Author: Alice Burton

We’re sandwiched here between the one hundredth anniversary of the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment (August 18, votes for women!) and the anniversary of it becoming “official” (August 26). So let’s look at some books about women’s suffrage!

Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote, and Insisted on Equality for All by Martha S. Jones. This is out in September, but you can PRE-order it (exciting). For a very, very long time, the story of women getting the vote was Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Seneca Falls and then Susan B. Anthony got arrested and women could vote. If Black women were mentioned at all, it was a passing reference to Sojourner Truth or Ida B. Wells, so I am very excited about this book.

 

The Women’s Hour: The Great Fight to Win the Vote by Elaine Weiss. While Weiss is clearly a Carrie Chapman Catt stan and not so much on the side of Alice Paul, she did a ton of research for this, and it’s a great summary of the final fight in Nashville to pass the Nineteenth. There is so much drama! And so much shady politics. It definitely made me want to take a trip to Nashville, so I guess given our present time, I’ll schedule that for…TBD. Read if you like a good narrative.

 

Amazons, Abolitionists, and Activists: A Graphic History of Women’s Fight for Their Rights by Mikki Kendall and A. D’Amico. I somehow don’t own this yet, and I feel like a reeeal dummy for not. This goes back to the beginning, world history-speaking, and looks at imperialism, suffrage, civil rights, and then women’s rights from the 1960s to now. And it’s all illustrated! It reads like a comic book, so if you want to get in some history without diving into some academic tome, here’s a good option.

Register to vote, and that’s it for this week! You can find me on social media @itsalicetime and co-hosting the nonfiction For Real podcast with Kim here at Book Riot. Until next time, enjoy those facts, fellow nerds.

We’re starting to get smashed with huge release dates due to all the postponed books from the spring, so consider these but a sprinkling of new nonfiction releases. If you’re interested in a more complete list, check out Book Riot Insiders, but between this newsletter and the podcast For Real, I try to catch what look like some of the best and/or weirdest. Here we go:

The Organ Thieves: The Shocking Story of the First Heart Transplant in the Segregated South by Chip Jones. I cannot summarize this any better than the publisher: “In 1968, Bruce Tucker, a black man, went into Virginia’s top research hospital with a head injury, only to have his heart taken out of his body and put into the chest of a white businessman. Now, in The Organ Thieves, Pulitzer Prize–nominated journalist Chip Jones exposes the horrifying inequality surrounding Tucker’s death and how he was used as a human guinea pig without his family’s permission or knowledge.”

 

Always Young and Restless: My Life On and Off America’s #1 Daytime Drama by Melody Thomas Scott. Yeah, like I’m NOT going to include this book. For those not caught up in the heady days of the ’90s soap opera, The Young and the Restless has been number one in the ratings for 28 years. Scott joined the show in 1979 and she is still on it. Soap operas are amazing, do not fight me. She talks about her forty years on the show, as well as her career as a child actor (she was in Hitchcock’s Marnie!). I was a Days of Our Lives lady, but I stan this book.

 

Resist: 35 Profiles of Ordinary People Who Rose Up Against Tyranny and Injustice by Veronica Chambers. John Lewis, Lucretia Mott, Rachel Carson, Dolores Huerta, Nelson Mandela, and more are profiled in this YA collection of activists around the world. Each has a resistance lesson and shows “men and women who resisted tyranny, fought the odds, and stood up to bullies that threatened to harm their communities.” Chambers also has a book out about the suffrage movement for younger readers called Finish the Fight.

 

BACKLIST BUMPS

Making Our Way Home: The Great Migration and the Black American Dream by Blair Imani. This came out back in January, but Morgan Jerkins’s new release Wandering in Strange Lands reminded me of it! It’s an illustrated history of “the Great Migration and its sweeping impact on Black and American culture, from Reconstruction to the rise of hip hop.” It looks at voting rights, domestic terrorism, discrimination, and segregation alongside the flourishing of arts and culture, activism, and civil rights. Check it out!

 

Girl Decoded: A Scientist’s Quest to Reclaim Our Humanity by Bringing Emotional Intelligence to Technology by Rana el Kaliouby. Love a long subtitle. This also came out closer to the beginning of the year, but tells the story of how el Kaliouby came to work on artificial emotional intelligence (Emotion AI). The purpose of this is to “humanize our technology and how we connect with one another.” Which anyone who’s dealt with a misunderstanding due to the lack of tone in text messages knows is SORELY needed.

 

That’s it for this week! You can find me on social media @itsalicetime and co-hosting the nonfiction For Real podcast with Kim here at Book Riot. Until next time, enjoy those facts, fellow nerds.

Did anyone else not have cable growing up and instead watched a lot of PBS, including their late night movies? That’s how I got into classic films. For a Hollywood theme, I tried to pick books with a “behind the scenes” feel across the years, but mostly focusing on the ’30s to the ’70s. *dances offscreen with jazz hands*

Adventures in the Screen Trade by William Goldman. It’s The Princess Bride‘s William Goldman! But also screenwriter of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, which I haven’t seen since I was 12, but 12-year-old Alice would tell you it is GREAT. He also wrote All the President’s Men. Basically he was amazing at screenplays starring Robert Redford. If you’re interested in screenwriting, how it works, what the process is of someone who did it very well, this is it.

 

Stealing the Show: African American Performers and Audiences in 1930s Hollywood by Miriam J. Petty. “Stars” really came into their own in the 1930s. But how did Black actors fare during this time? This book focuses in on five performers, including Academy Award winner Hattie McDaniel, “to reveal the ‘problematic stardom’ and the enduring, interdependent patterns of performance and spectatorship for performers and audiences of color.”

 

The Princess Diarist by Carrie Fisher. I just restarted this one because sometimes you just need Carrie Fisher’s voice in your head, y’know? This is her last book, which came out in 2016, and looks back through the journals she kept during the filming of Star Wars: A New Hope. It’s hilarious, it’s relatable, it’s all the things that Fisher presented herself as to us, her public. And for a classic Hollywood tie-in, there is, as always, mention of her mom, Debbie Reynolds. Love a Debbie Reynolds cameo.

Everything and Nothing: The Dorothy Dandridge Tragedy by Dorothy Dandridge, Earl Conrad. Dandridge, the first Black actor to be nominated for the Best Actress Academy Award, had what ended up being a tragic life. This was primarily due to racism. After her starring role in Carmen Jones and a few other gradually less-starring roles, she had to look for work in nightclubs, struggled with a substance-related disorder, and passed away at the very young age of 43. Check out clips of her in Carmen Jones if you haven’t. Or, you could watch the whole movie (do people still do that?).

That’s it for this week! You can find me on social media @itsalicetime and co-hosting the nonfiction For Real podcast with Kim here at Book Riot. Until next time, enjoy those facts, fellow nerds.

We haven’t checked in on STATS in a while. How’re your 2020 reading stats? If you’ve abandoned them in the abyss otherwise known as 2020 Plans, that makes complete sense. I’ve got some new reads for you! Just in case you’re lookin’.

Iron Empires: Robber Barons, Railroads, and the Making of Modern America by Michael Hiltzik. I don’t know how into nineteenth-century America you are, but if you know anything about it, you know that the railroads were The Thing. Crossin’ the country! Ruining nations of people! And then the robber barons, i.e. Vanderbilt, Morgan, and all those guys, hoarding all the wealth, like smug dragons. Hiltzik talks here about the impact of the railroad and how bananas everything went when/while it was built.

Good for You: Bold Flavors With Benefits by Akhtar Nawab. Ok, these are “100 recipes for gluten-free, dairy-free, vegetarian, and vegan diets.” Wow. Impressive. I have a hard time just trying to incorporate more protein into my diet, and Nawab is like, here’s how to cut it down to the essentials. Each recipe doesn’t cover ALL those bases though, because it includes things like Fish Tacos with Pistachio Mole, Gazpacho with Poached Shrimp, AND Dark Chocolate Almond Butter Cups with Sea Salt. A+.

Leave It As It Is: A Journey Through Theodore Roosevelt’s American Wilderness by David Gessner. Do you miss going outside? Why not read about it (she said, sadly)? Here, Gessner “embarks on a great American road trip guided by Roosevelt’s crusading environmental legacy.” Roosevelt, complicated figure that he was, laid the foundation for many of our national parks and was the first president to create a Federal Bird Reserve. On the trip, Gessner “questions and reimagines Roosevelt’s vision for today.” Which is GREAT, because, as previously stated: complicated.

BACKLIST BUMPS

Caste: The Origins of Our Discontent by Isabel Wilkerson. Ok, this isn’t really “backlist,” but it came out last week and I MISSED IT. In Wilkerson’s next book after The Warmth of Other Suns, she looks at “how America today and throughout its history has been shaped by a hidden caste system, a rigid hierarchy of human rankings.” By looking at America, India, and Nazi Germany, Wilkerson walks you through eight pillars that support caste systems around the world.

 

Amazons, Abolitionists, and Activists: A Graphic History of Women’s Fight for Their Rights by Mikki Kendall and A. D’Amico. This graphic history takes a more zoomed-out approach to the history of women’s rights. Kendall starts in antiquity, moves to slavery, colonialism, and imperialism, and then suffrage, civil rights, and women’s rights from the ’60s to today. It’s easy for women’s rights to be centered around the ballot when there is so much more to it.

 

That’s it for this week. As always, you can find me on social media @itsalicetime and co-hosting the nonfiction For Real podcast with Kim here at Book Riot. Until next time, enjoy those facts, fellow nerds.

Confession: I do not really cook. I’m juuust starting to. But I’ve been getting more and more interested in cookbooks because they seem to be much more of a ~journey~ than they used to be. I grew up with things like 30 Recipes to Achieve That Beach Body and it’s basically like, “drink a lot of aspartame” (remember the ’90s?). Now, cookbooks are like, here is the cook, look how neat they are, here are their beautiful photos, here is how easy this very healthy recipe is to make, maybe there’s some light journaling involved. So appealing.

So here’re come cookbooks!

Plenty by Yotam Ottolenghi. Okay, remember all that stuff I said about how easy something is to make? That’s not the case here. But when I stayed in London for a week (remember travel?), there was an Ottolenghi RIGHT BY my Airbnb and they had amazing food and a line regularly out the door. So this is all vegetarian recipes and has stuff like crusted pumpkin wedges with sour cream, two-potato vindaloo and lemon and goat cheese ravioli. Sure, it has an entire section on eggplants, but I’ll forgive it (p.s. eggplant is gross).

Chetna’s Healthy Indian by Chetna Makan. I love Indian food, but if you order it, it gets super-expensive so quickly! So I’m psyched by the idea of making my own. Especially from a cookbook by a Great British Bake-Off alum. She also has a vegetarian version if you don’t need the chicken/fish sections of this. This has recipes like cumin paneer salad, sweet potato yogurt curry, and chicken seekh kebabs (I do not eat chicken, but these sound really good).

Bean by Bean by Crescent Dragonwagon. Okay. So. My excellent friend and fellow Rioter Jesse recommends this on her 12 of the Best Cookbooks for Quarantine Cooking and Prep list. And sure, it sounds made-up. But it is NOT. And if you want to know the origin of the author’s name as I did, please check out dragonwagon.com. This compendium of bean knowledge highlights concepts like Bean Basics, Cool Beans (these are salads), and Hummus, Where the Heart Is. I am ordering it right now.

I am definitely doing a Cookbooks Part II in the near future, because these DID BUT SCRATCH THE SURFACE. Or did but rip open the bean pod. So. Look forward to that.

As always, you can find me on social media @itsalicetime and co-hosting the nonfiction For Real podcast with Kim here at Book Riot. Until next time, enjoy those facts, fellow nerds.

August! We’re gonna add some backlist bumps here of books that came out near the beginning of 2020. Remember the beginning of 2020? I had an AMC A-List membership. I saw movies in theaters. What an unthinkable thing now. Anyway! Here’s some new books to get into your brain:

The End of Everything (Astrophysically Speaking) by Katie Mack. Don’t you love to put things in perspective? Well, astronomer Katie Mack does. She’s a theoretical astrophysicist who in this book lays out five possible ways the universe could end. Fun! But for reals, this is not going to happen anytime soon and we’ve only had recorded history for like 10,000 years and the universe is like 13.8 billion years old, so…there’s some math for you. Mack walks you through “the Big Crunch; the Heat Death; Vacuum Decay; the Big Rip; and the Bounce.” If you like Space and Staring into the Void, here y’go.

 

A Furious Sky: The Five-Hundred-Year History of America’s Hurricanes by Eric Jay Dolin. I know, these new releases are a series of sunny looks into the future. Or a look at our stormy past! (get it?) Dolin has also written about pirates and whaling, so things on the open sea are his “thing.” This is a history of hurricanes in America going back to the late 1400s, “showing how these tempests frequently helped determine the nation’s course.” I know you weather fans are gonna be real into this.

 

Eliot Ness and the Mad Butcher: Hunting America’s Deadliest Unidentified Serial Killer by Max Allan Collins and A. Brad Schwartz. Do you know about Eliot Ness’s life after The Untouchables? Ohio brought him in to find a serial killer! He did some really bad things while trying to accomplish this goal! The killer was “the Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run,” who also had a grosser name that you can google if you want. Anyway, if you like history and true crime and want to find out what Eliot Ness’s follow-up to catching Capone was, here it is.

 

Wandering in Strange Lands: A Daughter of the Great Migration Reclaims Her Roots by Morgan Jerkins. Get! This! Book! In what’s kind of a sociology/memoir hybrid, Jerkins “recreates her ancestors’ journeys across America, following the migratory routes they took from Georgia and South Carolina to Louisiana, Oklahoma, and California.” It’s SO good and you should add it to your fall reading list. It’s also got that extra satisfaction of being a travel narrative in a time when traveling has become perilous, so you get to take a vicarious journey with her as she meets people and learns about her past and the lives of those who were part of the Great Migration.

 

BACKLIST BUMPS

The Magical Language of Others: A Memoir by E.J. Koh. It’s a mother/daughter book! When Koh was fifteen, her parents returned to South Korea and left her and her brother (who had lived in America for the last ten years) in California. Her mother writes her letters in Korean, which Koh reads as an adult years later. This book deals with “forgiveness, reconciliation, legacy, and intergenerational trauma.” Koh is a poet and Kim and I stan a poet writing nonfiction.

 

Hood Feminism: Notes from the Women That a Movement Forgot by Mikki Kendall. I can’t believe this only came out this year. It feels like it’s already almost a standard read. I’m just gonna quote the copy, because it states it awesomely: “Mainstream feminists rarely talk about meeting basic needs as a feminist issue, argues Mikki Kendall, but food insecurity, access to quality education, safe neighborhoods, a living wage, and medical care are all feminist issues.” Read this!

 

As always, you can find me on social media @itsalicetime and co-hosting the nonfiction For Real podcast with Kim here at Book Riot. Until next time, enjoy those facts, fellow nerds.

Ok, I usually do not read sports stories, because I do not do sports (…that’s the phrase, right), but Kim and I just did an Olympics ep of For Real and it’s got me thinking about how uplifting tales of sportery can be, so let’s look at some!

Proud: My Fight for an Unlikely American Dream by Ibtihaj Muhammad. An Olympics read! Muhammad was the first Muslim American woman to wear a hijab while competing for the United States in the Olympics, and the first Muslim American woman to medal. As “the only woman of color and the only religious minority on Team USA’s saber fencing squad, Ibtihaj had to chart her own path to success and Olympic glory.” I love this cover so hard.

 

Tessa and Scott: Our Journey from Childhood Dream to Gold by Tessa Virtue, Scott Moir. I’m not gonna pretend like there wasn’t a time when I was following three separate Virtue/Moir fan accounts on Instagram. So talented! So cute together! And yet not dating! They seem like they genuinely love hanging out, and they’re equally talented, so this is awesome. Also, another Olympics read!

 

Bloomer Girls: Women Baseball Pioneers by Debra A. Shattuck. It’s like A League of Their Own except not at all. But there’s baseball! This isn’t about a specific women’s baseball team, but about early involvement by women in the nineteenth century. Shattuck “tracks women players who organized baseball clubs for their own enjoyment and found roster spots on men’s teams.” Sports or women’s history nerds, here’s your crossover read.

 

Heart of a Champion: An Autobiography by Michelle Kwan. Michelle Kwaaaaan! This teensy autobiography (shorter than 200 pages) is aimed at middle schoolers and was written in 1998 (can you believe that was more than 20 years ago?). Kwan has a more recent book (2009), but it’s more focused on lifestyle. This came out right around the time she won a silver medal at the ’98 Olympics in Japan and then won the ’98 World Championships. She is an icon, and if you know a middle schooler, maybe get this for them.

 

As always, you can find me on social media @itsalicetime and co-hosting the nonfiction For Real podcast with Kim here at Book Riot. Until next time, enjoy those facts, fellow nerds.

We’re wrapping up July with some new releases. Remember to support authors with new books out! They can’t do live touring and their publicity is tamped wayy down, so if you can even request their book at the library, you’re doing a good thing. All right, here we go:

Fantastic Origami Flying Creatures: 24 Amazing Paper Models by Hisao Fukui. I don’t know about you, but I bought a bunch of crafts when quarantine started, and then did maybe half of them. That being said, I’ve been getting really into DuoLingo again, and my fiancee and I painted some papier-mache dinosaurs the other night, so maybe skills/crafts are in a second wave? She asked, based solely on her own experience. But for reals, these look VERY fun and then you could have a little origami menagerie on your windowsill.

Is Rape a Crime?: A Memoir, an Investigation, and a Manifesto by Michelle Bowdler. I know, what a provocative title. It points to the idea of “whether rape is a crime given that it is the least reported major felony, least successfully prosecuted, and fewer than 3% of rapists ever spend a day in jail.” Bowdler writes about her own rape and “after a career of working with victims like herself, Michelle decides to find out what happened to her case and why she never heard from the police again after one brief interview.”

Living Lively: 80 Plant‑Based Recipes to Activate Your Power and Feed Your Potential by Haile Thomas. I don’t usually have cookbooks on here, but 1) plant-based and 2) this looks v good. Also the author is nineteen years old. There’s also, in addition to eighty recipes, a journaling section?? And focuses on different kinds of wellness. She starts you off with “My intentions as I read this book,” and honestly I never buy cookbooks, but this looks genuinely helpful and good.

True or False: A CIA Analyst’s Guide to Spotting Fake News by Cindy L. Otis. There is so much garbage “news” out there, y’all. My rule of thumb is usually, if this sounds too much like what I want to hear, I check it out further. But I don’t work for the CIA! So here’s an entire book about tips on how to evaluate news stories and become a better-informed citizen. Otis also walks you through the history of fake news, which sounds A+, and there’re a bunch of illustrations and sidebar graphics.

That’s it for new releases this week! Stay tuned for Themed Friday, and I hope you are having as RESTFUL a week as possible. As always, you can find me on social media @itsalicetime and co-hosting the For Real podcast with Kim here at Book Riot. Until next time, enjoy those facts, fellow nerds.

On July 26, 1990, the Americans With Disabilities Act (ADA) passed. We’re at the 30th anniversary! Which is super weird, because you’d think maybe we would mandate access for all people before we focused on things like slap bracelets, but it exists now. So let’s look at some books!

The Girl Who Thought in Pictures: The Story of Dr. Temple Grandin by Julia Finley Mosca, Daniel Rieley. More nonfiction for young people! This is good for, let’s say 5-7 year olds and tells the story of Temple Grandin, who was diagnosed with autism in her twenties, but showed signs from a young age. Her “unique mind allowed her to connect with animals in a special way, helping her invent groundbreaking improvements for farms around the globe.”

 

Disability Visibility: First-Person Stories from the 21st Century ed. by Alice Wong. Speaking of the 30th anniversary of the ADA, Wong started the Disability Visibility Project for the 25th anniversary, and has now put together this excellent collection of essays for this year’s anniversary. One in five people in the United States live with a disability, and we should start seeing more of their stories in print. This collection covers a lot of ground, but I’m hopeful we’ll see more in the near future.

 

In the Kingdom of the Sick: A Social History of Chronic Illness in America by Laurie Edwards. Are you a human person? Then you probably know someone living with a chronic illness. This book goes from Plato to the post-WWII shift re medicine and illness in the U.S. to disability rights, the Women’s Health Movement, and more. If you like bird’s eye views of things, I’d recommend this. It was written in 2013, so it’s not going to have up-to-the-minute information, but its job is to say how we got to where we are in the 21st century.

 

Haben: The Deafblind Woman Who Conquered Harvard Law by Haben Girma. Girma was the FIRST Deafblind graduate of Harvard Law School. If you love excellent chapter titles, these include “Ableism and the Art of Blind PB&J,” “Kicking Butt, Legally Speaking,” and “Alaska Gives Me the Cold, Hard Truth.” Among many others. When I read about this one, I immediately put it on hold at my library. She climbs icebergs, she fights for the rights of blind readers, she develops a text-to-braille system. Amazing.

 

The Pretty One: On Life, Pop Culture, Disability, and Other Reasons to Fall in Love With Me by Keah Brown. Creator of the viral hashtag #DisabledAndCute, Brown talks about her life and growing up with cerebral palsy, but also her opinions on the Backstreet Boys and TV shows. If you want a low-key, chat-with-a-friend book, this is for you. She also has some good chapter titles, like “You Can’t Cure Me, I Promise It’s Fine” and “Freedom of a Ponytail.”

 

We need to do better! And these awesome books give me hope that we will. Let’s publish more.

All right, find me on social media @itsalicetime and co-hosting the nonfiction For Real podcast with Kim here at Book Riot. Until next time, enjoy those facts, fellow nerds.

Happy Wednesday! The new release stream is beginning to slow a bit (classic late July/August!) but there are still some great new books coming out. Here we go:

The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Cartoonist by Adrian Tomine. Cartoonist Tomine writes about “fandom, fame, and other embarrassments” in his memoir. It’s designed as a sketchbook, which is super cool, and he walks you back to his childhood and through his career, including the racism faced as a Japanese American and how it has interfered with his ability to enjoy his successes (like drawing covers for The New Yorker!). This one looks really good.

 

They Didn’t See Us Coming: The Hidden History of Feminism in the Nineties by Lisa Levenstein. Awwwww yeah, ’90s feminism. If you’re around my age, you were a child in the ’90s and vaaaguely aware of the state of feminism. Scholar Levenstein talks about “the Year of the Woman,” which can be traced back to Anita Hill’s testimony against Justice Clarence Thomas and the subsequent election of five women senators the following year. ’90s feminism involved coalition building that “centered on the growing influence of lesbians, women of color, and activists from the global South.”

 

Unidentified: Mythical Monsters, Alien Encounters, and Our Obsession with the Unexplained by Colin Dickey. Look. We all love weirdo mysteries. And travelogues! Because where can we go right now. Dickey goes to Mount Shasta in California (did aliens live there! probably not but maybe!), looks into the Great Kentucky Meat Shower (noooo), and talks about why we’re so into these stories. Dickey is the author of Ghostland, so also check that out if you want some more about the paranormal.

 

BACKLIST BONUS

A lot of feminism-centered books are out this week (find the full list on Book Riot Insiders‘ New Release Index), so let’s look at some feminist backlist!

Feminism is for everybody: passionate politics by bell hooks. “Simply put, feminism is a movement to end sexism, sexist exploitation, and oppression.” If you’re looking for a short intro to feminism (from the year 2000!), this is a classic. It goes from defining feminism to “an argument for the enduring importance of the feminist movement today.” Remember when people tricked the culture into thinking “feminist” was an embarrassing word? hooks wrote this when that was still a prevalent thought.

 

Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches by Audre Lorde. Okay, maybe read this first, because these essays/speeches are from 1976-1984 and then you get to experience a LINEAR HISTORY (if that is your jam). Lorde covers “sexism, racism, ageism, homophobia, and class, and propounds social difference as a vehicle for action and change.” This was sold out eeeeverywhere recently, but I think it’s starting to become readily available again, so check. it. out.

 

All right! Find me on social media @itsalicetime and you can also find me co-hosting the nonfiction For Real podcast with Kim here at Book Riot. Until next time, enjoy those facts, fellow nerds.