All in Non-fiction
When my book club chose The Truths We Hold as this month’s read, I figured it would be about just who the Democratic vice presidential candidate is and how she got to where she is today. This memoir delivers so much more than that though. From Senator Harris’ description of her childhood in Oakland, California, we understand how her parents’ activism in the civil rights movement shaped the person she would become.
Having read The Warmth of Other Suns, Wilkerson’s illuminating first book about the history of Black migration from the South to northern industrial cities that won the Pulitzer Prize, I was eager to read her latest book, Caste. And I was not disappointed. In Caste, Wilkerson has written a second seminal book – one which I predict will also win many literary prizes.
I will admit I was nervous to start this book, which I added to my reading list at the suggestion of smart people who offered resources to educate and spread anti-racism. In my vague understanding of who Malcolm X was, I pictured him as an angry, violent version of Martin Luther King Jr.
I would also like to recommend I Am Malala. Quite by chance I read this book less than a month after finishing Daugher of Destiny. The two books make excellent companions.
I honestly don’t remember how this book got on my reading list, except I think it was mentioned in another book. Perhaps Hillary Clinton’s most recent? However it came to me, I picked it up knowing almost nothing about Bhutto, her family or Pakistani history. My only understanding going in was that she was the first female prime minister in the Muslim world.
Best known for his 2020 presidential bid and his controversial “Freedom Dividend,” Andrew Yang provides a sobering look at the economic and sociocultural status of the United States in The War on Normal People. Yang, a former lawyer and entrepreneur, offers a statistics-backed look into the many problems plaguing the U.S. today: income inequality, wealth disparity, job loss, the opioid epidemic, and others. He tackles issues that many of us, including our elected officials, often minimize or ignore.
I’m not usually a big biography gal, probably because I have read more than a few boring ones, often of playwrights I admire. So this book sat on my shelf for a while, despite my dad’s hearty recommendation. Lesson learned: listen to dad.
In Trick Mirror, Jia Tolentino offers nine ori-ginal essays about the current state of the world we live in – as seen through the eyes of a whip-smart millennial with a feminist perspective. Tolentino is a staff writer at The New Yorker who before working in the Peace Corps in Kyrgyzstan, grew up in Houston in a family very dedicated to their evangelical mega-church. Through her essays we learn of her transformation from devout Christian and obedient daughter to independent thinker and commentator on her generation.
It may seem unusual for a 60+ woman to be reading a book about pregnancy, right? Well, my daughter Maddie was so fascinated by this book and talked to me about it so frequently, that I told her I wanted to borrow the book when she was done.
The musical Come From Away is easily one of my favorite shows of the last ten years. It tells the story of the days after 9/11 when 36 planes were forced to land in Gander, Newfoundland rather than their U.S. destinations. The Day The World Came To Town follows the same events, with many of the same characters, although the two are not related in anything other than subject matter. Each has its own authors who conducted their own interviews.
n recommending this book, which I do highly, I had to reflect on the many different aspects of a book that I believe make it a “must read.” Catch and Kill will punch you in the stomach and leave you breathless with the story Farrow tells. I knew the book was about Harvey Weinstein – his predatory behavior and how he got away with it for so long because he was a rich and powerful influence in the film industry. What I hadn’t anticipated was Farrow’s strong evidence that for years, many other powerful men knew of Weinstein's behavior.
The subtitle for Simplicity Parenting is “Using the Extraordinary Power of Less to Nurture Calmer, Happier and More Secure Kids,” and that is exactly what it delivers. Payne provides a toolbox of ideas, anecdotes and observations about why so many kids today are experiencing such high stress and anxiety, and how we might go about fixing it.
It was exactly one year ago that I had my breakthrough and realized that there are well-written, non-fiction books about history that even I could enjoy reading. It was Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Team of Rivals that opened my eyes. After Goodwin, I solicited ideas from friends and tried Jill Lepore’s These Truths and realized that not all popular history books would be to my liking. Therefore, when I read Ron Chernow’s Alexander Hamilton, I was thrilled to find it so accessible and entertaining.
This is not the kind of book I would normally pick out for myself, but my husband Dan saw Hadfield speak and brought his memoir home. His high praise of the man’s message and the book itself put it at the top of my list, and I wasn’t disappointed.
My co-editor and I so enjoy receiving book recommendations from our readers that we both read Born A Crime this month after our friend Jane Amara endorsed it. I was aware of the book, but unsure of its appeal. Thanks to Jane, I read it and recommend it highly.
I could not put this book down once I started reading it. At the same time, I didn’t want to read too much at one sitting because I wanted to absorb what I’d read and I didn’t want the book to end.
Thank goodness for the twice-yearly “Authors on Stage” program at Wellesley College, which I’ve happily attended for years with my friend, Pam. If not for this wonderful series, which each time features three authors talking about their new books, I may never have found The Food Explorer. As the title suggests, the book tells the remarkable story of David Fairchild, an American botanist, who from the late nineteenth century well into the twentieth, devoted his life to traveling the world in search of new plants and foods that he could bring back to America. He added a vast quantity of foods to Americans’ diets and increased by a huge amount the diversity of what farmers grow.
This amazing book is the true story of the woman who created the Veuve Clicquot empire in France just after the French Revolution when women weren’t generally allowed to own property or run businesses. Upon her husband’s death when she was 27 years old, Barbe-Nicole Clicquot Ponsardin assumed leadership of the wine company she and her husband had run together. With genuine strength and a natural ability for business, she nurtured the company through multiple political and financial firestorms – to become one of the first and most successful business women of her time.
While not a memoir, this book takes a very close look at a young woman who was born male and her journey, along with her family, to transition to the gender she was meant to be.
I don’t read a ton of memoirs, but this one is GREAT! I devoured it, staying up way too late several nights in a row. Not only is the story completely hypnotic, the book is structured to keep you turning pages.
