Where is your nonfiction section please.
Is there anything I love more than a best-of list? Maybe, but when a year's half-over and it's time to recap favorites, I can't think of anything better. Here are my favorites of the year's new nonfiction so far. The Soul of a Woman, by Isabel Allende - Allende's short but mighty powerful memoir (in... Continue Reading →
With the year half over, let's see what new and wondrous upcoming nonfiction we have to look forward to in the coming months! Here's what I'm excited for: The Icepick Surgeon : Murder, Fraud, Sabotage, Piracy, and Other Dastardly Deeds Perpetrated in the Name of Science, by Sam Kean (July 13) - Beginning "with Cleopatra’s... Continue Reading →
Why Fish Don't Exist: A Story of Loss, Love, and the Hidden Order of Life, by Lulu Miller Chaos will get them.Chaos will crack them from the outside — with a falling branch, a speeding car, a bullet — or unravel them from the inside, with the mutiny of their very own cells. Chaos will... Continue Reading →
The Confidence Game, by Maria Konnikova (Viking, 2016) Psychologist Konnikova takes a pop psych look at a subject so many of us find magnetically fascinating - con artists and why their manipulations work. She breaks down some of the psychology behind cons and the beliefs and tendencies in the average person that these play to,... Continue Reading →
Three Martini Afternoons at the Ritz, by Gail Crowther Both were emerging poets, and both were hugely ambitious women in a cultural moment that did not know how to deal with ambitious women. Author and biographer specialized in studies of Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath (cool job alert) Gail Crowther weaves together the groundbreaking similarities... Continue Reading →
Psychiatry, prison-camp manufactured Chinese goods, and racist tales from Nebraska. What a grab bag today. Let's dive in! Nobody's Normal: How Culture Created the Stigma of Mental Illness, by Roy Richard Grinkerpublished January 26, 2021 by W.W. Norton Only recently did mental illnesses brand the whole person, not just his or her behavior, with what['s...]... Continue Reading →
My reading lately has been heavily gearing towards pop science and medical and social science topics. These two deal with very specific breeds of evil: mediocre white men who think they deserve the world at the expense of people of color and women, and the middle school experience. Both are atrocious in their own special... Continue Reading →
In my desperate attempt to finish endless back reviews (and I mean way, way back -- these are from 2019, dare we even cast our memories back to such a halcyon time?) I'm rounding up a few true crime-themed titles that are worth discussing even if I couldn't form them into full-fledged reviews. You know... Continue Reading →
I'm guilty of sometimes buying a book because I like the cover. I'm not proud of this at all, but there you have it. Who isn't susceptible to some artistic influence from time to time? I also choose my edition on Goodreads based on the cover, even if I actually read a different one. So... Continue Reading →
Book review: The Ravine, by Wendy Lower & Those Who Forget, by Geraldine Schwarz In her new book The Ravine: A Family, a Photograph, a Holocaust Massacre Revealed, Wendy Lower, a historian with extensive work around the Holocaust, is put onto an intriguing research journey: Lower encountered an extremely rare photograph depicting the murder of... Continue Reading →
Book review: The Border: A Journey Around Russia, by Erika Fatland, translated from Norwegian by Kari Dickson I turned and looked out at the grey ocean. Here, right here, is where Asia and mighty Russia end. In The Border: A Journey Around Russia, journalist and Sovietistan author Erika Fatland embarks on an ambitious nine-month journey... Continue Reading →
Writers on walking stretches of England, weaving memoir with nature and various musings, has become a popular little sub-genre. I'm intrigued but not totally sold on it yet. Let's explore two of them. "When it hurts," wrote the Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz, "we return to the banks of certain rivers," and I take comfort in... Continue Reading →
