Author: Alice Burton

This came out THIS YEAR. Acclaimed singer/songwriter and subject of the film Coal Miner’s Daughter Loretta Lynn shares memories of her friendship with the utterly amazing and my first-dance-at-my-wedding-was-to-one-of-her-songs Patsy Cline. Loretta Lynn is extremely charming and her books are an easy read, so pick this up if you like nice things about nice people.

Yeah, like I’m not again recommending Mariah Carey’s book without still having read it. This book has five stars out of almost 5,000 ratings. That MEANS something. Learn more about the woman who not only gave us the greatest Christmas song of all time, but also “I don’t know her.” Legend. Icon. Mariah Carey.

You know who super loved this book? Kim, former runner of this newsletter and still-cohost of For Real. Lin-Manuel Miranda said “Wanna be an artist? Get this book.” She’s a REALLY good writer and if you haven’t heard her version of the cult song “Congratulations” from Hamilton, you are missing out.

Speaking of ICONS AND LEGENDS, here we have Billie Holiday’s 1956 memoir. Published three years before she passed away at the very young age of 44, Holiday tells the story of growing up in Baltimore, getting a record deal in the 1930s, and performing sold-out concerts at Carnegie Hall. Let’s all listen to some Billie Holiday.

If you loved the very-popular-this-year So You Want to Talk About Race, you’ll probably be pretty into this “history of white male America and a scathing indictment of what it has cost us socially, economically, and politically.” I keep track of a LOT of new nonfiction, and there are very few I mark that I’m very excited about. This is one of them.

Harriet the Spy came out in 1964 and has been the cause of countless children starting to spy on their neighbors and be very revved up by the idea of an egg cream. But what about its author?: “As a children’s author and a lesbian, Fitzhugh was often pressured to disguise her true nature. Sometimes You Have to Lie tells the story of her hidden life and of the creation of her masterpiece, which remains long after her death as a testament to the complicated relationship between truth, secrecy, and individualism.”

Do you know how the internet works? Like really how it works? Well, here is a cartoon cat to explain to you the technical aspects of the Internet that you need in order to advocate for digital rights. I’m talking transport protocols, basic internet infrastructure, security and privacy, algorithms, and MORE. Sure, it sounds potentially overwhelming, but need I remind you of the cartoon cat.

Oh man, women’s history for December. This anthology comprises 18 separate portraits, with a focus on women of the Mexican Revolution, but also including women like Frida Kahlo and activist Emma Tenayuca. Each portrait is paired with a historical or literary piece by a contemporary writer who was inspired by their subject’s legacy.

This covers from the 1600s to the 2010s, and looks at United States history from some of the “more than five hundred federally recognized Indigenous nations” that still exist. It goes from colonization to imperialism and beyond. Shorter than 300 pages, this might be a good beginning-of-2021 read for your list.

This book totally changed my ideas about the Pilgrims and early America. There can be a tendency to harken back to when everyone was kinder and better, etc, but the more you study history, the more you learn that people have always been horrible (and good! but also horrible). I will never think of Miles Standish the same way again.

The story of Thanksgiving is basically the story of a group of religious fanatics who came to a place where other people lived and then promptly started starving to death because they didn’t know how to farm the crops there. I grew up rolling my eyes at this “liberal” version of the story, but then I became an adult and read what is reported to have actually happened, and yep. Historian Silverman looks at what led to the Wampanoag/Pilgrim alliance and what destroyed it.

We know there’s a tendency to speak of Native Americans as one cohesive unit, when that is categorically false. In Sneve’s book, she focuses on how “Sioux women are the center of tribal life and the core of the tiospaye, the extended family. They maintain the values and traditions of Sioux culture, but their own stories and experiences often remain untold.” For this hundred page read, she combed through “the winter counts” and oral records of her ancestors to discover their past.

The place! England. The time! Mostly the 1940s. Imagine A League of Their Own, but with musicians instead of baseball players. Ivy Benson started her own band before the age of thirty and kept it going for forty years. The band became the BBC’s resident dance band in 1943, and were top of the bill at the London Palladium in 1944. Someone make a movie about it please?

In this collection, “preeminent civil rights attorneys and scholars of the past quarter-century weigh in on some of the most controversial aspects of race and the law.” Anita Allen, Chuck Lawrence, Michelle Alexander, and more offer “an unprecedented array of today’s most creative and brilliant thinking on race and the law.”

Masterpiece Theatre debuted in 1971, making next year its fiftieth year in existence. This history of the show combines interviews, photographs, commentary, and anecdotes. If you have any Downton Abbey or just British drama fans in your life, this seems like an especially good book gift for them.

This book is so specifically About a Thing, I’m going to entirely quote the publisher: “From the relationship between the endangered North Atlantic Right Whale and Gumbs’s Shinnecock and enslaved ancestors to the ways echolocation changes our understandings of “vision” and visionary action, this is a masterful use of metaphor and natural models in the service of social justice.” It’s such an interesting idea! Check it out.

Before she revealed herself to the world, Chanel Miller was Emily Doe, the person whose victim impact statement to the man convicted of her sexual assault (sentence: six months) went viral. Miller’s recounting of her life and this extremely traumatic event and its aftermath is very, very well done. Pick up if you’re okay with something a bit heavier.

Poet and literary editor of Harriet Tubman Press, Buchanan uses her memoir to “explore her family’s legacy of being African Americans with American Indian roots and how they dealt with not just society’s ostracization but the consequences of this dual inheritance.” Check it out if you’re interested in exploring identity.

GENDER amirite? I couldn’t do this list without a graphic memoir and Prince’s memoir is a nice look at what does it MEAN if you identify as a girl but you don’t fit in with the cultural signifiers (dresses, princesses, etc). Most of the book is her grappling with that. The resolution doesn’t take up much space, but does it need to, is the question.

Get this as an audiobook, for sure. I recommend that for basically any memoir by a comedian. Haddish went into the foster system as a teenager and after some issues, basically got told she could go to the Laugh Factory comedy camp or counseling. She clearly chose the former. She’s got such an awesome attitude about everything AND she’s hilarious, so we’re ending on this up note.

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!

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.

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.

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.

Álvarez is the son of Mexican immigrants and grew up in Washington state, working at an apple-packing plant. A first-generation college student, he struggled to find his place, until at 19 he learned about the Native American/First Nations movement called Peace and Dignity Journeys. This is an epic marathon, and Álvarez’s took four months and spanned from Canada to Guatemala. I’ve heard pretty much nothing but good things about this one.

I remember my Victorian lit professor saying, “do you know the female equivalent of flâneur? You do not, because it doesn’t exist, because women weren’t supposed to walk the city alone.” Well, here’s the modern day answer to that. It’s part memoir, as Elkin talks about her life in the subtitled cities, and also a history of “such flâneuses as the cross-dressing nineteenth-century novelist George Sand, the Parisian artist Sophie Calle, the wartime correspondent Martha Gellhorn, and the writer Jean Rhys.” I encourage you to flâneuse it up in your neighborhood.

Do you like food? Do you want to learn more about it, possibly accompanied by a travel theme? Chinese American journalist Lin-Liu gives a culinary tour of today’s (2008’s) China, “from cooking student to noodle-stall and dumpling-house apprentice to intern at a chic Shanghai restaurant.”

Maybe this will make you glad you’re inside? Streever “journeys through history, myth, geography, and ecology in a year-long search for cold–real, icy, 40-below cold.” He looks at hibernation habits, talks about the Clovis people of the Ice Age, what happens when trees freeze, Japanese ama (“sea women”) divers, finding frozen mammoths, and more. This sounds GREAT.

In 1969, Jane Britton, a 23-year-old graduate student in Harvard’s Anthropology Department, was found murdered in her apartment. Forty years later, undergrad Becky Cooper first heard a mythologized version of the story and began a decade of research into Jane Britton’s murder, rumored to be committed by a Harvard professor. This book is EXCELLENT.

I love paleoanthropology. What are humanity’s origins! We don’t actually know that much! It’s so weird! When did things settle into the way we do them and why! So this book goes into the team that discovered “Ardi,” a 4.4 million-year-old likely human ancestor. My assumption (I haven’t been able to access a galley of this one) is that it’s called Fossil Men because the the seven person team credited in the Science article is entirely composed of men. The leader of the Ardi team, Tim White, was helped in his early career by famed paleoanthropologist Mary Leakey, so you’d think he’d maybe have learned something from that, but here we are. Anyway! Here’s the story of Ardi and the impact its discovery and shielded research had on the paleoanthropology community.

I’m not usually into “how [random daily item] CHANGED EVERYTHING” books, but textiles definitely had a huge impact and it’s really just a fun way to say “The History of Textiles,” which one would maybe be less inclined to pick up. “From Minoans exporting wool colored with precious purple dye to Egypt, to Romans arrayed in costly Chinese silk, the cloth trade paved the crossroads of the ancient world. Textiles funded the Renaissance and the Mughal Empire; they gave us banks and bookkeeping, Michelangelo’s David and the Taj Mahal.” This looks super fun.

You’ve maybe seen Dr. Paul Koudounaris on some of mortician and author Caitlin Doughty’s YouTube vids. This history of cats is “dictated” to Koudounaris by Baba the Cat (just go with it), who goes through cats in ancient Egypt, Rome, Victorian England, modern France, and more. Scattered throughout are photos of Baba in pictures like the cover, wearing elaborate costumes. I mean, sign me up.

Originally published in 2013, but with SIX new essays, Carnegie Medal-winner Laymon revises and republishes his work on race, identity, and injustice. The thirteen essays touch on subjects ranging from “family, race, violence, and celebrity to music, writing, and coming of age in Mississippi.”

There are a lot of weird “facts” about animals floating around, some true, some not. Cooke looks into them here — the idea that eels are born from sand, that swallows hibernate under water, and that bears give birth to formless lumps that are licked into shape by their mothers — and breaks down what they say about *us*.

Yes, THAT Susan Orlean. Orchids, libraries, celebrity dogs, she covers them all. Rin Tin Tin was the #1 box office draw in the 1920s. I get it, 1920s. You’d just dealt with a world war, a pandemic, and you just wanted to watch a dog be a hero. Orlean’s biography not only talks about Rin Tin Tin, but the bond between humans and animals.

Dr. Akhtar studies animal ethics AND neurology and in her book looks at how “interspecies empathy enriches our well-being” and is “a vital component of human health.” She says that humans are neurologically designed to empathize with animals, and the love we give to them biologically reverberates back to us.

tw: bullying and abuse from Akhtar’s recounting of past incidents in her life.

Doesn’t this cover just make you FEEL better? Magdalena works at the Royal Botanic Gardens and is known for saving some of the world’s rarest plants. This is why it’s great to have so many humans. They care about so many disparate things, and Carlos Magdalena is HERE for plants. This takes you from Peru to Australia and back to England as he goes on quests to save plant life around the world. A+.

This is alREADY a finalist for the 2020 National Book Award in Nonfiction. It’s “an examination by one of America’s most acclaimed essayists of what it is to grow, parent, write, and exist as a black American male.” It includes essays like “Dragon Slayers,” “Feeding Pigeons,” “The Heritage Room,” and the eponymous “How to Make a Slave.”

Pulitzer Prize-winner Momaday is a member of the Kiowa tribe who has spent his life on reservations in the Southwest. In this new release, he “reflects on his native ground and its influence on his people” and “reminds us that the Earth is a sacred place of wonder and beauty; a source of strength and healing that must be protected before it’s too late.”

Remember travel? Outlander stars Heughan and McTavish travel through Scotland by boat, kayak, camper van, and motorbike. They go from Glencoe (like two hours north of Glasgow) to Inverness and Culloden battlefield (another two hours north!), all while hanging out with fun Scottish people. This book sounds like an A+ respite from 2020.

“Amazon, Google, Facebook, governments. No matter who we are or where we go, someone is collecting our data: to profile us, target us, assess us; to predict our behavior and analyze our attitudes; to influence the things we do and buy—even to impact our vote.” Doss, a privacy expert and former NSA and Senate lawyer, demystifies the digital footprints we leave in our daily lives and reveals how our data is being used. This all feels pretty dang relevant.

Olson and her husband were on vacation when their car was hit by a train. Olson lost both her legs and her right arm. In her memoir, she shares how she finished her residency as a doctor, raised two children, and traveled the world.