Category: True Story

You know how when poets write nonfiction, it’s its own special kind of good? Great, ok, so Ali, who grew up in London, Canada, and the U.S., starts thinking about Jenpeg in Manitoba, which was a community that grew up around the construction of a dam, and where Ali lived for a few years. He goes back to find out if it still exists, and he finds a story of environmental harm suffered by the Pimicikamak community. This looks so good, check it out.

It’s a new Anne Lamott! And one that’s pretty perfect for the for-many one year anniversary of being in quarantine. It’s a rough time, and Lamott asks “How can we recapture the confidence we once had as we stumble through the dark times that seem increasingly bleak?” How inDEED. Tbh I could use an inspirational read right about now, so I’m psyched this is out.

I started this and was like hu-ho, this is smart. Which makes sense, because it turns out McCarthy teaches in the English and African American Studies departments at Harvard. The title is reference to Ta-Nehisi Coates’s case for reparations, but he also covers art, music, literature, and politics in 20 essays. An example of what goes on in this book: “In ‘Back in the Day,’ McCarthy, a black American raised in France, evokes his childhood in Paris through an elegiac account of French rap in the 1990s.” So if that sounds like your jam, get into it.

Aghhh I am so excited about this book! It came out in the UK first a few months ago and I maybe (definitely) ordered a copy from there because I loved Emma Southon’s biography of Agrippina so much. She writes history how I would love everyone to write it: with humor, humanity, and a clear laying out of the facts. The subtitle kind of says it all for this one — she talks about murder in ancient Rome, how it was perceived, what it meant, how it shows up in the surviving texts, etc. If you like funny but solid history books, here you go.

Gbowee, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, organized and led the Liberian Mass Action for Peace, a coalition of both Christian and Muslim women who organized for peace during Liberia’s 14-year civil war and participated in public protest against the president and rebel warlords. TW: domestic and sexual abuse

If you, like I do, read a lot about the UK in the 19th century, you know a lot of people were deported for minor crimes. Where did they go? Well, Tasmania. This book covers the other side of the story of what happened after the women were sentenced, had tin tickets put around their necks, and arrived in a new country for crimes like stealing a bucket of milk.

Empress Dowager Cixi ruled China for decades in the 19th century and, under her leadership, revolutionized the country. She updated industries, brought in railways, electricity, the telegraph and modern weaponry for the military, as well as ending traditions like foot binding. Find out why she’s called “the most important woman in Chinese history.”

In 1976, a military junta took over Argentina and turned the government into a dictatorship that lasted for seven years. This book covers the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo who identified 57 of approximately 500 children who were stolen and illegally adopted during the dictatorship. Their work “also led to the creation of the National Genetic Data Bank, the only bank of its kind in the world, and to Article 8 of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, the ‘right to identity,’ that is now incorporated in the new adoption legislation in Argentina.”

Revolutionary and political anarchist Emma Goldman worked on a magazine called Mother Earth during the Progressive Era. Mother Earth “stirred an unprecedented anarchist awakening, inspiring an antiauthoritarian spirit across social, ethnic, and cultural divides and transforming U.S. radicalism.” I love the list of who they say this book should appeal to: readers interested in early twentieth-century history, transnational radicalism, and cosmopolitan print culture, as well as those interested in anarchism, anti-militarism, labor activism, feminism, and Emma Goldman. I LOVE Emma Goldman and am so psyched there’s another book out about her and the work she contributed to.

SHEEP. Can’t live with ’em. But have to bring them into the home in winter so they stay alive. If you’re familiar with the Bible or most stories from The Ancient Past, you know that sheep are all over those things and have been with us since the early days of human civilization. So what’s their history! How did we use them? What’s up with sheep. All these questions and more can be answered by Follow the Flock, a title that every time I see it gets a song from the musical Guys and Dolls stuck in my head.

Are you feeling perhaps especially exhausted? Doctor/nutritionist Shah has some ideas for you. The part of this book I’m most interested in, aside from the tip to eat more fiber (I’M GONNA) is the “energy booster” facts, because I kind of just eat hummus day in and day out, and it’s possible that is not max’ing out the ol’ energy possibilities. Huzzah for health ideas!

Does this woman on the cover remind anyone else of Ruth Wilson? Anyway, you might have heard of Pan Am, the airline renowned in the ’60s and ’70s and then slowly declining until its end in the early ’90s. Did you know only 3-5% of women applying to be flight attendants got hired? It was extremely competitive! This history gets into why and traces the stories of three women who flew Pan Am during its glory days.

We hear about “crimes and misdemeanors” but what are misdemeanors? Natapoff “reveals the inner workings of a massive petty offense system that produces over 13 million cases each year” and punishes people before they’re convicted, many of them poor and people of color.

This history of cancer treatment and research won the Pulitzer and is on approximately one million lists for best nonfiction. Mukherjee starts in Egypt 4,600 years ago and continues all the way to the 21st century. He also covers the history of hospice and palliative medicine. This one’s massive, but worth it.

Popular culture over the past century has portrayed Native American history as ending in the 1890 massacre at Wounded Knee. Treuer, a member of the Ojibwe nation, shows how “the story of American Indians since the end of the nineteenth century to the present is one of unprecedented resourcefulness and reinvention.”

My friend pointed me to this 2019 release about the impact of environmental racism. Just TWO facts from it: “Nearly two of every five African American homes in Baltimore are plagued by lead-based paint. Almost all of the 37,500 Baltimore children who suffered lead poisoning between 2003 and 2015 were African American.” Get a thorough grounding in the effects of environmental racism and what can be done to remedy it.

This is summarized as “a young woman’s journey to understanding her complicated parents–her mother an Okinawan war bride, her father a Vietnam veteran–and her own, fraught cultural heritage.” I LOVE this cover so much. It’s so pretty. Brina recounts growing up in the United States, her complex relationship with her mother, and her attempt to reckon “with the injustices that reverberate throughout the history of Okinawa and its people.”

We love a good subtitle. Frank “sets out across the infamous Diamond Coast to investigate an illicit trade that supplies a global market.” Because people sneak pigeons into closed down diamond mines and tie diamonds to their feet! There are so many things happening in the world all the time and this is definitely one I did not know about that is just bonkers.

Kim recommended this on the podcast and it sounds truly amazing. Wade “approaches grief as something that is bigger than what’s already happened to us” and says that “[e]ach of us has a moral obligation to attend to our own grief so that we can responsibly engage with others.” She connects this work with systemic oppression and how dealing with our grief can help us be more compassionate and available for other people. Love everything about this.

Do you like tales of TRICKSTERS? Telfer, author of Lady Killer, is apparently making collected tales of ne’er-do-well women her thing, and I am here for it. She splits the stories into themed sections, so you can either pick the section you want to start with and go, or do that good-for-our-times thing of reading an essay, leaving it for a bit, reading another, etc. It’s the true benefit of this sort of book. Aside from teaching you about all kinds of fascinating people.

Miami resident Ariza shows “not only what climate change looks like on the ground today, but also what Miami will look like 100 years from now, and how that future has been shaped by the city’s racist past and present.” It’s a view of Miami you don’t often see, one that talks about rising costs and sea levels. Not to be all about the cover, but I am all about this cover.

A modern nonfiction classic! Orlean goes way, way into the orchid world, focusing on not only the flower, but the people who love it. She wades into the Fakahatchee Strand to see rare orchids, visits orchid enthusiasts, and spends a lot of time with John Laroche, a man arrested for poaching rare orchids. I have literally never looked at orchids the same way after reading this book.

The depictions of the enslavement of people in American history tend to center around states like Georgia, the Carolinas, Virginia, etc. But slavery existed in Florida from the time of Spanish occupation. Rivers also tells “of the hundreds of armed free blacks and runaways among the Seminole, Creek, and Mikasuki Indians on the peninsula.” Bonus points to this for being a university press book.

This is a classic of environmental literature. If you’ve seen the Drunk History about Marjory Stoneman Douglas, then you know about Douglas’s dedication to saving the Everglades. In 1947, she published this book, which drew attention to the Everglades as a stunning ecosystem worth preserving from the onslaught of housing and land redevelopment.

If you want to learn more about India and would like an on-the-ground view, here you go. Stories range from “children playing a cricket match in no-man’s-land, to an elderly man living in complete darkness after sealing off his home from the floodlit border; from a woman who fought to keep a military bunker off of her land, to those living abroad who can no longer find their family history in India.” I’m amazed this is shorter than 400 pages, because there’s so much to encompass here, but she did it. There’s also some truly gorgeous photography included.

Kim talked this up on this week’s episode of For Real! If you listen to her talk about it, you will want to buy this immediately. McGhee is an expert in economic and social policy, and this book explains how we got to such raging inequality: “[t]his is the story of how public goods in this country—from parks and pools to functioning schools—have become private luxuries; of how unions collapsed, wages stagnated, and inequality increased; and of how this country, unique among the world’s advanced economies, has thwarted universal healthcare.” Ahhh I’m so excited about this book! Tell me why things are and what we should do!

Hello, I am in love with this cover. This is a women’s history/women friendship book! Art Nouveau dancer Loie Fuller used radium (I know) in her performances, and through that, became friends with Marie Curie. This is about that friendship, the Art Nouveau movement, and Paris at the turn of the century.

Of course, of COURSE I have to start with this one. Hosts of the Call Your Girlfriend podcast write about the “Big Friendship” that has been part of their lives for the last decade. “They have weathered life-threatening health scares, getting fired from their dream jobs, and one unfortunate Thanksgiving dinner eaten in a car in a parking lot in Rancho Cucamonga.” They interview others about their deep friendships and find common themes, like choosing to continue to be there for each other time after time. YAY FRIENDSHIP.

Haha this title hits me right in the feels (do people still say that??) every time. It’s such a THING. Like, think about people in the distant future where violence against women is somehow not a thing seeing that and being like, oh wow, they liked to text each other back in the day. And then you have to add in all the CONTEXT about it meaning “I care about you and what happens to you and making sure you get home okay.” Anyway! This is a book about friendship between women and why it is great.

The description for this opens with “Women in Victorian England wore jewelry made from each other’s hair and wrote poems celebrating decades of friendship.” I mean. Do you need anything else? Okay, it also talks about Victorian sexual relationships between women, as well as longterm “partnerships described as marriages.” This one’s a bit more academic, so be forewarned, but also — get into it.

I picked this one because of this VICE article by Tarisai Ngangura entitled “‘In Search of The Color Purple’ and Why Black Women Look For Each Other,” which says “[i]n going back to rediscover The Color Purple, Tillet gives readers a look into the thoughts of Black women of that era who embraced the book as a personal and public statement of their most intimate desires and pains.” It’s intergenerational, artistic friendship. If that makes sense. This book also JUST came out last month, so #2021NewRead.

Keeler is an activist of Dineh and Yankton Dakota heritage who co-founded Eradicating Offensive Native Mascotry, which launched and trended the hashtag #NotYourMascot. 2016 saw the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe’s protest against an oil pipeline in North Dakota and the armed takeover of Oregon’s Malheur Wildlife Refuge led by the Bundy family. Keeler “examines these episodes as two sides of the same story that created America and its deep–rooted cultural conflicts.”

A true crime book about the 1910 murder of 10-year-old Marie Smith, the dawn of modern criminal detection, and the launch of the NAACP. Tresniowski tells the story of Smith’s murder in New Jersey and the attempt to tie the crime to an innocent Black man, making this the third legal case ever handled by the NAACP. This one’s recommended by Kim of the For Real podcast!

A “study of the intersections between Jewish and Latin American culture,” Lomnitz’s family memoir goes back to his grandparents’ immigration to South America as Jewish emigrants, and “the almost negligible attention and esteem that South America holds in US public opinion.” Lomnitz is an anthropologist and historian who was born in Chile and currently teaches at Columbia University.

A handbook for the youth climate movement! I love an anthology, and this is a collection of pieces on the climate justice movement using a “feminist, indigenous, antiracist, internationalist” lens. If you’re interested in the Green New Deal or in learning more about it, this could be an easy primer or way to hear new voices.

Activist and lawyer Pauli Murray was the first African American to earn a law degree from Yale (1965!), worked with Betty Friedan, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and argued that “the same reasons used to condemn race discrimination could be used to battle gender discrimination.” I love legal arguments so much (evidence! reason!) and Murray was all about them.

I also love an anthology! This collection comprises pieces from forty-nine writers, ranging from “Sojourner Truth, Hannah Crafts, and Harriet Jacobs, as well as lesser-known writers like Ella Sheppard, who offers a firsthand account of life in the world-famous Fisk Jubilee Singers.” The subjects are wide-ranging, but include nineteenth-century social issues such as abolition, women’s suffrage, temperance, and the ever-relevant civil rights.

We don’t just cover adult nonfiction here! Okay, I mostly do. This focuses on 40 Black women who changed the world, including Phillis Wheatley, Bessie Coleman, and Dr. Mae Jemison. Each profile includes an excellent portrait and a brief biography. I would have loved this book when I was a kid and I love it now.

Davis does something super cool here and “demonstrates how the roots of the blues extend beyond a musical tradition to serve as a consciousness-raising vehicle for American social memory.” She does this by looking at three extremely influential blues singers through a feminist lens and providing “the historical, social, and political contexts” you need to interpret their music.