Where is your nonfiction section please.
As I mentioned in Nonfiction November, one of my favorite reading categories -- food history and foodoirs -- has been one of my least-read genres this year, and I ended up abandoning most of the titles I picked up. Nevertheless, I did read a few good ones, especially looking at American cuisine. Let's discuss! The... Continue Reading →
Book review: American Fire, by Monica Hesse In the American countryside, during five months from 2012 to 2013, a terrified county nearly went up in flames. The place was Accomack County, on the Eastern Shore of Virginia, within the East Coast's picturesque Delmarva (Delaware-Maryland-Virginia) region. "The Eastern Shore of Virginia is a hangnail, a hinky peninsula separated... Continue Reading →
Book review: Theft by Finding, by David Sedaris Book Depository "In order to record your life, you sort of need to live it. Not at your desk, but beyond it. Out in the world where it's so beautiful and complex and painful that sometimes you just need to sit down and write about it." David Sedaris, beloved... Continue Reading →
Book review: The World is On Fire, by Joni Tevis Joni Tevis has a strange talent for writing essays that combine the most unlikely, unrelated subjects, skipping without any obvious connection between topics and somehow making it work as a coherent, emotional, interesting piece. I've never read anything quite like it before. As one example,... Continue Reading →
Book review: The Solace of Open Spaces, by Gretel Ehrlich (Amazon / Used or new @ SecondSale.com) "I came here four years ago. I had not planned to stay, but I couldn't make myself leave." Achingly beautiful, emotionally charged prose essays with a distinctly lyrical style, written by a young woman as she initially pursues a... Continue Reading →
Book review: Glass House, by Brian Alexander Journalist Brian Alexander is a native of Lancaster, Ohio, a city highlighted by Forbes in 1947 with the shining, post-war pride declaration, "This is America." Now it's one of many towns in America's Rust Belt that's fallen victim to plagues of misfortune in recent decades - the restructuring and eventual closures of big companies,... Continue Reading →
Book review: Hillbilly Elegy, by J.D. Vance (Amazon / Book Depository) Hillbilly Elegy is the memoir of a still-young man looking back at his childhood and his family's migration from impoverished, seemingly hopeless Kentucky to a moderately more hopeful Ohio. But like the old Russian adage that if you try to drink your troubles away,... Continue Reading →
Book review: Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places Ghostland is a perfect October read. It's hard to find a nonfiction book about ghosts and hauntings that's not an utter cheeseball groanfest. And although it's sometimes (sometimes!) fun to watch ridiculous, guilty pleasure TV shows about spookiness (I mean, we have networks devoted to the genre - I came... Continue Reading →
Photo: New York Hospital, Payne Whitney Clinic. From the Historic American Buildings Survey, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Washington D.C. Credit: Wikimedia Commons Book review: One of These Things First: A Memoir, by Steven Gaines (Amazon ($1.99 ebook alert!) / Book Depository) It sounds strange, but I've read a couple of Holocaust memoirs lately... Continue Reading →
Book review: The Falcon and the Snowman by Robert Lindsey (Amazon (1.99 ebook alert there!) / Book Depository) Two childhood friends, former altar boys, develop their own espionage "scam", as they call it, and become unlikely spies, selling government documents to the Soviet Union during the Cold War. It would make an entertaining basis for a spy... Continue Reading →
Book review: Closing Time, by Lacey Fosburgh (Amazon / Book Depository) Page turner about the 1973 murder of a schoolteacher on New York City's Upper West Side by a troubled drifter. I haven't read the book or seen the film Looking for Mr. Goodbar, which immortalized the case, and didn't know much about the case... Continue Reading →
Book review: The Boston Strangler, by Gerold Frank (Amazon / Book Depository) (P.S. - $1.99 ebook alert for that one on Amazon) I know I have to take a break from true crime sooner or later, but this kept getting recommended as a good example of the genre, and then I noticed a newly... Continue Reading →
What's Nonfiction? 