Category: True Story

Ok first of all, I love this cover. Now, what’s it about? Wong’s memoir is about “a childhood amid revolutionary times, where boyish adventures and school days mixed with dire poverty and political persecution.” His father, a “patriotic Chinese official” was caught by Mao’s Hundred Flowers Campaign, which was a time when people were encouraged to express their true feelings about the government, and then later hundreds of thousands were sent to prison camps for “re-education.” Wong was one of half a million Freedom Swimmers who swam to Hong Kong to escape.

A Hungarian ghost hunter! A suburban housewife! A possible poltergeist! This story takes place in 1930s London when Alma Fielding started experiencing things flying off the shelves, tortoises appearing in her car, etc. Y’know. Ghost stuff. This is the story of her, ghost hunter Nandor Fodor (fun name), and an imminent war.

Is it possible to talk about Freedom Riders without getting emotional? Freedom Riders were incredibly brave men and women who rode interstate buses into segregated states to “challenge the non-enforcement of the U.S. Supreme Court decisions that ruled that segregated public buses were unconstitutional.” Charles Person was the youngest of the original Freedom Riders, being 18 when they started. The bus he rode was attacked by a mob, with several Riders severely beaten. This is his story.

Like I’m not highlighting this book. In the 1880s, James Vick spent $100,000 a year on advertising, publishing full-color floral guides multiple times a year, and getting rave reviews for his magazine. He employed 150 people and received 3000 letters a day. If you were into flowers and lived in the mid-to-late 19th century, you knew about Vick’s Illustrated Floral Guide.

Reporter Schlossberg relates environmental change and impact to every decision you make. Which can sound overwhelming! But she breaks it down into the categories Technology and the Internet, Food, Fashion, and Fuel, and uses surprisingly (in a good way!) informal, fun language for what can be seen as a stressful topic.

The protests at Standing Rock put a spotlight on Indigenous environmental activism, but it has been going on for decades and decades. This is a history of “Indigenous resistance to government and corporate incursions on their lands and offers new approaches to environmental justice activism and policy.” It connects Native people’s history with the environmental justice movement and looks at opportunities for change in the future.

Journalist Washington examines the impact of environmental racism on Black, Indigenous, and Latinx communities. Released in 2019, this covers the water crisis in Flint, where water has had lead levels high enough to be classified as hazardous waste; forced contraception that has a toxic effect on the pregnant parent; and the way waste products like toxins and heavy metals are disproportionately leeched into communities of color.

This is Kolbert’s newest release after her very successful and Pulitzer Prize–winning The Sixth Extinction. Sticking with her excellent formula, she spends each chapter focusing on a different area, including “biologists who are trying to preserve the world’s rarest fish, which lives in a single tiny pool in the middle of the Mojave; engineers who are turning carbon emissions to stone in Iceland; Australian researchers who are trying to develop a “super coral” that can survive on a hotter globe” and more. I’ve said this a lot with Kolbert, but her work makes me really happy that there is someone to care about everything. Including the tiny Mojave fish!

The Red Nation is a coalition advocating Native liberation. Here they explain their platform and offer a toolkit for how we can unite and, in the next decade, work to avert climate disaster. They describe their work as “a program for Indigenous liberation, life, and land—an affirmation that colonialism and capitalism must be overturned for this planet to be habitable for human and other-than-human relatives to live dignified lives.”

Can you imagine having a life where you have weekly martini meetings at the Ritz? If you’re like me and not supes into alcohol, that would be weekly Shirley Temple meetings at the Ritz, but STILL. The hugely talented Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton met at a workshop and had a kind of up-and-down, friends/rivals/friends arc that involved aforementioned martini meetings. This talks about their friendship, their rivalry, and their literary acclaim. Both Plath and Sexton died by suicide, so be aware going in.

A memoir! Nyamayaro, a former senior adviser at the United Nations and co-founder of HeForShe (a solidarity movement for gender equality), grew up in Zimbabwe and went on to become a world-traveling humanitarian. Throughout the book is the “African concept of Ubuntu – ‘I am because we are'” and her story of creating change in communities around the world. Don’t you love reading about contemporary people’s career trajectories? Maybe that’s a me thing. Anyway, her work is amazing and you should check this out.

Cooper Hewitt was an heiress whose grandfather founded The Cooper Union in NYC. The book begins with the story of her forced sterilization due to the actions of her mother, and then gets into eugenics and how the case against her mother and the medical professionals involved proceeded. The larger picture is how society’s perceptions of women changed in the 1930s and the evolving state of reproductive rights.

People hit each other for money and so sometimes they need a doctor. And Linda Dahl is one of those doctors! She grew up in the Midwest, her parents having immigrated from Syria, and fell in love with boxing while she was a surgical resident. She then rearranged her career to be more in line with her passion, which is very inspiring!

I love a funeral home memoir. Booker started working at a Baltimore funeral home when she was 15, where “along with the sadness, Booker encountered moments of dark humor: brawls between mistresses and widows, and car crashes at McDonald’s with dead bodies in tow.” She also discusses how AIDS and gang violence impacted the Black men in her community and how what started as a summer job impacted her formative years.

Do you know that legend about how if the ravens leave, the Tower of London will fall down? I mean, it’s probably not true, but why chance it? Yeoman Warder Skaife is the Ravenmaster of the Tower, and he tells you all about ravens, the personalities of the particular ones he works with, and what it’s like working at the Tower of London.

I admit to having a lot of curiosity as to what goes on working at a hotel. It can’t be like Hotel Babylon (or can it??). Tomsky started as a “valet parker” (which took me a sec to work out, but it’s literally just someone who parks the cars for the valet service) and then worked in hospitality for ten years. He covers “the unwritten code of the bellhops, the antics that go on in the valet parking garage, the housekeeping department’s dirty little secrets” etc.

Belva Davis is the first African American woman to become a television reporter on the U.S. West Coast! She has won eight Emmys! She began her career with a freelance assignment for Jet and then became a reporter in the 1960s (hence the amazing hairstyle on the cover of the book). “From being verbally and physically attacked while reporting on the 1964 Republican National Convention in San Francisco to witnessing the historic election of Barack Obama in 2008,” she’s seen it all. The foreword author is unfortunate, but chalk that up to the book coming out in 2011.

Remember that Bob’s Burgers episode where they were freaked out because an undercover food critic was reviewing restaurants? That’s Ruth Reichl’s job! She puts on wigs and eats food! Which you can also do from the comfort of your own home, but you might not get paid for it. Her most famous instance of this was doing a double review of renowned restaurant Le Cirque — one review was her in disguise and one from when she went as herself, a New York Times food critic.

Did you know Major League Baseball has a Department of Investigations?? It was created in response to the congressional hearings on steroid usage in baseball. Eduardo Dominguez Jr. was a founding member of the DOI, where they investigated “gambling, age and identity fraud, human trafficking, cover-ups, and more.” Boy. So many jobs out there.

I am interested in almost every book about how Florida is weird. I enjoy the specificity of it. We have 50 states, but THIS one — this one’s got its own thing goin’ on. The twist on this is that it’s an academic press book, but that just means its facts have probably been actually checked (hurray!). Gillespie takes you to “gator pits, rattlesnake rooms, and clothing-optional campgrounds, where he meets eclectic and unconventional Floridians.” I mean, it sounds good already, right? He interviews “storm chasers, Civil War reenactors, cattle ranchers, drag queens, python hunters, and pet smugglers. His conversations delve into serious issues such as addiction, Florida’s racist past, and care options for the state’s LGBTQ senior citizens.” I’m just saying, maybe add this to your Florida books list.

I would say the release of this book is particularly timely due to the murder of Daunte Wright and the trial of George Floyd, but in America, it is perennially relevant. Hattery and Smith say that these individual experiences of police brutality are connected to “the regulation of African American people in many settings, including the public education system and the criminal justice system.” It looks at the school-to-prison pipeline, mass incarceration, and how Black women and trans people are treated. Our global conversations around solutions have been shifting from individual to systemic, and this points out the systemic problem of policing Black bodies.

In 1972, Texaco began extracting oil from Amazonian Ecuador. It left behind “millions of gallons of spilled oil and more than eighteen million gallons of toxic waste.” “What?” you say. Yes. Oil was everywhere, in the water, on the roads, impacting health, and killing people. Fajardo is an Ecuadorian lawyer and activist who worked in the oil fields as a teenager and later became lead counsel for a group of over 30,000 people “who continue to fight for reparations and remediation to this day.”

In the 1880s and ’90s, newspapers were cutthroat and always looking for a new angle. At the same time, women were entering the workforce and gettin’ things done. This was the time of Nellie Bly and her compatriots, who traveled the world, posed as sanatorium residents, and were known as “girl stunt reporters.” Todd looks at their decades of popularity and the impact they had on journalism.

Of course of COURSE this is on here. Obama’s 700+ page memoir is the first in a two-volume set. This volume goes from Obama’s early years through the killing of Osama bin Laden in 2011, so before he was elected for his second term. According to Wikipedia, Obama took the longest of any president writing a memoir since it started being a regular “thing” with Calvin Coolidge. But it’s a massive book, so we get it, Obama. We get it.

Doyle’s previous books include Love Warrior and Carry On, Warrior. Her most recent memoir “is the story of how one woman learned that a responsible mother is not one who slowly dies for her children, but one who shows them how to fully live.” She discusses her divorce, her marriage to Abby Wambach, and their blended family. The book is divided into three sections: Caged, Keys, and Freedom. It’s all about empowerment for women and finding courage. My wife loves this book.

This was on so many antiracism lists last year, so it’s not a huge surprise it was one of the top sellers! Kendi talks about antiracism as “a transformative concept that reorients and reenergizes the conversation about racism” and “points us toward liberating new ways of thinking about ourselves and each other.” He relates how racism creates false hierarchies in society and makes everything actively worse. So we should stop that.

Pulitzer Prize–winning Wilkerson’s new book was a big, big release of last year. Despite America’s proclamation of being based in the notion that all people are created equal, all people are not treated equally. Wilkerson posits that there is a hidden caste system, which can be defined through eight pillars, including divine will and bloodlines. You know. The things people have used for millennia to say why they’re inherently better than other people. This came out last August, which both feels forever ago and “what, only eight months ago?”

This one surprised me, so I looked into it! For those of you in the know, forgive me, but I was shocked to see this has been a NYT bestseller for a full decade, so it made the top nonfiction list for 2020. All the reviews are very either “this book immediately changed my life” or “this book is garbage nonsense!” So sounds like something to arrive at your own opinion about!

In 1982, a Chinese American man named Vincent Chin was beaten to death in a Detroit bar. The two men who killed him were given a $3,000 fine and three years’ probation. This is about the case “that took the Asian American community to the streets in protest, and the groundbreaking civil rights trial that followed.”

Do you remember that Facebook group called like “Disney gave me unrealistic expectations about relationships”? Ok, so this Oxford University Press book (that’s right, it’s acaDEMIC) by social historian Dyhouse is about “the reshaping of women’s lives, loves and dreams since 1950,” the year Disney’s Cinderella came out, and how that changed in the next 60 years (the book ends with 2013’s Frozen). How have women’s lives transformed since 1950? Check this out to get into it.

Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright Hudes writes a coming of age memoir about growing up in a Philadelphia barrio with her Puerto Rican family. Yes, Lin-Manuel Miranda definitely blurbed this book, and he did so with his characteristic enthusiasm, saying, “Her sentences will take your breath away. How lucky we are to have her telling our stories.”

tw: drug use

Canning has been a paramedic for 25 years, and went from seeing those who use drugs as “victims only of their own character flaws” to individuals with different stories and paths. He now fights against their stigmatization and advocates for harm reduction, which includes safe-injection sites and community naloxone. His book includes personal stories, his journey to empathy, and ways we can reduce the severity of the opioid epidemic.

Of course the second science started being the “it” thing, dudes decided to start using it to prove they were awesome. Well, their science was bad and they should feel bad. This book explains why this was all nonsense and what contemporary science is in fact telling us about how things work.

The Lewis chess pieces are awesome. Ninety-three separate pieces carved from walrus ivory, found on a beach in Scotland in the early 1800s. Really distinctive and just so cool to look at. And apparently made by not only a woman in the 12th century, but a woman named “Margret the Adroit.” From Iceland! I’d never heard of this book or of Margret and this looks so interesting.

We’ve got some more nonsense science! Including the Idea That Actual Doctors Believed about how Black women could feel pain less than white women. Because of this, Black women were used as test subjects for procedures like experimental caesarean sections, ovariotomies, and obstetric fistula repairs. In the midst of some actual advancements in medicine, “these doctors were legitimizing, for decades to come, groundless theories related to whiteness and blackness, men and women, and the inferiority of other races or nationalities.”

Love a series-of-profiles book. From Mecca in the 600s to present day Europe and America, Kamaly tells the stories of 21 Muslim women and their impact on society, including “first believer” Khadija, Mughal empress Nur Jahan, and acclaimed architect Zaha Hadid, who “liberated architectural geometry,” which is a pretty cool thing to be said about yourself.

Have you ever lived in a city or area where there’s a university? Things can get expensive! Housing goes way up, things get gentrified, and frequently those on the margins end up paying for other people’s future. Baldwin highlights the ways universities can make cities inequitable and what we can do about it.

If this sounds familiar, it might be because it was on a whole bunch of “books we’re psyched about in 2021” lists. It’s a mix of reporting, research, and memoir, and looks at how “values she and so many other women had learned in girlhood did not prioritize their personal safety, happiness, or freedom, and she set out to reframe those values and beliefs.” So basically how, in girlhood, you’re taught a bunch of lies that you later either have to unlearn or just live with.

Boy, the royal family. Lots going on there. If you’re wondering about the background of the current queen and her close-in-age sister, this biography examines their lives from the angle of their sisterly relationship. As someone who was solely interested in Margaret for the approximately two episodes of The Crown that I made it through, this looks great.

In 1899, there were five times as many post offices in the United States than McDonald’s today. How? Where were they? When did they explode into such high numbers (appx 100,000)? Blevins looks into how the US Post was tied to western expansion by white settlers and how the country as we know it today started to form.

If you’re working remotely during the pandemic, or even did so beforehand, you’re familiar with the challenges. How do you build trust, maintain connections without in-person interactions, and keep a firm work/life balance when your computer and therefore office is always a few feet away? Neeley writes for employees and managers, offering action items (I love an action item) and interactive tools for a better remote work experience for everyone.

History professor Lee tells the story of Asians in America, including Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Hmong (among others) from the 16th century (when people came to what is now California from Manila) to now when Asian Americans are treated as America’s “model minorities.” This was published in 2015, so it goes up to pretty recent events, but just misses the last presidency.

Activist and beloved actor Takei shares the painful story of his family’s time in multiple Japanese internment camps during World War II. Ever since I read Maus, I’ve been a proponent of the graphic novel as memoir/biography, and this is an example of how the genre can be used to illustrate the more visual impressions of childhood. The story is a reminder of an extremely harmful and recent event in our nation’s history that is nevertheless rarely taught in school.

Yu Hua picks ten common Chinese words and, through each one, illustrates something about Chinese history and culture, using anecdotes and facts. The words and phrases — people, leader, reading, writing, lu xun, revolution, disparity, grassroots, copycat, and bamboozle — each reveal something unique about “the Chinese experience over the last several decades.” Yu Hua has written novels and short story collections. This is his only book of essays.

When Koh was fifteen years old, her parents left America (where they had arrived ten years earlier) and went back to South Korea, leaving her and her brother in California. Over the years, her mother writes her letters in Korean, apologizing, “letters Eun Ji cannot fully understand until she finds them years later hidden in a box.” This is a story of “hard-won selfhood and our deep bonds to family, place, and language” told by an acclaimed poet.