Where is your nonfiction section please.
Book review: Invisible Women, by Caroline Criado Perez I use gender data gap as an overarching term because sex is not the reason women are excluded from data. Gender is. [...] The problem is the social meaning that we ascribe to that body, and a socially determined failure to account for it. Caroline Criado Perez's... 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 →
An unexpected benefit of lockdown (we have to take little joys where we find them) has been getting to virtually snoop through people's bookshelves in Zoom meetings. Some journalists have done the good work of putting together lists of titles they've spotted on shelves during interviews. Dr. Fauci's books made it into one of these... Continue Reading →
A Promised Land, by Barack Obama Is it even worth reviewing former President Barack Obama's book? What can I add to any discussion? It sells itself; you probably already knew before it came out whether you would read it or not. I struggled with whether I had anything meaningful to say about it, or if... Continue Reading →
Book review: Café Europa Revisited: How to Survive Post-Communism, by Slavenka Drakulic What a weird day to be writing about a book on democracy in Europe, as it teeters precariously in the United States. But I think Americans would do well to consider democratic processes and totalitarian histories in Europe, because it's abundantly clear that... Continue Reading →
It's finally time to close the book on a year none of us will forget, much as we'd like to! 2020 may have sucked unendingly for so very many reasons, but it did have some redeeming qualities in the new nonfiction department. Here are my favorites, in no particular order, from the 2020 new nonfiction... Continue Reading →
To end Nonfiction November this year, Julie, Katie and I recorded an episode of Leann's Shelf Aware podcast. We talked Nonfiction November history, reading preferences, and a bunch of other stuff. It was so much fun to get to chat about books with my fellow hosts and I hope it's fun to listen to! I... Continue Reading →
The Age of Skin, by Dubrakva Ugrešić I was so excited for this book, because I don't think there's much Croatian-language nonfiction translated into English, and by a woman no less. Dubravka Ugrešić was born and raised in the former Yugoslavia and is now Amsterdam-based. She'd previously been a writer and journalist in her native... Continue Reading →
Two new essay collections out this month, both with weird, different looks at aspects of Americana. First, Tom Zoellner's The National Road: Dispatches From a Changing America, which "attempts to paint a picture of 'American place' in this uncertain era of political toxin and economic rearrangement. These are observations collected from thirty years of traveling... Continue Reading →
After the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg last week I barely even want to talk about this madman who may actually be responsible for putting a third Supreme Court Justice on the bench, but I did read two books about him last week. I don't know why I do these things to myself, besides... Continue Reading →
Book review: Not a Novel, by Jenny Erpenbeck, translated by Kurt Beals If the language that you can speak isn't enough, that's a very good reason to start writing. As paradoxical as it may be: The impossibility of expressing what happens to us in words is what pushes us towards writing. Whenever I haven't been... Continue Reading →
