Non-Fiction – Book & Diamond art Pairing

*All book descriptions taken from Amazon.com

The Color of Compromise by Jemar Tisby
Book Description*: The Color of Compromise is both enlightening and compelling, telling a history we either ignore or just don’t know. Equal parts painful and inspirational, it details how the American church has helped create and maintain racist ideas and practices. You will be guided in thinking through concrete solutions for improved race relations and a racially inclusive church.

1. Readability: ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️
2. Engagement: ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️
3. Emotional Investment: ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️
4. Originality: ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️
5. Insightful/Enlightening: ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️
Overall: ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️

Intimations by Zadie Smith
Book Description*: Written during the early months of lockdown, Intimations explores ideas and questions prompted by an unprecedented situation. What does it mean to submit to a new reality–or to resist it? How do we compare relative sufferings? What is the relationship between time and work? In our isolation, what do other people mean to us? How do we think about them? What is the ratio of contempt to compassion in a crisis? When an unfamiliar world arrives, what does it reveal about the world that came before it?

Suffused with a profound intimacy and tenderness in response to these extraordinary times, Intimations is a slim, suggestive volume with a wide scope, in which Zadie Smith clears a generous space for thought, open enough for each reader to reflect on what has happened–and what should come next.

1. Readability: ⭐️⭐️⭐️
2. Engagement: ⭐️⭐️⭐️
3. Emotional Investment: ⭐️⭐️⭐️
4. Originality: ⭐️⭐️⭐️
5. Insightful/Enlightening: ⭐️⭐️⭐️
Overall: ⭐️⭐️⭐️

Light for the World to See: A Thousand Words on Race and Hope by Kwame Alexander
Book Description*: From NPR correspondent and New York Times bestselling author, Kwame Alexander, comes a powerful and provocative collection of poems that cut to the heart of the entrenched racism and oppression in America and eloquently explores ongoing events. A book in the tradition of James Baldwin’s “A Report from Occupied Territory,” Light for the World to See is a rap session on race. A lyrical response to the struggles of Black lives in our world . . . to America’s crisis of conscience . . . to the centuries of loss, endless resilience, and unstoppable hope. Includes an introduction by the author and a bold, graphically designed interior.

1. Readability: ⭐️⭐️⭐️ ⭐️
2. Engagement: ⭐️⭐️⭐️ ⭐️
3. Emotional Investment: ⭐️⭐️⭐️ ⭐️
4. Originality: ⭐️⭐️⭐️
5. Insightful/Enlightening: ⭐️⭐️⭐️ ⭐️
Overall: ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️

The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemisin
Book Description*: At the end of the world, a woman must hide her secret power and find her kidnapped daughter in this “intricate and extraordinary” Hugo Award winning novel of power, oppression, and revolution. (The New York Times)

This is the way the world ends. . .for the last time.
It starts with the great red rift across the heart of the world’s sole continent, spewing ash that blots out the sun. It starts with death, with a murdered son and a missing daughter. It starts with betrayal, and long dormant wounds rising up to fester.

This is the Stillness, a land long familiar with catastrophe, where the power of the earth is wielded as a weapon. And where there is no mercy.

Read the first book in the critically acclaimed, three-time Hugo award-winning trilogy by NYT bestselling author N. K. Jemisin.

1. Readability: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ ⭐️
2. Engagement: ⭐️⭐️⭐️ ⭐️
3. Emotional Investment: ⭐️⭐️⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️
4. Originality: ⭐️⭐️⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️
5. Insightful/Enlightening: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ ⭐️
Overall: ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ This was breathtaking and memorable!

The Talented Miss Farwell by Emily Gray Tedrowe
Book Description*: At the end of the 1990s, with the art market finally recovered from its disastrous collapse, Miss Rebecca Farwell has made a killing at Christie’s in New York City, selling a portion of her extraordinary art collection for a rumored 900 percent profit. Dressed in couture YSL, drinking the finest champagne at trendy Balthazar, Reba, as she’s known, is the picture of a wealthy art collector. To some, the elusive Miss Farwell is a shark with outstanding business acumen. To others, she’s a heartless capitalist whose only interest in art is how much she can make.

But a thousand miles from the Big Apple, in the small town of Pierson, Illinois, Miss Farwell is someone else entirely—a quiet single woman known as Becky who still lives in her family’s farmhouse, wears sensible shoes, and works tirelessly as the town’s treasurer and controller.

No one understands the ins and outs of Pierson’s accounts better than Becky; she’s the last one in the office every night, crunching the numbers. Somehow, her neighbors marvel, she always finds a way to get the struggling town just a little more money. What Pierson doesn’t see—and can never discover—is that much of that money is shifted into a separate account that she controls, “borrowed” funds used to finance her art habit. Though she quietly repays Pierson when she can, the business of art is cutthroat and unpredictable.

But as Reba Farwell’s deals get bigger and bigger, Becky Farwell’s debt to Pierson spirals out of control. How long can the talented Miss Farwell continue to pull off her double life?

1. Readability: ⭐️⭐️⭐️
2. Engagement: ⭐️⭐️⭐️
3. Emotional Investment: ⭐️⭐️⭐️
4. Originality: ⭐️⭐️⭐️ ⭐️
5. Insightful/Enlightening: ⭐️⭐️⭐️
Overall: ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ Neither loved or disliked it; it was good, but there was nothing new or exciting about it.

The Lost and Found Bookshop by Susan Wiggs
Book Description*: There is a book for everything . . .

Somewhere in the vast Library of the Universe, as Natalie thought of it, there was a book that embodied exactly the things she was worrying about.

In the wake of a shocking tragedy, Natalie Harper inherits her mother’s charming but financially strapped bookshop in San Francisco. She also becomes caretaker for her ailing grandfather Andrew, her only living relative—not counting her scoundrel father.

But the gruff, deeply kind Andrew has begun displaying signs of decline. Natalie thinks it’s best to move him to an assisted living facility to ensure the care he needs. To pay for it, she plans to close the bookstore and sell the derelict but valuable building on historic Perdita Street, which is in need of constant fixing. There’s only one problem–Grandpa Andrew owns the building and refuses to sell. Natalie adores her grandfather; she’ll do whatever it takes to make his final years happy. Besides, she loves the store and its books provide welcome solace for her overwhelming grief.

After she moves into the small studio apartment above the shop, Natalie carries out her grandfather’s request and hires contractor Peach Gallagher to do the necessary and ongoing repairs. His young daughter, Dorothy, also becomes a regular at the store, and she and Natalie begin reading together while Peach works.

To Natalie’s surprise, her sorrow begins to dissipate as her life becomes an unexpected journey of new connections, discoveries and revelations, from unearthing artifacts hidden in the bookshop’s walls, to discovering the truth about her family, her future, and her own heart.

1. Readability: ⭐️⭐️⭐️
2. Engagement: ⭐️⭐️⭐️
3. Emotional Investment: ⭐️⭐️⭐️
4. Originality: ⭐️⭐️⭐️
5. Insightful/Enlightening: ⭐️⭐️⭐️
Overall: ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️

Transcendent Kingdom by Yaa Gyasi
Book Description*: Yaa Gyasi’s stunning follow-up to her acclaimed national best seller Homegoingis a powerful, raw, intimate, deeply layered novel about a Ghanaian family in Alabama.

Gifty is a sixth-year PhD candidate in neuroscience at the Stanford University School of Medicine studying reward-seeking behavior in mice and the neural circuits of depression and addiction. Her brother, Nana, was a gifted high school athlete who died of a heroin overdose after an ankle injury left him hooked on OxyContin. Her suicidal mother is living in her bed. Gifty is determined to discover the scientific basis for the suffering she sees all around her. But even as she turns to the hard sciences to unlock the mystery of her family’s loss, she finds herself hungering for her childhood faith and grappling with the evangelical church in which she was raised, whose promise of salvation remains as tantalizing as it is elusive. Transcendent Kingdom is a deeply moving portrait of a family of Ghanaian immigrants ravaged by depression and addiction and grief–a novel about faith, science, religion, love. Exquisitely written, emotionally searing, this is an exceptionally powerful follow-up to Gyasi’s phenomenal debut.

1. Readability: ⭐️⭐️⭐️ ⭐️
2. Engagement: ⭐️⭐️⭐️ ⭐️
3. Emotional Investment: ⭐️⭐️⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️
4. Originality: ⭐️⭐️⭐️ ⭐️
5. Insightful/Enlightening: ⭐️⭐️⭐️ ⭐️
Overall: ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️

~ ~ ~

📚 Next Reads:

768 pgs.

321 pgs

* All book descriptions are taken from Amazon.com

Tag: Non-Fiction

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