growing Up Human reveals, we can compare every aspect of our care and feeding, from the chemical composition of our milk to our fondness for formal education from ancient times onwards, in order to understand just what we evolved our weird and wonderful childhoods for.

Hollywood: The Oral History
(Harper)
Jeanine Basinger

From the archives of the American Film Institute comes a unique picture of what it was like to work in Hollywood from its beginnings to its present day. Gleaned from nearly three thousand interviews, involving four hundred voices from the industry, Hollywood: The Oral History, lets a reader "listen in" on candid remarks from the biggest names in front of the camera--Bette Davis, Meryl Streep, Tom Hanks, Harold Lloyd--to the biggest behind it--Frank Capra, Steven Spielberg, Alfred Hitchcock, Jordan Peele, as well as the lesser known individuals that shaped what was heard and seen on screen: musicians, costumers, art directors, cinematographers, writers, sound men, editors, make-up artists, and even script timers, messengers, and publicists. The result is like a conversation among the gods and goddesses of film: lively, funny, insightful, historically accurate and, for the first time, authentically honest in its portrait of Hollywood. It's the insider's story.

The Radical Potter: The Life and Times of Josiah Wedgwood
(Metropolitan Books)
Tristram Hunt

Wedgwood's pottery, such as his celebrated light-blue jasperware, is famous worldwide. Jane Austen bought it and wrote of it in her novels; Empress Catherine II of Russia ordered hundreds of pieces for her palace; British diplomats hauled it with them on their first-ever mission to Peking, audaciously planning to impress China with their china. But the life of Josiah Wedgwood is far richer than just his accomplishments in ceramics. He was a leader of the Industrial Revolution, a pioneering businessman, a cultural tastemaker, and a tireless scientific experimenter whose inventions made him a fellow of the Royal Society. He was also an ardent abolitionist, whose Emancipation Badge medallion--depicting an enslaved African and inscribed "Am I Not a Man and a Brother?"--became the most popular symbol of the antislavery movement on both sides of the Atlantic. And he did it all in the face of chronic disability and relentless pain: a childhood bout with smallpox eventually led to the amputation of his right leg. Drawing on a rich array of letters, journals, and historical documents, The Radical Potter brings us the story of a singular man, his dazzling contributions to design and innovation, and his remarkable global impact.

README.txt: A Memoir
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
Chelsea Manning

While working as an intelligence analyst in Iraq for the United States Army in 2010, Chelsea Manning disclosed more than seven hundred thousand classified military and diplomatic records that she had smuggled out of the country on the memory card of her digital camera. In 2011 she was charged with twenty-two counts related to the unauthorized possession and distribution of classified military records, and in 2013 she was sentenced to thirty-five years in military prison. The day after her conviction, Manning declared her gender identity as a woman and began to transition, seeking hormones through the federal court system. In 2017, President Barack Obama commuted her sentence and she was released from prison. In README.txt, Manning recounts how her pleas for increased institutional transparency and government accountability took place alongside a fight to defend her rights as a trans woman. Manning details the challenges of her childhood and adolescence as a naive, computer-savvy kid, what drew her to the military, and the fierce pride she has about the work she does. This powerful, observant memoir will stand as one of the definitive testaments of our digital, information-driven age.