Author: Alice Burton

It’s May! We’re a third through the year and so many new books to go. I hope you’re finding awesome new ways to get your books at home. With that in mind, here are some brand new nonfiction reads out in the world:

The Holy Shroud: A Brilliant Hoax in the Time of the Black Death by Gary Vikan. The Shroud of Turin! If you don’t know what it is, you’ve probably at least heard of it. Vikan is a medieval art scholar, and he’s here to tell you all about how this supposed burial shroud of Jesus is in fact a big piece of cloth at one point wrapped around a medieval Frenchman. How did the hoaxer (if you will) fool everyone for so long? And will you AGREE with Vikan? So many questions. This looks great.

 

Scandinavian Noir: In Pursuit of a Mystery by Wendy Lesser. Scandinavian mystery fiction. So kind of still hot right now. The book walks you through some of the bigger Nordic crime hits through the lens of her own intense fandom of them. This culminates in a travelogue as she goes on a journey to Norway, Sweden, and Denmark to visit the sites of her favorite genre. If you love Nordic mysteries or want to learn more about a new genre, bam, here you go.

 

On Account of Race: The Supreme Court, White Supremacy, and the Ravaging of African American Voting Rights by Lawrence Goldstone. We know the voting rights protected by the Fourteenth Amendment have been gutted, but starting when? Constitutional law historian Goldstone says 1876, carrying up to the present day. Of the more than “500,000 African-Americans who had registered to vote across the South, the vast majority former slaves, by 1906, less than ten percent remained.” To learn about this long history, check this out.

Daughter of the Boycott: Carrying on a Montgomery Family’s Civil Rights Legacy by Karen Gray Houston. A story of family and the Montgomery bus boycott and fight for equal rights in the 1950s and ’60s. Gray Houston focuses on this time through her father, Thomas Gray. His involvement in the civil rights movement began after a childhood friend was shot by a white police officer after the friend tried to board a bus. Gray Houston tells the story of her family in this time and how the boycott moved the country closer to equality.

It’s About Damn Time: How to Turn Being Underestimated into Your Greatest Advantage by Arlan Hamilton with Rachel L. Nelson. Do you know who blurbed this book? Stacey ABRAMS. In 2015, Arlan Hamilton was homeless and sleeping in an airport. She wanted to break into the rich white male space of venture capitalism as a queer woman of color, and she DID it. She “shares the hard-won wisdom she’s picked up on her remarkable journey from food-stamp recipient to venture capitalist, with lessons like ‘The Best Music Comes from the Worst Breakups,’ ‘Let Someone Shorter Stand in Front of You.’ As a 5’2” individual, I particularly support that last one. This looks swell.

Stay inside if you can, nonfictionites. Wear a mask, wash your hands, wipe down your phone, and read read read (while also taking a break to prevent eye strain!). As always, you can find me on Twitter @itsalicetime and co-hosting the For Real podcast with Kim here at Book Riot. Until next time! Enjoy those facts, fellow nerds.

I’ve been reading more and more mysteries while stuck in quarantine, so we’re focusing on true crime reads today! Murder gets a lot of space in the true crime genre, but I included a couple non-murder options for those (like my fiancée) who would prefer to spend their free time NOT reading about one of the worst things that can happen.

The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper by Hallie Rubenhold. If you listen to For Real, you might’ve heard us talking this up. If you’re mad about the amount of focus usually given to the perpetrator of the Whitechapel murders, Rubenhold is with you. She tells the stories of the women whose lives were taken away, she rights past injustices done to their narratives, and all around does a great job changing the perspective of this infamous true crime story.

 

Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption by Bryan Stevenson. Recently made into a film! Stevenson founded the Equal Justice Initiative to defend “the poor, the wrongly condemned, and women and children trapped in the farthest reaches of our criminal justice system.” He meets Walter McMillian, accused of a murder he insists he did not commit. If you’re looking for a story of hope and justice and people fighting for what’s right, then here you go.

 

The Skies Belong to Us: Love and Terror in the Golden Age of Hijacking by Brendan I. Koerner. You know how specific types of crimes can come in waves? Like people see other people doing it and then THEY do it? Well the ’60s and early ’70s was the age of airplane hijacking. As in they were happening once a week. This book tells the story of a couple that “pulled off the longest-distance hijacking in American history” and what finally ended this weirdly popular crime in 1973.

 

The Spy Who Couldn’t Spell: A Dyslexic Traitor, an Unbreakable Code, and the FBI’s Hunt for America’s Stolen Secrets by Yudhijit Bhattacharjee. In 2000, the FBI received a package. It was “a series of coded letters from an anonymous sender to the Libyan consulate, offering to sell classified United States intelligence.” What made the code much harder to crack was the sender had dyslexia. This is is billed as a “true-life spy thriller,” which is excellent.

 

Seven Fallen Feathers: Racism, Death, and Hard Truths in a Northern City by Tanya Talaga. We do not talk about the high rate of crime perpetrated against Indigenous people enough. Talaga is an Anishinaabe Canadian journalist and here investigates the deaths of seven Indigenous high school students that spanned 2000 – 2011 in Thunder Bay, Ontario. She tells the story of Thunder Bay, how Canada has not supported Indigenous communities, and what Indigenous youth in Canada face today.

 

Conan Doyle for the Defense: The True Story of a Sensational British Murder, a Quest for Justice, and the World’s Most Famous Detective Writer by Margalit Fox. I love a colorful cover with a long subtitle. In 1908, a wealthy Scottish woman was murdered inside her home. Police blamed a Jewish immigrant and he was convicted and sent to prison. Conan Doyle of Sherlock Holmes fame was OUTraged and spent years working to exonerate the convicted man. Another read for fans of JUSTICE.

Stay inside if you can, nonfictionites. Wear a mask, wash your hands, wipe down your phone, and read read read (while also taking a break to prevent eye strain!). As always, you can find me on Twitter @itsalicetime and co-hosting the For Real podcast with Kim here at Book Riot. Until next time! Enjoy those facts, fellow nerds.

How are you DOING, nonfictionite? I hope you’re taking care of yourself. I personally will be here to tell you about new and backlist nonfiction twice a week for the foreseeable future, so see that as a steady guidepost if nothing else. And also a way to learn about new nonfiction, which is still being published and we should uplift these authors, so HERE WE GO:

The Heart: Frida Kahlo in Paris by Marc Petitjean. This cover is so beautiful, I want to just stare at it for a while. Ok, so this book’s deal is: it’s the 1930s! Surrealism is king! Or at least very popular. Frida Kahlo is going to NYC for her first solo show, when her husband with impeccable timing tells her he wants a divorce and ALSO has been sleeping with her sister. Wow. Just wow. So she did what anyone in that situation should get to do: traveled to Paris. To read about what she did there, check out this book.

We Served the People: My Mother’s Stories by Emei Burell. Illustrated stories passed from mother to daughter about China’s Cultural Revolution! This movement lasted from 1966 – 1976 and shaped a generation in China. Burell’s mother tells her about her time driving a truck in the “Up to the Mountains and Down to the Countryside movement,” offering a vantage point not frequently seen.

 

Twitter: A Biography by Jean Burgess, Nancy K. Baym. Are you a Twitter nerd? These academics sure are. This scant 144 page biography tells the story of Twitter’s evolution “from its origins as a personal messaging service to its transformation into one of the most globally influential social media platforms, where history and culture is not only recorded but written in real time.”

 

 

What We Carry: A Memoir by Maya Shanbhag Lang. The story of Maya and her mother. Her mom was a doctor who immigrated to America from India, and they were close for all of Maya’s life until Maya was becoming a mother herself and her mom suddenly withdrew. Maya soon discovers her mother is dealing with Alzheimer’s. The stories she tells become a catalyst for Maya to reexamine their relationship, her mother’s past and “the weight we shoulder as women.”

 

Earth Almanac: A Year of Witnessing the Wild from the Call of the Loon to the Journey of the Gray Whale by Ted Williams. Look at this DARLING BOOK. I’ve been dipping into this at night when I need something calming. Williams has a column in Audubon, and he writes vignettes about animals and the fascinating little things they do. Did you know skunk cabbage has been prescribed for whooping cough? And that coatmundis are VERY cute?

Stay inside if you can, nonfictionites. Wash your hands, wipe down your phone, and read read read (while also taking a break to prevent eye strain!). As always, you can find me on Twitter @itsalicetime and co-hosting the For Real podcast with Kim here at Book Riot. Until next time! Enjoy those facts, fellow nerds.

Elizabeth! Mary! Some Katherines and Annes! A couple Janes! I glanced around my bookshelves for what our nonfiction theme could be this week, and I saw Wolf Hall, which I have still not read but definitely own. Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall focuses on Tudor pragmatist and moneyman Thomas Cromwell, who we are ignoring in this newsletter, but that book is very acclaimed, so maybe look into it. The Tudor era is incredibly popular because of its DRAMA, so there are appx. 1 million books about it. Here’s a brief list to get you started or to dive further into this fascinating time that lasted from 1485 to 1603!:

Blackamoores: Africans in Tudor England, their Presence, Status and Origins by Onyeka. We need to stop whitewashing history, y’all. People have always traveled to other towns, countries, and continents, and ignoring that in our historical dramas gives a false impression of reality. Onyeka’s work, published in 2013, focuses on Africans in four cities in Tudor England, how they were discussed by records of the time, and the various occupations they held, including one man employed by Elizabeth I’s chief adviser Robert Cecil.

Mary Queen of Scots: A Study in Failure by Jenny Wormald. This is my favorite title of all time because I hate Mary, Queen of Scots. Mary, Queen of Scots was a prime example of all the things not to do as queen. She also probably smelled bad (jk…they all probably smelled bad). Wormald examines the reasons the Scottish queen ended up imprisoned for decades and then executed. If you’re interested in something more rhapsodic, I suggest anything by the German Romantics.

 

Six Wives of Henry VIII by Alison Weir. I will never forget the DISDAIN my 16th c. English history professor had for Alison Weir, but I devoured her books in high school, so there’s no way I’m not recommending one here. If you’ve gotten into the musical SIX, definitely read this, and if you haven’t, go listen to SIX and then read this. You’ll get relatively brief bios of each of the women who had to marry Henry VIII, and a nice overview of some of the key Tudor players during Henry’s reign.

 

Elizabeth & Leicester: Power, Passion, Politics by Sarah Gristwood. THE LOVE STORY OF TUDOR TIMES. He lent her money when she was an almost-broke youth. She died with his last letter in a box next to her bed. I. cannot. with. these. two. If you want to read the story of Elizabeth I and Robert Dudley, here’s a more recent dual bio.

 

 

Black Africans in the British Imagination: English Narratives of the Early Atlantic World by Cassander L. Smith. Lotsa colonizing happening by the British and Spanish in the 16th century. Smith looks at how British writers “focused on encounters with Black Africans throughout the Atlantic world, attempting to use these points of contact to articulate and defend England’s global ambitions.” Expand your view of the Tudor world, for it was both vast and complicated.

Stay inside if you can, nonfictionites. Wash your hands, Clorox-wipe your phone, and read read read (while also taking a break to prevent eye strain!). As always, you can find me on Twitter @itsalicetime and co-hosting the For Real podcast with Kim here at Book Riot. Until next time! Enjoy those facts, fellow nerds.

I hope you’re excited about new releases, ’cause I got a bunch. This week we have James Baldwin, we have astrology, we have pathogens, we have Val Kilmer because why not. ENJOY:

Everything Is Under Control: A Memoir With Recipes by Phyllis Grant. Ok, you’re maybe asking, who is Phyllis Grant? Well, as might be guessed from its subtitle, she is a CHEF. And a former dancer. And a food writer. Which leads us to this book! It reads like a series of snapshots, which is fun and different. She talks about her time as a dancer at Juilliard, her time cooking in NYC restaurants, meeting her husband, and moving to Berkeley, CA. It’s a quick appx. 200 page read. With recipes! Have you heard of lamb popsicles, because I hadn’t.

Begin Again: James Baldwin’s America and Its Urgent Lessons for Our Own by Eddie S. Glaude Jr. The author starts with the idea that we are living in the “aftertimes,” meaning post-the beginning of the Black Lives Matter movement and post-Obama. He looks to the brilliant James Baldwin and his similar time for answers, saying that “from that journey, Baldwin emerged with a sense of renewed purpose about the necessity of pushing forward in the face of disillusionment and despair.”

 

Good Boy: My Life in Seven Dogs by Jennifer Finney Boylan. A dog book! Who doesn’t love a dog book? Ok, I don’t, because the dog eventually dies, and I cannot, BUT: Finney Boylan, author of She’s Not There: A Life in Two Genders, as well as many others, is an excellent writer and I am promoting her gay dog book. Here she pairs “seven crucial moments of growth and transformation” with seven dogs. And look at that good boy on the cover. What a good boy.

 

Biography of Resistance: The Epic Battle Between People and Pathogens by Muhammad H. Zaman. If I wrote a book about the epic battle between people and pathogens, I’d feel like I really hit the nail on the head right about now. This focuses on superbugs, which most people have heard of in that vague “don’t use too much hand sanitizer because #superbugs” way. Zaman is here to give you FACTS and what we can do about it.

 

I’m Your Huckleberry: A Memoir by Val Kilmer. Confession: I’ve never seen Tombstone, but people seem so delighted by the quote that is also this book’s title, that I felt like I had to include it. I just hope he talks about his real starring role: Moses in the banger soundtrack film The Prince of Egypt. Avoid the cares of this world and learn more about Val Kilmer than you ever thought you’d know! Available now wherever books are sold.

 

Madame Clairevoyant’s Guide to the Stars: Astrology, Our Icons, and Our Selves by Claire Comstock-Gay. It’s a breakdown of the zodiac signs! If there’s one thing I love, it’s correlating someone’s sign to their personality. And here’s a beautifully-covered book that helps with that. She posits that astrology signs are “more like mirrors that show us who we are, that give us an understanding of how to be and how to move through the world; how certain people do it differently, and what we can learn by studying them.” A+.

Missed Translations: Meeting the Immigrant Parents Who Raised Me by Sopan Deb. Deb, a writer for the New York Times and a standup comedian, opens the book talking about the disconnect he felt between his standup, which should lie in truth, and the reality of his family, which was fragmented. He goes on a journey to connect with his parents, learn who they are, and see if he can build bridges where none were before.

 

The Women With Silver Wings: The Inspiring True Story of the Women Airforce Service Pilots of World War II by Katherine Sharp Landdeck. In the grand tradition of “the story of ladies doing hard things you wouldn’t expect them to do given the times in which they lived” comes the story of women Air Force pilots in World War II. Side note: Mildred Hemmons Carter, who graduated from Tuskegee at 19, applied for this program (Women’s Airforce Service Pilots or WASPs) and was rejected due to her race. The white women accepted into the program were released when the war was over, in a very League of Their Own-style move. Combat exclusion for women in the Air Force was lifted in 1993, and the first African American woman fighter pilot in the USAF was Shawna Rochelle Kimbrell in 2000. For more women in the Air Force stories, check out this book!

Stay inside if you can, nonfictionites. Wash your hands, wipe down your phone, and read read read (while also taking a break to prevent eye strain!). As always, you can find me on Twitter @itsalicetime and co-hosting the For Real podcast with Kim here at Book Riot. Until next time! Enjoy those facts, fellow nerds.

Do you know what next Wednesday is? It’s EARTH DAY. If you’re like me, you grew up being like, “yeah, yeah, Earth Day, Dawn from The Baby-Sitters Club, pick up cans off the ground, I know.” But now it is a day of poignancy and meaning. Because omg the earth.

We did an Earth Day theme on For Real this week, so I’m going to highlight some different books than we covered there. Fortunately, a lot of authors seem interested in this, the only planet where humankind has ever lived (…or so we think). So there’re a lot of options, book-wise.

On Fire: The (Burning) Case for a Green New Deal by Naomi Klein. Klein has been covering the environment as a journalist for decades, and here we have a collection of her pieces (including some new ones) about the environment, politics, people, and how all are inextricably wrapped up together. Klein is a really accessible, really smart writer, so if you’re looking for an environmental read you can dip in and out of (because essays!), this is a good one that came out only last September, so its info is pretty up to date.

Planetwalker: 22 Years of Walking. 17 Years of Silence. by John Francis. I was trying to find a mix of familiar and unfamiliar earth-focused titles, and this one came out of nowhere. In the 1970s, Francis felt overwhelmed and powerless in the face of all the environmental challenges we faced as a planet, so he just…stopped using any motorized transportation and started walking everywhere. Then that wasn’t enough, so he took a vow of silence for 17 years. This is his fascinating story.

 

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life by Barbara Kingsolver. If you’ve ever browsed a used bookstore, you’ve seen this. Kingsolver decided to stop not knowing where her food was from, and instead grow everything she and her family ate, or buy it locally. Nothing beyond her own neighborhood. This means no Doritos, no Ben & Jerry’s, no Jack’s frozen pizzas (behold: my recent shopping list). Check out what eating locally looks like with this nonfiction classic.

Silent Spring by Rachel Carson. Did you notice how history doesn’t really talk about the environmental movement before the 1960s? That’s because Silent Spring didn’t come out until 1962, boom. This is the book that led to the banning of DDT, the incredibly harmful insecticide. When you talk hugely influential books of the 20th century, this is on that list.

 

 

As Long As Grass Grows: The Indigenous Fight for Environmental Justice, from Colonization to Standing Rock by Dina Gilio-Whitaker. Indigenous environmentalism! This covers the “the fraught history of treaty violations, struggles for food and water security, and protection of sacred sites, while highlighting the important leadership of Indigenous women in this centuries-long struggle.” Definitely a worthwhile read.

 

Stay inside if you can, nonfictionites. Wash your hands, wipe down your phone, and read read read (while also taking a break to prevent eye strain!). If you are so inclined, check out COVID-19 Updates from the Bookish World. As always, you can find me on Twitter @itsalicetime and co-hosting the For Real podcast with Kim here at Book Riot. Until next time! Enjoy those facts, fellow nerds.

What. a. week. I cannot count how many new nonfiction releases are out today (ok, it’s around 20). Here, I capture a SMATTERING of them; highlights that have been deemed of interest to me and hopefully to you, the nonfiction reader who is interested in the latest and most up-to-date facts and information in bookish form. Tl;dr: there’s a lot of greatness this week!

The Address Book: What Street Addresses Reveal About Identity, Race, Wealth, and Power by Deirdre Mask. Have you ever thought about why street addresses work the way they do? Why are they organized like that? Why do we need them? Who doesn’t have them and how do they direct people? Speaking as someone who used to have to tell people to “turn left at the pig sign,” this book spoke to me. Author Mask travels the world looking at how addresses were created, how they’re used today, and what they tell us about our global society.

The Betrayal of the Duchess: The Scandal That Unmade the Bourbon Monarchy and Made France Modern by Maurice Samuels. For my fellow lovers of pre-20th c. European history comes the story of 1830s France, the Duchesse de Berry, and how her betrayal by a former confidante was, according to Samuels, a key factor in the surge of anti-Semitism that still holds strong in Europe today.

 

 

Dancing at the Pity Party: A Dead Mom Graphic Memoir by Tyler Feder. If you’ve lost a parent, Feder gets it. This graphic memoir walks through her life from the time her mom got sick, to her passing and the following ten years in Feder’s life. It’s part-memoir, part tips for grieving and helping others grieve. It also walks you through Jewish cultural traditions around someone’s death, including the fact that “shiva” means seven, which I definitely did not know before. Definitely recommend.

No Justice in the Shadows: How America Criminalizes Immigrants by Alina Das. Just because we’re inside doesn’t mean we can’t talk about JUSTICE. Das co-directs the Immigrant Rights Clinic and teaches law at NYU. Here she tells the story of America’s immigration system and how we got where we are today. She highlights particular stories and says “we need to confront the cruelty of the machine so that we can build an inclusive immigration policy premised on human dignity and break the cycle once and for all.”

Antigone Rising: The Subversive Power of the Ancient Myths by Helen Morales. I love a fun classical cover. I’m gonna quote the publisher (Bold Type!) here because I cannot synthesize this as well: Morales “reminds us that the myths have subversive power because they are told — and read — in different ways. Through these stories, whether it’s Antigone’s courageous stand against tyranny or the indestructible Caeneus, who inspires trans and gender queer people today, Morales uncovers hidden truths about solidarity, empowerment, and catharsis.” Yesssssss, preach. I will buy all the hot pink cover, statues-wearing-sunglasses books about the classics meeting feminism that come out.

Why We Swim by Bonnie Tsui. We pondered this on For Real this week. Why DO we swim. It’s not natural for humans. And yet a bunch of people who are not me really love it. Tsui is a swimmer and a New York Times contributor and here really dives (!) into why we swim and who some really amazing swimmers are, from a Baghdad swim club to the Olympic champions that grace our cereal boxes. Swimming! What a weird thing for us to do.

 

No Filter: The Inside Story of Instagram by Sarah Frier. Do you use Instagram? Isn’t it kind of weird how popular it is and how much influencers can make and how influenced WE are by them? This tells you the story of how Instagram was created, how it became popular, and why you still can’t link from a caption (#LinkintheProfile). Also did you know Instagram only came out in 2010? Super weird.

 

Stay inside if you can, nonfictionites. Wash your hands, wipe down your phone, and read read read (while also taking a break to prevent eye strain!). If you are so inclined, check out COVID-19 Updates from the Bookish World. As always, you can find me on Twitter @itsalicetime and co-hosting the For Real podcast with Kim here at Book Riot. Until next time! Enjoy those facts, fellow nerds.

TIGERS. So hot right now. Mainly because of that Netflix show, which I felt behind the times for not watching, but now apparently it’s all kinds of problematic, so who wins now? That’s right, the lazy one. Anyway, I thought people might want to read some Tiger Facts in the face of all this, so I rounded up some tiger books, with a backlist bonus about the history of India! ENJOY.

The Tribe of Tiger: Cats and Their Culture by Elizabeth Marshall Thomas. Want to learn all about cats in their many forms? Here y’go. Thomas covers the evolution of 30 cat species (including tigers!) and talks about things like cat societies. She states that cats in all their sizes have some extremely strong commonalities, which makes sense if you’ve watched a lion vs. a house cat pounce on something.

 

Spell of the Tiger: The Man-Eaters of Sundarbans by Sy Montgomery. This is by the woman who wrote The Soul of an Octopus and The Good Good Pig (recommended by Kim on For Real!). In this tiger-focused book, she talks about Sundarbans, a giant and swampy area between India and Bangladesh and home to a big mangrove forest. And also tigers. The tigers there, at least as of 1995 when this book was written, attacked humans living there, but also were worshiped by them. Interesting stuff.

Life in the Valley of Death: The Fight to Save Tigers in a Land of Guns, Gold, and Greed by Alan Rabinowitz. The place: Burma. The subject: tigers. Rabinowitz, who passed in 2018, was “CEO, and chief scientist at Panthera Corporation, a nonprofit conservation organization devoted to protecting the world’s 40 wild cat species.” So this guy was legit. He wrote 7 books, but this one covers his creation of the world’s largest tiger preserve. I’m 100% adding this to my TBR shelf because it looks both super interesting and also inspiring.

No Beast So Fierce: The Terrifying True Story of the Champawat Tiger, the Deadliest Man-Eater in History by Dane Huckelbridge. So APPARENTLY in 1900 in Nepal, one tigress killed over 400 people. Over 400! Tigers are such majestic and terrifying creatures! This book makes clear that it happened because she had been shot in the mouth and started going after humans because they were easier prey, which is the same story I heard about the lions of Tsavo (not getting shot, but having mouth pain). This book is described as NOT being pro-hunter, so if you want to read the story of this legendary animal, go-to.

BACKLIST BONUS

Daughters of the Sun: Empresses, Queens and Begums of the Mughal Empire by Ira Mukhoty. Yessss, women’s history. Mukhoty has written two books focusing on women in India, and this one is specifically about the women of the Mughal Empire, which lasted from the 1500s to the 1700s (technically until 1857). The subtitle is all honorifics, as a begum is an aristocratic title. This covers awesome women like Khanzada Begum who, “at sixty-five, rode on horseback through 750 kilometres of icy passes and unforgiving terrain.” There’s political intrigue and battle and romance and all kinds of cool stuff.

City Adrift: A Short Biography of Bombay by Naresh Fernandes. Bombay, now Mumbai, has been occupied by humans since at least the South Asian Stone Age. It’s made up of seven islands, and this very short (less than 200 pages) biography tries to encapsulate the spirit of the city, while giving a peek into its history and how it has changed today (today in this case being 2013). I love brief city histories, so this looks awesome.

 

Stay inside if you can, nonfictionites. Wash your hands, Clorox-wipe your phone, and read read read (while also taking a break to prevent eye strain!). If you are so inclined, check out COVID-19 Updates from the Bookish World. As always, you can find me on Twitter @itsalicetime and co-hosting the For Real podcast with Kim here at Book Riot. Until next time! Enjoy those facts, fellow nerds.

This week is an avalanche of new releases. I don’t even have all the new nonfiction on here! It’s SO much! Speaking as someone who uses the library a lot and is now pivoting to supporting indie bookstores through this, I’m pretty psyched every week to find my top reads and then choose a place to order them. Don’t forget to check out Book Riot Insiders if you want ALL the new releases, regardless of genre, every week. It’s pretty awesome.

Canadian Women Now and Then: More Than 100 Stories of Fearless Trailblazers by Elizabeth MacLeod and Maïa Faddoul. If you’re American, you know that we are TERRIBLE at our Canadian history. Something with France but also England? And Margaret Atwood is from there. Well, here’s a collection to fix that. It has stories of “Indigenous women, immigrants, women with disabilities and women from the LGBTQ+ community.” Each entry is accompanied by a portrait by the awesome Maïa Faddoul.

Life Changing: How Humans Are Altering Life on Earth by Helen Pilcher. This looks like a stodgy academic book, but would a stodgy academic book talk about how “we carved chihuahuas from wolves and fancy chickens from jungle fowl.” I will never be able to forget “carved chihuahuas from wolves.” Pilcher looks at how evolution, formerly a millennia-long process, has been incredibly sped-up by humans, changing life on earth. Fun!

 

 

Ordinary Insanity: Fear and the Silent Crisis of Motherhood in America by Sarah Menkedick. There are a BUNCH of books about motherhood out this week (at least 3 I think?). I was especially drawn to this one because I’m a big fan of an “oh that’s not just me” sentiment, and after talking to my friends with kids, I think the tremendous fear instilled in mothers today can be something easily put into that camp. “Surely everyone else has this figured out.” Menkedick looks into anxiety in new mothers and examines its biology, psychology, history, and societal conditions.

Camp Girls: Fireside Lessons on Friendship, Courage, and Loyalty by Iris Krasnow. Did you go to camp? I didn’t. But my fiancee did, and BOY did she like it. Krasnow recounts her camp experiences and draws lessons from them. I’m going to assume that if you have fond camp memories or know someone who does, this would be an excellent read for them. She talks of camp as a place for “history, loyalty, and tradition.” Which sounds like a 19th century men’s club with canoes.

 

Joy at Work: Organizing Your Professional Life by Marie Kondo, Scott Sonenshein. What a time for this book! Kondo is known for The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up and Sonenshein wrote Stretch: Unlock the Power of Less – And Achieve More Than You Ever Imagined. They pair up to talk about how to declutter your physical and digital space and organize your work life. A lofty goal!

 

 

Navigate Your Stars by Jesmyn Ward and Gina Triplett. New Jesmyn Ward! Tiny joys in this world, I will take all of them. This is teeny at 64 pages, but the cover is gorgeous and it’s illustrated by Gina Triplett in full color. Excellent. This book is in the grand tradition of published commencement speeches, consisting of Ward’s 2018 Tulane University speech about your life’s next steps, the value of hard work, and the importance of family. And again, dang, what a pretty cover.

Talking to Strangers: A Memoir of My Escape from a Cult by Marianne Boucher. For my fellow readers-of-cult-nonfiction, here’s a graphic memoir! This recounts Boucher’s time in a 1980 Californian cult, which she joined as she was all set to get her figure skating dreams going (which TBH feels like a very 1980s dream). If you want a new graphic memoir for your shelves, here y’go.

 

More than Ready: Be Strong and Be You…and Other Lessons for Women of Color on the Rise by Cecilia Muñoz. Muñoz was the first Latinx to lead the White House Domestic Policy Council and served for eight years on President Obama’s senior staff. Here she “shares her insights, along with those of some extraordinary women of color she met along the way, as an offering of inspiration to women of color who are no longer willing to be invisible or left behind.”

 

I Don’t Want to Die Poor: Essays by Michael Arceneaux. Writer of I Can’t Date Jesus Arceneaux brings his humor and insight to bear on debt. In a series of essays, he covers how it impacts every aspect of his life, from dating (or not) to medical care and planning for the future. He deals with a stressful topic with humor and relatability.

 

 

Stay inside if you can, nonfictionites. Wash your hands, Clorox-wipe your phone, and read read read (while also taking a break to prevent eye strain!). If you are so inclined, check out COVID-19 Updates from the Bookish World. As always, you can find me on Twitter @itsalicetime and co-hosting the For Real podcast with Kim here at Book Riot. Until next time! Enjoy those facts, fellow nerds.

Happy Friday to all. Weekends are especially important now, IMHO, because when you work at home, it can be easy to just stay at your computer all day. My hope for this weekend is to spend some time away from my laptop and focus on either a book or my Kindle. I know Kindles are still screens kind of, but whatever, it is different. Anyway, here’s some chill nonfiction to counter last week’s theme:

The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating by Elisabeth Tova Bailey. YESSS, come to me, gentle memoirs about nature. Tova Bailey was laid up with an illness (ignore that part) and becomes semi-obsessed with a snail that lives next to her bed in a flowerpot. Just thinking about this makes me want to reread it. It is calming and slow-paced and great. And makes you more interested in snails than you thought you could be.

 

The Lost Art of Reading Nature’s Signs: Use Outdoor Clues to Find Your Way, Predict the Weather, Locate Water, Track Animals―and Other Forgotten Skills by Tristan Gooley. Look. This will all be over someday. And when that day comes, you’re gonna want to know how to predict the weather and track animals. Or, probably not, but it’ll be cool to know you COULD should the situation call for it.

 

The Compton Cowboys: The New Generation of Cowboys in America’s Urban Heartland by Walter Thompson-Hernández. Men and women! Cowboys! In Compton, California! “In 1988 Mayisha Akbar founded The Compton Jr. Posse to provide local youth with a safe alternative to the streets, one that connected them with the rich legacy of black cowboys in American culture.” Are there photos inside? YES there are.

 

Meaty by Samantha Irby. Irby’s first book is a magnificent tower of hilarity and good writing. If you will. She covers her childhood through early adulthood. I first discovered Irby through a GoFundMe for some tooth surgery that a friend of hers set up, and then through her amazing blog. Her style is distinctive and her words are a mix of poignant and so very, very funny.

 

 

Stay inside if you can, nonfictionites. Wash your hands, Clorox-wipe your phone, and read read read (while also taking a break to prevent eye strain!). If you are so inclined, check out COVID-19 Updates from the Bookish World. As always, you can find me on Twitter @itsalicetime and co-hosting the For Real podcast with Kim here at Book Riot. Until next time! Enjoy those facts, fellow nerds.