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I know I have gotten excited about new release weeks in the past, but all of these look so good and I am very there-are-not-enough-hours-in-the-day-whyyyy about them. They’re also all pretty different? IMO this is yet another example of why nonfiction is great: incredibly relevant conversations about race and guns and gender and historical inequalities and rebellions and also sexy escapades at a hotel?? It all falls under nonfiction and it’s all fascinating.
The Second: Race and Guns in a Fatally Unequal America by Carol Anderson
Historian Anderson, who previously wrote White Rage and One Person, No Vote, looks at the history and impact of the United States’s Second Amendment, “how it was designed, and how it has consistently been constructed to keep African Americans powerless and vulnerable.” Through her research, she demonstrates that “the Second Amendment is not about guns but about anti-Blackness.” Anderson consistently uses history to illuminate and explain issues of our time, which IMO, is the best use of history.
As a Woman: What I Learned about Power, Sex, and the Patriarchy after I Transitioned by Paula Stone Williams
Williams, formerly an anti-LGBTQ+ evangelical leader and president of a church-planting organization, transitioned in her sixties after a “call to authenticity.” In an other-side-of-the-coin to Thomas Page McBee’s book Amateur, instead of being listened to more post-transition, she finds herself ignored, sidelined, and overlooked. She “urges men to recognize the ways in which the world is tilted in their favor and validates the experiences of women who have been disregarded based solely on their gender, while also acknowledging how she was once like those men who are blind to their privilege.”
Wake: The Hidden History of Women-Led Slave Revolts by Rebecca Hall, Hugo Martínez (Illustrated by)
This graphic memoir and history of women-led slave revolts rejects the popularly-held idea that slave revolts were solely led by men. Hall, the granddaughter of enslaved people, combs through “old court records, slave ship captain’s logs, crumbling correspondence, and even the forensic evidence from the bones of enslaved women from the ‘negro burying ground’ uncovered in Manhattan. She finds women warriors everywhere.” I love Martínez’s art, which makes this history even more evocative.
The Secret Life of the Savoy: Glamour and Intrigue at the World’s Most Famous Hotel by Olivia Williams
One hundred years of “glamour and high society” told through the lives of the Savoy Hotel’s founders! It talks about Gilbert and Sullivan, it talks about P.G. Wodehouse, it talks about electric lights like Moulin Rouge did, it talks about Oscar Wilde, Marilyn Monroe, The Beatles, and basically everyone incredibly famous in the 20th century.
For more nonfiction new releases, 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.