Category: True Story

Does anyone else confuse Michael Palin with Michael Pollan? It’s easy to! Especially if you grew up hearing the former go “I’m Michael Palin! And you’re watching Comedy Central!” but with a British accent where Palin sounded like “Polin” for some reason. Ok anyway, for some time I thought the guy from Monty Python wrote nature books, and he does not (but he IS a travel writer). This book looks at “three plant-based drugs — opium, mescaline and caffeine” and how they appear in world culture, as well as their bodily effects.

The recent assault on voting rights makes me pretty emo about this one. This is a “brilliant and empowering collection of final reflections and words of wisdom from venerable civil rights champion, the late Congressman John Lewis at the end of his remarkable life.” Each section pivots around the word “on.” On Love, On Marriage, On Immigration, On Forgiveness. It sounds like a declaration (“on, forgiveness!”), and now I am even MORE emo.

I don’t know how I missed this one! Look at that AMAZING cover. Brady-Davis is a trans advocate who grew up in the Omaha, Nebraska foster care system and the Pentecostal faith. Here, she “speaks to anyone who has ever tried to find their place in this world and imparts the wisdom that comes with surmounting odds and celebrating on the other side.” Times are hard and this is exactly the sort of book we should have out there.

Well, this one’s just fun. And a university press book! The Belle Époque is basically the movie Moulin Rouge (French historians don’t @ me). You get the Bohemian scene and Toulouse-Lautrec and ART and SCIENCE. Plus, according to Wikipedia, “a period characterized by optimism, regional peace, economic prosperity, colonial expansion, and technological, scientific, and cultural innovations.” So vaguely like the ’90s, except not that. Also we weren’t optimistic in the ’90s, we were shielded by a thick layer of cynicism and a refusal to be vulnerable. But anyway! Learn about an in-retrospect Golden Age that took place from approximately 1871-1914!

Did you see The Other Boleyn Girl? It made me so mad! It basically took every rumor about Anne Boleyn and said “sure, why not.” Well here, Nolan is out to break down those lies and talk about “the shocking suppression of a powerful woman.” Also this cover’s pretty solid. I’m a fan. Learn some facts about the most famous of the Tudor wives!

I know close to nothing about sports, so I thought this was a medical memoir, but turns out, Dwight Gooden is a baseball player! A baseball player who mainly played in the ’80s and ’90s. This is a memoir of “talent, addiction, and recovery from one of the greatest baseball pitchers of all time.”

Sometimes I’m just like “sure, why not” about a new release. Searcy goes “from the decaying architectural wonder that is the town of Arcosanti, Arizona, to driving the vast, open Texas highway in his much-abused college VW Beetle,” which sounds a lot like a holdover book from the ’60s, but maybe we need a book about a person going on a meandering trip and contemplating life during these times. Times are weird.

Two journalism professors tackle what is happening with journalists in Mexico. Namely, it is a very hard thing to be right now. Since 2000, over 150 journalists have been killed in Mexico, and Bustamente and Relly “examine the networks of political power, business interests, and organized crime that threaten and attack Mexican journalists, who forge ahead despite the risks.” Their book highlights a crisis that, despite its proximity, is little known in America.

I know, there are a lot of serious reads this week! I don’t know what to tell you; publishers looked at mid-July and said “that’s it. The heart of summer. Release the solemn books.” I would like to point out that this one is short (208 pages) and covers something important — namely “how student protest against structural inequalities on campus pushes academic institutions to reckon with their legacy built on slavery and stolen Indigenous lands.” Keep protesting, students!

Yes, it’s the Little Prince guy! This is one of the rare cases where the English title is more poetic than the French (Terre des hommes? Land of Men? no thank you, please). This primarily contains stories of Saint-Exupéry’s time as an airmail carrier, flying across the Sahara Desert and the Andes Mountains. This includes his crash in the Sahara, which is most definitely included in The Little Prince. I love books from the 1920s/1930s. And I didn’t know this one existed!

Yeah, like I’m gonna see a book from almost sixty years ago about oysters and not include it in this list. Look at the beginning of the description: “On the northwest coast of France, just around the corner from the English Channel, is the little town of Locmariaquer.” It sounds like a fairytale! But one with oysters! This is not only about the Belon oysters of Locmariaquer, but also about Brittany and its people.

It’s a history of the Hemings family! Yes, the family that includes Sally Hemings. And look, I’m not THAT old and I still remember when it was kind of big news that Jefferson exploited/sexually-assaulted-due-to-the-power-imbalance Hemings. Here, Gordon-Reed “traces the Hemings family from its origins in Virginia in the 1700s to the family’s dispersal after Jefferson’s death in 1826.” Fair warning that this book is over 900 pages long. But probably a lot of that is endnotes! A bonus of nonfiction: it’s usually not as long as you think it is.

The most recent winner! It also won the 2021 Pulitzer. Les Payne passed in 2018, but he was a storied journalist who co-founded the National Association of Black Journalists. He spent almost thirty years on this book, which was finished by his daughter Tamara. Payne wanted to “transform what would become over a hundred hours of interviews into an unprecedented portrait of Malcolm X, one that would separate fact from fiction.” Based on the number of awards and laudatory statements this has received, it appears he succeeded.

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!