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Booker, Charles. From the Hood to the Holler: A Story of Separate Worlds, Shared Dreams, and the Fight for America’s Future. Crown. Apr. 2022. 272p. ISBN 9780593240342. $27. Downloadable. MEMOIR

Booker came to national attention as a promising new progressive when he campaigned for the U.S. Senate in the 2020 Kentucky Democratic Primary, losing to Amy McGrath by a thread, and is preparing to run against Rand Paul in the forthcoming election. His story starts in Louisville’s West End, among Kentucky’s poorest neighborhoods, where he was raised in a caring family that sometimes lacked for heat, water, and food; even after completing law school, he carefully rationed his insulin. Then in 2018, he was elected to the Kentucky House of Representatives as its youngest Black state legislator in nearly 90 years and used an unexpected appointment to the Department of Fish and Wildlife to build a bipartisan alliance connecting him to the state’s coal-mining families. As Booker argues, the folks of the holler and the folks of the hood share crucial concerns and should act together.

Jones, Chloé Cooper. Easy Beauty. Avid Reader: S. & S. Apr. 2022. 288p. ISBN 9781982151997. $28. MEMOIR

Born with a rare congenital condition called sacral agenesis that affects the lower spine, thus reducing her stature and altering how she walks, Pulitzer Prize finalist, Whiting Award–winning philosophy professor Jones experiences pain both physical and mental—she must contend daily with the idea that she’s somehow seen as lesser by others. When she unexpectedly became a mother, Jones decided to change her perspective, reclaiming a world that others often disallowed her—and that she initially disallowed herself. Leaving Brooklyn, she sought out places of meaning to her, whether for fun, for beauty, or to bear witness, from a rousing tennis tournament in California to Rome’s grand sculpture gardens to Cambodia’s devastating Killing Fields. Along the way, she mused on the myths that shape our understanding of beauty and those shaping disability, asking if she herself has sometimes bought into them. With a 150,000-copy first printing.

Roem, Danica. Burn the Page: A True Story of Torching Doubts, Blazing Trails, and Igniting Change. Viking. Apr. 2022. 320p. ISBN 9780593296554. $27. Downloadable. MEMOIR

The first out-and-seated transgender state legislator in U.S. history, Roem had worked as a journalist for ten years in her hometown, Manassas, VA, when she ran in the 2018 elections for a seat in the Virginia House of Delegates and defeated a stalwartly anti-LGBTQ+ incumbent. When she decided to run, she realized she had to demolish personal stories that restrained her, and she started by hiring an opposition researcher to uncover every story from her past that her opponent might use against her. Here she blends memoir with manifesto to persuade others to rewrite their personal narratives so that they can move forward, as she has.

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