Sponsored by Here We Are: American Dreams, American Nightmares by Aarti Namdev Shahani, published by Celadon Books
Here We Are is a heart-wrenching memoir about an immigrant family’s American Dream, the justice system that took it away, and the daughter who fought to get it back, from NPR correspondent Aarti Namdev Shahani.
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