Category: True Story

In this social history, writer and artist Sofi Thanhauser tells the stories of five fabrics — linen, cotton, silk, synthetics, and wool — to explore our clothing and what it says about us. In addition to looking at how fabrics were made and decorated, she also interrogates the modern clothing industry and the widespread environmental impacts of fast fashion. This book is smartly organized and full of fascinating stories.

This book tells the story of oil, from the moment it was discovered through its use in nearly all aspects of modern life. In addition to fuel and electricity, crude oil and related products are also in plastics, pavement, and fertilizers for plants. In this history, Sonia Shah also tells the story of people affected by oil — protestors, scientists, politicians, and more. I can think of a lot of materials that could make a great microhistory, but few that have impacts as wide-ranging as oil.

Everyone and their mother’s brother is talking about this memoir— and for good reason! Former Nickelodeon star Jenneatte McCurdy writes about her life as a child star, a job she never really wanted, but one her mother insisted she have. What’s more, McCurdy shares how her mother was incredibly abusive, forcing McCurdy to submit to intimate inspections of her body, even into her teen years, and restricting McCurdy’s diet to keep her looking younger longer.

McCurdy’s reflection on her mother can be very clinical, removed from emotions of the event, which reflects how she kept herself from thinking too deeply about her and her mother’s relationship. But after her mother dies from cancer, McCurdy must confront the trauma from her childhood if she is ever to truly move on.

Year of the Tiger was, hands down, one of my most anticipated books of the year. In the disability community, Alice Wong is a legend. She’s such a strong advocate for disability justice, and her memoir is a gift. She shares stories from her life, excerpts from articles she’s written for various publications, and transcripts of interviews she conducted in the last several years. I really appreciated her multimedia approach to her memoir, which gives it a unique feel, like snapshots from her life.

Because of my own disability, I listen to books via audio, and I wondered how all of the photos and illustrations would translate to a different medium. Most of the time, audiobooks with a lot of visuals just have a PDF that comes along with the audiobook. But Wong ensured the narrator— the wonderful Nancy Wu—read image descriptions so listeners can better picture the more visual parts of the memoir in our heads. This kind of attention to detail and dedication to making her work as accessible as possible is why Wong’s work is so important and why her work should be widely read.

The whole concept of this book fascinates me. As a college student, Jhumpa Lahiri studied abroad in Italy, falling in love with the country and the Italian language. In this book, she writes in Italian about her experience learning the language and immersing herself in it as a writer. She also writes about how learning a new language helped her separate from the stretching she felt between Bengali, the language of her parents, and English, the language she learned in the United States. This book is translated by Ann Goldstein, who has also translated Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels. There’s so much in here that sounds interesting. 

One of the most fascinating things about language is the way it shifts and changes over time. In this book, internet linguist Gretchen McCulloch looks at the ways language is being shaped by the Internet – the apps, platforms, conventions, and emojis that are affecting how we speak and think. As a person who spends a lot of time on the internet, I can’t wait to dive into this one. 

I’m obsessed with all sorts of stories around food, but Italian food is one of my favorites. So when I picked up Taste by Stanley Tucci, I knew I was in for a good time. Tucci tells us the story of his life through his relationship with food. We learn about his childhood as an Italian American and the many meals he ate with his family. We go to Italy as he reconnects with his heritage and then to New York City as he pursues his acting career. No matter where Stanley Tucci goes, he is sure to find a great plate of food. I loved how he describes the dishes with such detail that we can attempt to make dishes ourselves — he even provides recipes for some of his favorites!

Tung Nguyen and Katherine Manning met in the 1970s when Manning hosted Nguyen, who had just fled Vietnam at the end of the war. Their relationship grew into something like family as they became business partners and started Hy Vong, a Vietnamese restaurant in Miami. Lyn Nguyen, Tung Nguyen’s daughter, also grew up working at the family restaurant. These three women tell their stories, which are interconnected and overlapping. This multi-narrative effect gives this memoir a unique feel, reminding food lovers the incredible amount of work that goes into creating a restaurant and the great food they serve.

In the wake of the Supreme Court’s 2013 decision to undercut the Voting Rights Act of 1965, voting rights in the United States have been attacked and rolled back in communities around the country. In this book, Carol Anderson traces the history of voter suppression from 1865 through the present, looking specifically at how government-led discrimination has affected African American voters. The book shows how various voter suppression tactics work, looks at the impact these tactics had in 2018, and offers suggestions about how to move forward.

This is another book about the ways democracy is being threatened and challenged— specifically, how wealthy, right-wing interests are shaping our political discourse by pouring money into the system. Jane Mayer, an investigative reporter for The New Yorker, traces how a small group has funneled money through think tanks, academic institutions, the media, and the courts to set an agenda for the country. This book is deeply infuriating, but so important to understand.

While Marie Mutsuki Mockett’s mother is Japanese, her father comes from a family of wheat farmers in Nebraska. After spending years getting to know her family in Japan, Mockett decides that her next writing project will look at her father’s family. Every year, migratory harvesters arrive at the family farm to help harvest the wheat. So Mockett decides to travel with the harvesters to get to know them and better understand their world. Starting in Texas, Mockett travels with the group of men and women for weeks as they make their way up to Nebraska. Mockett discovers she carries a lot of assumptions about this more conservative group of blue collar workers and begins to challenge her own perception of their lives.

This book proved endlessly fascinating for me as Mockett begins to better understand the world of her father’s family and the people who help them out on the farm. She portrays herself in all of her messy humanity, making mistakes along the way, but always looking to better understand the people around her.

Sarah Smarsh is the first woman in many generations of her family to go to college instead of starting a family right away. After breaking this family norm, Smarsh begins to think about her life as a working class girl from Kansas and tries to better understand where she comes from. Focusing on the different generations of women in her family, she looks at the history of the heartland and the people who live there. Her prose is intimate, practical, and straightforward. Every word pulls its weight as Smarsh describes her childhood living with a family just trying to scrape by.

I appreciated Smarsh’s take on her hometown, both the good and the bad. She perfectly captures the feeling of not being able to stay home and achieve your dreams. But having left, you know you will never be able to return and nothing will ever be the same.

Siddhartha Mukherjee is one of the best science writers out there. He manages to write stories that are both full of facts and full of feelings, using his personal experiences to give heart to even the driest subjects. In this book he tackles the history of the gene, the tool through which we understand so much of what it means to be human. The story covers centuries, from Aristotle to mapping the human genome, while also acknowledging how much we still have left to learn.

This book has one of my very favorite subtitles— it’s so evocative! It’s also a great read that interrogates our tendency to attribute our own values to animals… and shows how it sometimes works. Biologist Lucky Cooke tells stories of animals from across the animal kingdom, exploring the instincts and mysteries that we’re still trying to understand today. This one is a lot of fun!

The American South contains a diverse world of lived experiences. In this anthology, writers — like Kiese Laymon, Joy Priest, and Natalia Sylvester — examine what it means to be a person of color in the South. Set in places like doctor’s offices and DMVs, these essays tackle the topic of their lived experiences with race very differently, and contain unique perspectives that deserve to be heard. Editor Cinelle Barnes does a great job of collecting a range of different essayists in the collection, creating a truly incredible anthology that highlights some of today’s most talented writers in the modern South.

I had never read Annie Dillard before, so I thought this short book of essays would be a great place to start. Dillard possesses an ability to capture ideas in such beautiful ways. She’ll start talking about forming sentences and how long she feels that it takes, and I find myself completely engrossed with how she spent her afternoon. If you love books about writers and writing, then you will absolutely love this book.

In a world increasingly filled with misinformation and confusion, we can all use some time thinking about thinking. In this book mathemetician Eugenia Cheng looks at how we need both logical and emotional reasoning to live in the world. She looks at how logic works, some of its limitations, and the role of emotion in thinking and communication. I love that combination!

One of the classes I regret never taking in high school or college is statistics because it seems like stats comes up nearly everywhere. In this book, Charles Wheelan pulls back the “archane and technical details” of statistics to explain the intuition that drives statistical analysis. He clarifies key terms, reveals how statistics can be used for manipulation, and shows some of the key insights being pulled from current statistics experiments. I am jazzed to pick this one up!

Right after I graduated college, I realized my deteriorating health meant that I wouldn’t be able to do that job I’d been training for. In that mourning process, I discovered Jenny Lawson. In her first memoir Let’s Pretend This Never Happened, Lawson describes her quirky family, sharing stories about her dad’s obsession with taxidermy and her husband’s baptism by fire sort of introduction to her family. She strikes the perfect balance between describing the challenges she’s faced and the beautiful parts of life that make it all worth it. Lawson is both chronically and mentally ill, and she weaves that experience throughout her memoir and her following book, Furiously Happy and Broken (in the Best Possible Way). Reading about her wild family and the everyday things in life that brought her joy helped me process my own chronic illness and realize that, even though there are a lot of difficult things that we all experience as human beings, there’s also so much joy out there.

When I discovered Samantha Irby’s essays, I knew almost immediately that I had discovered a new-to-me favorite writer. Irby’s essays are both hilarious and emotionally impactful. Like Lawson, Irby has an incredible talent of using humor as a way to process the difficult things in her life. She first started writing as a blogger, sharing everything from takes on TV shows to fashion critiques, all with her incredible narrative voice. I especially appreciate her perspective as someone with chronic illness. There’s a certain kind of dark humor that thrives in our communities that I can never get enough of. While We Are Never Meeting in Real Life is my favorite, I also love Meaty and Wow, No Thank You. Whichever collection you choose, you are sure to have a good time!