WICKED PLANTS by Amy Stewart is a small book with a poisonous green cover and a long subtitle "The Weed That Killed Lincoln's Mother and Other Botanical Atrocities." If you had any illusions about plants being 100% upright and beneficial, this book will soon set you straight. It's full of examples of plants that range from killers (white snakeroot) to merely bad neighbors (kudzu). It's also abundantly illustrated with elegant etchings and humorous drawings.

For those of us who enjoyed Haven Kimmel's A Girl Named Zippy, it's time for a second helping. She has a new book that takes up where Zippy left off. This book, She Got Up Off the Couch, tells us not only more about Zippy, but about her mother when she decides to get up off the couch, learn to drive and go back to school. It's funny, but it also digs in much deeper where it resonates with real inspiration.
--Joyce Moore

Banana: The Fate of the Fruit that Changed the World, by Dan Koeppel, tells the story of the exotic fruit we Americans eat more of than any other (including apples). Koeppel tells a mysterious and often violent story, full of corporate and political intrigue, with a cautionary conclusion: all those yellow bananas we know and love are clones of a single variety, the Cavendish, which replaced the previous banana of commerce, the Gros Michel, when a fast-spreading blight wiped it out all over the world. Now a variant of that same blight is attacking the Cavendish, and there is no cure in sight. Will another variety replace it in time? Or do we face a banana-less future?

Nearly thirty years ago, in the grip of a very small personal obsession with pecans, I planted a handful of the little brown nuts ordered from the Northern Nut Growers Association. The three surviving trees are now more than 50 feet tall and this spring, for the first time, have produced an abundance of catkins. I know that pecans aren't supposed to grow here, but for nearly three decades, I have hoped that a tree that produced nuts in Northern Michigan might thrive here. Meanwhile, I've read In Praise of Pecans, Recipes and Recollections by June Jackson from cover to cover, hoping to be prepared for a bumper fall crop. In addition to stories from her own life, the author includes information about the history and cultivation of the nut and more than 100 recipes for using pecans in everything from starters to desert. It is also beautifully illustrated.

From Joyce: BON APPETIT, Y’ALL is my favorite cookbook of the season. It’s fun to read, the illustrations are mouth watering and the recipes I’ve tried are delicious. Virginia Willis is from Georgia, spent some time in France and has combined recipes from her mother and grandmother with her own experiences to create a satisfying blend of new and old. The recipe for Cheddar Cornbread alone is worth the price of the book. And I love having recipes for Fried Fatback and Boeuf Bourguignonne just pages from each other.

Alexandra Fuller, who wrote the memoir about growing up in Africa (Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight), here returns to visit her parents who are still living in Africa (in Zambia). She undertakes a strange journey with a white African war veteran named K. to revisit scenes of battle in Zimbabwe (formerly Rhodesia) and Mozambique and to meet other veterans of the countries' wars for independence. As in her previous book, she portrays the incredible pain and contradictions that exist in Africa with great sensitivity. Her voice is unique and compelling. -- Joyce Moore

The Night Journal, by Elizabeth Crook, is a multigenerational novel set in New Mexico. Three richly depicted women span four generations of a family with very deep roots in the southwestern frontier. Hannah Bass wrote detailed journals of her life as it was shaped by the westward progress of the railroad in the late 19th century. Claudia, her (by now elderly) daughter, made her academic career by editing the journals of a mother she barely remembers. Meg, Claudia's grandaughter, has spent her life rebelling against the history of her famous family. I very much enjoyed spending time with these women as they unearth (literally) a part of the saga that had never been told. Crook succeeds in weaving the many threads of the story into a satisfying whole. - Joyce Moore

Francine du Plessix Gray has created a powerful portrait of her parents in the memoir, Them. Alexander Lieberman and Titiana du Plessix were talented Russian emigres who fled occupied Paris in 1940 and soon became one of the most influential couples of the New York fashion world. They were also neurotic, selfish and opportunistic. Their skills as parents were limited. Gray tells their facinating story with affection, but without rose-colored glasses. You meet her colorful Russian grandparents and extended family as well as the many famous and exotic people who socialized with her parents. It's a beautifully written memoir about two people and the cultural milieu/history that they inhabit.
- Joyce Moore

Larimore, with humor and sensitivity, decribes the trials and tribulations of his first year of practicing medicine in Bryson City. Young and idealistic, he describes some of the lessons that he didn?t learn in medical school at Duke University.

From his first delivery (a heifer calf named Walter in his honor) to dealing with resistance from some established doctors, Larimore paints a colorful and moving portrait of a town and its people.
-- Reviewed by Joyce Moore

In her new novel, Barbara Kingsolver returns to the more familiar southern Appalachians after her sojourn in Africa in her powerful 1998 novel, The Poisonwood Bible. But once again she uses a collage of women?s voices to build her story. Three women of three generations, whose lives touch and interweave, struggle with questions about predators versus prey, love and sex, and use versus conservation. In this novel, Kingsolver?s background as a biologist comes forward, and she asks us to look at humans as a part of the ecology of these ancient mountains.