For many people, the pandemic clarified the significance of urban sound in our daily lives. Cities and Memory, a global field recording and sound art project, features more than 5,000 sounds spread over 109 countries and territories, some of which are magical moments of soundscapes transformed. In a recording from St. Louis, Senegal, you can hear an anti-coronavirus song blasting from the radio of a cab, with the singer “praying” in the local Wolof language that the virus will not reach his community. In another from Milan, announcements from the megaphone of a police car urge people to stay home as ambulances wail and birds chirp in the background. In Times Square, the sound of air conditioners drone through deserted streets. In Helsinki, a woman reads stories to children she cannot see in person. In Warsaw, a man hears birdsong that had not been audible before.
Now when did we last see a book of such stimulating complexity that’s so downright hopeful too? Maybe skip the vacation this year, and hole up with it.
Time Is a Mother continues Vuong’s exploration and questioning of the meaning of grief, of family, and the toll it takes on the body and mind in the wake of the Vietnam War.
Food at its best, comes straight from the heart. That’s clearly true here with chef Jose Pizzaro’s latest cookbook, which was published earlier this month, The Spanish Home Kitchen.
Its title is a clear indication of what’s to come inside – simple home recipes, passed down through the generations. It’s something we all love and cherish within our families, but not everyone would be as willing to share their heirloom cookery secrets as Jose is.
“The Times They Were a-Changin’: 1964, the Year the Sixties Arrived and the Battle Lines of Today Were Drawn” jumps into this well-covered ground with gusto. Benefiting from the insights and wisdom of Robert S. McElvaine, a renowned scholar who has studied and lived through the period, “The Times” reflects upon the era’s consequential yet thorny legacy through an illuminating, provocative and entertaining lens. To do so, McElvaine sidesteps an encyclopedic account of the decade in favor of a focused examination of a 22-month period stretching from the Kennedy assassination in November 1963 to the fall of 1965 — what McElvaine dubs the “Long 1964” — as the starting point of what are now considered “the sixties.”