Author: Kim Ukura

Happy Friday, nonfiction fans! It really has been A WEEK, has it not? I was trying to put together a reading list to help make sense of the Supreme Court, but my brain just isn’t working in peak condition right now.

Instead, I want to catch up on some nonfiction news that’s been building for a few weeks – everything from some book announcements to a powerful excerpt I urge you to read!

Actress Betty Gilpin is writing a book! All the Women in My Brain: And Other Concerns, out September 6, is described as “a hilarious, intimate, and candid collection of essays.” In an interview, Gilpin said that the book won’t be a “tell all” about her TV and film roles, but rather how those experiences connect to being a woman in the world and managing all of the voices that try to tell you what to do and how to act. I love this cover!

The winners of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize have been announced. This particular prize has a lot of great nonfiction selections to highlight: 

• Biography – Burning Boy: The Life and Work of Stephen Crane by Paul Auster
• Autobiographical Prose – Real Estate: A Living Autobiography by Deborah Levy
• Current Interest – Midnight in Washington: How We Almost Lost Our Democracy and Still Could by Adam Schiff
• History – Cuba: An American History by Ada Ferrer
• Science and Technology – The Disordered Cosmos: A Journey into Dark Matter, Spacetime, and Dreams Deferred by Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein

LitHub ran a great excerpt from Tajja Isen’s new book Some of My Best Friends: Essays on Lip Service. In the piece, she writes about how “the failure of progressive change in contemporary book publishing is so total that there is now a whole string of books about the failure of progressive change in contemporary book publishing.” She specifically writes about a few recent fiction titles, but I think her commentary is more broadly applicable. This excerpt definitely got the book on my radar!

Biographer Walter Isaacson is working on a book about Elon Musk. Isaacson, who has written about Leonardo da Vinci, Benjamin Franklin, and Steve Jobs, said he was interested in profiling Musk because he is “interested in innovators and people who push boundaries.” I can’t really bring myself to get excited about this one, but I did think the interview linked above was an interesting peek into why Isaacson wants to write this book and what we might read in the future.

Don’t forget you can get three free audiobooks at Audiobooks.com with a free trial!

One Thing I Like

One of the books I picked up during my independent bookstore shopping spree was The Weather Machine: A Journey Inside the Forecast by Andrew Blum. It’s a slim little book that manages to give a comprehensive and entertaining overview of how weather forecasting actually works… and how fragile the whole system could turn out to be. 

To explore the forecast, Blum shares a brief history of weather forecasting, visits remote weather observation stations, watches weather satellites blast off, and visits the site of one of forecasting’s biggest and most accurate computation systems. This book, which I read in just a few hours, gave me a much deeper appreciation about everything it takes so I can turn on my phone in the morning to find out if it’s going to rain. Highly recommended!

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For more nonfiction reads, head over to the podcast service of your choice and download For Real, which I co-host with my dear friend Alice. If you have any questions/comments/book suggestions, you can find me on social media @kimthedork. Happy weekend! 

We’re nearly at the end of April, which means I am just squeaking in a book list in recognition of Autism Acceptance Month.

According to the Autism Society, the prevalence of autism has risen from 1 in 125 children in 2010 to 1 in 54 in 2020. This means we’re seeing even more opportunities to learn about autism and how it affects people in different ways.

For this book list, I tried to highlight writing by autistic women, families, and people of color. Check them out:

Don’t forget you can get three free audiobooks at Audiobooks.com with a free trial!

One Thing I Like

Tomorrow, Saturday, April 30, is Indie Bookstore Day! In the Twin Cities we celebrate all week, so my sister and I spent last weekend visiting independent bookstores across the area, several of which we’d never visited before. Buying books at independent stories isn’t always feasible, but if you have a chance to buy at least one this weekend, your local indie is always worth the trip!

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For more nonfiction reads, head over to the podcast service of your choice and download For Real, which I co-host with my dear friend Alice. If you have any questions/comments/book suggestions, you can find me on social media @kimthedork. Happy weekend!

Happiest of Fridays, nonfiction friends! I feel like I’m in the middle of a time loop, where spring is constantly promised for “next week,” but then when next week arrives it’s more of the same… cold and snow in some disgusting combination. It’s very demoralizing when all I want to do is read books on my patio in the sun!

This week’s nonfiction news is heavy on celebrity, with a couple of other interesting developments thrown in for added flavor. Let’s dive in!

Jeannette McCurdy, former Nickelodeon child star, has written a memoir. I’m Glad My Mom Died, out August 9, tells the story of how her mother pushed McCurdy into acting as a child, a decision that she says led to anxiety, shame, and self-loathing. McCurdy played Sam Puckett on iCarly and starred in Sam & Cat. That cover is giving me real Sweet Valley High vibes, which I’m definitely into.

Britney Spears has confirmed she’s writing a book! This affirmation from the star comes weeks after rumors circulated that she had a multimillion dollar deal for a memoir. In a post that’s since been taken down from Instagram, Spears said writing the book is “healing and therapeutic.” I remain excited to read this one. 

Tom Hiddleson will be starring in an adaptation of David Grann’s book The White Darkness. The book tells the story of Henry Worsley, a devoted family man and former soldier, who becomes obsessed with traversing Antarctica on foot (you can see where this is going, I assume). The series on Apple will “explore courage, love, family and the extremes of human endurance.” The White Darkness started as a magazine article in The New Yorker and was turned into a book. 

Here’s a story that’s a bit meta – an attempt to ban the graphic novel Persepolis is being turned into a graphic novel. Back in 2013, a library science graduate student discovered that the Chicago Public School district had tried to remove Persepolis from school libraries and classrooms without following the district’s formal book challenge process. The student, Jarrett Dapier, is now turning his experience fighting the book removal into a graphic novel – Wake Now In the Fire. Fascinating! Look for this one in 2023.

And here’s one that is just a real head scratcher – a publisher is removing the book Bad and Boujee: Toward a Trap Feminist Theology from publication after critics noted that the author is white. The book purports to explore the “Black Experience, hip-hop music, ethics, and feminism.” The Black woman credited with coining the concept of trap feminism, Sesali Bowen, said the white author, Jennifer Buck, didn’t approach her while writing the book. Others have criticized Buck and her publisher, Wipf and Stock Publishers, over the idea that a white woman could write deeply about a concept so tied to Black women’s experiences in the world. Uff.

One Thing I Like

This week was the week where I learned about the social media phenomenon of the Coastal Grandmother. Coined on TikTok, a coastal grandmother channels the vibe of Meryl Streep in It’s Complicated or Diane Keaton in Something’s Gotta Give, wearing white button downs, decorating with fresh flowers, and drinking white wine along the beach.

Turns out, you don’t need to be coastal or a grandmother to take in this vibe… which is delightful, because I think this is what I want to be. My favorite coastal grandmother discovery is this related Spotify playlist with bangers like “This Will Be (An Everlasting Love)” by Natalie Cole, “New Shoes” by Paolo Nutini, and “Save the Last Dance for Me” by Michael Bublé. Now you’ll have to excuse me while I do some online shopping for a matching pajama set, neutral turtleneck, and something pointless from Williams Sonoma. 

Don’t forget you can get three free audiobooks at Audiobooks.com with a free trial!

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For more nonfiction reads, head over to the podcast service of your choice and download For Real, which I co-host with my dear friend Alice. If you have any questions/comments/book suggestions, you can find me on social media @kimthedork. Happy weekend! 

Happy Friday, nonfiction friends! While it’s my Midwest inclination to open every conversion with the weather, this week I will resist. The less said about Mother Nature this week, the better.

In honor of National Poetry Month, in this edition I want to write about a few great memoirs by poets. I love reading memoirs, but I’ve always thought that memoirs by poets are particularly special. I’m consistently in awe of the way they can string together perfect sentence after perfect sentence, articulating feelings and experiences in ways that are both specific and universal.

It’s a real treat to pick up a memoir by a poet – here are three I recommend: 

To close, I want to point you to a couple of related articles over at Book Riot: 

• Why I Love Reading Memoirs by Poets by Neha Patel
• 5 Moving Memoirs in Verse by Amazing Women by Yashvi Peeti

Don’t forget you can get three free audiobooks at Audiobooks.com with a free trial!

One Thing I Like

My reading for the year has remained on the slow side, but I’m excited to have finished one of my most anticipated new titles of 2022 – Ancestor Trouble: A Reckoning and a Reconciliation by Maud Newton. 

In the book, Newton writes about her vexing and fascinating search to better understand her family and family history, which was full of strange stories and complicated people. The book is broadly about the different ways we can be connected to our families – family trees, genetics, physicality, temperament, and more. It’s also a very specific deep dive into Newton’s own family, and the complex questions that came up the deeper and further she dug into their stories. 

The book was just a smidge long for me, but I still really enjoyed the time I spent with it. Newton has used her story to offer a wide-ranging and curious look at genealogy, family history, and the ways in which we are and are not products of the people we come from.

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For more nonfiction reads, head over to the podcast service of your choice and download For Real, which I co-host with my dear friend Alice. If you have any questions/comments/book suggestions, you can find me on social media @kimthedork. Happy weekend! 

It’s Friday! Hooray! Despite the fact that Minnesota has been IGNORING the fact that it’s spring by spitting snow and sleet in my face all week, I remain optimistic that we’ll get some reading on the patio weather in April. I can manifest this, right?

This week’s nonfiction news is a bit of a jumble – some new books, some analysis of upcoming titles, and a couple of stories that just seemed interesting in a nonfiction-adjacent way. Let’s get to it!

NPR highlighted three nonfiction translations to read this spring. Nonfiction in translation is one of my blind spots, so I definitely have this article bookmarked! 

Tiffany Haddish will be releasing an essay collection this fall! I Curse You With Joy will be a story of “laughing through the tears,” with stories about how Haddish uses comedy to “metabolize pain and turn it into art.” I am jazzed about this one!

A nonfiction book claiming to reveal who betrayed Anne Frank and her family is being recalled by the Dutch publisher. A 69-page report by six Dutch historians and academics cast doubt on the conclusion of The Betrayal of Anne Frank by Rosemary Sullivan. The book was based on the findings of a cold case team led by a former FBI agent. The historian’s report called the book “a shaky house of cards.” 

If true crime is more of your jam, Publisher’s Weekly explores some upcoming titles to put on your radar. I like the mix of different types of true crime highlighted here, along with the emphasis on books that also talk about “the societal factors surrounding crime, victimhood, and punishment.”

Marie Kondo has another book coming out in November 2022. The title is Marie Kondo’s Kurashi at Home: How to Organize Your Space and Achieve Your Ideal Life, and it will offer “an inspirational visual guide to elevate the joy in every aspect of your life.” I honestly don’t know how I feel about that description, or the fact that I didn’t see this news picked up in bookish media. Are people just over Marie Kondo and I missed it?

I’m not sure this is strictly nonfiction related, but it’s an interesting story. In a nutshell, Shealah Craighaid, former White House photographer for President Trump, has canceled her plans to release a book of White House photos after Trump published his own book of photos. There’s a lot in the linked story about public records, historical trends around White House photographers, and ways Trump has monetized his presidency that I thought was worth a read.

Don’t forget you can get three free audiobooks at Audiobooks.com with a free trial!

One Thing I Like

This week I’ve been listening to the audiobook of How to Be Perfect: The Correct Answer to Every Moral Question by Michael Schur, which is a total forking delight. Schur is the creator of two of my favorite television shows, Parks and Recreation and The Good Place. This book is a guide to living an ethical life, informed by all of the reading and thinking Schur did while creating the universe of The Good Place.

He begins by explaining three of the biggest frames of secular ethical thought, then goes on to show how concepts like deontology or utilitarianism can be used to untangle thorny ethical questions about everything from face punching to Internet shaming. The audiobook is a treat, with great production flourishes and small pop-ins from the actors and actresses of The Good Place. The whole thing is just as smart and silly as the show, I can’t recommend it highly enough. 

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For more nonfiction reads, head over to the podcast service of your choice and download For Real, which I co-host with my dear friend Alice. If you have any questions/comments/book suggestions, you can find me on social media @kimthedork. Happy weekend!

Welcome to April, nonfiction friends! I hope that you’ve been pleasantly surprised by any April Fools’ Day jokes or pranks you come across in your personal and online endeavors. I’m writing this on Wednesday, so I don’t know what the buzzy or trending joke of the year is, but I hope it’s at least a little bit kind. The world is hard right now.

For whatever reason, I am deeply invested in three television shows about con artists – The Dropout on Hulu, Inventing Anna on Netflix, and WeCrashed on AppleTV+. In honor of the holiday and my current obsession, I want to share a few books from my TBR about scams (hopefully, there will be more diversity concerning authors writing about this topic in the future!): 

Don’t forget you can get three free audiobooks at Audiobooks.com with a free trial!

One Thing I Like

I can’t remember if I’ve mentioned Ijeoma Oluo’s (author of So You Want to Talk About Race) email newsletter, Behind the Book, before. It’s great, but this week’s edition is particularly excellent. In “We Have the Right to Not Be Annoyed,” Oluo uses the Will Smith/Chris Rock incident at the Oscars as a way to write more deeply about boundaries, anti-racism, and the specific ways that white people (particularly women) show up in these conversations. I hesitate to write more because I just won’t come close to summing it up well. Just click through and read it and take it to heart. 

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For more nonfiction reads, head over to the podcast service of your choice and download For Real, which I co-host with my dear friend Alice. If you have any questions/comments/book suggestions, you can find me on social media @kimthedork. Happy weekend! 

Hello hello, nonfiction friends! Can we all just say a big HOORAY that it is finally Friday? For me, it’s been one of those weeks where one day I feel incredibly bored and itching to start a big new project, and the next day I feel completely overwhelmed by everything on my list and want to just flatten everything and start from scratch.

I’m not sure why there’s such an imbalance from day to day (burnout, perhaps?) or how to work through it… so for now I’m just trying to feel the feelings and do my best and see where that leads.

First up this week, news about a few upcoming nonfiction adaptations coming to the small screen:

HBOMax released a trailer for a new limited series with Brené Brown based on her latest book Atlas of the Heart. In the show, Brown aims to help people learn how to “cultivate meaningful connections with ourselves and each other.” Based on the trailer, I think this is a show that will make me cry – I always cry when big feelings are involved.

A seven episode limited series based on Jon Krakauer’s book Under the Banner of Heaven will premiere on Hulu on April 28. The series will star Andrew Garfield as Detective Jeb Pyre, a devout Mormon charged with investigating the murder of Brenda Wright Lafferty and her baby daughter. I read this book many years ago and still remember how deeply unsettling parts of it were. I am curious to see how it’s adapted! 

Netflix has ordered a mystery drama from Shonda Rhimes inspired by Kate Andersen Brower’s book The Residence: Inside the Private World of the White House. The show is set to feature “one dead body, one wildly eccentric detective, and one disastrous State Dinner.” This adaptation feels like someone filled in a MadLib of all the things I am interested in to create a show that is PERFECT for me. I have absolutely no idea if it will come together, but I cannot wait!

And next, a few other news items of note:

Entertainment Weekly has released the cover of actress Constance Wu’s upcoming memoir, Making a Scene. Wu says she wrote the book during the pandemic, calling it her “second pandemic baby” – she also had a baby girl. The book is an essay collection covering much of her life and will come out this fall.

Musician Patti Smith has sold another book! A Book of Days, set to come out in November, is based on her popular Instagram account. This reminds me how much I want to read her previous books, Just Kids, M Train, or Year of the Monkey.

Don’t forget you can get three free audiobooks at Audiobooks.com with a free trial!

One Thing I Like

This week I want to recommend a newspaper article –  “The death spiral of an American family” – by journalist Eli Saslow in the Washington Post. Saslow is one of my favorite feature writers, and this piece about a family reckoning with “an inheritance of debt, desperation and a fall from the middle class” is just a stunner. In it, he writes about a family falling out of the middle class, now struggling to get by after seeming to do everything right.

Saslow is the author of several nonfiction books including Ten Letters: The American People in the Obama Years, Rising Out of Hatred: The Awakening of a Former White Nationalist, and Voices from the Pandemic: American Tell Their Stories of Crisis, Courage and Resilience. I can highly recommend the first two, and the last one is on my list.

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For more nonfiction reads, head over to the podcast service of your choice and download For Real, which I co-host with my dear friend Alice. If you have any questions/comments/book suggestions, you can find me on social media @kimthedork. Happy weekend!

Happiest of Fridays, nonfiction friends! I’m freshly back from a long weekend trip to a sunny and warm destination. As refreshing as that was, I’m also in the middle of a hard re-entry into real life – why can’t the world pause while I take a break?

Since March is Women’s History Month here in the United States, this week I would like to share a few great books about some under the radar contributions women have made in history:

Don’t forget you can get three free audiobooks at Audiobooks.com with a free trial!

One Thing I Like

I am happy to report that the one nonfiction book I read on vacation –Scoundrel: How a Convicted Murderer Persuaded the Women Who Loved Him, the Conservative Establishment, and the Courts to Set Him Free by Sarah Weinman – was excellent!

The scoundrel of the title is Edgar Smith, a man convicted of killing a teenage girl who was eventually set free after befriending neoconservative William F. Buckley, who took up his cause and advocated for his innocence. Smith became a minor celebrity, even publishing a book about his experience and going on a small speaking tour after he was released from death row.

Except… Smith was a sociopath who went on to abuse several women he had romantic relationships before attempting murder again. He was quickly caught, convicted, and jailed a second time, but not after embarassing the many famous people who originally came to his defense.

There’s so much interesting stuff in this book, it’s hard to describe all the twists and turns and famous people who had a connection to Smith. But what I loved most about it is that Weinman never loses sight of the fact that the story should really be about Smith’s victims, including his first, Victoria Zielinski, and the effects he had on them. It’s a book that’s as much about the stories we tell each other as anything else, and I really loved it.

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For more nonfiction reads, head over to the podcast service of your choice and download For Real, which I co-host with my dear friend Alice. If you have any questions/comments/book suggestions, you can find me on social media @kimthedork. Happy weekend! 

Happiest of Fridays, nonfiction readers! This past Tuesday, March 8, was International Women’s Day, “a global day celebrating the social, economic, cultural, and political achievements of women.” To celebrate, I’d like to share some of my favorite memoirs by women from across the globe. Here we go!

Don’t forget you can get three free audiobooks at Audiobooks.com with a free trial!

One Thing I Like

As I write this, I am about 24 hours away from being on vacation! This long weekend somewhere warm feels like it’s been a very, very long time coming. Of course, I am stuffing my suitcase with as many books as I can possibly trick the TSA into letting me bring, including a couple of highly-anticipated new nonfiction books. The true stories in my suitcase are: 

• Scoundrel: How a Convicted Murderer Persuaded the Women Who Loved Him, the Conservative Establishment, and the Courts to Set Him Free by Sarah Weinman
• From Hollywood with Love: The Rise and Fall (and Rise Again) of the Romantic Comedy by Scott Meslow

I’ve read a few chapters of each one just to make sure they’re worth the trip – I am so, so excited to dig in.

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For more nonfiction reads, head over to the podcast service of your choice and download For Real, which I co-host with my dear friend Alice. If you have any questions/comments/book suggestions, you can find me on social media @kimthedork. Happy weekend! 

Hello and happy Friday, nonfiction readers. It has been a heavy week in the world, one of those times when it feels important to both pay attention and, when possible, find healthy time away. And time for books, which I’ve found to be a great distraction that makes me feel refreshed rather than numbed out by the news.

Before we jump in, I have a couple of small corrections from last week’s newsletter: 

• You can read author Tracy Kidder’s essay about Dr. Paul Farmer online here. 
• The author of Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present is Harriet A. Washington.

And now on to the news!

Esquire has compiled a list of the best nonfiction of 2022 (so far). It feels early for a list like that… but sure, let’s do it.

Britney Spears has signed a $15 million deal with Simon and Schuster for a memoir about her career, life, and family. The deal came after a bidding war (no surprise there), and is one of the biggest in history. Good for her!

Actor Elliot Page will be releasing a memoir in 2023 called Pageboy. According to Deadline, the memoir will be about Page’s efforts “ to find himself amidst a torrent of homophobic hatred, not only in his hometown of Halifax, Nova Scotia but also in Hollywood.” I think this should be pretty amazing.

This fall, Matthew Perry will be releasing a memoir with Flatiron Books called Friends, Lovers and the Big Terrible Thing. This could be interesting or it could be lame, hard to know!

Deborah Birx, the former White House Coronavirus Task Force coordinator, is set to release a memoir. The book is called Silent Invasion: The Untold Story of the Trump Administration, Covid-19, and Preventing the Next Pandemic Before It’s Too Late. I can’t decide whether to be interested in this or not.

Don’t forget you can get three free audiobooks at Audiobooks.com with a free trial!

One Thing I Like

The book uses the framework of a narcissistic relationship to explore this dynamic, moving between Drayton’s personal experiences and the larger cultural and historical forces at play in her story. I thought it was a very moving story and enjoyed the structure she used around the symptoms of a narcissistic relationship. This is a thought-provoking read!

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For more nonfiction reads, head over to the podcast service of your choice and download For Real, which I co-host with my dear friend Alice. If you have any questions/comments/book suggestions, you can find me on social media @kimthedork. Happy weekend!