Britney Griner is used to the endless pressure from her father, coaches, and peers. The WNBA star and Olympic gold medalist reflects on battles she has faced both on and off the court. Griner fights for social issues that started from her college Baylor University in Waco, TX’s homosexuality policy to her image on the Phoenix Mercury team with Dina Taurasi. Griner's ability to black out family drama and relationship struggles once she steps on the court really attracts readers. Readers are reminded to embrace who they are.
In all honesty, this memoir felt very close to home. I chose this book because of the real-life topics included. I enjoyed Griner's connection to her childhood. However, I would have been more intrigued on a deeper analysis on her detention in Russia, this book surprised me. I related to her emotional struggles and writing her feelings away. This book was one of the best books I’ve read this year!

Calling all word nerds! If you love learning about the wonderful world of words, then Ursula Dubosarsky’s “The Word Snoop” will tickle your fancy. Find new fun in the English language as the Word Snoop and you navigate the history of the English language, the origin of the alphabet, and all the exciting and obscure ways that you can play with both! Surprise and intrigue await as you explore rebuses, mondegreens, Spoonerisms, and more. Plus, crack some cool codes along the way! Whether you are excited by confusingly simple oxymorons and find an awesomely good tautology delightful, or just forgot the difference between a anagram and a pangram, “The Word Snoop” is sure to be a great read.

This is definitely one of the best books I’ve read this year. Dubosarsky’s fun and educational style of writing is both easy and entertaining to read. Paired with illustrator Tohby Riddle’s humorous cartoons, this book is hard not to like. As a writer and grammarian, I simply loved the experience that this book offered. I’ve never had so much fun learning about something I thought I already knew! It’s definitely worth a read.

Our relationship to where we live is so multilayered. As a fellow resident of the front range I savored how Camille Dungy ‘spoke my language’ as much as she brought aliveness to her own experience and our current, heartbreakingly fractured American existence. Highly recommend.

This book is very, very good. While I tend to steer away from biographies and non fiction literature, this book was very interesting and fun to read. Exploring Trevor Noah’s childhood-young adulthood, this book educates its readers on the racial and violent issues that occurred during the apartheid era within South Africa. This book is extremely well written and often times witty. It had me laughing, then crying, then laughing again. I really recommend it!

An engaging adventure story that celebrates reverence for nature, curiosity about the world, bold explorations into the wild, and a poetic narration that is both reflective and inspiring.

A book you can't put down, but have to in order to digest each chapter fully. Macdonald ties in the experience of grief with her study and work with the most violent falcons. Reflective, penetrating, psychic, and wise - Macdonald connects seemingly unrelated topics to the basics of the human condition - effortlessly, as if her words are music and poetry flowing in and out of various moments in time. A book you will want to re-read once you finish it. Truly an original piece of work!

Elon Musk by Walter Isaacson is a tremendous book from start to finish. It captures the complete story of the billionaire and does not hesitate upon showing the many struggles he overcame to reach the level he is at today. It is completely unbiased and shows the many positives and negatives of Musk's personality. The amount of detail cannot be found within any other Musk paragraph. I highly recommend this book to readers with aspirations of starting their own business.

Having only really experienced Kate Beaton's web comic, Hark! A Vagrant and her sillier material, I was interested to see how a graphic novel of her life would play out on the printed page. I was shocked to find her somewhat whimsical style had so much emotion for a story that was assuredly a difficult one to tell. Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands is as gripping as it is frustrating that such working conditions remain this dangerous for women.

Telling the story of how Beaton paid off her student loans from art school in the fastest way possible, Ducks highlights the misogyny and sexism present in the (frankly) male-dominated field of petroleum. Working on the oil sands isn't safe in a physical sense, but add to that the "hanging with the guys" tropes that eventually lead to assault. It was hard to read sections of this book, knowing that men should be better than this. Beaton pours her trauma out on the page and it stuck with me in a way that only a graphic novel like this could convey.

I'd say that this book should be required reading for both men and women going into these fields, but I know it probably wouldn't change anything. There's too much inertia to effect the significant changes that would need to happen. This shouldn't lessen discussions about the depression, substance abuse, and suicide that men in these jobs endure, but instead highlight the tenuous strengths and inevitable weakness of humans pushed to their breaking points. For some, though, it is a lifestyle. For the lucky ones, they make it out alive in as little time as possible—which is still long enough to have lasting negative effects on their lives.

A deeply moving memoir about women working in a male-dominated field, I give Ducks 5.0 stars out of 5.

Humans are incredible creatures. There's a resilience for life that shows up in the most dire of circumstances. This is prevalent in many mountaineering books—especially the ones about climbing disasters. The Ledge is the harrowing real-life story of survival against the odds on Mount Rainier. Granted, most stories like this are usually framed with the benefit of hindsight, which can also highlight the risks that led to the disaster. It's amazing that anyone survived this situation, which is what makes this book an entertaining read.

There are a lot of extreme outdoor people in Colorado. My risk tolerance is usually low enough that I think what they do is crazy. I know it's easy to judge when things go wrong, so it s comforting that the situation that led to the titular ledge was mostly because of bad luck. An alignment of poor conditions can take even the most experienced mountaineers by surprise, just like it did here. I appreciate the decisions made in the moment were still the smartest options available.

While I wasn't wild about the back-and-forth framing of the disaster interspersed with flashbacks and exposition, it helped break up the intense sections where Davidson climbed out of the icy crevasse. I'm also glad that this book addressed the aftermath of the disaster, including all the PTSD and other mental effects associated with it. So many disaster books just stop at the point where they're rescued. That there was closure to the events that happened on Rainier helped to tell a complete story. After all, these are the things most people don't consider when dealing with the severe trauma involved with such a story of survival.

A harrowing tale of mountaineering survival, I give The Ledge 4.0 stars out of 5.

Every once in a while, I come across a book that feels like it's way above my head, but changes how I think about the world. Their analysis calls into question the known understanding of something and references plenty of famous individuals who have written on the topic. Unfortunately, a neophyte like myself does not know who any of these people are. The Dawn of Everything is very much one of these kinds of books for me.

Not knowing much about anthropology or ancient human civilizations, I came in with an open mind and found some intriguing points put forward in this book. We often look at history through modern lenses, but how often are we merely adopting the modern lenses of those before us? If the common thinking cannot support the physical evidence, should we continue to believe it? I learned a ton by reading this book, and I don't even feel like I was grasping everything that it was trying to convey because I wasn't as intimately familiar with the standard model it was trying to deconstruct.

While I think The Dawn of Everything can be approachable for anyone looking to educate themselves about how humans used to interact, it suffers from being occasionally overly academic. There are tons of examples brought forth in this text that merely reinforce the main thesis, each time trying to discredit some previously held belief that I wasn't aware existed until I read it for the first time here. At a certain point, it gets redundant. Still, there were many ideas it presented that made sense enough for me to consider that the authors were onto something big.

A mildly bloated re-thinking of the structure of early human societies, I give The Dawn of Everything 4.0 stars out of 5.