Category: True Story

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

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