Author of the Binti trilogy (and my favorite sci-fi writer) Nnedi Okorafor opens herself up in this little memoir, giving readers a glimpse into the driving forces behind her powerful storytelling. A child of immigrants from a lively Nigerian hometown, a star athlete who became paralyzed overnight, a black woman who experiences racial harassment—Okorafor has plenty to draw from when creating her characters: strong-willed black women who repeatedly overcome hardships. She believes that out of the broken emerges the fantastic, and this is precisely what you feel in her storytelling.
As a writer—of novels, essays, memoirs, poems—Kingsnorth’s engagement with the world comes filtered through words. Consequently, when something goes awry in his relationship to those words, his whole world starts to fall apart. Rather than bringing on a case of writer’s block, however, this crisis makes Kingsnorth reassess what words—those demanding, relentless “savage gods”—want from him and how he can live an authentic life through or despite them. The quest launches him into this extraordinary set of reflections—as eloquent as they are anguished—that range from literary to philosophical to spiritual to socio-cultural as he considers his roles and responsibilities to his family, to the environment, to culture.
Heinerth, a diver, photographer, and filmmaker, is one of the few women in the rarefied field of underwater cave exploration, a “sport” that claims more deaths than mountain climbing. Feeling at home in water as she seldom does on land, Heinerth finds an exhilarating freedom when plunged miles below the surface—despite being strapped into equipment weighing as much as 250+ pounds. In her astounding memoir she recounts her record-breaking dives to map cave networks around the world, including, most spectacularly—and dangerously—her exploration of “the largest moving object on earth,” the Antarctic’s B-15 iceberg. But Heinerth’s rich descriptions of otherworldly seascapes, the fascinating glimpses of the technology that makes long, deep dives possible, her tales of the adventures involved in just getting to the dive sites, and the chilling reports of illness, accidents, and fatalities, are only half her story. The other half is the self-scrutiny of a talented, ambitious woman struggling with doubt, insecurity, and rampant sexism even as she sets records, leads dangerous projects, and proves herself over and over again. Launched into diving as a way to manage two traumatizing experiences when she was in college, she found her calling when she “learned to embrace fear as a positive catalyst in my life.”
