Author: Alice Burton

Burnt Roti is the UK’s leading South Asian magazine, which talks about mental health and sexuality as they impact young creatives (among other things). Dhaliwal’s book of the same name is part-memoir and part discussion of topics like body hair, colorism, “and a particular focus on the suffocating beauty standards South Asian women are expected to adhere to.” I’m really feeling this almost ’70s color palate/illustration on the cover!

In June 2020, poet Alexander wrote an essay in The New Yorker entitled “The Trayvon Generation,” which “incisively and lovingly observed the experiences, attitudes, and cultural expressions of what she referred to as the Trayvon Generation, who even as children could not be shielded from the brutality that has affected the lives of so many Black people.” This expands her original essay into book form and is definitely worth picking up not only for its subject matter, but because nonfiction by poets tends to be amazing.

This cover!! Ok, this is a massive biography of a romance — the romance of Vivien Leigh and Laurence Olivier. They were married from 1940 to 1960, starred in films and plays together, and finally divorced, at least in part due to Leigh’s struggles with her mental illness. Wikipedia cites this as bipolar disorder, but I want to read the book before saying this is definitely true. Leigh died of tuberculosis at age 53. If you have not seen them in That Hamilton Woman, you should! They are a Golden Age of Hollywood power couple that I’ve loved since I was a teenager. Hurray for the Oliviers.

This all about the Battle of Actium! After Caesar was assassinated, Antony and Cleopatra got involved and Egypt battled with Rome. Hundreds of ships fought! This battle determined who would rule the Roman Empire, and ended in the deaths of Antony and Cleopatra. Ancient world drama, right here.

Noorani is the executive director of the National Immigration Forum, an immigrant advocacy group that works for increased immigration and acceptance of refugees. In his newest book, he focuses on Honduras, Mexico, and Texas, focusing on why immigration happens and how we can be more compassionate.

Ok here’s a confession: I’ve only seen two seasons of Buffy. But I know people love it! So here’s a book about it. This is all about the history and cultural impact of a show my coolest professors were all really into. Katz interviews the cast, creators, and crew and talks about his own time in the Buffy fandom. Hurray, TV history!

Based on Sekyiamah’s blog of over ten years, she interviews African women around the world about sex. This includes talking to members of a queer community in Egypt, what it’s like to be polyamorous in Senegal, and chatting with “a pansexual Canadian of Malawian heritage.” The women range from ages 21 to 71 and are from thirty-one countries. Super cool.

You may recognize Alicia Malone from her hosting work on FilmStruck. Here she examines the representation and impact of women on film. Each chapter “looks at a female character representative of a stereotype or trope,” which is awesome and very helpful for people like me. I’m still using the phrase “Smurfette principle,” because it easily illustrates an issue. Hoping for more like that from this book!

Can you imagine seeing a crowd of people in a field and you ask an excited woman passing by what’s up and she says “it’s a mania! Balloonmania!” Sophie Blanchard was a French balloonist in the early nineteenth century who, you might not be surprised, died in a balloon accident. Learn more of her tale here!

Adams’s book profiles eight young Black women who are “leading, organizing, advocating, and creating.” These include Ssanyu Lukoma, who founded Brown Kids Read when she was thirteen years old and Hannah Lucas, a teenager who co-created a mental health app. What a balance to strike today between praising Gen Z for their excellent work and not making them feel like the weight of the future is on their shoulders! But I do love when we praise them. They are dealing with a lot.

Coast Salish is “a group of ethnically and linguistically related Indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest Coast, living in British Columbia, Canada and the U.S. states of Washington and Oregon.” Sasha taqʷšəblu LaPointe blends her Coast Salish heritage with her love of punk culture in her autobiography. LaPointe’s great-grandmother helped preserve the Indigenous language Lushootseed, which is super cool.

Omg yeeeess give me this weird 1970s throwback cover! Thomas highlights the links between environmentalism, racism, and privilege, and how we cannot achieve real environmental progress “without uplifting the voices of its people — especially those most often unheard.” I can’t get over this cover. But also this message is important! Thomas founded the Intersectional Environmentalist platform, a “climate justice community and resource hub centering BIPOC and historically under-amplified voices in the environmental space.” Amazing.

Avashia is a teacher and writer who grew up in West Virginia and identifies as a queer, Desi, Appalachian woman. She expands the stereotypical notions of Appalachia to show its true complexity, while exploring its “foodways, religion, sports, standards of beauty, social media, gun culture, and more.”

Author Bird looks at one particular block in New York City and tells its history, from the time of the Lenape, through Dutch colonization, the nineteenth century (including the Gilded Age — how relevant!), to the twentieth. This covers theaters, factories, gambling dens, and colorful characters of the time.

Journalist and producer on This American Life, Foo looks at complex PTSD (C-PTSD) and how it has impacted her life. She travels to her hometown in California and examines the impact of immigrant, as well as inherited, trauma. Be aware that this book discusses physical and emotional parental abuse.

Weinman, author of The Real Lolita, which was very good, returns for another true crime book. This is about Edgar Smith, a man who in the ’60s was put on death row for murder. National Review founder William F. Buckley championed his cause, eventually resulting in Smith’s release, and then — yep, he tried to murder someone else. The whole story is here in Weinman’s book, so check out how on earth this happened.

Robertson tells his story as the first Black man to run for the Virginia General Assembly, his work to integrate a white school, and his support of the Black Lives Matter movement in his eighties. Robertson passed away in 2021, and the University of Virginia Press is publishing his memoir.

Is Shelley Puhak a historian? No! She is a poet and a professor of creative writing. BUT. This is a really fun story about a time popular culture never talks about — sixth century Merovingian France! I’m talking about Brunhild, I’m talking about Fredegund, I’m talking about Chilperic unfortunately (Chilperic sucks). It’s a really fascinating time in history and I totes recommend this.

Are you a teacher? Do you teach BIPOC students? This is a resource for K-12 educators serving BIPOC and/or first-generation students that’s all about inclusive pedagogy. The three teachers who contributed “draw on their experiences as immigrants and educators to address racial inequity in the classroom.” Teachers are amazing, and this book can maybe help them be even more amazing. Hurray!

It’s a nonfiction picture book! Brew-Hammond is an American-Ghanaian author/novelist and illustrator Minter is a Caldecott Honoree. It covers the history of the color blue, how it was made over time, and the human labor that has gone into making it. But also how it’s been used in cultures throughout the world! Super neat, love nonfiction for younger people.

Davis grew up running to get water for her family in The Bahamas, going sideways to avoid bullies. She navigated astonishing challenges to compete in five Olympics and win two Olympic gold medals, becoming the first individual gold medalist in sprinting from the Caribbean. She went on to become the first Black woman on the World Athletics council. Did I mention she didn’t win her gold medals until age 34? 34! Amazing.

Well this looks fun. Chadwick was a late nineteenth century con artist who defrauded banks for literally millions of dollars. This was when women weren’t even allowed to get loans from banks. Because of sexism. She also opened a brothel in Cleveland because sure. Her biggest con was saying she was Andrew Carnegie’s “illegitimate” daughter. She got millions of dollars from banks based on this lie! To learn more including how she got away with this for eight years check this out.

Sure, marriage can be hard, and sometimes boring, but maybe the boring is good? Ask Polly advice columnist Havrilesky writes about the ups and downs of her own fifteen year marriage, illustrating “what a tedious, glorious drag forever can be.” Havrilesky wrote a piece for this book that was in the NYT, and it definitely made me want to pick this up.

Called one of the most anticipated books of 2022 by Entertainment Weekly, this is “a rare insider’s view” of Hong Kong from someone who grew up there. Cheung was born just prior to Hong Kong being “handed over” from the UK to China. She tells of her “yearslong struggle to find reliable mental health care in a city reeling from the traumatic aftermath of recent protests” and delves into its musical and artistic life, sharing what it means to be a part of this complicated city.

Drayton and her siblings moved to New Jersey in the early 1990s to join her mother. They were coming from Trinidad and Tobago. She soon started asking questions about the racial dynamics of the US — “Why were the Black neighborhoods she lived in crime-ridden, and the multicultural ones safe? Why were there so few Black students in advanced classes at school, if there were any advanced classes at all?” At age twenty, she moved back to Tobago, and absorbs the news from America, particularly concerning Black Americans, with the keen eye of someone outside the maelstrom.

I love this trend of telling the stories of multiple figures and how their work combined. William Lloyd Garrison and certainly Frederick Douglass are more known, but Maria Weston Chapman, aka “the Contessa,” has not stuck as strongly to the pages of history. These three all worked for abolition from the 1830s to 1860s. If you’re wondering about the Contessa nickname, no worries, I did a deep dive on Google. It looks like she was nicknamed that by American author Edmund Quincy, who liked to dole out nicknames. Anyway! This looks interesting.

Irish comedian Higgins, author of Maeve in America, writes about the Alamo, monuments, Tom Hardy, Paper Source, “love for the glamorous older women of Brighton Beach with tattooed eyeliner and gold jewelry, love for everybody on this train.” I am very in the mood for this sort of book, so I am delighted this is out with its extremely fun cover.

The publisher calls it the “definitive social history of tuberculosis.” Krishnan looks at the slums of nineteenth century New York to current-day Mumbai and how, while tuberculosis has been seen as a disease of the past, “the cure was never available to black and brown nations.” I love social histories, I love when investigative journalists really INVESTIGATE something, and Krishnan does that here.

Did you know the first modern Egyptian revolution was in 1919, leading to the United Kingdom’s recognition of Egyptian independence in 1922? And that King Tutankhamun was excavated IN 1922! British archaeologist Howard Carter received the Order of the Nile, third class, from King Fuad I of Egypt. Fascinating. Anyway, this is a history of King Tut and his tomb from the last century. Super cool.

I LOVE WHITNEY HOUSTON. What an amazing singer. This explores “Whitney’s life as both a woman in the spotlight and someone who often had to hide who she was.” I can’t believe this month will be a decade since she died (she was 48). Let’s all read this bio and listen to “Didn’t We Almost Have It All.” And then we can watch the Brandy Cinderella since Brandy also contributed the foreword to this book.

National Book Award-finalist Zoboi offers a middle grade biography of Octavia Butler! Something I love about the looser forms of middle grade and YA nonfiction is they can do something like this combination of prose and poetry to describe the life of this amazing sci-fi writer. Also “A Biographical Constellation” sounds so cool.

Shirk pairs her quest to create a more communal way of living with a history of American utopian experiments, which as a premise, I LOVE. American utopias were so weird! As are basically all utopias! Does the description mention “the radical faerie communes of Short Mountain”? It does! And it is a “a two hundred-acre faerie sanctuary/safe queer space in central Tennessee.” Amazing.

The first Black lead on Bachelorette has a book and it looks excellent. Lindsay has taken a step back from the show recently, especially in light of things like former host Chris Harrison defending a contestant attending a plantation-themed fraternity party. She talks about growing up the daughter of a judge in Texas, why she chose to go on the show, and “the lack of diversity in reality television and the importance of political engagement, protest, and the Black Lives Matter movement.”

I am 100% including this because the title made me laugh. Ali writes about the transition of America’s bogeyman from communism to Muslims, post-9/11, and how that impacted him, someone who grew up in Fremont, California with Pakistani parents. He also talks about “the dangers of Islamophobia, white supremacy, and chocolate hummus.” I am INTERESTED.

This has been on All the Lists for anticipated 2022 books, so I probably don’t even need to cite it, but some people don’t read those lists! So this is for you. Perry shares stories from “immigrant communities, contemporary artists, exploitative opportunists, enslaved peoples, unsung heroes, her own ancestors, and her lived experiences.” Perry is a Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University and generally awesome. Her biography of Lorraine Hansberry won the PEN award for biography and was generally critically lauded.

Columbia University professor Fisher writes a history of addiction, not only from a medical perspective, but incorporating literature, religion, philosophy and sociology. This was one of my 2022 picks on For Real because I’m real psyched about it. Addiction has been with us for practically our entire history as humans, so why not learn more about why it happens and how we talk about it. Just a heads up, Fisher started the book because of his experience as an alcoholic, so he also covers some of his story there.

Ypi grew up in Albania in the early ’90s (a country with a very dramatic flag) and writes about her living through the collapse of the Soviet state in the 1991 revolution and how the emergence of the “free market” led to chaos. Now a voice for the left in the United Kingdom, here she “offers a fresh and invigorating perspective on the relation between the personal and the political, between values and identity, posing urgent questions about the cost of freedom.”

Thomas was part of the first integrated class in her school in 1964 in Orangeburg, South Carolina, and it was a traumatic experience. In her book, she looks at how desegregation happened in South Carolina from the 1950s to the ’60s. Despite rulings from the Supreme Court (including Brown v. Board of Education), all schools in South Carolina were not desegregated until the shockingly late year of 1970.

Ok you jazz nerds, I have a book for you. The title comes from Ralph Ellison’s description of ensemble jazz improvisation. Columbia University professor (another one!) O’Meally demonstrates how this concept “runs throughout twentieth-century African American culture to provide a new history of Black creativity and aesthetics.” O’Meally teaches Comparative Literature and has written about jazz for over three decades. Here he talks about Louis Armstrong, Toni Morrison, Duke Ellington, Basquiat, and more.