SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
Growing a little tired of just sitting by the pool or lounging on a beach or curled up on your couch under the chilled caress of the air conditioner? Any brain rot yet? Well, we have an antidote for your summer stupor – read some nonfiction. NPR’s Books We Love has some great recommendations, including these from some of our colleagues.
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DEBBIE ELLIOTT, BYLINE: Hi, it’s Debbie Elliott, and I cover the American South for NPR News. The book I’m recommending is “When It’s Darkness On The Delta: How America’s Richest Soil Became Its Poorest Land” by W. Ralph Eubanks. It’s the story of the beautiful yet tragic pull of the Mississippi Delta. It’s a region that gave us the blues, and it’s a landscape that produces agricultural riches. Yet it remains among the most poverty-stricken regions in the country.
Eubanks examines why this place, a place his father once thought presented opportunity for Black farmers, has never lived up to that promise, despite generations of people who have tried to break free from the Delta’s plantation economy. He argues real change requires grappling with the difficult legacies of slavery, sharecropping and Jim Crow. But he does find hope in the work of resilient locals who are determined to revitalize the Delta.
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EMILY FENG, BYLINE: I’m Emily Feng, and over the last year, I’ve spent a lot of time in the Middle East, including in Syria, because of the end of the former Assad regime there in late 2024. And the Syrian civil war that ended as a result was so destructive and messy, it essentially became a proxy conflict, and it had massive consequences for not just the Middle East, but also the U.S. and Europe. And I’ve been looking for something that could encompass these shades of gray with Syria’s civil war. And that book was “Days Of Love And Rage” by Anand Gopal.
The book is not just a sweeping overview of Syrian modern history, but it’s also so brilliantly and evocatively told through the eyes of about half a dozen Syrians, and it’s told in a way that’s so intimate and so detailed that although I never met these people, I wasn’t in Syria during the civil war, I felt like I knew them and I knew the lives they lived. And that is the ultimate measure of success for a literary nonfiction book.
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ISABELLA GOMEZ SARMIENTO, BYLINE: Hi. My name’s Isabella Gomez Sarmiento. I’m a reporter with NPR Music. My pick for this summer’s Books We Love is the book “My Mother’s Daughter” by Tracy Clark-Flory. It’s a story about how, when Tracy Clark-Flory was a teenager, she found out her mother had gotten pregnant around her age and given the baby up for adoption. They didn’t talk about it much again, but decades later, after her mom’s death, Clark-Flory decided to find her half-sister and figure out what really happened all of those years ago.
Through her investigations, she learned that in 1965, her mom was sent off to a home for unwed mothers, where she and other women were coerced into giving up their children. The book is part memoir, part investigation, and in it, Clark-Flory uses her family story to dig into a larger history of who is considered worthy of motherhood in America and at what cost.
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SIMON: Those book recommendations again – “My Mother’s Daughter,” “Days Of Love And Rage” and “When It’s Darkness On The Delta.” And for more books we’ve loved so far this year, you can head to npr.org/books.
(SOUNDBITE OF OSKAR SCHUSTER’S “FJARLAEGUR”) Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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