Category: True Story

Hello and happy Black Friday, nonfiction friends! If you’re a person who gets out early to shop, I hope you found some good deals. If you’re a person who likes to stay home, I hope you’re still in sweatpants and enjoying a day on the couch. And if you’re a person who has to work, my thoughts are with you on this busy day.

This is the time of year where I feel like I’m scrambling to finish up some of the great books that came out and I missed earlier in the year. Last week, I flew through In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado, a truly stunning and inventive memoir chronicling an abusive, queer relationship. This weekend, I want to dive into Guest House for Young Widows by Azadeh Moaveni, “a gripping account of thirteen women who joined, endured, and, in some cases, escaped life in the Islamic State.” No light reading for me just yet!

As promised last week, this newsletter is primarily a deeper dive into this year’s National Book Award winner for nonfiction, The Yellow House by Sarah Broom. Here are a few links (older and newer) to get you even more hyped about the book:

• From Vulture: Sarah M Broom’s National Book Award Speech Will Make You Want to Call Your Mom – There’s a link at the bottom of this article that goes to the winning speeches. It’s on my list to watch this weekend.
• From The Cut: Sarah M. Broom Knows What You Think of Her Hometown – This Q&A with author Katelyn Greenidge is so, so interesting.
• From Esquire: The 2019 National Book Awards Prove a Once Insular Literary Institution Can Be Inclusive – The National Book Award is one of my favorites each year, so this piece reflecting on how it’s changed (and how it hasn’t) was a good read.
• The Atlantic: How to Write the Book No One Wants You to Write – I love this profile piece about Boom and the book too.

The Yellow House has also been named a top 10 book of the year by the New York Times and the Washington Post, one of (I think) just three books in common. This book has had a good year, and I’m annoyed I haven’t read it yet.

Over at Book Riot

And if that wasn’t quite enough links for you, here are a few of this week’s best posts from over at Book Riot:

• 10 of the Best Nonfiction Comics on Hoopla
• 20 Personal Development Books for Your Bet 2020
• 6 Books About Art Theft and Repatriation

I know it’s the day after Thanksgiving, but I want to wrap up this newsletter with a heartfelt thank you to all of you. Writing this newsletter is such a fun part of my week, and I appreciate the privilege of getting in your inbox twice a week.

You can find me on Twitter and Instagram @kimthedork and co-hosting the For Real podcast here at Book Riot. Happy reading! – Kim

Hello and happy early Thanksgiving, nonfiction readers! As I am writing this newsletter, the first significant winter storm of the season is barreling down on Minnesota. Early forecasts show six inches of snow and lots of wind, which sounds just great! I’m kidding, it does not!

Given the holiday, it’s a very quiet week for new books – I’ve only got three that I want to highlight for you this week. Let’s check them out!

America for Americans: A History of Xenophobia in the United States by Erika Lee – In this book, award-winning historian Erica Lee gives a new perspective on our current immigration debates by exploring how “irrational fear, hatred, and hostility towards immigrants” has been embedded in our country since the beginning. The book explores how xenophobia works, why it continues, and why it’s a threat to our country.

JAY-Z: Made in America by Michael Eric Dyson – For the last decade, Michael Eric Dyson has taught JAY-Z’s lyrics as poetry, thought the rapper and artist doesn’t get the same recognition as other iconic American writers. In this book, Dyson explores the themes of JAY-Z’s career, his use of politics in his lyrics, and “his role in making this nation what it is today.”

The Girl in the Photograph: The True Story of a Native American Child, Lost and Found in America by Byron L. Dorgan – Using the story of Tamara, a five-year-old Native American girl who was abused while in foster care, this book offers a larger exploration around the “plight of children living on reservations – and offers hope for the future.” Byron Dorgan, a former U.S. Senator for North Dakota, has been an advocate in bringing the voices of Native American youth to policy discussions, and so offers much of that perspective in this book.

Have a wonderful and safe holiday weekend, my friends! You can find me on Twitter and Instagram @kimthedork and co-hosting the For Real podcast here at Book Riot. This week, Alice and I offered some holiday gift suggestions, including a bunch of books to read if you need something happy and uplifting this holiday season. Happy reading! – Kim

Hello and happy Friday, dear nonfiction readers. My quest to finish Frederick Douglass ahead of my book club meeting in a few weeks is going… not well. I’ve read about five chapters, which is definitely not a pace to finish before the meeting. I commit to reading more by next Friday.

The problem is that there are just so many other books I want to be reading instead. My library hold for In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado came in on Monday, so I’m way more interested in spending time with that book. We’ll see what happens!

Before we get going, I want to also acknowledge the big news of the week – Sarah Broom’s amazing memoir, The Yellow House, is the winner of the 2019 National Book Award for nonfiction! My deadline is too early to put more than this, but hopefully I can include some good links next week.

This week’s nonfiction news is a real grab bag – some best-of posts, some upcoming releases, and more adaptation news. Let’s dive in!

Slate has put together a list of the 50 best nonfiction books of the last 25 years, an interesting mix of “reporting, memoir, and argument.” I’ve only read 12 of the 50, but I think that says more about me than the quality of the list!

Scribner and the Washington Post are publishing an illustrated version of The Mueller Report. Out December 13, The Mueller Report Illustrated: The Obstruction Investigation will focus on Volume II of the report, which looked specifically at obstruction of justice in the Russia investigation. According to the Post, “The book provides a unique, graphic depiction of the report’s most scrutinized passages and pivotal moments, all contextualized with The Post’s original reporting.” I’m really curious about this.

Amazon has released its list of best nonfiction of 2019, headlined by Casey Cep’s Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud, and the Last Trial of Harper Lee. Their top 20 books of the year list includes seven nonfiction titles, most of which seemed a bit under-the-radar to me.

Restaurateur David Chang is writing a memoir! The first book of the two-book deal will be about “how the son of conservative Korean immigrants confronted his insecurities and depression, and discovered his talents and found fellowship in the kitchen.”

The James Comey miniseries coming to CBS officially has its Barack Obama. Kingsley Ben-Adir, star of The OA, will play the former president in a miniseries based on Comey’s best-selling memoir, A Higher Loyalty. The rest of the cast list, which I somehow missed, is interesting once you get beyond the fact that Jeff Daniels is playing Comey: “Brendan Gleeson as Donald Trump, Holly Hunter as Acting Attorney General Sally Yates, Michael Kelly as Acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe, Jennifer Ehle as Patrice Comey, Peter Coyote as Robert Mueller, Steven Pasquale as Peter Strzok and Oona Chaplin as Lisa Page.”

Over at Book Riot

This week on Book Riot, we’ve had a few great nonfiction posts to check out:

• A Brief (and Admittedly Incomplete) History of Cookbooks
• The Nature Writing that Helped Me Fall in Love with the Outdoors
• 10 of the Best Nonfiction Comics on Hoopla
• 5 Works of Graphic Nonfiction About Artists and Activists for Your TBR
• The 21 Best Poker Books for Beginners, Experts, and Enthusiasts
• 20 Must-Read Works of Innovative Nonfiction from 2019

And that’s all for this week! You can find me on Twitter and Instagram @kimthedork and co-hosting the For Real podcast here at Book Riot. Happy reading! – Kim

Hello, nonfiction friends! It feels like this is the last truly quiet week of the year before we tumble into the rush of the holiday season. Publishing is also slowing down, although I’m still happy to suggest nine more books to add to the TBR before the end of the year.

This week’s featured books include essays by Elena Ferrante, a look at the rise of smart machines, and a peek behind the scenes at the world of debutantes. Let’s get going!

Incidental Inventions by Elena Ferrante, translated by Anna Goldstein – For one year, author Elena Ferrante published a weekly column in the Guardian on subjects ranging from first love to climate change. The weekly topics were a suggestion from the editors at the paper, and allowed Ferrante to test out new ideas and explore other aspects of her voice. This book collects the columns in one place, along with illustrations by Andrea Ucini.

Further Reading: Ferrante’s columns are all still available online, so you can scroll through them and find a few that seem like a good read.

User Friendly: How the Hidden Rules of Design Are Changing the Way We Live, Work, and Play by Cliff Kuang with Robert Fabricant – In this book, Cliff Kuang and Robery Fabricant explore what it means that we all assume that machines should anticipate what we need. The book goes back over the changes of the last 100 years to unpack “the ways in which the world has been … remade according to the principles of the once-obscure discipline of user-experience design.”

Further Reading: Last spring, Kuang wrote an article about the “real war in driverless cars” and how the underlying story in this area is how we’re going to deal with all the changes coming in this industry.

The Season: A Social History of the Debutante by Kristen Richardson – “A social history” is another one of those phrases that always gets me in a subtitle. This book is a peek into the world of debutantes, a tradition that began in England 600 years ago “when wealthy fathers needed an efficient way to find appropriate husbands for their daughters.” Kirsten Richardson – who came from a family of debutants but chose not to participate – look s at the history of the custom and what it says about women and marriage today.

Further Reading: It’s a bit of a stretch, but Richardson is quoted in this New York Post piece about “The sensational debut and fall of the world’s first ‘celebutante’” that’s a fun read.

And finally, a few last exciting books coming out this week:

• Broke: Hardship and Resilience in a City of Broken Promises by Jodie Adams Krishner
• A Warning by Anonymous
• Radical Black: The Life and Times of William Monroe Trotter by Kerri K. Greenidge
• The Martyrdom of Collins Catch the Bear by Gerry Spence
• Family Papers: A Sephardic Journey Through the Twentieth Century by Sarah Abrevaya Stein
• Snow: A Scientific and Cultural Exploration by Giles Whittell

That’s it for this week! You can find me on Twitter and Instagram @kimthedork and co-hosting the For Real podcast here at Book Riot. Happy reading! – Kim

Hello, hello, happy Friday dear nonfiction readers! Minnesota’s November cold snap is ongoing, so I am writing this missive to you while sitting under several blankets, SAD lamp turned on high, wishing I’d been motivated enough to make myself a cup of tea before sitting down at my desk. C’est la vie.

In my reading life, I’m getting ready to tackle my own white whale, Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom by David W. Blight. The book is the 2019 Pulitzer Prize winner in history and my book club’s final read of the year. Readers who listen to the podcast will know that I am TERRIBLE at reading giant biographies. I start them with the best of intentions, but inevitably fizzle out around page 300 when it occurs to me that, if this were another book, I would be done already!

But, I’m going to make a solid effort with this one. I have a chapter-a-day reading schedule mapped out (although I’m already behind) and, with this newsletter, have created a bit of public accountability with the effort. I will see you next Friday with an update!

Today, however, I’m thinking all about memoirs. This week’s news includes a few upcoming memoirs, one list of the best memoirs of the decade, and an update on Edward Snowden’s book. Let’s go!

Tori Amos is writing a politically-themed memoir coming out in May 2020! Resistance: A Songwriter’s Story of Hope, Change, and Courage will be a guide for “for engaging with our current political moment and handling it with intelligence, grace, and integrity.”

Val Kilmer is also writing a memoir coming out in April 2020! Kilmer recently sold the book, I’m Your Huckleberry, to Simon & Schuster. The book will be about his career, his romances, his spiritual journey, and include some “tantalizing celebrity anecdotes.” The announcement notes that the April 2020 release will coincide with the release of Top Gun: Maverick, so that’s a thing too.

I am deeply fascinated by all of the “best books of the decade” lists we’re starting to see published. This week, Paste Magazine offered their take on the 25 best memoirs of the 2010s. It’s a good reading list, although a little heavy on 2019 releases at the expense of some earlier titles.

In a long Twitter thread, Edward Snowden shared how the Chinese version of his book, Permanent Record, has been censored by the Chinese government. The cuts seem to be around critiques of authoritarianism, ways for getting around government restrictions, and other small critiques of China.

Over at Book Riot

Since it’s unofficially memoir week, here are some great recent Book Riot posts about memoirs:

• 5 Autobiographies or Memoirs by Latina Actresses Gracing Your Screens
• Michelle Obama’s Becoming Book Club Questions: Your Reading Guide
• Books From 202 Democratic Presidential Candidates
• New Celebrity Memoirs Hitting Shelves This Fall
• 8 Memoirs About Surviving the Horrors of War
• 3 Animal Memoirs to Make Your Heart Sing, Winny, and Woof

And that’s all for this week! You can find me on Twitter and Instagram @kimthedork and co-hosting the For Real podcast here at Book Riot. Happy reading! – Kim

Hello, friends, and welcome to another new week of great nonfiction books! It seems as though the entire state of Minnesota has just skipped over fall and landed in winter… there’s snow on the ground, and record cold temperatures in the air. Let’s just all stay inside with books, shall we?

This week’s featured new releases are about immigrants in the city, the multibillion-dollar industry around getting rid of the stuff we all KonMari-ed, and a dual literary biography that seems perfect to just cuddle in with. Let’s go!

Barrio America: How Latino Immigrants Saved the American City by A. K. Sandoval-Strausz – In this book, historian A. K. Sandoval-Strausz looks at how Latino families helped revitalize urban neighborhoods across the country. He focuses on two barrios – Chicago’s Little Village and Dallas’s Oak Cliff – to show how immigrants from Latin America started to turn around those areas beginning in the 1970s to create the stable, dynamic, and safe places the white “creative class” would move to in the 1990s and 2000s.

Further Reading: The Washington Post published an excerpt from the book about how “The revitalizing influence of Latinos and other immigrants now extends far beyond cities.”

Secondhand: Travels in the New Global Garage Sale by Adam Minter – With all the talk about decluttering going on, it’s worth thinking about what happens to all of that stuff. In this book, journalist Adam Minter looks at what happens to all of the stuff we take to donation centers, and the multibillion-dollar industry of reuse and recycling. He also profiles the people who move and profit from our stuff and what we need to do to “build a sustainable future free of excess stuff.”

Further Watching: In 2015, Minter gave a talk at TEDxBeijing about why China “is one of the most innovative countries by exploring the trash industry and its often unrecognized potential.”

Parisian Lives: Samuel Beckett, Simone de Beauvoir, and Me by Deirdre Bair – The end of the year seems like a great time for a literary biography. In this book, an award-winning biography explores the 15 years she spent in Paris with Samuel Beckett and Simone de Beauvoir, first writing a biography of Beckett and then another of Simone de Beauvoir. The book gives a behind-the-scenes peek at library Paris in the 1970s, the art of biography, and the human side of legendary writers.

Further Reading: I liked this profile of Bair that came out when her previous book, a biography of Al Capone, came out.

And finally, a few other books that caught my eye this week:

• Essays One by Lydia Davis
• Highway of Tears: A True Story of Racism, Indifference, and the Pursuit of Justice for Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls by Jessica McDiarmid
• White Negroes: When Cornrows Were in Vogue … and Other Thoughts on Cultural Appropriation by Lauren Michele Jackson
• No One Is Too Small To Make A Difference by Greta Thunberg
• Carrie Fisher: A Life on the Edge by Sheila Weller
• Busted in New York and Other Essays by Darryl Pinckney
• Camgirl by Isa Mazzei
• What It Is: Race, Family, and One Thinking Black Man’s Blues by Clifford Thompson

And that’s everything on my radar for this week.  You can find me on Twitter and Instagram @kimthedork and co-hosting the For Real podcast here at Book Riot. This week, Alice and I took a deep dive into early November new releases. Happy reading! – Kim

Hello hello, and happiest of Fridays nonfiction readers – we’ve made it to the end of another week!

I haven’t had as much reading time this week as I would have liked, but I’ve somehow found my groove with audiobooks again. I’m deep into Ronan Farrow’s Catch and Kill: Lies, Spies, and a Conspiracy to Protect Predators, another look at the reporting that finally exposed Harvey Weinstein.

I wasn’t sure I needed more of this story after reading She Said by Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey, but it’s turned into a fascinating companion read. Kantor and Twohey had strong organizational support behind their reporting, while Farrow had to contend with powerful men at NBC who wanted to keep the story under wraps. Plus, the audiobook is a hoot – Farrow does some ridiculous and entertaining accents.

This week’s nonfiction news is another mixed collection – politics, true crime adaptations, and conflict over Carrie Fisher’s biography. Plus, I’ve rounded up some great posts on cookbooks from over at Book Riot. Let’s dive in!

If you’re looking for another way to decide which Democratic presidential candidate might be for you consider how popular is their book at the library! Slate tabulated the number of print copies checked out or on hold at a bunch of major library systems to see which candidate books were most popular. I’ll leave you to click through to the link to find the answers!

As one might have (sadly) predicted, the Department of Justice is trying to identify the anonymous author of A Warning, an upcoming book that goes inside the Trump Administration. The department sent a letter to the book’s publisher and literary agency demanding information about whether the author signed a nondisclosure agreement or had access to classified information. Both Hachette and Javelin responded “defiantly” to the request.

Something about the headline for this story makes me laugh – “Lady Gaga to Star in Gucci Murder Movie Directed by Ridley Scott.” There’s just so much there! The singer/songwriter/actress will star as Patriza Reggiani, the ex-wife of the grandson of Guccio Gucci who served 18 years in prison for orchestrating her ex-husband’s assassination. The movie is based on a book, The House of Gucci by Sara Gay Forden.

The author of a new, unauthorized, biography of Carrie Fisher has defended her work against criticisms from the family. Sheila Weller said she reached out to representatives of the Fisher family twice to tell them about the book and get approval, but was turned down or ignored. “It is my great admiration for Carrie Fisher’s life and work that compelled me to write the book in the first place,” she said. Carrie Fisher: A Life on the Edge will be out November 12.

Over at Book Riot

Since it’s so close to Thanksgiving, I want to call out some of the great posts about cookbooks that have been published recently:

• Comfort Food Cookbooks That Will Keep You Warm as the Temperature Drops
• Literary Cookbooks to Feed Your Soul
• 6 Themed Cookbooks to Spice Up Mealtime

And that’s everything for this week! That’s again for inviting me to your inbox once again. You can find me on Twitter and Instagram @kimthedork and co-hosting the For Real podcast here at Book Riot. Happy reading! – Kim

Hello and welcome to November, dear nonfiction readers! I had a feeling that this week was a big one in publishing, but then Book Riot’s velocireader Liberty Hardy confirmed it on Twitter, saying, “Tomorrow is the biggest new release day of the fall, if not the year.” Exciting!

On the nonfiction side, I could have continued well beyond the 15 books I’m including in the newsletter this week… but that felt like it would just get to be too much. I’m featuring three books that feel like they’ve gotten a lot of buzz, then 12 more worth looking at for your TBR. Let’s get going!

The Witches Are Coming by Lindy West – Do I need to say more than that there’s a new Lindy West book coming out? Fine, I will. In this book, West unpacks the idea of a witch hunt in the age of the #MeToo movement and the “outright bullsh*t that has allowed white male mediocrity to maintain a death grip on American culture and politics.” I’m 100 percent in for everything about that.

Further Reading: This is a bit older, but West’s 2017 piece about going to the Goop festival is a great read.

In the Dream House: A Memoir by Carmen Maria Machado – It feels like readers in my circle have been excited about this book since it was announced last year. In it, Carmen Maria Machado offers an “engrossing and wildly innovative account of a relationship gone bad” and takes a deeper look at psychological abuse and abuse in queer relationships. The book uses familiar narrative tropes to unpack events of Machado’s relationship with “a charismatic but volatile woman.”

Further Reading: There are a lot of good reviews of this one, but I thought this piece in WIRED was interesting because it’s not the kind of book I would have expected to get a rave in that magazine.

Mighty Justice: My Life in Civil Rights by Dovey Johnson Roundtree and Katie McCabe – Dovey Johnson Roundtree was on the front lines of the Civil Rights movement in multiple areas. In her lifetime, she won a key bus desegregation case that helped dismantle “separate but equal,” then led a group of women who became ordained in the AME Church. This memoir highlights her achievements and “speaks movingly and urgently to our racially troubled times.” This book was originally published in 2009 and is being reissued after Roundtree passed away last year at the age of 104.

Further Reading: All of Rountree’s 2018 obituaries give a flavor of her life, but I appreciated this piece in Politico by Katie McCabe, co-author of Mighty Justice.

And finally, 12 more books to consider for your fall reading pleasure. I want to give a special shout to books by Susannah Cahalan, Erica Armstrong Dunbar, and Matthew Goodman, who are three writers that I’ve previously enjoyed a lot.

1. The Great Pretender: The Undercover Mission That Changed Our Understanding of Madness by Susannah Cahalan
2. She Came to Slay: The Life and Times of Harriet Tubman by Erica Armstrong Dunbar
3. Our Wild Calling: How Connecting with Animals Can Transform Our Lives – And Save Theirs by Ricard Louv
4. Amazons, Abolitionists, and Activists: A Graphic History of Women’s Fight for Their Rights by A D’Amico and Mikki Kendall
5. The Mutual Admiration Society: How Dorothy L. Sayers and her Oxford Circle Remade the World for Women by Mo Moulton
6. Finding Meaning: The Sixth Stage of Grief by David Kessler
7. The Likeability Trap: How to Break Free and Succeed as You Are by Alicia Menendez
8. Conversations with RBG: Ruth Bader Ginsburg on Life, Love, Liberty, and Law by Jeffrey Rosen
9. The City Game: Triumph, Scandal, and a Legendary Basketball Team by Matthew Goodman
10. Be My Guest: Reflections on Food, Community and the Meaning of Generosity by Priya Basil
11. The Suspect: An Olympic Bombing, the FBI, The Media, and Richard Jewell, the Man Caught in the Middle by Kent Alexander and Kevin Salwen
12. An Underground Guide to Sewers or: Down, Through and Out in Paris, London, New York by Stephen Halliday

Whew, that seems like more than enough for this week! You can find me on Twitter and Instagram @kimthedork and co-hosting the For Real podcast here at Book Riot. Happy reading! – Kim

Hello and welcome to November, nonfiction nerds! I am so excited to fall back this weekend – I’ll definitely be using my extra hour to read!

Right now, I’m a few chapters into The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck by Mark Manson, “a look at how “s**t is f**ked and we have to live with it.” It sounds a little depressing, I suppose, but I’m enjoying the sort of grouchy and entirely unsubtle way the book asks us to face our fears, confront painful truths, and learn to live with discomfort.

This week’s nonfiction news is a bit of a hodge-podge of best-of lists, controversial publishing decisions, and an interview with an author I really admire. Let’s get going!

Publisher’s Weekly has released its best books of 2019 list, which still feels so dang early! In the intro to their top 10 list, the publication notes that Mira Jacob’s Good Talk is the first graphic memoir to ever make the list! The rest of the nonfiction is equally good:

• Audience of One by James Poniewozik
• The British Are Coming by Rick Atkinson
• Guest House for Young Widows by Azadeh Moaveni
• Solitary by Albert Woodfox

A new biography of Carrie Fisher is set to come out next month, but her family has already disavowed the book. Carrie Fisher: A Life on the Edge by Sheila Weller has already received some starred reviews, but in a statement family members said the book was sold without their involvement.

Author Naomi Wolf, who was under fire for inaccuracies in her latest book, has split with her publisher. Last week, Wolf and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt announced they have mutually agreed to part ways, and that the publisher would not not be releasing Outrages. The rights to the book revert to Wolf, who told the New York Times that it would come out “in due course” in the United States.

After initially refusing to stock Ronan Farrow’s new book Catch and Kill, Amazon Australia has reversed their decision and will sell copies of the book. The bookseller initially yielded threats from lawyers for Dylan Howard, former editor of the National Enquirer.

Speaking of Ronan Farrow, the author is launching a podcast offshoot of the book. The podcast will feature new audio and interviews with the sources Farrow used for the book and “provide a deeper understanding of the plot that unravels in the book.”

I really liked this interview with Nnedi Okorafor about writing her memoir Broken Places and Outer Spaces and recording the audiobook version of the book. She’s great.

That’s all for this week! You can find me on Twitter @kimthedork, on email at kim@riotnewmedia.com, and co-hosting the For Real podcast here at Book Riot. Happy reading! – Kim

Hello hello, nonfiction friends! Can you believe it’s the last Wednesday of October? Bananas! This week is another pretty big one for new nonfiction, but it looks like things will be lightening up soon. Next week, November 5, is a huge day, but I think after that things will calm down so we can all just catch our breath a bit. Or maybe that’s just me, looking at my increasingly impossible 2019 TBR pile?

This week’s featured nonfiction includes a memoir of growing up poor and Puerto Rican in Miami, a look at the science behind hearing, and a story of immigrants in a small Maine community. They all seem great, I can’t wait to share!

The Beautiful Ones by Prince – As a Minnesotan, I’m obligated to tell you that Prince’s memoir is out this week. The book has four parts – the memoir Prince was writing when he died, a look at his early musical years, his evolution through images, and the “handwritten treatment for Purple Rain.” It also includes private photos, scrapbook images, and song lyrics. I haven’t read any part of this book yet, but it’s Prince and so I have to imagine that it’s a beautiful piece of work.

Volume Control: Hearing in a Deafening World by David Owen – This book explores the science of hearing and the technology being developed to help us hear better. David Owen explores the biology of processing sound, the social cost of poor hearing, and the different ways science is looking to address all of the ways hearing can be difficult or damaged in our increasingly loud world. I think this one looks fascinating.

Home Now: How 6000 Refugees Transformed an American Town by Cynthia Anderson – After losing industrial jobs the town of Lewiston, Maine seemed like it was on the decline. But over the course of 15 years, “the city became home to thousands of African immigrants and, along the way, turned into one of the most Muslim towns in the U.S.” Cynthia Anderson grew up in Lewiston, so she brings an insider’s perspective to the complexity and humanity of this place. I really want to read this one.

And finally, it wouldn’t be a fall nonfiction new release newsletter without links to several other books that look great but I don’t have time to write about in more detail:

• The In-Betweens: The Spiritualists, Mediums, and Legends of Camp Etna by Mira Ptacin
• Ordinary Girls: A Memoir by Jaquira Díaz
• Genuine Fakes: How Phony Things Teach Us About Real Stuff by Lydia Pyne
• Big Sister, Little Sister, Red Sister: Three Women at the Heart of Twentieth-Century China by Jung Chang
• When the Earth Had Two Moons: Cannibal Planets, Icy Giants, Dirty Comets, Dreadful Orbits, and the Origins of the Night Sky by Erik Asphaug
• Classic Krakauer: Essays on Wilderness and Risk by Jon Krakauer
• Shadow Network: Media, Money, and the Secret Hub of the Radical Right by Suzanne Nelson

October has been a great month for books! You can find me on Twitter @kimthedork, on email at kim@riotnewmedia.com, and co-hosting the For Real podcast here at Book Riot. At the suggestion of a listener, this week’s episode is all about medical mysteries. Happy reading (and listening)! – Kim