Where is your nonfiction section please.
When I was growing up, Go Ask Alice, the "true diary" of an anonymous teen girl, nicknamed Alice, was still an ubiquitous must-read despite being released in 1971, already decades old at that point. It's a salacious, haphazard diary of a young girl who is dosed once with LSD at a high school party, from... Continue Reading →
Some minis on remarkable women doing amazing things today, because we can always use more of that. The Double Life of Katharine Clark: The Untold Story of the Fearless Journalist Who Risked Her Life for Truth and Justice, by Katharine Gregorio. Published March 15, 2022 by Sourcebooks Used or new @SecondSale.com Quite the incredible story... Continue Reading →
Mud Sweeter Than Honey: Voices of Communist Albania, by Margo Rejmer, translated from the Polish by Zasia Krasodomska-Jones and Antonia Lloyd-JonesUsed and new at SecondSale.com What was meant to be has already happened.Time smooths out the edges of our recollections; the past is distorted by the weight of the present. Albania isn't a country I... Continue Reading →
I'm not sure why now, but the Jeffrey MacDonald case is having something of a cultural resurgence. A new Hulu/FX documentary based on legendary documentarian Errol Morris's book A Wilderness of Error just aired, with a podcast, Morally Indefensible, to accompany it. Ok, maybe it's just that one thing which is actually two things, plus... Continue Reading →
Book review: Surviving Autocracy, by Masha Gessen (Amazon / Book Depository) Journalist and author Masha Gessen lived through the changes of the Soviet Union, including Putin's ascendancy and increasing control over the state media. Gessen’s reported and written extensively about totalitarianism and the relationship of Putin's Russia with the west. In Surviving Autocracy, Gessen turns this... Continue Reading →
Book review: One Day, by Gene Weingarten (Amazon / Book Depository) Select an ordinary day at random, report it deeply, then tell it like it happened -- from midnight to midnight, the most basic, irreducible unit of human experience. Ideally, the more you'd learn, the more firmly you'd establish that in life, there's no such... Continue Reading →
Book review: Savage Appetites, by Rachel Monroe (Amazon / Book Depository) For the past few years, as the US murder rate has approached historic lows, stories about murder have become culturally ascendant...whether our tastes tended toward high-end HBO documentaries interrogating the justice system or something more like Investigation Discovery's Swamp Murders. (Or, as was often... Continue Reading →
Book review: Three Women, by Lisa Taddeo (Amazon / Book Depository) Journalist Lisa Taddeo crisscrossed the country interviewing women about desire for eight years, eventually selecting three for deep-diving in Three Women. She moved to two of their towns in order to examine desire and the innermost details of their sex lives from their perspectives.... Continue Reading →
Book review: The Psychopath Test, by Jon Ronson (Amazon / Book Depository) Journalist Jon Ronson's "journey through the madness industry" begins with a stressful situation in parallel with a mystery dropped in his lap: First, he's tapped to use his journalistic prowess to trace a book that's been sent to prominent academics around the world... Continue Reading →
Book review: No One Man Should Have All That Power, by Amos Barshad (Amazon / Book Depository) Wherever there is a puppet master, an eminence grise, a Svengali, a manipulator, a secret controller - that is a Rasputin. Author Amos Barshad, fascinated by the shadowy and powerful, started noticing manipulative figures everywhere, from pop culture... Continue Reading →
Book review: I'm Writing You From Tehran, by Delphine Minoui (Amazon / Book Depository) The taxi rolls along gray lines. That's all we can make out in the darkness: gray lines, as far as the eye can see, marking out the road to the airport. Outside, beyond the window, the night devours the last forbidden... Continue Reading →
Book review: Duped, by Abby Ellin (Amazon / Book Depository) Journalist Abby Ellin, an observer of human nature for her work, couldn't believe she'd been so deceived. She'd been in a long-term relationship with a man dubbed "the Commander," a military doctor prone to spinning impossibly tall (and borderline silly) tales and who was secretly... Continue Reading →
What's Nonfiction? 