In her powerful memoir, Shut Up and Read, Jeannine A. Cook (It's Me They Follow) explores the value of conversation, the necessity of listening, and the struggles and triumphs of her journey as a bookseller, writer, and community organizer. Cook brings readers into her conversations (verbal and written) with her ancestors and patron saints, including the namesakes of her three bookstores: Harriet Tubman, Josephine Baker, and Ida B. Wells.
Cook opened Harriett's Bookshop in Philadelphia weeks before the 2020 outbreak of Covid-19. She recounts the challenges of balancing bookstore management with writing, interviewing authors, and mentoring the shop's youth conductors, some of whom traveled to Minneapolis with Cook to hand out books after George Floyd's murder. Cook opened Harriett's in search of "a quiet place to write," but "lost track of [her] mission, so everyone else had a place to read." The narrative captures the constant push-pull between Cook's own needs and those of her community; her writer self and her shopkeeper/event-planner self; and her need to be in two literal places at once: Philadelphia, tending to Harriett's, and Paris, France, where, like James Baldwin, she writes. Incorporated throughout are phone conversations with Cook's father, whom she calls Lazarus; his longtime health issues don't prevent him from dispensing candid (if unsolicited) advice to his daughter. As Cook listens to him and the other wise voices in her life, she gradually finds her own voice as a writer: sharp, dynamic, visionary, and absolutely worth reading. --Katie Noah Gibson, blogger at Cakes, Tea and Dreams