Category: True Story

This. Is. So. Cool. Blain and Kendi have brought together 90 writers, each of whom takes on a five-year period of the 400 years from 1619-2019. Writers explore their time period through “historical essays, short stories, personal vignettes, and fiery polemics. They approach history from various perspectives: through the eyes of towering historical icons or the untold stories of ordinary people; through places, laws, and objects.” This book seriously looks so good. Really excited for it.

Berdis Baldwin, Alberta King, and Louise Little. All grew up among Jim Crow and all “passed their knowledge to their children with the hope of helping them to survive in a society that would deny their humanity from the very beginning.” A celebration of Black motherhood well in time for Mother’s Day and just in time for Black History Month.

The essays in this book cover topics like “how Black Panther has created a shared fantasy for Black audience members—and why this is groundbreaking; what we can learn from Black Panther’s portrayal of a culture virtually untouched by white supremacy; and how Nakia, Shuri, Okoye, and Ramonda—all empowered, intelligent, and assertive women of color—can make a lasting impression on women and girls.” If you’ve never stopped thinking about this movie or if you’re interested in diving in and thinking more about what it means, check this out.

I am currently obsessed with this book. As a journalist, McGarrahan witnessed the prison execution of a man convicted of the murder of two police officers. Years later, she discovered the condemned man might have been innocent. This book is her exhaustive search into what really happened, which takes her across the country from Florida to Washington.

Wiking is the CEO of the Happiness Research Institute in Copenhagen, which is a real thing. “Hygge is about an atmosphere and an experience,” Wiking explains. “It is about being with the people we love. A feeling of home. A feeling that we are safe.” This little book has advice and ideas on how to incorporate this vibe into your life. Get into it (y’know, if you want).

This newsletter endorses a variety of ways to practice self-care. Also I like the leaves on the cover. Wiccan author Murphy-Hiscock covers Green Space Meditation, DIY body butter, how to magically cleanse things and a ritual to release guilt. I actually might get this one, despite not doing anything witchy in my daily life.

Conscious breathing! Mindfulness! How to be present and peaceful when the world around you is chaos. It “contains commentaries and meditations, personal anecdotes and stories from Nhat Hanh’s experiences as a peace activist, teacher, and community leader.” There are so many exercises to incorporate into your life. Exciting.

This “offers radical self-love as the balm to heal the wounds inflicted by [systems of oppression]” and awakening “to our own indoctrinated body shame.” Body shame can take up a LOT of personal energy, and this is a step to counteracting it and being able to spend that energy doing other things. Like playing video games!

Ok, this cover is stunning. Written by the great-granddaughter of Wells, this brief (less than 200 pages) biography is a “visual celebration of Wells’s life, and of the Black experience.” I particularly love this promo line: “In 1862, Ida B. Wells was born enslaved in Holly Springs, Mississippi. In 2020, she won a Pulitzer Prize.” A+.

This is blurbed by Hidden Valley Road author Robert Kolker as “[r]emarkably intimate, fair-minded, and trustworthy reporting,” which as a nonfiction editor, I love to see. Chammah is a journalist for The Marshall Project. Here he looks at “the rise and fall of capital punishment through the eyes of those it touched,” by interviewing lawyers, judges, and death row prisoners.

Anthropologist Grinker “chronicles the progress and setbacks in the struggle against mental-illness stigma” from the 17th century to the 21st. Looking at “cutting-edge science, historical archives, and cross-cultural research in Africa and Asia, Grinker takes readers on an international journey to discover the origins of, and variances in, our cultural response to neurodiversity.” Looks INteresting.

University press book! MacArthur fellow Willis examines over SEVENTY images of Black soldiers in the Civil War and not only dives into the lives of Black Union soldiers, but also includes stories of other African Americans involved with the struggle—from left-behind family members to female spies.

Everyone loves an essay collection. This gathers twelve Didion essays from 1968-2000 that range from the news to fabled William Randolph Hearst property San Simeon to the act of writing. My 2021 thing for this newsletter is going to be pointing out shorter nonfiction, and this clocks in at fewer than 200 pages.

In 2013, Biden’s oldest son Beau was diagnosed with a malignant brain tumor. The title of the book comes from Beau’s request of his father that “no matter what happens, you’re going to be all right.” “For twelve months, while Beau fought for and then lost his life, the vice president balanced the twin imperatives of living up to his responsibilities to his country and his responsibilities to his family. And never far away was the insistent and urgent question of whether he should seek the presidency in 2016.”

Vice President Harris’s 2019 memoir about growing up as the daughter of immigrants in Oakland, CA, becoming a prosecutor, District Attorney for San Francisco, attorney general for the state of California, and senator for California, the latter of which she served from 2017 until January 2021 when she became vice president of the United States (she typed, subduing her all-caps). The promo copy describes it as “a master class in problem solving, in crisis management, and leadership in challenging times,” which feels appropriate.

Susan Rice is the new Director of the Domestic Policy Council and was previously National Security Advisor to President Obama and US Ambassador to the United Nations. This 2019 memoir discusses issues as wide ranging as “Black Hawk Down” in Somalia, the genocide in Rwanda, the East Africa embassy bombings in the late 1990s, Libya, Syria, a secret channel to Iran, the Ebola epidemic, and the opening to Cuba during the Obama years.” So. Quite a lot. Her Goodreads bio also says she serves on the board of Netflix (??), so try piecing those things together.

Nominee for Surgeon General, Murthy previously served in the position from 2014-2017. He founded the nonprofit Doctors for America, was the first surgeon general of Indian descent, and in this 2020 release, he argues that “loneliness is the underpinning to the current crisis in mental wellness and is responsible for the upsurge in suicide, the opioid epidemic, the overuse of psych meds, the over-diagnosing and pathologizing of emotional and psychological struggle.” This came out in April 2020, and 10 months into lockdown, this message feels very “yep, seems right.” Fortunately, he doesn’t only diagnose the problem, he also offers actionable solutions.

The Black Panthers were founded in 1966 in Oakland, California and quickly became a hugely influential group in America. This graphic novel “explores the impact and significance of the Panthers, from their social, educational, and healthcare programs that were designed to uplift the Black community to their battle against police brutality through citizen patrols and frequent clashes with the FBI, which targeted the Party from its outset.”

Elizabeth Blackwell was the first woman in America to receive a medical degree (which she was able to achieve in part because the students voting her into the school thought it was a joke). She and her sister Emily, also a physician, founded the New York Infirmary for Indigent Women and Children, the first hospital staffed entirely by women, and were very interesting figures. Check this out if you’re looking for some new women’s history reads.

Ok, this is awesome. McKinley, a writer and curator, looked at how images of African women were primarily seen from an anthropological perspective or exoticized, and so in this book, she “draws on her extensive collection of historical and contemporary photos to present a visual history spanning a hundred-year arc (1870–1970) of what is among the earliest photography on the continent. These images tell a different story of African women: how deeply cosmopolitan and modern they are in their style; how they were able to reclaim the tools of the colonial oppression that threatened their selfhood and livelihoods.” Awesome.

Once again: fwoof. Patricia Highsmith was a…hm. Lot going on there. Author of Carol (aka The Price of Salt), Strangers on a Train, and The Talented Mr. Ripley, she was an acclaimed writer. But in this new biography, Bradford “considers Highsmith’s bestsellers in the context of her troubled personal life; her alcoholism, licentious sex life, racism, anti-Semitism, misogyny and abundant self-loathing.” He also points out that “her status as an LGBT icon is undermined by the fact that she was excessively cruel and exploitative of her friends and lovers.” If you want to learn more about Highsmith and what on earth her deal was, here’s this new bio.

I continue to be very into the James Baldwin Renaissance we all seem to be living through. Originally written in 1963, a year that I think we can relate to in this upside-down time, it contains two essays: “My Dungeon Shook: Letter to my Nephew on the One Hundredth Anniversary of the Emancipation” and “Down at the Cross: Letter from a Region of My Mind.” It’s a modern classic and at 130 pages, one you can fit into your reading sched.

I really admire when someone can tell a story in the number of pages it should be told. This story’s really neat! But I don’t need a padded-out 350 page book about it. We just straight-up didn’t have longitude at sea figured out for most of human history. You could figure out your position based on the stars (hey there, Polynesian wayfinding), but if you were trying to calculate longitude, couldn’t do it. UNTIL THIS GUY. He invented a way to figure out where you were at sea, which meant you had less of a chance of being completely lost/shipwrecked. This is the story of how he did it.

This book! So short! So good! Such an iconic cover. I read this over my lunch break at a women’s history museum, because they sold it in the gift shop. It’s adapted from Adichie’s TEDx Talk, which was given in 2012. Remember in 2014 when Emma Watson gave a speech in the U.N. and people were like, “Emma Watson said she’s a feminist!!” Because that word was still associated with the scorn that people had been piling on it for years? Adichie saying “We should all be feminists” was pushing all that baggage off it and saying something unusual and extremely impactful. It’s an important read!

When Murakami was training for the New York City marathon, he decided to keep a journal. This resulting book is about “his intertwined obsessions with running and writing, full of vivid recollections and insights, including the eureka moment when he decided to become a writer.” I’m not a runner in the slightest, but this is getting bumped way up in my TBR pile.

What motivates the human tendency to construct Others? Why does the presence of Others make us so afraid? Toni Morrison is here to get into those and other Giant Questions, but in a limited number of pages, because she doesn’t need a lot of fluff and nonsense to make herself understood. This clocks in around 136 pages and seems like an excellent read for 2021.

You know how sometimes you vaguely remember something like talcum powder causes cancer, but you don’t remember where you heard it and have no idea if it’s true? This book is there to give you some solid footing or some solid undercutting of your belief in medical myths. Yasmin has done a pretty good video series on these, and has helped debunk a number of COVID-19 myths this past year. Really looking forward to this one so I can confidently discuss whether we are running out of antibiotics (probably not if it’s in the myth book!).

It’s 1597. You’re a Dutch explorer (just go with it). You’re in the Far Arctic and your ship has been crushed by icebergs. Some people love survival-against-the-odds stories, and if you’re one of those people, you’ll love this story of how William Barents and his crew spent nine months fighting polar bears. It also talks about “survival at twenty degrees below, the degeneration of the human body when it lacks Vitamin C, the history of mutiny, the practice of keel hauling, the art of celestial navigation and the intricacies of repairing masts and building shelters.” Omg it sounds so FACT-filled.

You’ve hopefully seen Amber Ruffin on Late Night with Seth Meyers or her excellent Drunk History episodes. This book, written with her sister Lacey, centers around Lacey’s experiences living as a Black woman in Nebraska. I like how the stories are described as “entertainingly horrifying” and it also references their “laugh-out-loud sisterly banter.” I love sisterly banter! My wife is exTREMEly excited about this book.

I honestly think this is the main example of microhistories that always comes to mind, mainly because it was so weird in 1998 that someone wrote a book all about cod. Did Kurlansky start the trend? PERHAPS. He did also write the one on salt. His theory here seems to be that without cod, people would’ve just sat around not eating, and the Basque people would’ve had nothing to sell. INTERESTING STUFF.

Imagine it. Someone asks you what you’re reading and you say, “Oh, just Brolliology: A History of the Umbrella.” Saying “brolliology” is extremely fun, but also, think of how long in human history we just did not have umbrellas and how extremely annoying the rain must have been. When did that annoyance lessen due to the umbrella’s invention! Find it out here.

Historian Painter looks at the last two thousand years and “not only the invention of race but also the frequent praise of “whiteness” for economic, scientific, and political ends.” This history starts with the ancient Greeks and ends in the twenty-first century. If you want some solid facts about the invention of whiteness, check this out.

Am I adding this because For Real’s Kim liked it? Yes. Kim has good taste. Also, why not take a moment when a good percentage of the workforce is suddenly NOT in an office and see why we ended up in offices in the first place. This is the “fascinating, often funny, and sometimes disturbing anatomy of the white-collar world and how it came to be the way it is—and what it might become.”

This book is so good! Beck looks at “how elitism and racial prejudice has driven the narrative of feminist discourse.” The way I keep talking about it is that it’s made me reeeeally examine my own assumptions about feminism and women’s history and how those were put in place initially. It’s informative, it’s thought-provoking, get into it.

I confess to including this at least partially because it’s published by Pegasus Books, which has an endearing history of publishing nerdy history books. The Battle of Hastings was that pivotal 1066 battle when the Normans booted out the Anglo-Saxons and William the Conqueror became King of England. This looks at who the Normans were, who the Saxons were, and apparently gets reeeeal into battle specifics, so be aware if you’re not into military tactics.

Effa Manley, the first and only woman inducted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame, was the co-owner of the Newark Eagles, who won the Negro League World Series in 1946.
“[J]ust as her Eagles reached their pinnacle, so did calls to integrate baseball, a move that would all but extinguish the Negro Leagues.” This tells her story and the story of the “teams coached by Black managers, cheered on by Black fans, and often run by Black owners.”

I cannot tell you how excited I was to see this title coming out. If you’re like a lot of people in America, you at some point have been anxious that you’re not DOING enough. Price’s book “explores the psychological underpinnings of the ‘laziness lie,’ including its origins from the Puritans and how it has continued to proliferate as digital work tools have blurred the boundaries between work and life. Using in-depth research, Price explains that people today do far more work than nearly any other humans in history yet most of us often still feel we are not doing enough.” Should we all read this? Probably.

The next entry in Prothero’s 25 Discoveries series (previous works include fossils and dinosaurs) shares 25 vignettes concerning those who made discoveries that became important to our understanding of evolution. Seems a good book to dip in and out of, which is always a useful thing to keep on hand.

Look. Some books I put on here for you, some books I put on for me, and some I put on because I assume someone somewhere is interested. But no, delving deep into any subject can be fascinating, and master distiller Arnold travels the world and tells you all about flavor, what farmers are doing, and what terroir is and why it definitely is not the word terror.

You might have heard of the Green Book, but if you haven’t, it was what offered Black American travelers some measure of safety from the 1930s to 1960s. The Green Book listed hotels, restaurants, gas stations, and other businesses that were safe for them. Taylor’s book “shows the history of the Green Book, how we arrived at our present historical moment, and how far we still have to go when it comes to race relations in America.”

In 2016, Pakistan’s first social media celebrity, Qandeel Baloch, was murdered in a suspected honor killing. Journalist Maher tells Baloch’s story and “depicts a society at a crossroads, where women serve as an easy scapegoat for its anxieties and dislocations.”

Historian Chatelain not only covers the history of fast food companies and their relationship with Black communities, but how those companies have historically exploited those communities. It “tells a troubling success story of an industry that blossomed the very moment a freedom movement began to wither.”