Author: Alice Burton

Have you ever lived in a city or area where there’s a university? Things can get expensive! Housing goes way up, things get gentrified, and frequently those on the margins end up paying for other people’s future. Baldwin highlights the ways universities can make cities inequitable and what we can do about it.

If this sounds familiar, it might be because it was on a whole bunch of “books we’re psyched about in 2021” lists. It’s a mix of reporting, research, and memoir, and looks at how “values she and so many other women had learned in girlhood did not prioritize their personal safety, happiness, or freedom, and she set out to reframe those values and beliefs.” So basically how, in girlhood, you’re taught a bunch of lies that you later either have to unlearn or just live with.

Boy, the royal family. Lots going on there. If you’re wondering about the background of the current queen and her close-in-age sister, this biography examines their lives from the angle of their sisterly relationship. As someone who was solely interested in Margaret for the approximately two episodes of The Crown that I made it through, this looks great.

In 1899, there were five times as many post offices in the United States than McDonald’s today. How? Where were they? When did they explode into such high numbers (appx 100,000)? Blevins looks into how the US Post was tied to western expansion by white settlers and how the country as we know it today started to form.

If you’re working remotely during the pandemic, or even did so beforehand, you’re familiar with the challenges. How do you build trust, maintain connections without in-person interactions, and keep a firm work/life balance when your computer and therefore office is always a few feet away? Neeley writes for employees and managers, offering action items (I love an action item) and interactive tools for a better remote work experience for everyone.

History professor Lee tells the story of Asians in America, including Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Hmong (among others) from the 16th century (when people came to what is now California from Manila) to now when Asian Americans are treated as America’s “model minorities.” This was published in 2015, so it goes up to pretty recent events, but just misses the last presidency.

Activist and beloved actor Takei shares the painful story of his family’s time in multiple Japanese internment camps during World War II. Ever since I read Maus, I’ve been a proponent of the graphic novel as memoir/biography, and this is an example of how the genre can be used to illustrate the more visual impressions of childhood. The story is a reminder of an extremely harmful and recent event in our nation’s history that is nevertheless rarely taught in school.

Yu Hua picks ten common Chinese words and, through each one, illustrates something about Chinese history and culture, using anecdotes and facts. The words and phrases — people, leader, reading, writing, lu xun, revolution, disparity, grassroots, copycat, and bamboozle — each reveal something unique about “the Chinese experience over the last several decades.” Yu Hua has written novels and short story collections. This is his only book of essays.

When Koh was fifteen years old, her parents left America (where they had arrived ten years earlier) and went back to South Korea, leaving her and her brother in California. Over the years, her mother writes her letters in Korean, apologizing, “letters Eun Ji cannot fully understand until she finds them years later hidden in a box.” This is a story of “hard-won selfhood and our deep bonds to family, place, and language” told by an acclaimed poet.

What if you used your knowledge of tax law to fight evil? Brown was doing her parents’ tax returns one day and realized they were paying a weirdly high amount for their jobs. Then when she became a law professor, she started researching why that happened. Surprise, turns out “American tax law rewards the preferences and practices of white people while pushing black people further behind” for things from going to college to buying a home.

I love a travel and history book. Sociologist and novelist Villoro walks Mexico City, recounting its history from indigenous antiquity to the Aztecs, the Spanish conquistadors, and modern day. Mexico City is the largest Spanish-speaking city in the world, built on a tectonically-active plateau and growing at a tremendous rate.

In the 1960s, Clara Park’s daughter three-year-old daughter Jessy was diagnosed with autism, and Clara was blamed for it. At the time, the idea of the “refrigerator mother” was huge: “a cold, intellectual parent who starved her children of the natural affection they needed to develop properly.” Clara decided to document her daughter’s development and challenge this myth. This biography tells the story of how Clara and others “fought against medical and popular attitudes toward autism while presenting a rich account of major scientific developments in the history of autism in the US.”

Did you know a plant neurobiologist was a thing? I definitely did not. Mancuso states that in the last three hundred thousand years, humans have wreaked chaos in the plant world. He responds to this by writing a plant constitution. Yes, it’s a constitution written on behalf of plants, presenting “eight fundamental pillars on which the life of plants—and by extension, humans—rests.”

Love a Mary Roach. Her examination of humans at war “tackles the science behind some of a soldier’s most challenging adversaries—panic, exhaustion, heat, ​flies, ​noise,” and looks at the scientists who are trying to create answers to all of it. Want to know why a zipper creates a problem for a sniper? How a wedding gown is like a bomb suit? Why shrimp are dangerous to sailors? Check this out.

We know a little about women baseball, basketball, and soccer players, but what about extreme sports? The sections of this read like energy drinks from the ’90s, with titles like “Maximum Sky,” “Extreme Ocean,” and “Radical Rides.” Each section highlights three different women, like ultrarunner Courtney Dauwalter and racing driver Sneha Sharma.

Irby’s third book of essays continues her themes of blunt observational humor and memoir. This book chronicles scenes from her life post-marriage, and her move to a more country than urban setting, as she describes herself as a “cheese fry-eating slightly damp Midwest person.” Which many of us can relate to. I love books like this for when I’m stressed. They’re great to dip in and out of, and Irby is a wonderful voice to spend time with.

TW for domestic abuse, which is the central theme of the book. Machado’s innovative memoir chronicles the arc of her unhealthy relationship as she “struggles to make sense of how what happened to her shaped the person she was becoming.” Every section is a different way of writing and viewing the situation, and includes titles like “Dream House as Time Travel,” “Dream House as Memory Palace,” “Dream House as Perpetual Motion Machine.”

Called “the feminist sports book we’ve all been waiting for” by Jessica Valenti, this goes from the minimizing of and condescension towards women’s sports to “athletes who abuse their partners and face only minimal consequences” (see: Hope Solo). DiCaro is a sports journalist and covers the sexist online environment of Barstool Sports, the horrifically racist treatment of Serena Williams, and the fight for equal pay. I do not really get into sports, but this looks really good.

Greene, a constitutional law expert at Columbia, writes about how we can build a better system of justice, ridding ourselves of our current system of legal absolutism and “how we can recover America’s original vision of rights, while updating them to confront the challenges of the twenty-first century.”

Hot chicken or “Nashville style” has become popular worldwide, but its roots belong in Nashville’s Black communities, where it goes back 70 years. Martin tells the story of this dish, and of Nashville’s Black history, “from the Civil War, when Nashville became a segregated city, through the tornado that ripped through North Nashville in March 2020.” This feels like a good counterbalance to Netflix’s Marriage or Mortgage, which is doing crap like showing potential brides a former Nashville plantation as a wedding locale.

Winfrey-Harris created the Letters to Black Girls project, where she asked Black women to write letters of hope and support to teenaged and young adult Black girls. Topics covered include identity, self-love, parents, violence, grief, mental health, sex, and sexuality. This selection of letters provides “a balm for the wounds of anti-black-girlness and modeling how black women can nurture future generations.”

What happens if you can’t sleep? Neurologist Leschziner studies people dealing with insomnia, narcolepsy, night terrors, apnea, and sleepwalking. Here he shares stories of cases like the woman who, while sleepwalking, got dressed, got in her car, and drove several miles. He also shows “the neuroscience behind our sleeping minds.” Stories + science!

This came out only last September! Black fatigue is here defined as “the intergenerational impact of systemic racism on the physical and psychological health of Black people.” Winters demonstrates how systemic racism impacts every aspect of life, including economics, education, work, and health. If you want to learn what you can do about it, pick this up.

So what’s up with sleeping? It leaves you so VULnerable. All unconscious for multiple hours. But also sleeping is awesome, so. Why? Walker “explains how we can harness sleep to improve learning, mood and energy levels, regulate hormones, prevent cancer, Alzheimer’s and diabetes, slow the effects of aging, and increase longevity.” He also gives you action items (I love an action item) for how you can improve your sleep. As someone who does that “revenge bedtime procrastination” thing, I am extremely interested in said items.

Kim from For Real liked this! This is focused on how women experience burnout from stress differently than men, why, and what you can do to address it. I am extremely interested in the answer to “what you can do to complete the biological stress cycle—and return your body to a state of relaxation.” It’s probably not “watch Arrested Development over and over again.” Or IS it?

You know how when poets write nonfiction, it’s its own special kind of good? Great, ok, so Ali, who grew up in London, Canada, and the U.S., starts thinking about Jenpeg in Manitoba, which was a community that grew up around the construction of a dam, and where Ali lived for a few years. He goes back to find out if it still exists, and he finds a story of environmental harm suffered by the Pimicikamak community. This looks so good, check it out.

It’s a new Anne Lamott! And one that’s pretty perfect for the for-many one year anniversary of being in quarantine. It’s a rough time, and Lamott asks “How can we recapture the confidence we once had as we stumble through the dark times that seem increasingly bleak?” How inDEED. Tbh I could use an inspirational read right about now, so I’m psyched this is out.

I started this and was like hu-ho, this is smart. Which makes sense, because it turns out McCarthy teaches in the English and African American Studies departments at Harvard. The title is reference to Ta-Nehisi Coates’s case for reparations, but he also covers art, music, literature, and politics in 20 essays. An example of what goes on in this book: “In ‘Back in the Day,’ McCarthy, a black American raised in France, evokes his childhood in Paris through an elegiac account of French rap in the 1990s.” So if that sounds like your jam, get into it.

Aghhh I am so excited about this book! It came out in the UK first a few months ago and I maybe (definitely) ordered a copy from there because I loved Emma Southon’s biography of Agrippina so much. She writes history how I would love everyone to write it: with humor, humanity, and a clear laying out of the facts. The subtitle kind of says it all for this one — she talks about murder in ancient Rome, how it was perceived, what it meant, how it shows up in the surviving texts, etc. If you like funny but solid history books, here you go.

Gbowee, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, organized and led the Liberian Mass Action for Peace, a coalition of both Christian and Muslim women who organized for peace during Liberia’s 14-year civil war and participated in public protest against the president and rebel warlords. TW: domestic and sexual abuse

If you, like I do, read a lot about the UK in the 19th century, you know a lot of people were deported for minor crimes. Where did they go? Well, Tasmania. This book covers the other side of the story of what happened after the women were sentenced, had tin tickets put around their necks, and arrived in a new country for crimes like stealing a bucket of milk.

Empress Dowager Cixi ruled China for decades in the 19th century and, under her leadership, revolutionized the country. She updated industries, brought in railways, electricity, the telegraph and modern weaponry for the military, as well as ending traditions like foot binding. Find out why she’s called “the most important woman in Chinese history.”

In 1976, a military junta took over Argentina and turned the government into a dictatorship that lasted for seven years. This book covers the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo who identified 57 of approximately 500 children who were stolen and illegally adopted during the dictatorship. Their work “also led to the creation of the National Genetic Data Bank, the only bank of its kind in the world, and to Article 8 of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, the ‘right to identity,’ that is now incorporated in the new adoption legislation in Argentina.”

Revolutionary and political anarchist Emma Goldman worked on a magazine called Mother Earth during the Progressive Era. Mother Earth “stirred an unprecedented anarchist awakening, inspiring an antiauthoritarian spirit across social, ethnic, and cultural divides and transforming U.S. radicalism.” I love the list of who they say this book should appeal to: readers interested in early twentieth-century history, transnational radicalism, and cosmopolitan print culture, as well as those interested in anarchism, anti-militarism, labor activism, feminism, and Emma Goldman. I LOVE Emma Goldman and am so psyched there’s another book out about her and the work she contributed to.

SHEEP. Can’t live with ’em. But have to bring them into the home in winter so they stay alive. If you’re familiar with the Bible or most stories from The Ancient Past, you know that sheep are all over those things and have been with us since the early days of human civilization. So what’s their history! How did we use them? What’s up with sheep. All these questions and more can be answered by Follow the Flock, a title that every time I see it gets a song from the musical Guys and Dolls stuck in my head.

Are you feeling perhaps especially exhausted? Doctor/nutritionist Shah has some ideas for you. The part of this book I’m most interested in, aside from the tip to eat more fiber (I’M GONNA) is the “energy booster” facts, because I kind of just eat hummus day in and day out, and it’s possible that is not max’ing out the ol’ energy possibilities. Huzzah for health ideas!

Does this woman on the cover remind anyone else of Ruth Wilson? Anyway, you might have heard of Pan Am, the airline renowned in the ’60s and ’70s and then slowly declining until its end in the early ’90s. Did you know only 3-5% of women applying to be flight attendants got hired? It was extremely competitive! This history gets into why and traces the stories of three women who flew Pan Am during its glory days.

We hear about “crimes and misdemeanors” but what are misdemeanors? Natapoff “reveals the inner workings of a massive petty offense system that produces over 13 million cases each year” and punishes people before they’re convicted, many of them poor and people of color.

This history of cancer treatment and research won the Pulitzer and is on approximately one million lists for best nonfiction. Mukherjee starts in Egypt 4,600 years ago and continues all the way to the 21st century. He also covers the history of hospice and palliative medicine. This one’s massive, but worth it.

Popular culture over the past century has portrayed Native American history as ending in the 1890 massacre at Wounded Knee. Treuer, a member of the Ojibwe nation, shows how “the story of American Indians since the end of the nineteenth century to the present is one of unprecedented resourcefulness and reinvention.”

My friend pointed me to this 2019 release about the impact of environmental racism. Just TWO facts from it: “Nearly two of every five African American homes in Baltimore are plagued by lead-based paint. Almost all of the 37,500 Baltimore children who suffered lead poisoning between 2003 and 2015 were African American.” Get a thorough grounding in the effects of environmental racism and what can be done to remedy it.