Author: Kim Ukura

Russian history is vast and varied. This book offers a look at both the people and events that have shaped the country as well as the ideas and stories that have shaped those events. Figes, a British historian, has written several books about Russian history, but this looks to be his first that really grapples with the ways that Russia has “reimagined its own story” over time. Then, he shows how those varied stories can help explain modern Russia, the war in Ukraine, and the country’s ongoing antagonism with the United States. This feels like the kind of big history book that I’d want to tackle. 

Graphic memoirs are one of my new favorite genres – I love the way that the combination of words and art can illuminate parts of a person’s story in ways that words alone can’t quite do. Malaka Gharib grew up in the United States, but spent every summer with her father in Cairo. When she was nine, her father announced he had remarried, changing the dynamics of all future trips. Gharib writes about growing up in two worlds and trying to fit in imperfectly in both places. The images of this one are so vibrant and fun.

Buzz Bissinger is back with another inspirational sports story! This book recounts “The Mosquito Bowl,” a rag-tag football game played between regiments of the U.S. Marine Corps on the beach at Guadalcanal. The two groups— the 4th and 29th regiments— included many of the era’s star college football players and young men who would eventually play in the NFL. In this book, he shares their stories and the stories of their families within the context of college sports and a world war.

Psychologist Woo-kyoung Ahn teaches a class at Yale called “Thinking,” which is a study in biases and how they affect our lives. This book is basically the story of her class, covering the most common “thinking problems” we run into in our daily lives— think things like confirmation bias, delayed gratification, anecdotes, and more. Each chapter includes examples from class, breakdowns of relevant experiments, and lessons about how to combat these thinking problems when they arise. It’s a very fun and quick read.

Throughout his career, Edward Enninful has been breaking barriers in the world of fashion, most recently in his role as the editor-in-chief of British Vogue. As the first Black person in that seat, Enninful has pushed to make all of us see the world differently, through choices like putting octogenarians on the cover of the magazine and repeatedly featuring designers of all different backgrounds. In this memoir, Enninful shares his journey from a “Black, gay, working-class refugee” to a leader in the fashion industry. 

As I planned out this edition, I didn’t necessarily intend to pick two books related to fashion, but here we are! In this book, historian and curator Kimberly Chrisman-Campbell looks at the various roles women have played in the last 100 years through the evolution of fashion. She notes that while we often consider pants to be the height of female fashion liberation, it’s actually the skirt that was most connected to major movements. She explores the representation of iconic styles, some obscure innovations, and much more.

I’m most familiar with actress Jennifer Lewis from her work on Black-ish, but she’s had a long and successful Hollywood career. This book is a collection of stories from her life, covering everything from travels around the world to finding joy in everyday encounters and taking down a conman. In addition to acting, Lewis is an activist and mental health advocate, so her book is also about how to deflect negative people and find joy in your own life. I bet this one will be stellar as an audiobook. 

I’m not sure if you’d call “books that interrogate the American Dream” a nonfiction subgenre or not, but they are always interesting to me. In this book, journalist Alissa Quart looks at how the American foundational belief that individualism and self-sufficiency can lead to success has hobbled us and put together a system of half-solutions to social ills. She connects this story to everything from hyper-capitalist philanthropy to GoFundMe to the increasing debt burden faced by young people. I’m here for this.

This book digs into a big topic – anti-Black racism in the Latino community. In it Tanya Katerí Hernández, a law professor and expert in comparative race relations, looks at how it’s possible for a marginalized group to both experience discrimination and be discriminatory against others. She notes that Latinos are the second-largest ethnic group in the United States, so understanding anti-Blackness in that community is a key part of dismantling systemic racism. This is obviously a complex topic, but this book seems like a great way to understand it better. 

This is another subtitle I just love. After coming out as a lesbian in 2002, Casey Parks assumed she’d never be able to return to her home in the South after being shunned and threatened by her community. But then her grandmother shared a secret: “I grew up across the street from a woman who lived as a man,” and asked Parks to find him. This leads Parks on a decades-long odyssey to learn what happened to Roy Hudgins—she knocks on doors, searches for diaries, uncovers nursing home records, and more. I’m so curious how these stories will come together. 

I love long and detailed subtitles, which is why this book first caught my attention. In it, journalist Hayley Campbell tries to understand why we’re so afraid of death by asking the people who experience it every day through their work. This leads her to conversations with “mass fatality investigators” (so curious about that), embalmers, detectives, gravediggers, crime scene cleaners, and a former executioner. I am so intrigued with this approach and deeply curious to find out what she learns.

In this book, scholar Psyche A. Williams-Forson explores how “anti-Black racism operates in the practice and culture of eating”—a subject I had never even considered until learning about this book. To answer this question, she looks at how “mass media, nutrition science, economics, and public policy” drive narratives about what is good or healthy to eat, and how ideas about what Black people eat perpetuate the feeling that they need to be fixed. She also looks at how food connects to culture and community, and the ways that scarcity and control contribute to Black people’s relationships with food. Fascinating! 

Farewell Transmission is a small press book of essays about things that are hidden – secret lives, forgotten stories, and unique passions— that can make us feel both connected and alone. The stories in the book come from all over, from rural Namibia to an Elvis festival in rural Canada to a homeless shelter in Arizona and more. Like most essay collections, there are some ups and downs, but overall I found these pieces moving, observant, funny, and always coming from a place of genuine curiosity. 

In this debut memoir, attorney and radio host Kiara Imani explores her journey to understand racial trauma and its ongoing impacts on Black mental health in America. After learning about the idea of racial trauma in therapy, Imani looks back to her own family history growing up in the south and her professional experiences of being the only Black person in a room. The book ranges through many topics – “career, money, religion, food, health, dating, friendships” and more – to offer another perspective on America’s issues with race.

In 1934, a group of Aborigial prisoners escaped into the Australian outback. A white police officer tracked them to a sacred rock formation, Uluru, but what happens next is disputed. Using new evidence, this book tries to explain the murder of Yokununna, one of the Aboriginal men who escaped. While the book is a deep dive into one cold case, it is also a look at how Australia’s history of white supremacy continues to shape lives today.  

This book is the latest entry in the ReVisioning History series from Beacon Press, a series I am so glad exists. Each title offers a history of the United States through the lens of a particular marginalized group. In this entry, historian Catherine Ceniza Choy chronicles the diverse history of the fastest-growing group of Americans. She also connects this 200 year history with contemporary increases in anti-Asian violence and the way Asian American stories are being erased. I particularly love the use of “histories” in the title, acknowledging the many stories that make up this book. 

At the close of World War II, countries around the world were competing for the next great technological achievement. In the United States, six pioneering women were racing to figure out how to program the world’s first electronic computer, the ENIAC. There were no instructions or programming languages to guide them – everything they figured out they did on their own. To write this book, researcher Kathy Kleiman met with four of the six women, recording extensive interviews about their experiences as some of the earliest women in technology. I am such a fan of books that explore the hidden contributions women have made in science, so getting this one is high on my list.

Who doesn’t love reading a book about reading? In this linked essay collection, novelist Elaine Castillo explores the politics and ethics of reading, going beyond the traditional arguments about empathy and diversity to find “a more entangled relationship not just with our fiction and our art, but with our buried and entangled histories.” She looks at our relationships with the classics, “settler colonialism” in beloved authors, and more to encourage “a more complicated, embodied form of reading.” That all just sounds so good.

As much as I don’t particularly love politics, I am someone who loves to understand how things work… and the best way to do that is often from the people who actually do the making. That’s why I’m intrigued by this memoir from Lis Smith, a highly-sought after operative for the Democratic Party. The book is described as a look at human nature in politics as well as the story of a personal journey (complete with some choices that end up in the tabloids), which sounds intense! The book follows Smith from her days as a college intern all the way through serving as a chief advisor to the Buttigieg campaign in 2020. I’m sold.

You might be familiar with journalist Carmen Rita Wong from her work as a personal finance expert at CNBC or as a former host of Marketplace Money from American Public Media. In this memoir she explores her relationship with her family and the big secrets her mother kept until her death. Wong grew up in Harlem and Chinatown, before moving to New Hampshire after her mother remarried. Their mother-daughter relationship was fraught, but the reason didn’t become clear until her mother’s secrets came to light late in life. Who doesn’t love a memoir of family secrets?