Where is your nonfiction section please.
Book review: Before and After, by Judy Christie and Lisa Wingate (Amazon / Book Depository) Author Lisa Wingate wrote a popular novel in 2017, Before We Were Yours, a fictionalized story about children adopted from the notorious Tennessee Children's Home Society ("TCHS"). Starting in the 1920s through 1950, a woman named Georgia Tann ran this "questionable"... Continue Reading →
Book review: The Splendid Things We Planned, by Blake Bailey (Amazon / Book Depository) Award-winning biographer Blake Bailey took on a different kind of challenging biographical subject in The Splendid Things We Planned -- his own dysfunctional family. The central point of his memoir, around which everything in this story revolves, is his older brother, Scott. Scott... Continue Reading →
Book review: The Dead Ladies Project, by Jessa Crispin (Amazon / Book Depository) It was my circumstances that were killing me, I was sure of it. Jessa Crispin, editor of the now-defunct online literary magazine Bookslut, published a memoir, The Dead Ladies Project in 2015, but I was in no hurry to read it. I couldn't... Continue Reading →
Book review: The Only Street in Paris, by Elaine Sciolino (Amazon / Book Depository) Former New York Times Paris Bureau Chief Elaine Sciolino's The Only Street in Paris is a travelogue memoir meets micro-history and sociocultural study of the Parisian street where she and her family made their home for a time. There's a lot going... Continue Reading →
Book review: One Summer: America, 1927, by Bill Bryson (Amazon / Book Depository) Babe Ruth hit 60 home runs. The Federal Reserve made the mistake that precipitated the stock market crash. Al Capone enjoyed his last summer of eminence. The Jazz Singer was filmed. Television was created. Radio came of age. Sacco and Vanzetti were... Continue Reading →
Book review: Secondhand Time, by Svetlana Alexievich (Amazon / Book Depository) In writing, I’m piecing together the history of “domestic,” “interior” socialism. As it existed in a person’s soul. I’ve always been drawn to this miniature expanse: one person, the individual. It’s where everything really happens. 2015 Nobel Prize in Literature winner Svetlana Alexievich's Secondhand Time is... Continue Reading →
Book review: Red River Girl, by Joanna Jolly (Amazon / Book Depository) "The wide, frozen snake of the Red River curved through the city's landscape, a timeless witness to all that had gone before and all that would come." BBC journalist Joanna Jolly learned of the murder of Tina Fontaine, a 15-year-old Indigenous girl from... Continue Reading →
Book review: Five Days Gone, by Laura Cumming (Amazon / Book Depository) When she was three years old, in 1929, a young girl was kidnapped from a beach in Lincolnshire, on the eastern coast of England. She was returned to her family after those five days, and didn't even learn that this had happened to... Continue Reading →
Book review: The Beekeeper, by Dunya Mikhail (Amazon / Book Depository) Poet Dunya Mikhail, a US resident originally from Iraq, writes in The Beekeeper about the escape stories of women from that country, fleeing the Islamic State/Daesh, made possible by the eponymous beekeeper of Sinjar province. The women were Yazidis, an ethnic minority heavily targeted by IS... Continue Reading →
Book review: Within the Whirlwind, by Eugenia Ginzburg (Amazon / Book Depository) The most fearful thing is that evil becomes ordinary, part of a normal daily routine extending over decades. It's hard to believe, considering the popularity over time and general excellence of Eugenia Ginzburg's first memoir, Journey into the Whirlwind, that her second one... Continue Reading →
One last installment of 2019's upcoming nonfiction new releases: We've got cult insiders, lesser known Cold War tales, undercover in asylums, retracing Napoleon's Russian retreat, jackasses, life and death in colonial Sydney, women profiling women, and a genre-bending look at domestic abuse, and some new nonfiction in translation, among others. The Berlin Mission: The American... Continue Reading →
What's the best nonfiction you've read so far this year? Any standouts yet? Looking back from the halfway point, I think it's already been a pretty good year for nonfiction. In no particular order, here are my favorites from the new nonfiction published in the first half of 2019. Dreyer's English: An Utterly Correct Guide... Continue Reading →
