Happy Birthday VAWC!

Happy Birthday, Valley Alliance of Worker Cooperatives! We love you!

Volunteer at Food For Thought Books!

Volunteering is a fun and easy way to support Food For Thought Books. It helps keep our costs down, frees up time for staff to work on specific tasks, and builds community around the store.

Volunteers also get a sweet discount on everything in the store (bibliophiles, take note!).

Click here for more details!

Justin Vivian Bond's Tango - A Book Review

A good review of Bond's upcoming memoir: Tango

Problematic coverage of the book aside, I loved Tango. Kate Bornstein said it best when she wrote, “…Tango is like listening to your favorite eccentric cousin or auntie tell you hair-​raising tales…Justin Vivian spins a one-​of-​a-​kind story that you won’t be able to put down.” She nailed it on both accounts: the book feels incredibly conversational, as though it were not a book at all, but a collection of Bond’s famously biting asides between songs at a cabaret. Secondly, I truly could not put the book down. I lied to myself, saying I would just read until I was tired, and then tucked myself into bed some hours later, book complete, in the wee hours of the morning.

Tango is largely the story of Bond’s relationship with v’s childhood lover, who was also v’s greatest tormentor in school. This intersects with the various ways in which the adults in v’s life tried, through various means and with varied success, to regulate v’s clearly emerging queer sexuality and gender. The moments range from the utterly traumatic to the touching to laugh out loud. Justin’s mother forbade v from wearing her frosted pink lipstick to school, v’s pop pop bought v Barbie coloring books without question or issue, and v’s Cub Scout troupe found v the odd boy out who picked Sandy Duncan as the figure in history that v would most like to be.

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Also, thank you, J. Rudy for calling out the NYT's transphobic b.s. - so tiresome and so unwarranted.

Baby's Got Book

You know it's true...



Thanks, Rhymes With Orange & Lily Library! That was a good chuckle :)

Call out to Local Artists!

A call out to local artists: our right-side window is available to display your work! Click here to submit a proposal to our artists in the window series!

David Graeber Interview - Debt: The First 5,000 Years

Excellent interview with anarchist anthropologist David Graeber about his new book Debt: The First 5,000 Years

What’s been happening since Nixon went off the gold standard in 1971 has just been another turn of the wheel – though of course it never happens the same way twice. However, in one sense, I think we’ve been going about things backwards. In the past, periods dominated by virtual credit money have also been periods where there have been social protections for debtors. Once you recognize that money is just a social construct, a credit, an IOU, then first of all what is to stop people from generating it endlessly? And how do you prevent the poor from falling into debt traps and becoming effectively enslaved to the rich? That’s why you had Mesopotamian clean slates, Biblical Jubilees, Medieval laws against usury in both Christianity and Islam and so on and so forth.

Since antiquity the worst-case scenario that everyone felt would lead to total social breakdown was a major debt crisis; ordinary people would become so indebted to the top one or two percent of the population that they would start selling family members into slavery, or eventually, even themselves.

Well, what happened this time around? Instead of creating some sort of overarching institution to protect debtors, they create these grandiose, world-scale institutions like the IMF or S&P to protect creditors. They essentially declare (in defiance of all traditional economic logic) that no debtor should ever be allowed to default. Needless to say the result is catastrophic. We are experiencing something that to me, at least, looks exactly like what the ancients were most afraid of: a population of debtors skating at the edge of disaster.

And, I might add, if Aristotle were around today, I very much doubt he would think that the distinction between renting yourself or members of your family out to work and selling yourself or members of your family to work was more than a legal nicety. He’d probably conclude that most Americans were, for all intents and purposes, slaves.

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Bonus Graeber essay: Are You An Anarchist? The Answer May Suprise You! :)

Welcome Back Students!

Welcome back students! Best of luck in this upcoming semester - remember: Food For Thought Books is here for you whether it's finding a book, helping you with a project, or just a comfy couch on a rainy day.

Come by & visit us soon - we've missed you!

Bookfessions

read more: Bookfessions

Co-opoly: The Game of Cooperatives

Check out this new cooperative board game being developed by one of our awesome volunteers, Brian Van Slyke!

Co-opoly: The Game of Cooperatives is a creative and exciting educational game about the growing co-op movement. In order to survive as individuals and to
strive for the success of their cooperative, players make tough choices while putting their teamwork abilities to the test. This is a game of skill and solidarity, where everyone wins – or everybody loses.
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Like A Girl at Food For Thought Books

Thank you, Food for Thought Books Collective, for letting us film at your bookstore!

Thank you Blurred Divide! It was fun having you here!

Charles Mann's new book: 1493

Check out this article in the Amherst Bulletin about local author Charles Mann's upcoming book: 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created.

A consistent theme throughout Mann's work is the idea that the trade of animals and plants between the Eastern and Western hemispheres led to a series of dramatic biological changes that forged a new world, both ecologically and economically.

These changes also gave Europeans an advantage over the native peoples they encountered in places like the Americas, Mann contends. The introduction of European crops and animals made the Americas more comfortable to Europeans colonists while also making it harder for indigenous people to continue their traditional ways of life, he said.

That idea plays a central role in "1493." He writes that Spanish explorer Miguel Lopez de Legazpi managed to accomplish something that Columbus tried but failed to do - establish overseas trade with China. In 1571 Legazpi founded Manila in the Philipines and from there traded silver mined by African slaves in South America for Chinese silk and porcelain.

The event is notable because it marks the first time that the world economy was completely intertwined, Mann said. But it also had a larger, unintended effect.

In the 1590s a Chinese merchant, Chen Zhenlong, brought sweet potatoes, introduced to the Philippines by the Spanish, to China. Until that point Chinese agriculture had been rice-intensive and centered around the deltas of the Yangtze and Huang He rivers. The vast majority of the country was dry and unsuitable for such crops, Mann said.

But the sweet potato changed that. The tuber thrived along dry hillsides. Its arrival coincided with the introduction of maize to China, which entered the country through Portuguese traders at Macao. The crop proved similarly suited to China's dry climate.

"Suddenly, not only are you growing stuff in the areas where you couldn't grow anything before, but it's fantastically productive," Mann said. "It was always a populous place, but this was the moment when China became China, the watchword for huge numbers of people. And it had a whole lot to do with the introduction of the sweet potato and maize."

Yet the Chinese made a series of beginners' mistakes in planting the new crops, Mann said. They planted them vertically along the hillsides, instead of horizontally. They deforested much of the land to make way for new crops. The result was erosion and massive flooding. Mann said he talked to one researcher who likened the situation to "one Katrina a month for 20 years."

The flooding helped weaken the Qing Dynasty, Mann said, opening the door for the British to essentially walk into the country unopposed before the dynasty's ultimate fall in 1911.

"That's what I mean when you talk about the biological consequences outstripping the financial consequences. It was important for China to have the silver trade," Mann said. "But the sweet potato and maize had far greater consequences." --read more

We'll be hosting a reading for 1493 with Charles Mann this upcoming October - Thursday, the 27th. Be sure to mark your calendars!

Michelle Tea at Food For Thought Books

Michelle Tea browsing at Food For Thought Books - we love this photo.