Where is your nonfiction section please.
Is it cold where you are? Egads, it's freezing in New York City right now. A good excuse to round up some of my long-overdue reviews of books I'd love to share but haven't managed to writing reviews for. That's been a pattern the last year plus. And when is the best time to read... Continue Reading →
All Lara's Wars, by Wojciech Jagielski, translated from Polish by Antonia Lloyd-Jones (Bookshop.org) I sent them to Omar myself... But my thinking was that it might finally put them off war -- they'd see what it can do to a man, how badly it can destroy him. Then they wouldn't imagine it was just heroism,... Continue Reading →
How to Feed a Dictator, by Witold Szabłowski, translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones (Amazon / Book Depository) Polish journalist Witold Szabłowski saw a movie about army cooks that featured Branko Trbovic, the personal cook to Marshal Josip Broz Tito, "the absolute ruler of Yugoslavia" and describes it as being a lightbulb moment: "I started wondering what... Continue Reading →
Book review: Dirty John and Other True Stories of Outlaws and Outsiders, by Christopher Goffard (Amazon / Book Depository) Christopher Goffard, the journalist behind last year's wildly popular Dirty John podcast, opens this frequently California-centric collection of his long-form investigative reporting with an introduction explaining the beginnings of his journalism career. It has to be... Continue Reading →
Fear: Trump in the White House, by Bob Woodward (Amazon Book Depository) (I keep promising myself I'm not going to read any more of these Trump/White House books but I'm unable to resist, apparently.) Real power is fear. That's the mantra seeded throughout veteran political reporter and one-half of Woodward and Bernstein Bob Woodward's diligently... Continue Reading →
Book review: Sin, Shame & Secrets, by David Yonke On Holy Saturday in 1980, the day before Easter Sunday, elderly nun Sister Margaret Ann Pahl was found murdered in the sacristy of Mercy Hospital in Toledo, Ohio. She'd been strangled with an altar cloth and her body bore stab wounds in the shape of an... Continue Reading →
Book review: American Prison, by Shane Bauer (Amazon / Book Depository) The United States imprisons a higher portion of its population than any country in the world. In 2017 we had 2.2 million people in prisons and jails, a 500 percent increase over the last forty years. We now have almost 5 percent of the... Continue Reading →
Book review: A Deal with the Devil, by Blake Ellis and Melanie Hicken (Amazon / Book Depository) We knew that many people thought of all psychics as frauds. We'd heard plenty of horror stories about people who lost thousands of dollars to storefront psychics or psychic hotlines. But we had never heard of a psychic scam... Continue Reading →
Book review: In the Skin of a Jihadist, by Anna Erelle (Amazon / Book Depository) When one worked on “societal” issues, it was out of passion. If only I could write about this topic in a new way, one that avoided treating individuals as part of a succession of similar cases. I wanted to investigate... Continue Reading →
Book review: To the Bridge, by Nancy Rommelmann Book Depository Journalist and author Nancy Rommelmann found herself captivated by a disturbing news story. Young mother Amanda Stott-Smith had, in the early morning hours of May 23, 2009, driven to the Sellwood Bridge in Portland, Oregon and dropped her two young children into the Willamette River... Continue Reading →
Book review: Columbine, by Dave Cullen (Amazon / Book Depository) Anyone reading here knows I'm a huge fan of narrative (or creative) nonfiction, a genre that can encompass a lot, but the key element is nonfiction that uses narrative literary structures, styles and concepts similar to those used in fiction. Books like Adrian Nicole LeBlanc's... Continue Reading →
Book review: A False Report, by T. Christian Miller and Ken Armstrong Amazon / Book Depository It's early, but I'll call it - this will be one of the most important nonfiction titles released this year. Pulitzer Prize-winning journalists T. Christian Miller and Ken Armstrong discovered every reporter's nightmare - they were chasing nearly the same story.... Continue Reading →
What's Nonfiction? 