Category: True Story

Brammer was first called “Papi” on Grindr. Then, “what started as a racialized moniker given to him on a hookup app soon became the inspiration for his now wildly popular advice column “¡Hola Papi!”” In his memoir, he talks about growing up biracial in Oklahoma, and shares some of the advice he regularly doles out in his column. Not to be all about covers (again), but I love this cover. #HappyPrideMonth

I hope you’re ready for a teenage Northern Irish naturalist, because here we go. McAnulty is only 16 years old, and is part of the youth climate activist movement. His diary “captures his perspective as a teenager juggling exams, friendships, and a life of campaigning.” McAnulty himself says, “In sharing this journey my hope is that people of all generations will not only understand autism a little more but also appreciate a child’s eye view on our delicate and changing biosphere.” He is the youngest winner of the RSPB Medal (Royal Society for the Protection of Birds).

Ok, if you don’t love this part of this book’s blurb, I don’t know what appeals to you. Henderson grew up “Black, weird, and overwhelmingly uncool in a mostly white neighborhood in upstate New York.” She was left by her mom in the care of her grandparents when she was 10, and her grandmother was tough but hilarious (frequently a winning combo). Henderson now is a TV writer who cohosts the film podcast I Saw What You Did and “reluctantly lives in Los Angeles.”

HAPPY PRIDE MONTH, here’s a gay classics book. This is the story of the Theban Sacred Band, “an elite 300-man corps recruited from pairs of lovers” in the 300s BCE. Plutarch says they made vows to each other at the shrine of Iolaus. When I saw this title, I was very confident that I’d be sharing it here, because how often do you see something like that? Romm is the director of the Classical Studies Program at Bard College.

This graphic history looks at how we “came to view sex, gender and sexuality in the ways that we do; how these ideas get tangled up with our culture and our understanding of biology, psychology and sexology; and how these views have been disputed and challenged.” It’s kind of like, how do we look at queer theory and some Big Ideas, but do it in an illustrated and more comprehensible way.

Rustin was the organizer of the 1963 March on Washington (yes, the “I Have a Dream” event) and had an enormous influence on Martin Luther King, Jr, but he is not as well known as others in the Civil Rights movement. Why? Because he was openly gay. While it is near-impossible to truly know a person, I would argue that reading their letters is a better way than reading a biography. This collection gathers over 150 of Rustin’s letters, spanning almost four decades of his life (he died in 1987). What a way to learn more about him.

I really love the family aspect of this. Selenis Leyva, known from Orange Is the New Black, co-writes this book with her sister about growing up in the Bronx in a Latinx household, about Marizol transitioning, their relationship as sisters, how Caitlin Jenner does not stand for all trans experiences, their relationship with Laverne Cox, and more.

June 28, 2019 was the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall uprising, and if you love primary sources, boy is this great for you. Edited by the New York Public Library, it compiles “first accounts, diaries, periodic literature, and articles from LGBTQ magazines and newspapers that documented both the years leading up to and the years following the riot.” A lot of accounts about this seminal event in American queer history.

Historian Anderson, who previously wrote White Rage and One Person, No Vote, looks at the history and impact of the United States’s Second Amendment, “how it was designed, and how it has consistently been constructed to keep African Americans powerless and vulnerable.” Through her research, she demonstrates that “the Second Amendment is not about guns but about anti-Blackness.” Anderson consistently uses history to illuminate and explain issues of our time, which IMO, is the best use of history.

Williams, formerly an anti-LGBTQ+ evangelical leader and president of a church-planting organization, transitioned in her sixties after a “call to authenticity.” In an other-side-of-the-coin to Thomas Page McBee’s book Amateur, instead of being listened to more post-transition, she finds herself ignored, sidelined, and overlooked. She “urges men to recognize the ways in which the world is tilted in their favor and validates the experiences of women who have been disregarded based solely on their gender, while also acknowledging how she was once like those men who are blind to their privilege.”

This graphic memoir and history of women-led slave revolts rejects the popularly-held idea that slave revolts were solely led by men. Hall, the granddaughter of enslaved people, combs through “old court records, slave ship captain’s logs, crumbling correspondence, and even the forensic evidence from the bones of enslaved women from the ‘negro burying ground’ uncovered in Manhattan. She finds women warriors everywhere.” I love Martínez’s art, which makes this history even more evocative.

One hundred years of “glamour and high society” told through the lives of the Savoy Hotel’s founders! It talks about Gilbert and Sullivan, it talks about P.G. Wodehouse, it talks about electric lights like Moulin Rouge did, it talks about Oscar Wilde, Marilyn Monroe, The Beatles, and basically everyone incredibly famous in the 20th century.

This is a short nonfiction classic. It’s so short! I read it during a lunch break at work! And not only is it short, but it’s got some A+ points by a great writer. Adichie’s feminism is something that benefits everyone (the patriarchy harms all! it is only superficially beneficial to men! this is an important fact!). You can knock this out on Saturday afternoon and still have time to watch some Star Trek: Discovery. Or…whatever people watch. It should probably be that, though.

This title reminds me of Tracy Jordan talking about mind grapes, and I had to get that out of the way because this book is intense! Lots of serious topics! But also it’s v. short, so you can delve into Feelings and then come back out. Mailhot grew up on the Seabird Island Indian Reservation in the Pacific Northwest. As an adult, she is simultaneously diagnosed with PTSD and bipolar II disorder. She takes to a notebook to write out her feelings, which turns into exploring memory, family, and maybe give yourself a tiny recovery window from this one.

This is shorter than 250 pages! And pretty breezy. I’ve talked about this on the podcast, but I happened to bring this to a tough family holiday, and I retreated to a room with it and it was SUCH an amazing break. I will forever love this book. Kaling talks about working in writers rooms, creating her two women show (two woman show?) about Matt Damon and Ben Affleck, and how she’s a huge nerd and figured out what she wanted to do with her life.

Remember Katherine Johnson, the amazing central character of Hidden Figures?? She wrote a book! It’s about her path from growing up in the mountains of West Virginia to becoming a “human computer” for NASA. An AMAZING human computer. Her story “is centered around the basic tenets of her life—no one is better than you, education is paramount, and asking questions can break barriers.” Ngl, the asking questions one made me tear up. I love questions. She seems like such a fantastic person and I’m so glad she got to tell her own story.

Wow, remember when everyone was like, boy, Nixon sure was the worst? I’m not saying he wasn’t real bad, but boy. Things have happened. ANYWAY, 1) I love this cover, 2) ever since the movie Dick, I have been interested in Watergate (what a great movie), 3) this was on some “most anticipated” lists for 2021, so if you’re like, “WOW, cannot wait to learn more about mid-20th century American political scandals” then do I have a new release for you.

Bailey, who coined the term “misogynoir,” defines it as “the ways anti-Black and misogynistic representation shape broader ideas about Black women, particularly in visual culture and digital spaces.” Here, she focuses on the many ways Black women resist misogynoir on YouTube, Facebook, Tumblr, and other platforms. It “highlights Black women’s remarkable efforts to disrupt mainstream narratives, subvert negative stereotypes, and reclaim their lives.” Sounds amazing.

How can a chef get her own restaurant? Hamilton’s memoir goes from rural Pennsylvania to New York City and across Europe as she gathers cooking knowledge, gets married, and starts her restaurant Prune. This was a NYT bestseller that has been described as “gritty.” Also, look at that cover. It is A+.

Samuelsson was born in Ethiopia, grew up in Sweden, and moved to America. He cooked in Switzerland, on cruise ships, and “became the youngest chef ever to be awarded a coveted three-star rating from the New York Times.” He also cooked for Obama and won Top Chef Masters, which I have not SEEN, but it sounds very impressive. I’m gonna be honest, the part of his extremely varied life I am most fascinated by is cooking on a cruise ship. The writing immediately draws you in and if you’re going to read a chef book, this one is great.

This has recipes! Tan was born in Singapore in the Year of the Tiger (hence the title!). At eighteen, she moved to the U.S. and became a fashion writer, but in her 30s, she began to seriously miss Singaporean cooking. By cooking with her family, she not only learns the recipes of her childhood, but the stories of her family. You meet her parents, aunts, uncles, and grandmother. She “learns to infuse her New York lifestyle with the rich lessons of the Singaporean kitchen, ultimately reconnecting with her family and herself.”

I am so excited about this book? Hinton makes a clear case that the 2020 protests over the murder of George Floyd did not exist in isolation. They were part of a history of police violence and public reaction, specifically on the part of the Black community. In it, Hinton says “the word riot was nothing less than a racist trope applied to events that can only be properly understood as rebellions—explosions of collective resistance to an unequal and violent order.” Love this reframing. Love adding context to current events.

Adams emigrated to the US from Poland in 1912, where she hung out with anarchists and ran queer speakeasies in NYC and Chicago. It’s like Emma Goldman, but gay. In 1925, she published a book called Lesbian Love, which is included as part of the biography. She was convicted of publishing an obscene book, because it was America in the 1920s, and eventually deported to Europe, where she later died in Auschwitz. I tell you all these details so you know what you’re getting into, but also dang, I thought I knew my US lesbian history, and I did not.

ACT UP was founded in 1987 at the Lesbian and Gay Community Services Center in NYC. At a time when the AIDS crisis was being ignored, they made it impossible to ignore. Author Schulman has been working on the ACT UP Oral History Project since 2001, and here highlights how “a broad and unlikely coalition of activists from all races, genders, sexualities, and backgrounds, changed the world.”

Poet Broome writes this extremely interesting memoir, framed around Gwendolyn Brooks’s ‘We Real Cool.’ It covers his “early years growing up in Ohio as a dark-skinned Black boy harboring crushes on other boys,” his increasing drug use, his family, and “the true depth of vulnerability for young Black boys,” which is a phrase that just cuts right to your heart. Also, bonus points for the title, which is SO good.

Dating apps. Real annoying. Real helpful. Lot to unpack there probably. Sales not only talks about the data around dating apps, but as an almost-50-year-old, went on TENS of dates through them, which she covers in the book. She says that these apps do little to foster real connection, but in a world where more and more people are meeting their longtime partners through them, what’s the alternative? (side note: I met my wife through Tinder and she is great.)

Did I pick this because I A) love the cover, B) love Diane Guerrero and her story, or C) all of the above? YES, C wins the day. This is an adaptation of Guerrero’s memoir In the Country We Love, which is about her parents’ deportation and the push for immigration reform in the United States. This is listed as ages 10-14, which I agree with because it clocks in at over 200 pages. If you have some ambitious 10-year-olds, check this out.

I like that we’re in an age when we’re adding more context about the Founders of America, which includes George and Martha Washington enslaving people. Ona Judge was among these people, and her story of escape and ability to elude captors is amazing. This is for kids age 9-13 and is also just over 200 pages.

I LOVE this because it not only adds knowledge, it prompts curiosity. The world is so interesting and there’s so much going on that we can’t even see! This is 20 pages and for ages 5-8, but there’s so much going on in the pictures, that it could take up a good amount of time.

Fun fact: this book was one of our picks in Kim’s and my first episode of the nonfiction podcast For Real. It’s a board book! And 97 pages, but lists at ages 8-12. IMO, you can go younger with it? Especially if you read it out loud. There are 18 stories and each features an illustration of the woman featured.

Okay. I wouldn’t normally START by quoting the book description, but look at this: “In 1897, Britain responded to the killing of a group of officials by razing an empire to the ground.” Like, what?? That’s an amazing intro. Horrifying, but amazing. The kingdom of Benin (now Nigeria) was destroyed by the British and they carried off the Benin Bronzes, which still sit in the British Museum. Author Phillips is also working to shut down the ivory trade and save Africa’s elephants. Great job, sir.

This title refers to the Spiritualist movement and the women who made their names off it. This includes the Fox sisters, who started the movement with the knocking sounds they claimed to hear in their Hydesville, NY home, to Victoria Woodhull, Georgina Weldon, and others. More books about women in the 19th century! All the books.

It’s a food book, it’s a memoir, it’s a “sociological investigation.” There’s a lot going on here. Cho grew up with a white American father and a Korean mother. In Cho’s teens, her mother was diagnosed with schizophrenia. In “her mother’s final years, Grace learned to cook dishes from her parent’s childhood in order to invite the past into the present, and to hold space for her mother’s multiple voices at the table.”

Winner: 2020
I know. I know! What a year+ we have had, and this is a very sad-sounding book. But I have only heard raves about it. Boyer was diagnosed with breast cancer right after her 41st birthday. She was a single mother living paycheck to paycheck. From that experience, she writes this expansive book (in not that many pages) covering “the experience of illness as mediated by digital screens, weaving in ancient Roman dream diarists, cancer hoaxers and fetishists, cancer vloggers, corporate lies, John Donne, pro-pain ‘dolorists,’ the ecological costs of chemotherapy, and the many little murders of capitalism.” Man.

Winner: 2018
Forman is a former public defender who focuses on the disproportionate representation of people of color in our system of mass incarceration. The title refers to how he “seeks to understand the war on crime that began in the 1970s and why it was supported by many African American leaders in the nation’s urban centers.” One of his focuses, which he adds as a layer to the systemic racism that has led to mass incarceration, is classism. I usually don’t point to Goodreads ratings, since they typically sit at an unhelpful 3-3.5, but this has a 4.38 from over 3,000 reviews. Which is pretty impressive.

Winner: 2011
I KNOW, another cancer book. This is from the perspective of a doctor and not a patient, though, and it is a history of cancer rather than someone’s specific experience of it. So maybe read both. Mukherjee starts 4,600 years ago in Egypt, all the way to the 21st century, detailing the history of cancer treatment around the world. This is a modern nonfiction classic.

Winner: 1996
This won the Pulitzer AND the National Book Award. I had literally never heard of it before. Because nonfiction is frequently unsung! Rosenberg travels across Eastern Europe, looking at East Germany, the Czech Republic, and Poland and how their citizens responded to the way communism was managed in their countries.