Category: True Story

Have you done the crafts you bought at the start of quarantine? Because I literally just started on mine. That tiny bookshop won’t build itself. I assume. But who has time for crafts when we’ve got these new BOOKS? Here are your new nonfiction releases for this week:

Mad and Bad: Real Heroines of the Regency by Bea Koch. If you’re at all into the Regency, you know about Byron, the Duke of Wellington, and so forth, but what about the women like “Dido Elizabeth Belle, whose mother was a slave but was raised by her white father’s family in England, Caroline Herschel, who acted as her brother’s assistant as he hunted the heavens for comets, and ended up discovering eight on her own, Anne Lister, who lived on her own terms with her common-law wife,” and more? If you’re interested in learning more about this fascinating period in English history, this acts as a primer on some of the notable women of the period.

 

The Art of Drag by Jake Hall, Sofie Birkin, Helen Li, Jasjyot Singh Hans. Drag is still in the middle of its prime in pop culture, but it’s been around for millennia. This book looks at its history (accompanied by some gorgeous illustrations) and covers everything from mime to Kabuki theatre to Stonewall and the New York ballroom scene. Wanted to learn why all the queens talk about Amanda Lepore? Why Lady Bunny and Wigstock are a thing? Here you go.

 

Who We’re Reading When We’re Reading Murakami by David Karashima. The publisher puts this succinctly: “Thirty years ago, when Haruki Murakami’s works were first being translated, they were part of a series of pocket-size English-learning guides released only in Japan. Today his books can be read in fifty languages and have won prizes and sold millions of copies globally. How did a loner destined for a niche domestic audience become one of the most famous writers alive?” Ever wondered that? Or wondering now that you’ve read that question? David Karashima is here to answer it.

 

You’re the Only One I’ve Told: Stories Behind Abortion by Dr. Meera Shah. This collection contains 17 true stories by people who had abortions, but faced barriers to accessing them. These stories span fifty years, from when Roe v. Wade was decided and abortion was no longer a backroom horror, to now, when people are faced with sometimes insurmountable financial or access barriers to what can be a life-saving procedure. Shah works to humanize abortion and combat the myths about it that persist to this day.

 

That’s it for this week! You can find me on social media @itsalicetime and co-hosting the nonfiction For Real podcast with Kim here at Book Riot. Until next time, enjoy those facts, fellow nerds.

Wow, we are almost 3/4 through 2020 and I haven’t done any kind of “here’s some great releases from the year!” email. Dang. I’m gonna focus on the first half of the year, but some later ones might sneak in. If you didn’t catch these the first time around, here’s your chance!

Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family by Robert Kolker. I mention this because Kim, formerly of this newsletter and still of For Real, read it and LOVED it. It’s about a family with 12 children, half of whom were diagnosed with schizophrenia. “Their story—and samples of their DNA—would prove invaluable to quest to understand and hopefully cure schizophrenia.” This was also an Oprah’s Book Club pick, if that has any sway with you.

 

American Sherlock: Murder, Forensics, and the Birth of American CSI by Kate Winkler Dawson. Not only is it true crime, but it is STILL everywhere on my #bookstagram wanderings. It’s the story of Edward Oscar Heinrich, the American Sherlock Holmes, a crime science investigator who worked in both the field and in the lab. One of his particularly Holmesian feats was finding literally dozens of clues from ONE pair of overalls left at a crime scene. Amazing.

 

Me and White Supremacy: Combat Racism, Change the World, and Become a Good Ancestor by Layla Saad. I can’t believe this only came out this year. Saad’s sold-out-this-summer book “challenges you to do the essential work of unpacking your biases, and helps white people take action and dismantle the privilege within themselves so that you can stop (often unconsciously) inflicting damage on people of color.” This is all about being more aware, learning, and doing better.

 

Uncanny Valley: A Memoir by Anna Wiener. We’ve heard the male story of Silicon Valley for quite some time, so how about another perspective? Wiener moved from a New York job in book publishing (hello!) to tech in San Francisco. This highlights the time when “the tech industry rapidly transformed into a locus of wealth and power rivaling Wall Street” and looks at its changing role from “self-appointed world savior to democracy-endangering liability.” It’s both nostalgia-inducing and relevant!

 

Hood Feminism: Notes from the Women That a Movement Forgot by Mikki Kendall. It’s a story going back to at least the suffragists of the nineteenth century — middle and upper class white women in the women’s rights movement tend to ignore the needs of others as necessary to achieving equality. Or, as Kendall says, mainstream feminists “rarely talk about meeting basic needs as a feminist issue.” I love the description of this book as “a ferocious clarion call to all would-be feminists to live out the true mandate of the movement in thought and in deed.”

 

There are a TON more great books that have come out this year, so I’ll try to do a few more of these in the months to come. If you’ve read any particular great 2020 nonfiction releases, let me know @itsalicetime. You can also find me co-hosting the nonfiction For Real podcast with Kim here at Book Riot every two weeks (subscribe!). Until next time, enjoy those facts, fellow nerds.

Welcome to the end of August! We can’t know what the future holds, but we CAN know what new books are coming out. Here’s a select few of some A+ new releases from the nonfiction world:

Sitting Pretty: The View from My Ordinary, Resilient, Disabled Body by Rebekah Taussig. It’s a memoir in essays! Taussig created the Instagram account @sitting_pretty, which narrates life from “my ordinary, resilient disabled body.” In her memoir, she looks at the disability images she grew up with (Forrest Gump, Quasimodo, Helen Keller), and instead wanted stories that “allowed disability to be complex and ordinary, uncomfortable and fine, painful and fulfilling.” Make the thing you want to be out there in the world! That’s this book.

 

Rising Heart by Aminata Conteh-Biger, with Juliet Rieden. As a child in Sierra Leone, Conteh-Biger was kidnapped, but eventually returned. Still in danger, as a teenager, she was sent on her own to Australia. After a traumatic childbirth experience, she looked at the dangers of childbirth in Sierra Leone, where maternal fatalities are 200x more likely than in Australia. She then set up the Aminata Maternal Foundation, which was established to improve maternal mortality outcomes for women and babies in Sierra Leone.

 

Enchanting Embroidery Designs: Whimsical Animal and Plant Motifs to Stitch by MiW Morita. Crafts! Whimsical ones! If you’re into embroidery, or wanting to get into it, Morita teaches you how to make microbes, trees, sheep, and fun animals.

 

His Truth Is Marching On: John Lewis and the Power of Hope by Jon Meacham. A timely biography of John Lewis, with an afterword by him included. Pulitzer Prize–winning Meacham tells the story of Lewis’s long involvement with nonviolent protest, his teachers, his youthful hope to become a minister, and his lifelong commitment to standing up for the powerless. Lewis and others led the Selma March in 1965, but the work he did stretched long before and long, long after.

 

Superman’s Not Coming: Our National Water Crisis and What We the People Can Do About It by Erin Brokovich. The average American uses nearly one hundred gallons of water each day, for everything from drinking to cooking to bathing. In classic Brokovich style, she reports on unreported cancer clusters, of plastic pollutants in our tap water, and what we can do to hold governments and corporations accountable. In a time when everything seems out of control, she offers small steps that can lead to big change.

 

That’s it for this week! You can find me on social media @itsalicetime and co-hosting the nonfiction For Real podcast with Kim here at Book Riot. Until next time, enjoy those facts, fellow nerds.

We’re sandwiched here between the one hundredth anniversary of the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment (August 18, votes for women!) and the anniversary of it becoming “official” (August 26). So let’s look at some books about women’s suffrage!

Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote, and Insisted on Equality for All by Martha S. Jones. This is out in September, but you can PRE-order it (exciting). For a very, very long time, the story of women getting the vote was Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Seneca Falls and then Susan B. Anthony got arrested and women could vote. If Black women were mentioned at all, it was a passing reference to Sojourner Truth or Ida B. Wells, so I am very excited about this book.

 

The Women’s Hour: The Great Fight to Win the Vote by Elaine Weiss. While Weiss is clearly a Carrie Chapman Catt stan and not so much on the side of Alice Paul, she did a ton of research for this, and it’s a great summary of the final fight in Nashville to pass the Nineteenth. There is so much drama! And so much shady politics. It definitely made me want to take a trip to Nashville, so I guess given our present time, I’ll schedule that for…TBD. Read if you like a good narrative.

 

Amazons, Abolitionists, and Activists: A Graphic History of Women’s Fight for Their Rights by Mikki Kendall and A. D’Amico. I somehow don’t own this yet, and I feel like a reeeal dummy for not. This goes back to the beginning, world history-speaking, and looks at imperialism, suffrage, civil rights, and then women’s rights from the 1960s to now. And it’s all illustrated! It reads like a comic book, so if you want to get in some history without diving into some academic tome, here’s a good option.

Register to vote, and that’s it for this week! You can find me on social media @itsalicetime and co-hosting the nonfiction For Real podcast with Kim here at Book Riot. Until next time, enjoy those facts, fellow nerds.

We’re starting to get smashed with huge release dates due to all the postponed books from the spring, so consider these but a sprinkling of new nonfiction releases. If you’re interested in a more complete list, check out Book Riot Insiders, but between this newsletter and the podcast For Real, I try to catch what look like some of the best and/or weirdest. Here we go:

The Organ Thieves: The Shocking Story of the First Heart Transplant in the Segregated South by Chip Jones. I cannot summarize this any better than the publisher: “In 1968, Bruce Tucker, a black man, went into Virginia’s top research hospital with a head injury, only to have his heart taken out of his body and put into the chest of a white businessman. Now, in The Organ Thieves, Pulitzer Prize–nominated journalist Chip Jones exposes the horrifying inequality surrounding Tucker’s death and how he was used as a human guinea pig without his family’s permission or knowledge.”

 

Always Young and Restless: My Life On and Off America’s #1 Daytime Drama by Melody Thomas Scott. Yeah, like I’m NOT going to include this book. For those not caught up in the heady days of the ’90s soap opera, The Young and the Restless has been number one in the ratings for 28 years. Scott joined the show in 1979 and she is still on it. Soap operas are amazing, do not fight me. She talks about her forty years on the show, as well as her career as a child actor (she was in Hitchcock’s Marnie!). I was a Days of Our Lives lady, but I stan this book.

 

Resist: 35 Profiles of Ordinary People Who Rose Up Against Tyranny and Injustice by Veronica Chambers. John Lewis, Lucretia Mott, Rachel Carson, Dolores Huerta, Nelson Mandela, and more are profiled in this YA collection of activists around the world. Each has a resistance lesson and shows “men and women who resisted tyranny, fought the odds, and stood up to bullies that threatened to harm their communities.” Chambers also has a book out about the suffrage movement for younger readers called Finish the Fight.

 

BACKLIST BUMPS

Making Our Way Home: The Great Migration and the Black American Dream by Blair Imani. This came out back in January, but Morgan Jerkins’s new release Wandering in Strange Lands reminded me of it! It’s an illustrated history of “the Great Migration and its sweeping impact on Black and American culture, from Reconstruction to the rise of hip hop.” It looks at voting rights, domestic terrorism, discrimination, and segregation alongside the flourishing of arts and culture, activism, and civil rights. Check it out!

 

Girl Decoded: A Scientist’s Quest to Reclaim Our Humanity by Bringing Emotional Intelligence to Technology by Rana el Kaliouby. Love a long subtitle. This also came out closer to the beginning of the year, but tells the story of how el Kaliouby came to work on artificial emotional intelligence (Emotion AI). The purpose of this is to “humanize our technology and how we connect with one another.” Which anyone who’s dealt with a misunderstanding due to the lack of tone in text messages knows is SORELY needed.

 

That’s it for this week! You can find me on social media @itsalicetime and co-hosting the nonfiction For Real podcast with Kim here at Book Riot. Until next time, enjoy those facts, fellow nerds.

Did anyone else not have cable growing up and instead watched a lot of PBS, including their late night movies? That’s how I got into classic films. For a Hollywood theme, I tried to pick books with a “behind the scenes” feel across the years, but mostly focusing on the ’30s to the ’70s. *dances offscreen with jazz hands*

Adventures in the Screen Trade by William Goldman. It’s The Princess Bride‘s William Goldman! But also screenwriter of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, which I haven’t seen since I was 12, but 12-year-old Alice would tell you it is GREAT. He also wrote All the President’s Men. Basically he was amazing at screenplays starring Robert Redford. If you’re interested in screenwriting, how it works, what the process is of someone who did it very well, this is it.

 

Stealing the Show: African American Performers and Audiences in 1930s Hollywood by Miriam J. Petty. “Stars” really came into their own in the 1930s. But how did Black actors fare during this time? This book focuses in on five performers, including Academy Award winner Hattie McDaniel, “to reveal the ‘problematic stardom’ and the enduring, interdependent patterns of performance and spectatorship for performers and audiences of color.”

 

The Princess Diarist by Carrie Fisher. I just restarted this one because sometimes you just need Carrie Fisher’s voice in your head, y’know? This is her last book, which came out in 2016, and looks back through the journals she kept during the filming of Star Wars: A New Hope. It’s hilarious, it’s relatable, it’s all the things that Fisher presented herself as to us, her public. And for a classic Hollywood tie-in, there is, as always, mention of her mom, Debbie Reynolds. Love a Debbie Reynolds cameo.

Everything and Nothing: The Dorothy Dandridge Tragedy by Dorothy Dandridge, Earl Conrad. Dandridge, the first Black actor to be nominated for the Best Actress Academy Award, had what ended up being a tragic life. This was primarily due to racism. After her starring role in Carmen Jones and a few other gradually less-starring roles, she had to look for work in nightclubs, struggled with a substance-related disorder, and passed away at the very young age of 43. Check out clips of her in Carmen Jones if you haven’t. Or, you could watch the whole movie (do people still do that?).

That’s it for this week! You can find me on social media @itsalicetime and co-hosting the nonfiction For Real podcast with Kim here at Book Riot. Until next time, enjoy those facts, fellow nerds.

We haven’t checked in on STATS in a while. How’re your 2020 reading stats? If you’ve abandoned them in the abyss otherwise known as 2020 Plans, that makes complete sense. I’ve got some new reads for you! Just in case you’re lookin’.

Iron Empires: Robber Barons, Railroads, and the Making of Modern America by Michael Hiltzik. I don’t know how into nineteenth-century America you are, but if you know anything about it, you know that the railroads were The Thing. Crossin’ the country! Ruining nations of people! And then the robber barons, i.e. Vanderbilt, Morgan, and all those guys, hoarding all the wealth, like smug dragons. Hiltzik talks here about the impact of the railroad and how bananas everything went when/while it was built.

Good for You: Bold Flavors With Benefits by Akhtar Nawab. Ok, these are “100 recipes for gluten-free, dairy-free, vegetarian, and vegan diets.” Wow. Impressive. I have a hard time just trying to incorporate more protein into my diet, and Nawab is like, here’s how to cut it down to the essentials. Each recipe doesn’t cover ALL those bases though, because it includes things like Fish Tacos with Pistachio Mole, Gazpacho with Poached Shrimp, AND Dark Chocolate Almond Butter Cups with Sea Salt. A+.

Leave It As It Is: A Journey Through Theodore Roosevelt’s American Wilderness by David Gessner. Do you miss going outside? Why not read about it (she said, sadly)? Here, Gessner “embarks on a great American road trip guided by Roosevelt’s crusading environmental legacy.” Roosevelt, complicated figure that he was, laid the foundation for many of our national parks and was the first president to create a Federal Bird Reserve. On the trip, Gessner “questions and reimagines Roosevelt’s vision for today.” Which is GREAT, because, as previously stated: complicated.

BACKLIST BUMPS

Caste: The Origins of Our Discontent by Isabel Wilkerson. Ok, this isn’t really “backlist,” but it came out last week and I MISSED IT. In Wilkerson’s next book after The Warmth of Other Suns, she looks at “how America today and throughout its history has been shaped by a hidden caste system, a rigid hierarchy of human rankings.” By looking at America, India, and Nazi Germany, Wilkerson walks you through eight pillars that support caste systems around the world.

 

Amazons, Abolitionists, and Activists: A Graphic History of Women’s Fight for Their Rights by Mikki Kendall and A. D’Amico. This graphic history takes a more zoomed-out approach to the history of women’s rights. Kendall starts in antiquity, moves to slavery, colonialism, and imperialism, and then suffrage, civil rights, and women’s rights from the ’60s to today. It’s easy for women’s rights to be centered around the ballot when there is so much more to it.

 

That’s it for this week. As always, you can find me on social media @itsalicetime and co-hosting the nonfiction For Real podcast with Kim here at Book Riot. Until next time, enjoy those facts, fellow nerds.

Confession: I do not really cook. I’m juuust starting to. But I’ve been getting more and more interested in cookbooks because they seem to be much more of a ~journey~ than they used to be. I grew up with things like 30 Recipes to Achieve That Beach Body and it’s basically like, “drink a lot of aspartame” (remember the ’90s?). Now, cookbooks are like, here is the cook, look how neat they are, here are their beautiful photos, here is how easy this very healthy recipe is to make, maybe there’s some light journaling involved. So appealing.

So here’re come cookbooks!

Plenty by Yotam Ottolenghi. Okay, remember all that stuff I said about how easy something is to make? That’s not the case here. But when I stayed in London for a week (remember travel?), there was an Ottolenghi RIGHT BY my Airbnb and they had amazing food and a line regularly out the door. So this is all vegetarian recipes and has stuff like crusted pumpkin wedges with sour cream, two-potato vindaloo and lemon and goat cheese ravioli. Sure, it has an entire section on eggplants, but I’ll forgive it (p.s. eggplant is gross).

Chetna’s Healthy Indian by Chetna Makan. I love Indian food, but if you order it, it gets super-expensive so quickly! So I’m psyched by the idea of making my own. Especially from a cookbook by a Great British Bake-Off alum. She also has a vegetarian version if you don’t need the chicken/fish sections of this. This has recipes like cumin paneer salad, sweet potato yogurt curry, and chicken seekh kebabs (I do not eat chicken, but these sound really good).

Bean by Bean by Crescent Dragonwagon. Okay. So. My excellent friend and fellow Rioter Jesse recommends this on her 12 of the Best Cookbooks for Quarantine Cooking and Prep list. And sure, it sounds made-up. But it is NOT. And if you want to know the origin of the author’s name as I did, please check out dragonwagon.com. This compendium of bean knowledge highlights concepts like Bean Basics, Cool Beans (these are salads), and Hummus, Where the Heart Is. I am ordering it right now.

I am definitely doing a Cookbooks Part II in the near future, because these DID BUT SCRATCH THE SURFACE. Or did but rip open the bean pod. So. Look forward to that.

As always, you can find me on social media @itsalicetime and co-hosting the nonfiction For Real podcast with Kim here at Book Riot. Until next time, enjoy those facts, fellow nerds.

August! We’re gonna add some backlist bumps here of books that came out near the beginning of 2020. Remember the beginning of 2020? I had an AMC A-List membership. I saw movies in theaters. What an unthinkable thing now. Anyway! Here’s some new books to get into your brain:

The End of Everything (Astrophysically Speaking) by Katie Mack. Don’t you love to put things in perspective? Well, astronomer Katie Mack does. She’s a theoretical astrophysicist who in this book lays out five possible ways the universe could end. Fun! But for reals, this is not going to happen anytime soon and we’ve only had recorded history for like 10,000 years and the universe is like 13.8 billion years old, so…there’s some math for you. Mack walks you through “the Big Crunch; the Heat Death; Vacuum Decay; the Big Rip; and the Bounce.” If you like Space and Staring into the Void, here y’go.

 

A Furious Sky: The Five-Hundred-Year History of America’s Hurricanes by Eric Jay Dolin. I know, these new releases are a series of sunny looks into the future. Or a look at our stormy past! (get it?) Dolin has also written about pirates and whaling, so things on the open sea are his “thing.” This is a history of hurricanes in America going back to the late 1400s, “showing how these tempests frequently helped determine the nation’s course.” I know you weather fans are gonna be real into this.

 

Eliot Ness and the Mad Butcher: Hunting America’s Deadliest Unidentified Serial Killer by Max Allan Collins and A. Brad Schwartz. Do you know about Eliot Ness’s life after The Untouchables? Ohio brought him in to find a serial killer! He did some really bad things while trying to accomplish this goal! The killer was “the Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run,” who also had a grosser name that you can google if you want. Anyway, if you like history and true crime and want to find out what Eliot Ness’s follow-up to catching Capone was, here it is.

 

Wandering in Strange Lands: A Daughter of the Great Migration Reclaims Her Roots by Morgan Jerkins. Get! This! Book! In what’s kind of a sociology/memoir hybrid, Jerkins “recreates her ancestors’ journeys across America, following the migratory routes they took from Georgia and South Carolina to Louisiana, Oklahoma, and California.” It’s SO good and you should add it to your fall reading list. It’s also got that extra satisfaction of being a travel narrative in a time when traveling has become perilous, so you get to take a vicarious journey with her as she meets people and learns about her past and the lives of those who were part of the Great Migration.

 

BACKLIST BUMPS

The Magical Language of Others: A Memoir by E.J. Koh. It’s a mother/daughter book! When Koh was fifteen, her parents returned to South Korea and left her and her brother (who had lived in America for the last ten years) in California. Her mother writes her letters in Korean, which Koh reads as an adult years later. This book deals with “forgiveness, reconciliation, legacy, and intergenerational trauma.” Koh is a poet and Kim and I stan a poet writing nonfiction.

 

Hood Feminism: Notes from the Women That a Movement Forgot by Mikki Kendall. I can’t believe this only came out this year. It feels like it’s already almost a standard read. I’m just gonna quote the copy, because it states it awesomely: “Mainstream feminists rarely talk about meeting basic needs as a feminist issue, argues Mikki Kendall, but food insecurity, access to quality education, safe neighborhoods, a living wage, and medical care are all feminist issues.” Read this!

 

As always, you can find me on social media @itsalicetime and co-hosting the nonfiction For Real podcast with Kim here at Book Riot. Until next time, enjoy those facts, fellow nerds.

Ok, I usually do not read sports stories, because I do not do sports (…that’s the phrase, right), but Kim and I just did an Olympics ep of For Real and it’s got me thinking about how uplifting tales of sportery can be, so let’s look at some!

Proud: My Fight for an Unlikely American Dream by Ibtihaj Muhammad. An Olympics read! Muhammad was the first Muslim American woman to wear a hijab while competing for the United States in the Olympics, and the first Muslim American woman to medal. As “the only woman of color and the only religious minority on Team USA’s saber fencing squad, Ibtihaj had to chart her own path to success and Olympic glory.” I love this cover so hard.

 

Tessa and Scott: Our Journey from Childhood Dream to Gold by Tessa Virtue, Scott Moir. I’m not gonna pretend like there wasn’t a time when I was following three separate Virtue/Moir fan accounts on Instagram. So talented! So cute together! And yet not dating! They seem like they genuinely love hanging out, and they’re equally talented, so this is awesome. Also, another Olympics read!

 

Bloomer Girls: Women Baseball Pioneers by Debra A. Shattuck. It’s like A League of Their Own except not at all. But there’s baseball! This isn’t about a specific women’s baseball team, but about early involvement by women in the nineteenth century. Shattuck “tracks women players who organized baseball clubs for their own enjoyment and found roster spots on men’s teams.” Sports or women’s history nerds, here’s your crossover read.

 

Heart of a Champion: An Autobiography by Michelle Kwan. Michelle Kwaaaaan! This teensy autobiography (shorter than 200 pages) is aimed at middle schoolers and was written in 1998 (can you believe that was more than 20 years ago?). Kwan has a more recent book (2009), but it’s more focused on lifestyle. This came out right around the time she won a silver medal at the ’98 Olympics in Japan and then won the ’98 World Championships. She is an icon, and if you know a middle schooler, maybe get this for them.

 

As always, you can find me on social media @itsalicetime and co-hosting the nonfiction For Real podcast with Kim here at Book Riot. Until next time, enjoy those facts, fellow nerds.