Category: True Story

Greetings and salutations, nonfiction friends! As you’re reading this, I’m gearing up for Dewey’s 24 Hour Readathon, which kicks off where I live at 7 a.m. on Saturday.  I’ve been starting to put together my stack of potential reads, and think I may try a new approach this year – finishing up all of the partially-finished books in my house!

For whatever reason, I’ve gotten in a bad habit of reading about half of any given book, then putting it down for something else. That means I’ve started, then stopped, a bunch of amazing nonfiction this year. From where I’m writing, I can see books like Leaving the Witness by Amber Scorah, Rough Magic by Lara Prior-Palmer, and The Yellow House by Sarah M. Broom. I’m sure some fiction will make the pile, but that seems like a good start! I’ll report back next week.

For this week’s newsletter, I’ve rounded up some of the best of Book Riot’s nonfiction coverage from the last few months. Here’s what caught my eye:

I don’t particularly enjoy books by current politicians, but if you want to read up on candidates here’s a round-up of books from all of the 2020 Democratic candidates. It’s a doozy of a list because there are so many of them.

If you want to get your money’s worth on a book purchase, consider one of these nonfiction bricks – collections of essays, reviews, or articles that are around 1000 pages.

As if we needed it, here are six books to remind us why journalism is important. These are all real good.

I added a few books to my TBR thanks to this list of books about data science. So smart!

Or, start to learn more about climate change and the emergency happening on our planet with this excellent list.

I’m still not quite done with the audiobook of Leslie Jamison’s latest essay collection, Make it Scream, Make it Burn, but I still devoured this Q&A. Her process in putting together the collection, and how it relates to her first collection, The Empathy Exams, was fascinating to me.

Curious what nonfiction is popular on Goodreads? Rebecca did some service journalism to round up the top 30 books on the site, a collection of books with more than 100,000 ratings and an average rating of 3.90 or higher.

There has been a lot of nonfiction connected to the #MeToo movement published this year – here are a few of the best ones so far. Looking for something with more variety? Here are some of the best essay collections of the year so far. Like reading about famous people? Here are some celebrity memoirs hitting the shelves this fall.

For all the awesome ladies reading this newsletter (or anyone who loves ladies), check out five books for women who don’t play by the rules, or five boss lady books of nonfiction.

And to conclude with something a little lighter, here are three great animal memoirs.

And that’s all I’ve got. Thanks so much for reading! 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 and happiest of Wednesdays, fellow nonfiction fans. It is cold and rainy and dark here in Minnesota, which has drained my energy and convinced me that constantly baking cookies is a good idea. Thank goodness for audiobooks and Spotify’s Mood Booster playlist, which have been keeping me company for the last couple of days.

This week is another pile on of great new books! I’ve featured three – about persuasion, ordinary days, and diversity – then linked out to nine more, for a full dozen great new nonfiction books to read this week. Let’s dive in!

Stop Being Reasonable: How We Change Minds by Eleanor Gordon-Smith – We all like to think we’re rational, and that rational discourse changes minds. In this book, Eleanor Gordon-Smith argues that isn’t true at all. She tells the stories of people who have radically changed their beliefs, and explores what it actually took to change their minds. She explores where resistance to new ideas comes from, shame in being wrong, and how people can actually be persuaded.

Further Reading: Gordon-Smith writes an advice column, I think, for The Guardian where she answers ethical dilemmas. This one about friends and friends of friends is interesting.

One Day: The Extraordinary Story of an Ordinary 24 Hours in America by Gene Weingarten – The concept of this book totally fascinates me. Journalist Gene Weingarten asked three strangers to help him pick a random day – December 26, 1986 – then set out to tell as many stories as he could about that seemingly ordinary day. I love the idea that there are no small stories, and so a book that goes out to prove that is going on my radar.

Further Reading: A story from the book, about a woman receiving a heart transplant via a surgery that had never been done before, was published a few weeks ago in the Washington Post magazine.

Diversity, Inc.: The Failed Promise of a Billion-Dollar Business by Pamela Newkirk – In this book, journalist Pamela Newkirk explores how “workplace diversity initiatives have turned into a profoundly misguided industry” and failed to bring equality into industries and institutions. She highlights some success stories, which also looking at “the vast gap between the rhetoric of inclusivity and real achievements.” I feel like anyone who has participated in a workplace diversity initiative will find something interesting in this book.

Further Reading: Newkirk previously wrote a book called Spectacle: The Astonishing Life of Ota Benga. You can read a brief essay from the book here.

And here are some more books!

• The Life and Afterlife of Harry Houdini by Joe Posnanski
• The Queens of Animation: The Untold Story of the Women Who Transformed the World of Disney and Made Cinematic History by Nathalia Holt
• Lakota America: A New History of Indigenous Power by Pekka Hamalainen
• Janis: Her Life and Music by Holly George-Warren
• The Hidden World of the Fox by Adele Brand
• A Month in Siena by Hisham Matar
• Still Here: The Madcap, Nervy, Singular Life of Elaine Stritch by Alexandra Jacobs
• For Small Creatures Such as We: Rituals for Finding Meaning in Our Unlikely World by Sasha Sagan
• Initiated: Memoir of a Witch by Amanda Yates Garcia

There are so many good books this week! It’s hardly even fair… an embarrassment of riches. 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

Happiest of Fridays, nonfiction friends! I hope you are rolling into this weekend with a pile of books to read and a pile of cozy blankets to curl up in while you read them.

Something about this fall weather has reignited my interest in political nonfiction. I haven’t had the stomach for it in a while, but now a bunch of books about free speech, democracy, and politics have caught my eye. I just started Antisocial: Online Extremists, Techno-Utopians, and the Hijacking of the American Conversation by Andrew Marantz, a look at how the alt-right and other extremists have taken over political conversations online. It’s horrifying, but I am hooked.

This week’s nonfiction news has some legal maneuverings, a couple of book lists, and some upcoming adaptations I think a bunch of people will be excited about but aren’t particularly in my wheelhouse. Let’s go!

A former editor at the National Enquirer has hired two high-profile law firms to try and stop the publication and sale of journalist Ronan Farrow’s anticipated expose of reporting on Harvey Weinstein. Catch and Kill: Lies, Spies, and a Conspiracy to Protect Predators came out on Tuesday under the threat of a libel suit and warnings to booksellers to avoid stocking the book. The book shares the story of Farrow’s reporting on Harvey Weinstein, as well as the resistance, corruption, abuse, and intimidation he faced tracking down the story. According to The Daily Beast, the intimidation tactic has worked in Howard’s native Australia. I don’t expect this to get much traction in the United States, but it is fascinating to see how powerful people will lash out when they’re against a wall.

I just finished reading Maybe You Should Talk to Someone by Lori Gottlieb, so I was all primed to click on this Goodreads list of Gottlieb’s favorite advice from self-help books. It’s a particularly great list because she offers some great lessons and commentary on each book. I placed a couple on hold after reading!

If you’re subscribed to this newsletter you probably know a lot about nonfiction, but I still appreciated this nonfiction genre primer from the New York Public Library. It also has some great examples in each category, if you’re looking to add some backlist titles to your TBR.

Tiger Woods is publishing a memoir which promises to be “a ‘definitive’ story of his career, fall and comeback. The memoir – Back – will be published by HarperCollins, but there’s no release date set. In an interview, Woods said, “This book is my definitive story. It’s in my words and expresses my thoughts. It describes how I feel and what’s happened in my life.” I am not super interested in this, but perhaps some of you are.

Calling all World War II aficionados – an adaptation of Donald Miller’s Masters of the Air: America’s Bomber Boys Who Fought the Air War Against Nazi Germany will be coming to Apple TV. Producers include Steven Spielberg, Tom Hanks, and Gary Goetzman, who worked together on HBO’s Band of Brothers and The Pacific. According to Deadline, “the miniseries will be more than eight hours in length” and “costs well north of $200 million to produce.” Whew!

In adaptation news that will surprise absolutely no one, Jeff Daniels is set to play former FBI Director James Comey in a four-hour CBS miniseries based on Comey’s memoir, A Higher Loyalty. This story made me laugh because I don’t think I could have picked a more perfect combination of actor, story, and network to put together something that will be totally pompous and self-serious. #burn

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, nonfiction friends! As I was pulling together this week’s newsletter, I noticed there are a bunch of books by celebrities coming out this week. Five that caught my eye were Me by Elton John, Beautiful on the Outside by Adam Rippon, Dear Girls by Ali Wong, Medallion Status by John Hodgeman, and Home Work by Julie Andrews.

But I’m not going to talk about those! Instead, I’ve got three other memoirs to feature, plus seven more to add to you toppling TBR. Let’s go!

Life Undercover: Coming of Age in the CIA by Amaryllis Fox – At 21-years-old, Amaryllis Fox was recruited to join the CIA, where she began her career reading and summarizing classified cables for the president. Eventually, she was deployed as a spy, sent to infiltrate terrorist networks in the Middle East and Asia. I started reading a galley of this one and love it so far.

 

 

The First Cell: And the Human Costs of Pursuing Cancer to the Last by Raza Azra – In this memoir, an oncologist writes about how “medicine and our society (mis)treats cancer,” paralleling that story with her experience being her husband’s oncologist after he was diagnosed with leukemia. I think this one looks emotional and fascinating.

 

A Year Without a Name by Cyrus Grace Dunham – I’ve tried to summarize this one myself, but the opening paragraph of the jacket copy does a great job: “For as long as they can remember, Cyrus Grace Dunham felt like a visitor in their own body. Their life was a series of imitations – lovable little girl, daughter, sister, young gay woman – until their profound sense of alienation became intolerable.” This memoir explores the transition from Grace to Cyrus in a “thrillingly unresolved queer coming of age story.”

And finally, seven more books that looked interesting to me:

• Unwanted Spy: The Persecution of an American Whistleblower by Jeffrey Sterling
• Wild Game: My Mother, Her Lover, and Me by Adrienne Brodeur
• Catch and Kill: Lies, Spies, and a Conspiracy to Protect Predators by Ronan Farrow
• Unashamed: Musings of a Fat, Black Muslim by Lean Vernon
• No Stopping Us Now: The Adventures of Older Women in American History by Gail Collins
• Self-Portrait in Black and White: Unlearning Race by Thomas Chatterton Williams
• The Body: A Guide for Occupants by Bill Bryson

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. This week, Alice and I chatted about some great new memoirs and took a deep dive into books about monsters. Happy reading! – Kim

Hello and happy Friday, dear nonfiction readers! This week has been a flurry of activity in my personal and work lives. I’ve had meetings, trainings, author visits, and the chance to see the Broadway adaptation of Mean Girls during the touring company’s stop in the Twin Cities.

Through all of that, I’ve been able to sneak in a bit of time reading. I’m currently engrossed in The Lady from the Black Lagoon: Hollywood Monsters and the Lost Legacy of Milicent Patrick by Mallory O’Meara. It’s an amazing Hollywood history, with a very feminist slant that I am in love with. But I’m not going to say more though, since it’s one of my picks for next week’s episode of For Real.

This week’s nonfiction news is a bit of a hodge-podge – some new books, some awards, and a brief update on the trial of Elizabeth Holmes (grab some popcorn, this is gonna be so good). Onwards!

Marie Kondo is coming to your work! Her next book, coming out in April 2020, is titled Joy at Work: Organizing Your Professional Life and will be co-written by management processor Scott Soneshein. Kondo announced the new book on Instagram, where she described it this way: “This book offers stories, studies and strategies to help you eliminate clutter and make space for work that really matters.” I’m cautiously curious about this one.

And just like that, the National Book Award finalists are out! NPR notes that none of the finalists in any of the five categories have won this award before, which is really exciting! The nonfiction list is great, I want to read all of the books on it. Winners will be announced on November 2.

Impeachment-themed reading lists are all over the place! This one from Barnes & Noble pulls together 11 books – from history to contemporary politics – that will help make sense of the process.

I promise I will always link to news about Elizabeth Holmes when I find it. Last week, Holmes made news when her attorneys requested to be removed from the case. According to their filing, the three lawyers haven’t been paid in a year and, “given Ms. Holmes’s current financial situation” they have “no expectation that Ms. Holmes will ever pay it for its services as her counsel.” LOLZ.

Michelle Obama is publishing a companion journal to her blockbuster, record-setting memoir, Becoming. The journal will feature “more than 150 inspiring questions and quotes that resonate with key themes in Mrs. Obama’s memoir and that are designed to help readers reflect on their personal and family history, their goals, challenges, and dreams, what moves them and brings them hope, and what future they imagine for themselves and their community.” That sounds pretty awesome.

The New York Times is changing the makeup of its bestseller lists, again. In the world of nonfiction, that means retiring the science- and sports-specific lists because, according to the Times, “the titles on those lists are frequently represented on current nonfiction lists.” I don’t really know that there’s much of an impact on readers with this change, but I am always a little bummed to see fewer ways to dive down into nonfiction books since there are so many that come out each week.

Hello and welcome to a new week, nonfiction friends! The onslaught of new books that marks fall in the publishing world is not letting up any time soon, which is amazing and intimidating and seems like it’ll never quit.

This week, I’ve got three books to feature – two highly-anticipated memoirs and a collection of essays – plus seven more books to put on your radar. Let’s get going!

How We Fight for Our Lives: A Memoir by Saeed Jones – This coming-of-age memoir about growing up black and gay in the South is one of the most anticipated titles of this year. In it, Saeed Jones writes about finding a place for himself “within his family, within his country, within his own hopes, desires, and fears.” The book is told in a series of vignettes that are about himself and a bigger look at race, queerness, power, love and grief.

Further Reading: Jones was interviewed in The Nation about “queer masculinity and the point of being an artist.”

Unfollow: A Memoir of Loving and Leaving the Westboro Baptist Church by Megan Phelps-Roper – As a child, Megan Phelps-Roper protested alongside members of her grandfather’s church, Westboro Baptist Church. She eventually started manning the organization’s Twitter account, where debates about religion began to make her question the church. In this memoir, she chronicles her awakening, departure from the church, and shift away from black-and-white thinking.

Further Reading: Last week, People magazine published a profile of Phelps-Roper where she talks about her relationship with her family.

Burn it Down: Women Writing About Anger by Lilly Dancyger – Given the state of the world, I am always going to pay attention to books about women’s anger. This essay collection brings together 22 writers looking at how anger has shaped their lives. It looks at the #MeToo movement, women running for office, and what anger can mean both personally and systemically.

Further Reading: Dancyger writes a column for Catapult called Fallen Women with a deep and interesting archive.

And to wrap up, seven more books that you could add to your TBR:

1. Erosion: Essays of Undoing by Terry Tempest Williams
2. On Time: A Princely Life in Funk by Morris Day and David Ritz
3. American Radicals: How Nineteenth-Century Protest Shaped the Nation by Holly Jackson
4. Hate Inc.: Why Today’s Media Makes Us Despite One Another by Matt Taibbi
5. Tough Love: My Story of the Things Worth Fighting For by Susan Rice
6. A Savage Dreamland: Journey’s in Burma by David Eimer
7. Horror Stories: A Memoir by Liz Phair

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

Happiest of Fridays, fellow book nerds! After an unseasonably warm Monday, it has been cool and rainy all week. While not particularly nice for getting out to do fall activities – I’m itching to get to a corn maze – it has been a good week for hunkering down with a book.

Right now I’m making my way through Maybe You Should Talk to Someone by Lori Gottlieb, a memoir by a therapist about her patients, her therapist, and the role therapy can play in our lives. It is completely fascinating and I can’t put it down.

This week’s nonfiction news has a little bit of everything –  awards, impeachment, an adaptation, and the first of what I expect will be many, many best-of-the-year lists. Let’s dive in!

The American Library Association has released the 25 nonfiction titles longlisted for this year’s Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction. This is another interesting award because the range of books they longlist is pretty wide. There are some familiar titles – The Yellow House and Say Nothing – both make an appearance, but many more that weren’t on my radar. The three finalists will be announced on November 4, and the award will be announced in January.

Given all the talk of impeachment in the news, I was interested in this Rolling Stone interview with Frank Bowman, “the guy who wrote the book on impeachment” – High Crimes and Misdemeanors: A History of Impeachment for the Age of Trump. In the interview, Bowman says he thinks the bar for impeachment has been cleared and “moreover, Congress ought to do something about it.” He then walks through the idea of high crimes and misdemeanors, including the history and contemporary understanding. It’s a really good primer on the issues at stake here.

I also want to mention a book my nonfiction partner-in-crime, Alice, highly recommends – Impeachment: An American History. This book collects essays from four scholars exploring the three situations where impeachment has been invoked and what it might mean today. 

CBS TV Studios has optioned a book about “the dynastic but dysfunctional Busch brewing family, to develop as an epic American family drama series.” According to Deadline, the studio hopes to adapt Bitter Brew by William Knoedlseder for a cable or streaming service. I think this one could be a lot of fun.

September/October seems awfully early for putting out a favorites of the year list, but I guess that’s just where we’re at right now. Esquire’s list includes a lot of books by women (yay!) and a few titles that fell off my radar – Working by Robert Caro and Biased by Jennifer L. Eberhardt, for example. Yay, books!

And 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. This week, we chatted about cozy nonfiction you just want to snuggle up with. Happy reading! – Kim

Welcome to October, nonfiction friends! As I sat down to write this newsletter, I realized that I have 20 new books on my list for this week. Twenty! It really is an embarrassment of riches.

To keep this newsletter from turning into a novella, I decided to feature just the five I’m most excited about, then include the rest with links near the end. Let’s dive in!

Things We Didn’t Talk About When I Was a Girl by Jeannie Vanasco – As a teenager, Jeannie Vanasco was raped by a boy she considered a close friend. As an adult, Vanasco reached out to him for an interview to try and understand whether a good person can commit a terrible act.

Crisis of Conscience: Whistleblowing in an Age of Fraud by Tom Mueller – This book wasn’t initially near the top of my list… but then last week happened. In this book, Tom Mueller shares the stories of whistleblowers from healthcare, business, and politics to understand “what inspires some to speak out while the rest of us become complicit in our silence.”

Stealing Green Mangoes: Two Brothers, Two Fates, One Indian Childhood by Sunil Dutta – After being diagnosed with Stage IV lung cancer, Sunil Dutta looks back to his childhood to understand how he and his brother Raju ended up on such different paths in life. Sunil became a 20-year veteran of the LAPD, while Raju became a fugitive, terrorist, and murderer.

Daughters of Chivalry: The Forgotten Children of King Edward Longshanks by Kelcey Wileson-Lee – I haven’t pulled a history book for a while, so I want to change that! This book tells the story of the five daughters of King Edward I, who “ran the full gamut of experiences open to royal women in the Middle Ages.”

The Greater Freedom: My Life as a Middle Eastern Woman Outside the Stereotypes by Alya Mooro – born in Egypt and raised in London, Alya Mooro always felt pulled between two cultures. In this book, Mooro pushes back against the idea she should be one thing or another and makes peace with not fitting in.

And finally, here are 15 that might pique your interest:

1. Fair Play: A Game-Changing Solution for When You Have Too Much to Do (and More Life to Live) Eve Rodsky
2. Toil and Trouble by Augusten Burroughs
3. Radical: The Science, Culture, and History of Breast Cancer in America by Kate Pickert
4. Here We Are: American Dreams, American Nightmares Aarti Namdev Shahani
5. Face It by Debbie Harry
6. The Preacher’s Wife: The Precarious Power of Evangelical Women Celebrities by Kate Bowler
7. A Human Algorithm: How Artificial Intelligence is Redefining Who We Are by Flynn Coleman
8. The Forest City Killer: A Serial Murderer, a Cold-Case Sleuth, and a Search for Justice by Vanessa Brown
9. I Will Never See the World Again: The Memoir of an Imprisoned Writer by Ahmet Altan and Yasemin Congar
10. Blowout: Corrupted Democracy, Rogue State Russia, and the Richest, Most Destructive Industry on Earth by Rachel Maddow
11. The Ingenious Language: Nine Epic Reasons to Love Greek by Andrea Marcolongo and Will Schutt
12. Good Habits, Bad Habits: The Science of Making Positive Changes That Stick by Wendy Wood
13. The Book of Gutsy Women: Favorite Stories of Courage and Resilience by Chelsea Clinton and HIllary Rodham Clinton
14. The Districts: Stories of American Justice from the Federal Courts by Johnny Dwyer
15. This is Your Brain on Birth Control: The Surprising Science of Women, Hormones, and the Law of Unintended Consequences by Sarah Hill

My goodness, that’s a lot of 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. This week, we chatted about cozy nonfiction you just want to snuggle up with. Happy reading! – Kim

Happy Friday, book nerds and bookworms! Due to the deadline for last week’s newsletter, I didn’t get to share the exciting news about the long list for one of my favorite book awards, the National Book Award!

I usually love checking out the titles on this list because there’s variety in topics and approaches. This year’s list is especially exciting because it is half books by women, nine of the 10 authors have never been nominated before, and it includes memoirs and an essay collection. Here’s the list, with some context from The New Yorker:

1. Go Ahead in the Rain by Hanif Abdurraqib
2. The Yellow House by Sarah M. Broom
3. Thick: And Other Essays by Tressie McMillan Cottom
4. What You Have Heard is True by Carolyn Forché
5. Say Nothing by Patrick Radden Keefe
6. The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee by David Treuer
7. The End of the Myth by Greg Grandin
8. Burn the Place by Iliana Regan
9. Race for Profit by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor
10. Solitary by Albert Woodfox with Leslie George

The five finalists in each category will be announced on October 8. The winners will be announced on November 20. Awards season!

This week has been full of a few other things I loved:

This interview with Doris Payne, an 88-year-old grandmother who used to be a notorious jewel thief, is interesting from beginning to end. Payne also just released a memoir that I am angry I missed – Diamond Doris: The True Story of the World’s Most Notorious Jewel Thief.

This list of 18 inspiring leadership books for women from The Good Trade is full of excellent titles. It has a few familiar titles – I Am Malala, We Should All Be Feminists – and several others that haven’t been on my radar. I put What Will It Take to Make a Woman President? on my library hold list immediately.

I never get tired of reading articles about fact-checking in nonfiction, so of course I ate up this story about how publishing is changing after a string of high-profile fact-checking errors this year. The push and pull between who should pay – authors or their publishers – is an interesting one, and I hadn’t really thought about how our polarized political climate affects the liability for both. Worth a read!

And that’s everything on my radar 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

Happy Wednesday, nonfiction readers! I spent the weekend reading, hiking, and hanging out with a dear friend, so I’ve been feeling invigorated and excited all week.

Because it was a vacation, of sorts, I dug back through some of the nonfiction of the year I haven’t gotten to read and settled on Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland by Patrick Radden Keefe. It’s a story that combines true crime and history to better understand The Troubles in Ireland, a period I know very little about. The book is fascinating and beautifully written.

It’s another big week filled with great new books. I’ve decided to focus on just five of them:

Make it Scream, Make it Burn by Leslie Jamison – This collection of essays is, perhaps, my most anticipated book of 2019. I absolutely adored Leslie Jamison’s first essay collection, The Empathy Exams, and so far I love this one too. It covers a fascinating mix of memoir, journalism, and criticism on subjects as varied as the past-life memories of children, eloping in Las Vegas, and a lonely whale named 52 Blue. So great.

Preview Reading: You can read an essay from the book, “The Quickening” in The Atlantic.

Motherhood So White: A Memoir of Race, Gender, and Parenting in America by Nefertiti Austin – After adopting a young Black baby, single mother Nefertiti Austin came to realize that the idea of mother in the United States often means white. This book is about “her fight to create the family she always knew she was meant to have and the story of motherhood that all American families need now.”

Further Reading: Austin talks about her adoption journey, how the writing community can support mothers, and more with Fiction Advocate.

Year of the Monkey by Patti Smith – I still haven’t read a Patti Smith memoir, and that seems like a dereliction of duty of some kind. In this book, Smith writes about 2016, her “year of solitary wandering” when she turned 70. The year turns into a time to reckon with all sorts of big issues, including loss, aging, and “a dramatic shift in the political landscape of America.”

Further Reading: I’m fascinated with how Smith described writing the book in an interview with Variety: “Year of the Monkey was literally written in real-time, in a journal, because how it opens is what happened when I started, and I had no idea where it was going to go.”

Sorted: Growing Up, Coming Out, and Finding My Place (A Transgender Memoir) by Jackson Bird – This memoir by a writer, YouTuber, and LGBTQ+ advocate is about his experience coming out as transgender to friends, family, and a huge part of the Internet at 25. This memoir shares “the ups and downs of growing up gender confused” through navigating the obstacles of his transition.

Further Watching: I liked Bird’s 2017 TED Talk, “How to talk (and listen) to transgender people.” If you want more, check out his YouTube channel too.

Know My Name: A Memoir by Chanel Miller – Chanel Miller is famous, but until just a few weeks ago very few people knew her real name. Referred to as Emily Doe, Miller is the young woman sexually assaulted by Brock Turner in a case now infamous for the six-month jail sentence Turner received. Miller’s victim impact statement went viral, and has inspired other survivors and spurred legislative action. This book is her story of “trauma, transcendence, and the power of words.”

Further Reading/Watching: Miller’s victim impact statement in the case is still a stunning read. As part of an interview with 60 Minutes, Miller also read the statement on video. It’s powerful.

Those are five small but mighty books. I hope you can find something to enjoy. Before we go, make sure to click through to enter Book Riot’s giveaway of the year’s 10 best mystery/thrillers so far! It’s an amazing list!

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