Author: Alice Burton

Nolan writes about living in the in-between, from growing up with her Black and Mexican father and white mother to how she “began her first diet at the age of three and has been both fat and painfully thin throughout her life. She has experienced both the discomfort of generational poverty and the ease of wealth and privilege.” She breaks down these themes through twelve essays, including “On Dating White Guys While Me,” “The Body Endures,” and “Fat in Ways White Girls Don’t Understand.”

The author of The Disappearing Spoon comes back in an “untold history of science’s darkest secrets.” We talk about science as a force for good, but what about when it’s not? And how far back does that go? Kean “reveals the origins of much of modern science in the transatlantic slave trade of the 1700s, as well as Thomas Edison’s mercenary support of the electric chair and the warped logic of the spies who infiltrated the Manhattan Project.” Booooo Edison.

In 2015, journalist Ito charged well-known reporter Noriyuki Yamaguchi with rape. When she went to the police, they told her that her case was a “black box,” which meant it was “untouchable and unprosecutable.” Her memoir was published in 2017 and “became the center of an urgent cultural and legal shift around recognizing sexual assault and gender-based violence.”

It’s about a librarian! Rappaport was a Jewish librarian who grew up in 1920s and ’30s Germany, immigrating to Seattle in 1938. She became a staunch anti-censorship advocate and ended up at the Library of Congress, where she worked for over twenty years. We should have more biographies of librarians. More, I say!

I love this cover, it’s SO pretty. Ahmadi talks about growing up in peaceful Kabul prior to the 1980 Soviet invasion and how the ensuing war separates her family and creates chaos all around her. The center of the book is her family and their quest to reunite.

Not to go on about covers again, but LOOK at this. That’s beautiful. Barnes, also author of Monsoon Mansion, writes about leaving the Philippines and living as an undocumented teenager in New York. She marries a white Southerner and has to manage “being a new mother, an immigrant affected by PTSD, and a woman with a brown body in a profoundly white world.”

Look at this cover. LOOK AT THIS COVER. This is a memoir that “illuminates the lives of rural Chinese workers, offering a portrait of generational strife, family, love, and loss.” Cai grows up in a rural fishing village in Fujian province and, after his father has a stroke, has to start earning money for his family and his father’s medical bills. After going to college, he moves to Beijing, where he eventually becomes the editorial director of GQ China (a twist I was not expecting!). This is being compared to Hillbilly Elegy (hm) and The Glass Castle (huh). It looks really interesting.

If there’s one thing readers are suckers for, it’s books about how great reading is. White is an English professor (natch) who splits the book into three different ways of thinking about reading (Play, Transgression, Insight). She “advocates for a life of constant, disorderly, time-consuming reading, and encourages readers to trust in the value of the exhilaration and fascination such reading entails.” Yesss. Also, this is under 200 pages, and I am all for a short book.

In 2010, Afghanistan allowed women to join the armed forces, and in 2013, Niloofar Rahmani became Afghanistan’s first female fixed-wing air force pilot. After receiving death threats from the Taliban, who disapproved of her career choice Rahmani sought and was granted asylum in the United States. She is only in her late twenties, but has already done way more than anyone I know.

If this looks familiar, it’s because I talked about it in my second half of 2021 releases newsletter! Still psyched about this one, and it’s out now. Evans and Holmon write about “everything from Mario Kart and The Wire to issues of representation and police brutality across media.” Side note: I asked last time if it’s too late to watch The Wire and I was assured it’s not, so. That’s on my to-do list. Anyway. Check this out!

Nothing makes me more aware of how much I love nonfiction than when I see a title like this and gasp with delight. Who doesn’t want to learn more about seashells! They’re so neat! I’m not super-clear on whether we’re supposed to take them from beaches, but my guess is no if we apply the “take only memories and leave only footprints” forest ranger rule. Do I have some anyway? Maybe. Yes. It’s fine. But back to Barnett’s book, which probably elucidates these points! It is a “history of seashells and the animals that make them, revealing what they have to tell us about nature, our changing oceans, and ourselves.” Ooo.

Botanist and member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation Kimmerer “shows how other living beings―asters and goldenrod, strawberries and squash, salamanders, algae, and sweetgrass ― offer us gifts and lessons.” This was a bestseller and made a lot of “best book” lists. What better time than now to think about the reciprocal relationship we have with nature and what we can do to reflect that?

Ok, so there’s nature and then there’s how we conCEPTualize nature. This is the biography of 18th c. Prussian scientist and philosopher von Humboldt. Wulf “makes the case that Humboldt synthesized knowledge from many different fields to form a vision of nature as one interconnected system, that would go on to influence scientists, activists and the public.”

You know how people used to be able to tell things based on what they saw outside, but now the best most of us can do is be like “hm. Storm’s a-brewin'”? Gooley’s gonna tell you the sun’s direction based on tree roots, what the smell of cinnamon means, and hundreds of tips for forecasting, tracking, and LOcating things. Feel more confident in your outdoorsiness!

Feel like you got a late start? Maybe comparing yourself to your peers and feeling weird about it? Shafrir “was an intern at twenty-nine and met her husband on Tinder in her late thirties,” then had a baby at forty-one. She didn’t feel truly successful until age forty. If you need even more evidence that there isn’t an exact timeline for anyone (no one! do what you want when you want!), check out her memoir.

BY GRABTHAR’S HAMMER, I love Galaxy Quest. I remember watching that movie as an early teen, seeing the girl faint in the audience when Sigourney Weaver and Tim Allen kissed, and being like “…she gets it.” This behind-the-scenes look goes from the origins to the shoot to its release and legacy, also getting into the starships, aliens, technology (THE CHOMPERS, why are they there), and features interviews with the cast. Man. What a great movie. “Let’s get out of here before one of those things kills Guy!”

Calvin University historian Du Mez looks at the last 75 years of white evangelicalism and how evangelicals “have worked to replace the Jesus of the Gospels with an idol of rugged masculinity and Christian nationalism.” Their heroes are manly men (and Reagan) and “chief among these evangelical legends is John Wayne, an icon of a lost time when men were uncowed by political correctness, unafraid to tell it like it was, and did what needed to be done.” As someone who was steeped in non-denominational-but-definitely-evangelical-leaning Christianity as a teen in the early 2000s, this is the book from this week that I’m most excited about.

As a toddler, Ly Tran’s family emigrated from Vietnam to Queens. As she grows up in her new country, she faces the dilemma of pressure to conform to its culture, while also living at home with her parents and their Buddhist faith. We look at a lot of memoirs in this newsletter, and this is ideal if you like a coming-of-age story along with (probably unsurprisingly) a story of family. This was in Vogue‘s Best Books to Read 2021.

It is an anthology! I love an anthology. Ok, farmers are summery because I assume that summer is a super busy time for farmers. Maybe that is wrong. Which is why I should read this (to LEARN). But summer on a farm sounds really idyllic, and in Baszile’s book, she collects “photographs, quotes, conversations, and first-person stories to examine black people’s connection to the American land from Emancipation to today.” She also talks about the Returning Generation, which is a name I 100% love, who are coming back to farming and looking to address “issues of food justice, food sovereignty, and reparations.” Also — look at that cover. So good.

Is this a reach and is that reach the fact that summer is warm and frequently depicted with a prominent sun? Maybe. But anyway — in her extremely lauded book, Wilkerson recounts the story of the Great Migration, which took place from appx 1915-1970 and involved about six million Black Americans moving from the rural South to the rest of the country (primarily to urban areas). Wilkerson interviewed more than a thousand people for this book. It was a massive undertaking for a massive movement.

Kim and I have talked about this a couple times on the For Real podcast, mainly because she’s not into Bryson’s other books, but I usually cite this one as being less “here is a collection of facts” and more “here is a semi-cohesive story.” The book is entirely focused on the summer of 1927, when a ton of things happened, including the transatlantic flight of Charles Lindbergh; the 1927 NY Yankees; the transition from the Model T Ford to the Model A; the execution of anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti; and more. Lots of big cultural shifts! I really liked this one.

I keep thinking about this book. I mention it basically any time Miami comes up. It’s focused on the present and future of Miami, specifically regarding climate change. The description starts with “Miami, Florida, is likely to be entirely underwater by the end of this century.” Which is a real attention-grabber. It talks about residential inequality, racism, and how climate change impacts the day-to-day life of Miami residents. Obviously it’s in the summer list because — look at the cover.

I confess to a weakness for books about the American Revolution. I know it’s not everyone’s cup of tea! (get it?) But this one is SHORT and covers the summer of 1776, so you get this very specific moment when things had started moving into place, and then shows you what was happening on both the British and American sides in a really digestible amount of space. And it’s during the summer!

If you’ve listened to For Real (or possibly read this newsletter), you know I am into memoirs trying something different, if only because we just have so many memoirs that it’s neat to see a new take on them. Mohabir grew up in the U.S. and in his memoir, “blends literary genres to tackle questions of caste, ethnicity, and sexuality, and to explore the author’s experiences as an Indo-Guyanese queer poet.” That’s so many things! He goes from India to Florida to New York City, where a cousin derogatorily calls him “antiman.” This just looks really good and interesting.

Sure, we’ve heard of cults, but do we understand their appeal? Like reeeeally understand it? Montell says nope! And that the appeal of cults does not lie in some nebulous brainwashing concept, but in the word choices of their leaders. She also discusses how many groups that could be described as cults are pretty harmless, and how humans tend towards them because we love to belong to groups (seems about right). It’s a pretty fascinating book, from the author of Wordslut.

Belc’s memoir looks at the gendered treatment of giving birth, and what nonbinary parenthood can look like. When he gave birth to his son, it “clarified his gender identity and allowed him to project a more masculine self. And yet, when his partner Anna adopted Samson, the legal documents listed Belc as ‘the natural mother of the child.'” I love the idea of how having a body can influence the perception of a family, and what shifting the way that has been can look like, and this just seems excellent.

I love landmarks and historical markers and anything drawing attention to the past and how it shaped our present. We don’t have many of those in America when it comes to our history with the enslavement of human beings. Smith takes you around the country to Monticello (Jefferson’s home), the Whitney Plantation, Angola Prison, a Confederate cemetery, and more, as he examines the legacy of slavery.

This literally just came out last month and is described as a SLIM VOLUME (I love a slim volume). Gordon-Reed is a Harvard history professor who “provides a historian’s view of the country’s long road to Juneteenth, recounting both its origins in Texas and the enormous hardships that African-Americans have endured in the century since, from Reconstruction through Jim Crow and beyond.” In 144 pages!

When people talk about women being trapped as housewives, they implicitly mean white women. Mitchell looks at Black families “asserting their citizenship in domestic settings while the larger society and culture marginalize and attack them, not because they are deviants or failures but because they meet American standards.” As the title indicates, it spans the time of slavery to Michelle Obama in the White House. Mitchell has recently been talking more about “know-your-place aggression” on Twitter, and I highly recommend following her, because she is great.

What would this newsletter be if I didn’t include an academic press book from 1990? Wiggins looks at the beginnings of Emancipation celebrations, takes four field trips to Texas, Kentucky, Georgia, and Pennsylvania, and writes vividly of his experiences. It starts off looking like a somewhat daunting academic text, but if you can read his descriptions of “Texas melon patches, endless acres of gnarled vines,” “sagging russet-rusted roofs,” and “freshly plowed rows glistening in the hot afternoon sun like rolls of licorice,” then you quickly and happily realize your error.

This came out in the mid-2010s, and argues that rather than American slavery being isolated in a distant past, we are currently living in a society whose economy was immensely shaped by it. This might sound like “well, yeah,” but I would argue that (in popular culture anyway) systemic thinking has taken hold pretty recently. If you’re interested in getting more facts behind why this was and how “the expansion of slavery in the first eight decades after American independence drove the evolution and modernization of the United States,” then pick this up.

I love diving into a subject, because I end up running across so many titles I’ve somehow missed for years. Camp writes about enslaved Black women in the South, and “discusses the multiple dimensions to acts of resistance that might otherwise appear to be little more than fits of temper.” I love her thesis that these (sometimes) small and bodily acts of everyday resistance “helped foment and sustain the more visible resistance of men in their individual acts of running away and in the collective action of slave revolts.” I also love the phrase “everyday resistance.”

This was referenced in Aubrey Gordon’s What We Don’t Talk About When We Talk About Fat and I’ve been interested in it for a while, so I wanted to make sure and highlight it. Strings looks at art, magazine articles, medical journals, etc, and says that fat phobia, “as it relates to black women, did not originate with medical findings, but with the Enlightenment era belief that fatness was evidence of ‘savagery’ and racial inferiority” and that “it was not until the early twentieth century, when racialized attitudes against fatness were already entrenched in the culture, that the medical establishment began its crusade against obesity.” It is so important to be conscious of these sorts of things! Our current cultural values have not been the same forever and they will continue to change, but we (if we can) should spend a little time examining why they are what they are.

When I got this galley, I was SURPRISED how many people were like “omgggg new tree book.” But people really, really liked The Hidden Life of Trees. In his newest book, Wohlleben looks at humanity’s connection with trees and how we can increase our own awareness of it. Have I hugged a tree in my life? Yes. Yes, definitely. Trees are AMAZING and I am pro-any book that wants us to spend more time around them.

Brunson became known through her Instagram series Girl Who Has Never Been on a Nice Date. She then was in iZombie (which I’ve seen one episode of, but it was enjoyable!) and starred in A Black Lady Sketch Show on HBO. In her debut essay collection, she talks about “what it was like to go from a girl who loved the World Wide Web to a girl whose face launched a thousand memes” and essays ranging from the comic to those covering her struggles with depression.

Heumann was paralyzed due to polio and, at the age of five, not allowed to attend school. This is the Young Readers version of her memoir Being Heumann, which came out early last year. It covers her achievements, from “fighting to attend grade school after being described as a ‘fire hazard’ because of her wheelchair, to suing the New York City school system for denying her a teacher’s license because of her disability,” as well as her famed sit-in protest in San Francisco. This is a middle grade version, so for kids 10 and up.

What was it like being a Black member of America’s first generation raised after the civil rights era? What can we learn from the extremely-recent-to-white-America revelation that the country did not, in fact, end racism? In his book, Ross looks at this as well as things like “how we were all educated with colorblind narratives and symbols that typically, albeit implicitly, privileged whiteness and denigrated Blackness.” As an elder Millennial, absolutely this.

Do I love that this cover looks like Moss from The IT Crowd? Yis. These are essays by the creators of the eponymous website, who write about “everything from Mario Kart and The Wire to issues of representation and police brutality across media” (side note: should I watch The Wire or is it too late to be culturally relevant?) If you want pop culture, social commentary, and NERD things, look forward to this.

OCEAN LINERS. So vast. So oceanic. This feels very crafted to appeal to the Titanic viewer, with emphases on the class differences and experiences between decks (and yes, of course they talk about the Titanic and “The Unsinkable Stewardess” aboard her). I’m an absolute sucker for books focused around a specific workplace and for women-centered history books, so this is really hitting all the right notes, including the phrase “golden age of ocean liners.”

There have been a lot of pieces about what “essential work” is and how we define it and how that became incredibly pressing during the pandemic. This book looks at jobs that “society considers essential but morally compromised,” like drone pilots, prison guards, and slaughterhouse workers, and how the majority of Americans are shielded from the ethically troubling work we expect unnamed others to do. I expect this book to be thought-provoking and I am glad it was written.

Can’t have a list of books without a weird nature one! This is also a university press book, so +2. Brown asks “how a tiny blue fish—confined to a single, narrow aquifer on the edge of Death Valley National Park in Nevada’s Amargosa Desert—has managed to survive despite numerous grave threats.” How has it! I’m invested now! Nature is so strange!

Cashin has written a number of nonfiction books, including Loving: Interracial Intimacy in America and the Threat to White Supremacy and Place Not Race: A New Vision of Opportunity in America. In her newest, she talks about the spreading of the ghetto myth to concentrate poverty in Black spaces and create “high opportunity white spaces.” She calls for “investment in a new infrastructure of opportunity in poor Black neighborhoods, including richly resourced schools and neighborhood centers, public transit, Peacemaker Fellowships, universal basic incomes, housing choice vouchers for residents, and mandatory inclusive housing elsewhere.” Love it.

Sometimes you need a silly adventure nonfiction book. They pitch it as Lost City of Z meets The Da Vinci Code, and the basic premise reads like that; look at this: “This book tells the untold true story of Monty Parker, a British rogue nobleman who, after being dared to do so by Ava Astor, the so-called ‘most beautiful woman in the world,’ headed a secret 1909 expedition to find the fabled Ark of the Covenant.” Don’t you want to read that?? I do! What happened! Did he find it? I mean, evidently not, but the STORY still sounds great.

We’re living in a second Gilded Age, so this feels pretty relevant. There’s a love triangle, there’s poetry, there’s social reform movements, there’s a real estate developer; it’s just got All the Things. I also love a story where it was HUGE in the news at the time, and then almost no one today has heard of it. This is one of those!

Ok, I got so psyched for this as soon as I saw it. White is a descendant of Jefferson and Hemings’ families, something she found out for certain after she was named a Jefferson Studies Fellow. She’s the the Public Relations & Community Engagement Officer at Monticello, Jefferson’s famed home, which makes me even more interested in reading it, because I want to know why she likes him.