Category: True Story

Happy New Release Day! Which was technically yesterday, but we’re talking about them today, as we do every Wednesday! I’m extremely excited about the number of woman-written nonfiction titles coming out this week, so let’s look at some:

Troop 6000: The Girl Scout Troop That Began in a Shelter and Inspired the World by Nikita Stewart. I love a troop story! Troop Beverly Hills, Troop Zero, and now we’ve got Troop 6000. This is the story of the “Girl Scout program specially designed to serve girls in the New York City Shelter System.” A Girl Scout mother and her five children had their rental home sold out from under them and ended up in a shelter. She volunteered to start a chapter and Troop 6000 has now served over 700 members. People and the things they do are sometimes amazing.

 

No, You Shut Up: Speaking Truth to Power and Reclaiming America by Symone D. Sanders. If you’re looking to find your voice, here y’go. Sanders says that “change doesn’t just happen at the ballot box. We need people fighting oppression, injustice, and inequality—in the workplace, on the cultural battlefield, in government, in every corner of the world.” Here she shares her personal stories and the stories of other changemakers to help inspire you to take action and speak up.

 

Brown Album: Essays on Exile and Identity by Porochista Khakpour. If you’ve been waiting for Khakpour’s latest after 2018’s Sick: A Memoir, here you GO. Here she writes about her family’s immigration to the United States in the wake of the Iranian Revolution, trying to negotiate “Tehrangeles” while also trying to assimilate into her new country, and post-9/11 and post-2016 life for an Iranian-American.

 

 

Weird But Normal: Essays by Mia Mercado. Racial identity! Gender roles! Workplace dynamics! Beauty standards! Don’t you love books that tell you that thing you thought only you dealt with / were embarrassed by is in fact common to many people? Add in essay titles like “Depression Isn’t a Competition but, Like, Why Aren’t I Winning?” and “Bath & Body Works Is the Suburban Nonsense I Crave” and you’ve got a new release I am very excited about.

 

America’s First Female Serial Killer: Jane Toppan and the Making of a Monster by Mary Kay McBrayer. We haven’t done a true crime new release in a while! And the author writes for Book Riot! What unexpected synergy. Ok, so in 1902, Jane Toppan, aka Jolly Jane, confessed to 31 murders, most if not all of which were in Massachusetts. This biography of her is for people “who are fascinated by how serial killers are made.” And by a woman writing about women instead of Harold Schechter for once.

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

Or horse boy! Or anyone who loves horses! But I love the concept of horse girls, because almost everyone either knows one or was one. So identifiable. So real. The Preakness Stakes was scheduled for this month, and if you used to be a horse person, you know that that is one of the races in the Triple Crown (the other two are the Kentucky Derby and the Belmont Stakes). Horses like Man o’ War and Secretariat won the Triple Crown, and those races are a Big Deal. The Preakness has been delayed this year, but that doesn’t mean we can’t read some horsey nonfiction in honor of it!

Seabiscuit: An American Legend by Laura Hillenbrand. Ol’ Seabiscuit! Ok, I did not know anything about Seabiscuit, but Hillenbrand wrote Unbroken, so she’s really into like, tough survival tales and perseverance, etc. He was a STAR of the 1930s, though described as the “crooked-legged racehorse with the sad tail.” It’s an underdog story, but a horse. An underhorse story. Honestly, with the way things are now, even seeing a picture of Seabiscuit makes me tear up, so I’m pretty sure I’d sob through this one. Horses!

Black Winning Jockeys in the Kentucky Derby by James Robert Saunders and Monica Renae Saunders. The first black jockey won the Kentucky Derby at its inauguration in 1875. Between 1875 and 1902, black jockeys won the Derby sixteen times. This looks at why that trend stopped (the answer is racism) and the early and immense success of black men in the field of horse racing. Note: the first woman jockey rode in the Derby in 1970, and the first black woman jockey in the Derby rode in the Derby never.

Wild Ride: The Rise and Tragic Fall of Calumet Farm, Inc., America’s Premier Racing Dynasty by Ann Hagedorn Auerbach. I love a rise and tragic fall! Drama-wise. When it’s deserved. A favorite Goodreads review of this is “The subtitle of this book should be ‘Greedy, selfish people excel at destruction.'” This story also involves the “Bluegrass Bubble,” which I also love as a concept. Basically the story sounds like, rich people try to get richer through horses and then fail at it. And that’s why you never misuse a horse.

The Eighty-Dollar Champion: Snowman, the Horse That Inspired a Nation by Elizabeth Letts. ANOTHER UNDERHORSE STORY. Snowman was a plow horse that his rider bought for $80. He went on to become an incredibly beloved show jumper and oh no, I’m gonna cry again. If you think Snowman doesn’t have his own entry in Horse Stars Hall of Fame, you would be MISTAKEN (they call his story nags-to-riches!!). All the feelings for Snowman.

 

The Compton Cowboys: The New Generation of Cowboys in America’s Urban Heartland by Walter Thompson-Hernández. We’ve definitely talked about this on For Real, but I want to talk about urban cowboys (and cowgirls!) again. The Cowboys have their roots in a program from 1988 called the Compton Jr. Posse. The Compton Cowboys became friends in that program. Their motto is “the streets raised us, the horses saved us” and oh no, I’m gonna cry again because humanity’s precious bond with horses, oh no my feelings. Part of their work is to combat negative stereotypes about African Americans and the city of Compton.

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

Can you believe it’s May? Super weird. Release dates for books are shifting at a rapid pace, so if any books you were hoping for now have been pushed ahead, remember you can always pre-order. That’s fun because then you forget about it and months later you get a thing you wanted to read. Win-win (since pre-orders also help authors). And so! Here’re your new nonfiction release highlights for the week:

50 Drag Queens Who Changed the World by Dan Jones. Okay, sure, you know RuPaul and maybe Dame Edna or even Alaska and Latrice Royale, but do you know Amrou Al-Kadhi or Victoria Sin or historical queen Princess Seraphina? This guide is super colorful and gives you not just bios of each queen, but also fun illustrations. I love overview books like this because they can serve as a jumping off point to learn more about the people who stand out to you.

Elephants: Birth, Life, and Death in the World of Giants by Hannah Mumby. Who doesn’t love elephants? Probably the people who hunt them. Stop doing that. If you want to learn about elephant society (you should), Dr. Mumby has been studying it for over ten years and is here to share her findings. She “explains how elephants communicate with one another and demonstrates the connection between memory and trauma—how it affects individual elephants and their interactions with others in their herd.” Amazing.

Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World by Tyson Yunkaporta. This is being pitched as akin to Sapiens, but bringing “a crucial Indigenous perspective to historical and cultural issues of history, education, money, power, and sustainability.” Yunkaporta is a member of the Apalech Clan in Far North Queensland, Australia. The title Sand Talk is the Aboriginal custom of drawing images on the ground to convey knowledge. This looks awesome.

 

The Museum of Whales You Will Never See and Other Excursions to Iceland’s Most Unusual Museums by A. Kendra Greene. I LOVE A MUSEUM. The more specific the better. Iceland has one museum/public collection for every ten people, so why have we all not gone there?? Fortunately, we can stave off our impatience with this. Greene highlights some of the 265 museums and collections, including the Icelandic Phallological Museum, and the Museum of Icelandic Sorcery and Witchcraft. Yesssss.

BACKLIST BONUS

For the backlist, I want to focus on Aboriginal books! Not enough of those. Let’s look at two:

Growing Up Aboriginal in Australia ed. by Anita Heiss. Love an anthology! This one’s from 2018 and highlights 51 stories from Aboriginal people in Australia. They function as snapshots, memoirs, and, I’m gonna say it, poetic MUSings. If you live in Australia or not, these lives are worth hearing about and learning from.

 

 

Too Afraid to Cry: Memoir of a Stolen Childhood by Ali Cobby Eckermann. Eckermann is one of the Stolen Generations (also known as the Stolen Children): Australian Aboriginal people removed from their families by the Australian federal and state government agencies and church missions. In her memoir, she discusses the “devastating effects of racist policies that tore apart Indigenous Australian communities” as well as her own reconciliation with her birth family.

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

I’ve been catching up on every single season of RuPaul’s Drag Race in its many iterations, and the one I just finished had a very good MAGIC theme, so let’s talk about books about magic. Or magick if you want to be fun and also write things like folk songstress Loreena McKennitt.

Grimoires: A History of Magic Books by Owen Davies. I personally do not do anything with magic, possibly because I saw too many episodes of MTV’s Fear back in 2000, but I am very interested in the HISTORY of it. This looks at magic books ranging from centuries ago in the Middle East to modern America. Grimoires are a sort of how-to manual and people have loved them for forever (because magic!). Davies also highlights the “role they have played in the spread of Christianity, the growth of literacy, and the influence of western traditions from colonial times to the present.” Cool stuff.

Jambalaya: The Natural Woman’s Book of Personal Charms and Practical Rituals by Luisah Teish. This first came out in 1985 and combines memoir with folk magic and spiritual practices. In other words: it’s got it all. She travels from New Orleans to San Francisco, offering charms and rituals in every chapter. It seems to primarily focus on the ’60s and ’70s, which is honestly perfect, because those are the decades I want to hear about re San Francisco.

 

Cottage Witchery: Natural Magick for Hearth and Home by Ellen Dugan. Well this is precious. No condescension meant to Ellen Dugan; anything with “cottage” in it is going to inspire that feeling in me (side note: if I had a cottage, I would name it Nutmeg Cottage and you’d all be invited for the weekend). This is much more for the earthy-minded, as Dugan shows you “how to bring the beauty of nature and its magickal energies indoors” (magick!).

Enchantments A Modern Witch’s Guide to Self-Possession by Mya Spalter. It is a pun of a title! Self-possession here is a focus on owning your life and your space. Spalter works at NYC’s “oldest occult shop,” Enchantments. Here she talks altars, money magic, the power of colors (here for it), cleaning your room and why you should do it in more than just a “change your sheets omg it’s been weeks” way, and more. Sure it’s dedicated “To the Moon” but the chapter on Magical Collaboration is sub-headed “Psychic Friend Networks,” so you’re probably gonna want to check it out.

Recommended article for the week: check out Bustle’s For Witches of Color, Books About the Occult Are Scarce by Evan Nicole Brown.

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

It’s May! We’re a third through the year and so many new books to go. I hope you’re finding awesome new ways to get your books at home. With that in mind, here are some brand new nonfiction reads out in the world:

The Holy Shroud: A Brilliant Hoax in the Time of the Black Death by Gary Vikan. The Shroud of Turin! If you don’t know what it is, you’ve probably at least heard of it. Vikan is a medieval art scholar, and he’s here to tell you all about how this supposed burial shroud of Jesus is in fact a big piece of cloth at one point wrapped around a medieval Frenchman. How did the hoaxer (if you will) fool everyone for so long? And will you AGREE with Vikan? So many questions. This looks great.

 

Scandinavian Noir: In Pursuit of a Mystery by Wendy Lesser. Scandinavian mystery fiction. So kind of still hot right now. The book walks you through some of the bigger Nordic crime hits through the lens of her own intense fandom of them. This culminates in a travelogue as she goes on a journey to Norway, Sweden, and Denmark to visit the sites of her favorite genre. If you love Nordic mysteries or want to learn more about a new genre, bam, here you go.

 

On Account of Race: The Supreme Court, White Supremacy, and the Ravaging of African American Voting Rights by Lawrence Goldstone. We know the voting rights protected by the Fourteenth Amendment have been gutted, but starting when? Constitutional law historian Goldstone says 1876, carrying up to the present day. Of the more than “500,000 African-Americans who had registered to vote across the South, the vast majority former slaves, by 1906, less than ten percent remained.” To learn about this long history, check this out.

Daughter of the Boycott: Carrying on a Montgomery Family’s Civil Rights Legacy by Karen Gray Houston. A story of family and the Montgomery bus boycott and fight for equal rights in the 1950s and ’60s. Gray Houston focuses on this time through her father, Thomas Gray. His involvement in the civil rights movement began after a childhood friend was shot by a white police officer after the friend tried to board a bus. Gray Houston tells the story of her family in this time and how the boycott moved the country closer to equality.

It’s About Damn Time: How to Turn Being Underestimated into Your Greatest Advantage by Arlan Hamilton with Rachel L. Nelson. Do you know who blurbed this book? Stacey ABRAMS. In 2015, Arlan Hamilton was homeless and sleeping in an airport. She wanted to break into the rich white male space of venture capitalism as a queer woman of color, and she DID it. She “shares the hard-won wisdom she’s picked up on her remarkable journey from food-stamp recipient to venture capitalist, with lessons like ‘The Best Music Comes from the Worst Breakups,’ ‘Let Someone Shorter Stand in Front of You.’ As a 5’2” individual, I particularly support that last one. This looks swell.

Stay inside if you can, nonfictionites. Wear a mask, wash your hands, wipe down your phone, and read read read (while also taking a break to prevent eye strain!). As always, you can find me on Twitter @itsalicetime and co-hosting the For Real podcast with Kim here at Book Riot. Until next time! Enjoy those facts, fellow nerds.

I’ve been reading more and more mysteries while stuck in quarantine, so we’re focusing on true crime reads today! Murder gets a lot of space in the true crime genre, but I included a couple non-murder options for those (like my fiancée) who would prefer to spend their free time NOT reading about one of the worst things that can happen.

The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper by Hallie Rubenhold. If you listen to For Real, you might’ve heard us talking this up. If you’re mad about the amount of focus usually given to the perpetrator of the Whitechapel murders, Rubenhold is with you. She tells the stories of the women whose lives were taken away, she rights past injustices done to their narratives, and all around does a great job changing the perspective of this infamous true crime story.

 

Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption by Bryan Stevenson. Recently made into a film! Stevenson founded the Equal Justice Initiative to defend “the poor, the wrongly condemned, and women and children trapped in the farthest reaches of our criminal justice system.” He meets Walter McMillian, accused of a murder he insists he did not commit. If you’re looking for a story of hope and justice and people fighting for what’s right, then here you go.

 

The Skies Belong to Us: Love and Terror in the Golden Age of Hijacking by Brendan I. Koerner. You know how specific types of crimes can come in waves? Like people see other people doing it and then THEY do it? Well the ’60s and early ’70s was the age of airplane hijacking. As in they were happening once a week. This book tells the story of a couple that “pulled off the longest-distance hijacking in American history” and what finally ended this weirdly popular crime in 1973.

 

The Spy Who Couldn’t Spell: A Dyslexic Traitor, an Unbreakable Code, and the FBI’s Hunt for America’s Stolen Secrets by Yudhijit Bhattacharjee. In 2000, the FBI received a package. It was “a series of coded letters from an anonymous sender to the Libyan consulate, offering to sell classified United States intelligence.” What made the code much harder to crack was the sender had dyslexia. This is is billed as a “true-life spy thriller,” which is excellent.

 

Seven Fallen Feathers: Racism, Death, and Hard Truths in a Northern City by Tanya Talaga. We do not talk about the high rate of crime perpetrated against Indigenous people enough. Talaga is an Anishinaabe Canadian journalist and here investigates the deaths of seven Indigenous high school students that spanned 2000 – 2011 in Thunder Bay, Ontario. She tells the story of Thunder Bay, how Canada has not supported Indigenous communities, and what Indigenous youth in Canada face today.

 

Conan Doyle for the Defense: The True Story of a Sensational British Murder, a Quest for Justice, and the World’s Most Famous Detective Writer by Margalit Fox. I love a colorful cover with a long subtitle. In 1908, a wealthy Scottish woman was murdered inside her home. Police blamed a Jewish immigrant and he was convicted and sent to prison. Conan Doyle of Sherlock Holmes fame was OUTraged and spent years working to exonerate the convicted man. Another read for fans of JUSTICE.

Stay inside if you can, nonfictionites. Wear a mask, wash your hands, wipe down your phone, and read read read (while also taking a break to prevent eye strain!). As always, you can find me on Twitter @itsalicetime and co-hosting the For Real podcast with Kim here at Book Riot. Until next time! Enjoy those facts, fellow nerds.

How are you DOING, nonfictionite? I hope you’re taking care of yourself. I personally will be here to tell you about new and backlist nonfiction twice a week for the foreseeable future, so see that as a steady guidepost if nothing else. And also a way to learn about new nonfiction, which is still being published and we should uplift these authors, so HERE WE GO:

The Heart: Frida Kahlo in Paris by Marc Petitjean. This cover is so beautiful, I want to just stare at it for a while. Ok, so this book’s deal is: it’s the 1930s! Surrealism is king! Or at least very popular. Frida Kahlo is going to NYC for her first solo show, when her husband with impeccable timing tells her he wants a divorce and ALSO has been sleeping with her sister. Wow. Just wow. So she did what anyone in that situation should get to do: traveled to Paris. To read about what she did there, check out this book.

We Served the People: My Mother’s Stories by Emei Burell. Illustrated stories passed from mother to daughter about China’s Cultural Revolution! This movement lasted from 1966 – 1976 and shaped a generation in China. Burell’s mother tells her about her time driving a truck in the “Up to the Mountains and Down to the Countryside movement,” offering a vantage point not frequently seen.

 

Twitter: A Biography by Jean Burgess, Nancy K. Baym. Are you a Twitter nerd? These academics sure are. This scant 144 page biography tells the story of Twitter’s evolution “from its origins as a personal messaging service to its transformation into one of the most globally influential social media platforms, where history and culture is not only recorded but written in real time.”

 

 

What We Carry: A Memoir by Maya Shanbhag Lang. The story of Maya and her mother. Her mom was a doctor who immigrated to America from India, and they were close for all of Maya’s life until Maya was becoming a mother herself and her mom suddenly withdrew. Maya soon discovers her mother is dealing with Alzheimer’s. The stories she tells become a catalyst for Maya to reexamine their relationship, her mother’s past and “the weight we shoulder as women.”

 

Earth Almanac: A Year of Witnessing the Wild from the Call of the Loon to the Journey of the Gray Whale by Ted Williams. Look at this DARLING BOOK. I’ve been dipping into this at night when I need something calming. Williams has a column in Audubon, and he writes vignettes about animals and the fascinating little things they do. Did you know skunk cabbage has been prescribed for whooping cough? And that coatmundis are VERY cute?

Stay inside if you can, nonfictionites. Wash your hands, wipe down your phone, and read read read (while also taking a break to prevent eye strain!). As always, you can find me on Twitter @itsalicetime and co-hosting the For Real podcast with Kim here at Book Riot. Until next time! Enjoy those facts, fellow nerds.

Elizabeth! Mary! Some Katherines and Annes! A couple Janes! I glanced around my bookshelves for what our nonfiction theme could be this week, and I saw Wolf Hall, which I have still not read but definitely own. Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall focuses on Tudor pragmatist and moneyman Thomas Cromwell, who we are ignoring in this newsletter, but that book is very acclaimed, so maybe look into it. The Tudor era is incredibly popular because of its DRAMA, so there are appx. 1 million books about it. Here’s a brief list to get you started or to dive further into this fascinating time that lasted from 1485 to 1603!:

Blackamoores: Africans in Tudor England, their Presence, Status and Origins by Onyeka. We need to stop whitewashing history, y’all. People have always traveled to other towns, countries, and continents, and ignoring that in our historical dramas gives a false impression of reality. Onyeka’s work, published in 2013, focuses on Africans in four cities in Tudor England, how they were discussed by records of the time, and the various occupations they held, including one man employed by Elizabeth I’s chief adviser Robert Cecil.

Mary Queen of Scots: A Study in Failure by Jenny Wormald. This is my favorite title of all time because I hate Mary, Queen of Scots. Mary, Queen of Scots was a prime example of all the things not to do as queen. She also probably smelled bad (jk…they all probably smelled bad). Wormald examines the reasons the Scottish queen ended up imprisoned for decades and then executed. If you’re interested in something more rhapsodic, I suggest anything by the German Romantics.

 

Six Wives of Henry VIII by Alison Weir. I will never forget the DISDAIN my 16th c. English history professor had for Alison Weir, but I devoured her books in high school, so there’s no way I’m not recommending one here. If you’ve gotten into the musical SIX, definitely read this, and if you haven’t, go listen to SIX and then read this. You’ll get relatively brief bios of each of the women who had to marry Henry VIII, and a nice overview of some of the key Tudor players during Henry’s reign.

 

Elizabeth & Leicester: Power, Passion, Politics by Sarah Gristwood. THE LOVE STORY OF TUDOR TIMES. He lent her money when she was an almost-broke youth. She died with his last letter in a box next to her bed. I. cannot. with. these. two. If you want to read the story of Elizabeth I and Robert Dudley, here’s a more recent dual bio.

 

 

Black Africans in the British Imagination: English Narratives of the Early Atlantic World by Cassander L. Smith. Lotsa colonizing happening by the British and Spanish in the 16th century. Smith looks at how British writers “focused on encounters with Black Africans throughout the Atlantic world, attempting to use these points of contact to articulate and defend England’s global ambitions.” Expand your view of the Tudor world, for it was both vast and complicated.

Stay inside if you can, nonfictionites. Wash your hands, Clorox-wipe your phone, and read read read (while also taking a break to prevent eye strain!). As always, you can find me on Twitter @itsalicetime and co-hosting the For Real podcast with Kim here at Book Riot. Until next time! Enjoy those facts, fellow nerds.

I hope you’re excited about new releases, ’cause I got a bunch. This week we have James Baldwin, we have astrology, we have pathogens, we have Val Kilmer because why not. ENJOY:

Everything Is Under Control: A Memoir With Recipes by Phyllis Grant. Ok, you’re maybe asking, who is Phyllis Grant? Well, as might be guessed from its subtitle, she is a CHEF. And a former dancer. And a food writer. Which leads us to this book! It reads like a series of snapshots, which is fun and different. She talks about her time as a dancer at Juilliard, her time cooking in NYC restaurants, meeting her husband, and moving to Berkeley, CA. It’s a quick appx. 200 page read. With recipes! Have you heard of lamb popsicles, because I hadn’t.

Begin Again: James Baldwin’s America and Its Urgent Lessons for Our Own by Eddie S. Glaude Jr. The author starts with the idea that we are living in the “aftertimes,” meaning post-the beginning of the Black Lives Matter movement and post-Obama. He looks to the brilliant James Baldwin and his similar time for answers, saying that “from that journey, Baldwin emerged with a sense of renewed purpose about the necessity of pushing forward in the face of disillusionment and despair.”

 

Good Boy: My Life in Seven Dogs by Jennifer Finney Boylan. A dog book! Who doesn’t love a dog book? Ok, I don’t, because the dog eventually dies, and I cannot, BUT: Finney Boylan, author of She’s Not There: A Life in Two Genders, as well as many others, is an excellent writer and I am promoting her gay dog book. Here she pairs “seven crucial moments of growth and transformation” with seven dogs. And look at that good boy on the cover. What a good boy.

 

Biography of Resistance: The Epic Battle Between People and Pathogens by Muhammad H. Zaman. If I wrote a book about the epic battle between people and pathogens, I’d feel like I really hit the nail on the head right about now. This focuses on superbugs, which most people have heard of in that vague “don’t use too much hand sanitizer because #superbugs” way. Zaman is here to give you FACTS and what we can do about it.

 

I’m Your Huckleberry: A Memoir by Val Kilmer. Confession: I’ve never seen Tombstone, but people seem so delighted by the quote that is also this book’s title, that I felt like I had to include it. I just hope he talks about his real starring role: Moses in the banger soundtrack film The Prince of Egypt. Avoid the cares of this world and learn more about Val Kilmer than you ever thought you’d know! Available now wherever books are sold.

 

Madame Clairevoyant’s Guide to the Stars: Astrology, Our Icons, and Our Selves by Claire Comstock-Gay. It’s a breakdown of the zodiac signs! If there’s one thing I love, it’s correlating someone’s sign to their personality. And here’s a beautifully-covered book that helps with that. She posits that astrology signs are “more like mirrors that show us who we are, that give us an understanding of how to be and how to move through the world; how certain people do it differently, and what we can learn by studying them.” A+.

Missed Translations: Meeting the Immigrant Parents Who Raised Me by Sopan Deb. Deb, a writer for the New York Times and a standup comedian, opens the book talking about the disconnect he felt between his standup, which should lie in truth, and the reality of his family, which was fragmented. He goes on a journey to connect with his parents, learn who they are, and see if he can build bridges where none were before.

 

The Women With Silver Wings: The Inspiring True Story of the Women Airforce Service Pilots of World War II by Katherine Sharp Landdeck. In the grand tradition of “the story of ladies doing hard things you wouldn’t expect them to do given the times in which they lived” comes the story of women Air Force pilots in World War II. Side note: Mildred Hemmons Carter, who graduated from Tuskegee at 19, applied for this program (Women’s Airforce Service Pilots or WASPs) and was rejected due to her race. The white women accepted into the program were released when the war was over, in a very League of Their Own-style move. Combat exclusion for women in the Air Force was lifted in 1993, and the first African American woman fighter pilot in the USAF was Shawna Rochelle Kimbrell in 2000. For more women in the Air Force stories, check out this book!

Stay inside if you can, nonfictionites. Wash your hands, wipe down your phone, and read read read (while also taking a break to prevent eye strain!). As always, you can find me on Twitter @itsalicetime and co-hosting the For Real podcast with Kim here at Book Riot. Until next time! Enjoy those facts, fellow nerds.

Do you know what next Wednesday is? It’s EARTH DAY. If you’re like me, you grew up being like, “yeah, yeah, Earth Day, Dawn from The Baby-Sitters Club, pick up cans off the ground, I know.” But now it is a day of poignancy and meaning. Because omg the earth.

We did an Earth Day theme on For Real this week, so I’m going to highlight some different books than we covered there. Fortunately, a lot of authors seem interested in this, the only planet where humankind has ever lived (…or so we think). So there’re a lot of options, book-wise.

On Fire: The (Burning) Case for a Green New Deal by Naomi Klein. Klein has been covering the environment as a journalist for decades, and here we have a collection of her pieces (including some new ones) about the environment, politics, people, and how all are inextricably wrapped up together. Klein is a really accessible, really smart writer, so if you’re looking for an environmental read you can dip in and out of (because essays!), this is a good one that came out only last September, so its info is pretty up to date.

Planetwalker: 22 Years of Walking. 17 Years of Silence. by John Francis. I was trying to find a mix of familiar and unfamiliar earth-focused titles, and this one came out of nowhere. In the 1970s, Francis felt overwhelmed and powerless in the face of all the environmental challenges we faced as a planet, so he just…stopped using any motorized transportation and started walking everywhere. Then that wasn’t enough, so he took a vow of silence for 17 years. This is his fascinating story.

 

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life by Barbara Kingsolver. If you’ve ever browsed a used bookstore, you’ve seen this. Kingsolver decided to stop not knowing where her food was from, and instead grow everything she and her family ate, or buy it locally. Nothing beyond her own neighborhood. This means no Doritos, no Ben & Jerry’s, no Jack’s frozen pizzas (behold: my recent shopping list). Check out what eating locally looks like with this nonfiction classic.

Silent Spring by Rachel Carson. Did you notice how history doesn’t really talk about the environmental movement before the 1960s? That’s because Silent Spring didn’t come out until 1962, boom. This is the book that led to the banning of DDT, the incredibly harmful insecticide. When you talk hugely influential books of the 20th century, this is on that list.

 

 

As Long As Grass Grows: The Indigenous Fight for Environmental Justice, from Colonization to Standing Rock by Dina Gilio-Whitaker. Indigenous environmentalism! This covers the “the fraught history of treaty violations, struggles for food and water security, and protection of sacred sites, while highlighting the important leadership of Indigenous women in this centuries-long struggle.” Definitely a worthwhile read.

 

Stay inside if you can, nonfictionites. Wash your hands, wipe down your phone, and read read read (while also taking a break to prevent eye strain!). If you are so inclined, check out COVID-19 Updates from the Bookish World. As always, you can find me on Twitter @itsalicetime and co-hosting the For Real podcast with Kim here at Book Riot. Until next time! Enjoy those facts, fellow nerds.