Sponsored by Henry Holt & Co.
Loved and Wanted is the passionate story of a woman’s love for her children, and a poignant and bracing look at the difficult choices women in America are forced to make every day, in a nation where policies and a cultural war on women leave them without sufficient agency over their bodies, their futures, and even their hopes for their children’s lives.
Everyone holding up? Maybe? I used a bath bomb this week and it was a really A+ decision. If you don’t have a bathtub, they’ve got these shower…things. I’ve never used them, but my guess is they release some super nice-smelling MIST into your shower. Anyway, what I’m trying to say is, take care of yourself and also smell some nice things. And read some new books! Here are highlights from this week’s new nonfiction releases:
A Promised Land by Barack Obama
It is the FIRST volume of Obama’s presidential memoir. This goes from “young man searching for his identity to leader of the free world” and from his earliest political aspirations to being elected president in 2008. “We are privy to his thoughts as he assembles his cabinet, wrestles with a global financial crisis, takes the measure of Vladimir Putin, overcomes seemingly insurmountable odds to secure passage of the Affordable Care Act, clashes with generals about U.S. strategy in Afghanistan, tackles Wall Street reform, responds to the devastating Deepwater Horizon blowout, and authorizes Operation Neptune’s Spear, which leads to the death of Osama bin Laden.” This is a HUGE book, meaning metaphorically in the book world and also it is 768 pages. Wooooo!
I Want to Be Where the Normal People Are by Rachel Bloom
If you enjoyed Bloom’s show Crazy Ex-Girlfriend or her A+ YouTube vids, you’ll like this book. She goes deep into her past, meaning grade school and college stories, her struggles with mental illness and how she dealt with them, and there is even a MUSICAL chapter. She shows her career trajectory too, meaning basically how she went from making hilarious videos to having her own show. It’s great.
What We Don’t Talk About When We Talk About Fat by Aubrey Gordon
Described as an “indictment of the systemic and cultural bias facing plus-size people,” Gordon looks at “the cultural attitudes and social systems that have led to people being denied basic needs because they are fat” and discusses what fat activism can really look like in practice.
Waste: One Woman’s Fight Against America’s Dirty Secret by Catherine Coleman Flowers
Flowers is the founder of the Center for Rural Enterprise and Environmental Justice and was selected as a MacArthur Fellow this year. In her book, she talks about her life’s work: the fight for basic sanitation: “Too many people, especially the rural poor, lack an affordable means of disposing cleanly of the waste from their toilets, and, as a consequence, live amid filth.” This is the story of systemic class, racial, and geographic prejudice across the U.S. in California, Florida, Alaska, the Midwest, and more.
For more nonfiction reads, check out the For Real podcast which I co-host with the excellent Kim here at Book Riot. If you have any questions/comments/book suggestions, you can find me on social media @itsalicetime. Until next time, enjoy those facts, fellow nerds.