Category: True Story

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

Hello! It’s Friday! That is something to celebrate, dear nonfiction friends. I was supposed to go hiking with a friend this weekend, but the forecast looks like rain… I’m sad about missing nature, but perhaps that will mean more time for books!

This week’s nonfiction news feels like a preview for the rest of what we’ll be seeing in 2019 – book prize announcements and political scandals. Let’s just get into it!

This week, the finalists for the Kirkus Prize were announced. Although this prize may not be well-known outside literary circles, the cash money is huge – $50,000 each for the winners in fiction, nonfiction, and young readers’ literature. I’m excited about the nonfiction list:

• Go Ahead in the Rain: Notes to A Tribe Called Quest by Hanif Abdurraqib
• When Death Takes Something from You Give It Back: Carl’s Book by Naja Marie Aidt, translated by Denise Newman
• How We Fight for Our Lives: A Memoir by Saeed Jones
• Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland by Patrick Radden Keefe
• The Ungrateful Refugee: What Immigrants Never Tell You by Dina Nayeri
• No Visible Bruises: What We Don’t Know About Domestic Violence Can Kill Us by Rachel Louise Snyder

I’ve only read one – No Visible Bruises – but several of the others have been on my list this year. The TBR grows!

The New York Times is facing some criticism over their coverage of a new nonfiction book, The Education of Brett Kavanaugh by reporters Robin Pogrebin and Kate Kelly. The paper decided to run an excerpt of the book in the book review section, but the excerpt alleges some additional serious accusations against Kavanaugh. According to Vanity Fair, “Sources say Robin Pogrebin and Kate Kelly initially pitched their reporting to the news side, but top editors ultimately felt that there wasn’t enough juice to warrant a story there—punting the scoop to the Sunday Review section.” And there’s a lot more beyond that concern – definitely check out the article for more.

Edward Snowden is being sued by the U.S. government. The Verge reported that the Justice Department has filed a civil lawsuit against Snowden to try and recover the proceeds of his memoir, Permanent Record. They allege that because the book was not submitted to intelligence agencies for review, Snowden has improperly released information and shouldn’t benefit from the book. This whole thing just makes me laugh.

And that’s the news 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 and happy Wednesday, nonfiction nerds! We are in the middle of a September hot streak in Minnesota and it is amazing. This weekend, I sat out on my porch in shorts and a t-shirt! Unheard of! I’ve also been reading up a storm – I finished She Said by Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey, an account of breaking the Harvey Weinstein story, and absolutely adored it. 

This week is another good one for new books. I’ve got three books to highlight, plus five more that could find a spot on your TBR. Onward! 

Nice Try: Stories of Best Intentions and Mixed Results by Josh Gondelman – This book is a collection of essays by a comedian who has been described as the “nicest man in comedy.” In it, Gondelman “celebrates a life of good intentions – and mixed results.” Given how hard the world is right now and what a bummer it is to celebrate comedians who try to excuse mean-ness in their work, I’m all for this book. 

Further Reading: His 2017 essay titled “What if I Bombed at My Own Wedding?” is a highlight of the book you can grab online. It made me laugh out loud. If the paywall is an issue, he also recently published a piece for BuzzFeed called “The 2 Best Times I’ve Fainted As A Grown Man.”

Think Black: A Memoir by Clyde W. Ford – Clyde W. Ford’s father, John, was the first black software engineer hired at IBM. Although accomplished, the racism John faced each day had an emotional cost that damaged him and the relationship he had with his son. When Clyde joined IBM two decades later, he discovered the same institutional racism at work and gained a new appreciation of his father’s work. 

Background Reading: On his blog, Ford shares the origins of the book, including how it had origins as a 10-episode television series.  

Monster, She Wrote: The Women Who Pioneered Horror and Speculative Fiction by Lisa Kröger and Melanie R. Anderson – Although authors like Mary Shelley and Shirley Jackson are household names, they’re far from the earliest or most prolific women writing horror and science fiction stories. This book explores the contributions that women have made to the genre in the past and into the future. The book has more than 100 authors and 200 recommended novels, novellas, and short stories. Amazing!

Further Reading: Tor.com published an excerpt from the book about Margaret Cavendish, a writer who produced” strange fiction a century before Gothic novels came along.”

1. The Seven Necessary Sins for Women and Girls by Mona Eltahawy
2. Wildhood: The Epic Journey from Adolescence to Adulthood in Humans and Other Animals by Dr. Barbara Natterson-Horowitz and Kathryn Bowers
3. Coventry by Rachel Cusk
4. On Fire: The (Burning) Case for a Green New Deal by Naomi Klein 
5. That Will Never Work: The Birth of Netflix and the Amazing Life of an Idea by Marc Randolph

Before you click on through your email, follow this link to enter Book Riot’s enter our giveaway of the year’s 10 best mystery/thrillers so far!

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 took a deep dive into many of September’s best new releases. Happy reading! – Kim

Hello and happy Friday the 13th, nonfiction friends! I can only hope this potentially unlucky day treats you well, and you go into the weekend with a full pile of books and a hot cup of whatever seasonal beverage makes you happy.

This week’s collection of nonfiction news gave me all the feels – giggles, squeals, sighs, cheers, and groans. Let’s get into it!

Giggles – I’ve been reading a lot of long-form journalism lately, so this Onion article really made me laugh. The kicker is also great, especially, given some other news I found this week (keep reading!).

Squeals – The official trailer for Just Mercy is here, and I think it looks awesome! I’m also excited that one of my favorite critics, Linda Holmes, tweeted some generally positive comments about the movie after seeing a screening at the Toronto International Film Festival. You can also consider this your weekly reminder to pick up Bryan Stevenson’s book!

Sighs – Erik Larson announced that his next book will be set during the Nazi blitz of London in 1940 and 1941. I’m a little bummed by this news because I like Erik Larson but don’t especially enjoy books about World War II. In an interview, Larson said he hopes to find ways to tell the story of Winston Churchill’s first year as prime minister in a new way, but that feels like a tall order. I guess we’ll know more when the book arrives in March 2020.

Cheers – Joshua Hammer’s The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu is being made into a documentary! The documentary will focus on a group of scholars that “transformed themselves into a roving gang of smugglers” to transport the ancient texts across the desert. It’s an interesting, readable book that I think will translate well into a documentary.

Groans – Sarah Huckabee Sanders is writing a memoir about her life and tenure as the White House Press Secretary. Given how much time she spent lying to the American people from the White House, I can’t bring myself to care about what she has to say about anything. It’s just… so annoying that bad people keep getting book deals. The only good thing about this news is all of the hilarious title suggestions folks offered on Twitter.

Whew, that’s enough news to round out the week. Before you go, click through to enter Book Riot’s enter our 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

Hello and happy second-week-of-September, fellow reading nerds. I think the arrival of fall has helped pick up my reading mojo just a bit – I’ve finished four books already this month, and I hope I won’t stop that pace any time soon.

And that’s good because, to borrow a phrase from my favorite velocireader, there are an absolutely banana-pants number of books coming out this week. I’ve decided to pull the 10 that I’m most interested in, but please know there are many, many others you could grab. Let’s dive in!

For the Love of Men: A New Vision for Mindful Masculinity by Liz Plank – A look at toxic masculinity and what all of us can do to live better and help others do the same.

Audience of One: Donald Trump, Television, and the Fracturing of America by James Poniewozik – The chief television critic for the New York Times offers a history of television and mass media in America, paired with a history of Donald Trump and how he used mass media to win the presidency.

The Years That Matter Most: How College Makes or Breaks Us by Paul Tough – “Does college still work? Is the system designed just to protect the privileged and leave everyone else behind? Or can a college education today provide real opportunity to young Americans seeking to improve their station in life?”

Billion Dollar Fantasy: The High-Stakes Game Between FanDuel and DraftKings That Upended Sports in America by Albert Chen – This one’s for all the fantasy sports nerds out there! A Sports Illustrated reporter looks at how two rival daily fantasy sports gambling websites went from billion-dollar companies to targets of investigations by the FBI and Department of Justice. Yikes!

How to Fight Anti-Semitism by Bari Weiss – In the wake of the 2018 mass shooting at Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, Weiss looks at how anti-Semitism is on the rise again and finding a way to migrate into the mainstream.

She Said: Breaking the Sexual Harassment Story that Helped Ignite a Movement by Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey – The New York Times journalists who broke the story about Harvey Weinstein tell the story of their investigation and explore what it took to get the evidence they needed to finally reveal his history of harassment.

Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know About the People We Don’t Know by Malcolm Gladwell – “A powerful examination of our interactions with strangers – and why they often go wrong.”

Fantasy Island: Colonialism, Exploitation, and the Betrayal of Puerto Rico by Ed Morales – Puerto Rico has been an American colony for 122 years. This book looks at a history of the island since 1989 and how it has “served as a testing ground for the most aggressive and exploitative US economic, political, and social policies.”

Guest House for Young Widows: Among the Women of ISIS by Azadeh Moaveni – A look at 13 women who joined ISIS, initially responding to “promises of female empowerment and social justice, and calls to aid the plight of fellow Muslims in Syria” that turned out to be entirely false.

The Only Plane in the Sky: An Oral History of 9/11 by Garrett M. Graff – A history of the September 11, 2001 attacks that offers “a 360-degree account of the day told through the voices of the people who experienced it.”

What Is a Girl Worth?: My Story of Breaking the Silence and Exposing the Truth about Larry Nassar and USA Gymnastics by Rachael Denhollander – In this memoir, the first woman to publicly accuse Larry Nassar of abusing members of USA Gymnastics shares her story.

The Education of an Idealist: A Memoir by Samantha Power – In this memoir, an activist shares her journey “from immigrant to war correspondent to presidential Cabinet official” and Ambassador to the United Nations.

And don’t forget, you can enter Book Riot’s enter our 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