Category: True Story

First published in 2011 and updated in 2022, this book is a look at five centuries of Latine history in the United States. Journalist Juan González begins with America’s colonization and continues through the 2020 election, showing the growing impact of Latine people on American culture and politics. He offers profiles of Latine pioneers, including stories about why they came to the United States, giving voice to many different experiences.

This book is described as a “revolutionary, politically charged narrative history” that uses the stories of African American and Latinx people to show how U.S. history is a story of “the working class organizing against imperialism.” Paul Ortiz links historical movements like segregation, Mexican labor organizing, and the Civil Rights Movement to show how different historically oppressed groups worked together to push back against the dominant narrative. I’m interested to learn how these stories all work together.

Fresh Off the Boat and Crazy Rich Asians star Constance Wu went viral when she tweeted that she was disappointed that Fresh Off the Boat was renewed for a sixth season. After receiving such intense backlash, Wu left social media and her mental health began to spiral. She ended up entering a mental health facitility for depression and suicidal ideation. Now she’s returned to the public eye with this new collection of essays. Wu writes about her life as the daughter of Taiwanese immigrants living in Richmond, Virginia. And if you love audiobooks, Wu performs her memoir, creating that perfect pairing when a writer performs their own work.

New Yorker writer Hua Hsu writes about his young adult years in college meeting his friend Kevin. Hsu describes the unique magic of college life, feeling like the world is stretching before you with endless possibilities. Hsu details his days trying to find the most unique, the most well-thought out piece of cultural knowledge that would prove he understood culture more than anyone else. But Kevin didn’t seem to care that Hsu felt he had something to prove. Despite all odds, and incredible differences, Hsu and Kevin became great friends. Hsu’s writing is incredible, succinct, just the right amount of stylized beauty and depth of content.

I just finished reading this one in September, and I am going to be recommending it a lot (although content warnings abound). As a child, Silvia Vasquez-Lavado experienced violence and sexual abuse at home. She came to the United States for college, then managed to make it big in Silicon Valley… all while hiding her sexuality, trying to manage her alcoholism, and repressing her trauma. After hitting a deep low, she turned to mountain climbing as therapy. The book tells her story, along with following her quest to lead a group of female sexual assault survivors on a climb to Mount Everest Base Camp before attempting the summit herself. That sounds like a lot, but the whole book comes together beautifully, with emotional highs and lows as well as a terrifying mountain climb. I tore through it.

This is another memoir about overcoming childhood trauma and violence that’s equally as moving and inspiring. Jaquira Díaz grew up in housing projects in Puerto Rico and Miami Beach, first with her family and then with friends and relatives after her mother’s schizophrenia became too much to deal with while parenting. She writes about coming into herself amidst violence, discovering her sexual identity, and connecting with her found family. This one is so vivid and evocative and full of heart.

If you want to dig deep into how weather forecasting works, this is the book for you! Andrew Blum is interested in systems and infrastructure, the nitty gritty of how things we take for granted actually work. The book explores the history of weather forecasting, the current network of weather monitoring stations, the computer models that run current forecasts, and the potential impacts of climate change, privatization, and more on the forecasts we take for granted.

This book is a little more of a stretch, but I didn’t think it was fair to suggest books about the weather without acknowledging the impact that climate change is having on the extreme weather we’re experiencing. This book is a collection of essays by Black intellectuals and experts across disciplines looking at how anti-racist policies would impact all of us. There’s a fascinating section looking at the climate movement, highlighting the systematic changes needed to ensure environmental justice for all.

In this social history, writer and artist Sofi Thanhauser tells the stories of five fabrics — linen, cotton, silk, synthetics, and wool — to explore our clothing and what it says about us. In addition to looking at how fabrics were made and decorated, she also interrogates the modern clothing industry and the widespread environmental impacts of fast fashion. This book is smartly organized and full of fascinating stories.

This book tells the story of oil, from the moment it was discovered through its use in nearly all aspects of modern life. In addition to fuel and electricity, crude oil and related products are also in plastics, pavement, and fertilizers for plants. In this history, Sonia Shah also tells the story of people affected by oil — protestors, scientists, politicians, and more. I can think of a lot of materials that could make a great microhistory, but few that have impacts as wide-ranging as oil.

Everyone and their mother’s brother is talking about this memoir— and for good reason! Former Nickelodeon star Jenneatte McCurdy writes about her life as a child star, a job she never really wanted, but one her mother insisted she have. What’s more, McCurdy shares how her mother was incredibly abusive, forcing McCurdy to submit to intimate inspections of her body, even into her teen years, and restricting McCurdy’s diet to keep her looking younger longer.

McCurdy’s reflection on her mother can be very clinical, removed from emotions of the event, which reflects how she kept herself from thinking too deeply about her and her mother’s relationship. But after her mother dies from cancer, McCurdy must confront the trauma from her childhood if she is ever to truly move on.

Year of the Tiger was, hands down, one of my most anticipated books of the year. In the disability community, Alice Wong is a legend. She’s such a strong advocate for disability justice, and her memoir is a gift. She shares stories from her life, excerpts from articles she’s written for various publications, and transcripts of interviews she conducted in the last several years. I really appreciated her multimedia approach to her memoir, which gives it a unique feel, like snapshots from her life.

Because of my own disability, I listen to books via audio, and I wondered how all of the photos and illustrations would translate to a different medium. Most of the time, audiobooks with a lot of visuals just have a PDF that comes along with the audiobook. But Wong ensured the narrator— the wonderful Nancy Wu—read image descriptions so listeners can better picture the more visual parts of the memoir in our heads. This kind of attention to detail and dedication to making her work as accessible as possible is why Wong’s work is so important and why her work should be widely read.

The whole concept of this book fascinates me. As a college student, Jhumpa Lahiri studied abroad in Italy, falling in love with the country and the Italian language. In this book, she writes in Italian about her experience learning the language and immersing herself in it as a writer. She also writes about how learning a new language helped her separate from the stretching she felt between Bengali, the language of her parents, and English, the language she learned in the United States. This book is translated by Ann Goldstein, who has also translated Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels. There’s so much in here that sounds interesting. 

One of the most fascinating things about language is the way it shifts and changes over time. In this book, internet linguist Gretchen McCulloch looks at the ways language is being shaped by the Internet – the apps, platforms, conventions, and emojis that are affecting how we speak and think. As a person who spends a lot of time on the internet, I can’t wait to dive into this one. 

I’m obsessed with all sorts of stories around food, but Italian food is one of my favorites. So when I picked up Taste by Stanley Tucci, I knew I was in for a good time. Tucci tells us the story of his life through his relationship with food. We learn about his childhood as an Italian American and the many meals he ate with his family. We go to Italy as he reconnects with his heritage and then to New York City as he pursues his acting career. No matter where Stanley Tucci goes, he is sure to find a great plate of food. I loved how he describes the dishes with such detail that we can attempt to make dishes ourselves — he even provides recipes for some of his favorites!

Tung Nguyen and Katherine Manning met in the 1970s when Manning hosted Nguyen, who had just fled Vietnam at the end of the war. Their relationship grew into something like family as they became business partners and started Hy Vong, a Vietnamese restaurant in Miami. Lyn Nguyen, Tung Nguyen’s daughter, also grew up working at the family restaurant. These three women tell their stories, which are interconnected and overlapping. This multi-narrative effect gives this memoir a unique feel, reminding food lovers the incredible amount of work that goes into creating a restaurant and the great food they serve.

In the wake of the Supreme Court’s 2013 decision to undercut the Voting Rights Act of 1965, voting rights in the United States have been attacked and rolled back in communities around the country. In this book, Carol Anderson traces the history of voter suppression from 1865 through the present, looking specifically at how government-led discrimination has affected African American voters. The book shows how various voter suppression tactics work, looks at the impact these tactics had in 2018, and offers suggestions about how to move forward.

This is another book about the ways democracy is being threatened and challenged— specifically, how wealthy, right-wing interests are shaping our political discourse by pouring money into the system. Jane Mayer, an investigative reporter for The New Yorker, traces how a small group has funneled money through think tanks, academic institutions, the media, and the courts to set an agenda for the country. This book is deeply infuriating, but so important to understand.

While Marie Mutsuki Mockett’s mother is Japanese, her father comes from a family of wheat farmers in Nebraska. After spending years getting to know her family in Japan, Mockett decides that her next writing project will look at her father’s family. Every year, migratory harvesters arrive at the family farm to help harvest the wheat. So Mockett decides to travel with the harvesters to get to know them and better understand their world. Starting in Texas, Mockett travels with the group of men and women for weeks as they make their way up to Nebraska. Mockett discovers she carries a lot of assumptions about this more conservative group of blue collar workers and begins to challenge her own perception of their lives.

This book proved endlessly fascinating for me as Mockett begins to better understand the world of her father’s family and the people who help them out on the farm. She portrays herself in all of her messy humanity, making mistakes along the way, but always looking to better understand the people around her.

Sarah Smarsh is the first woman in many generations of her family to go to college instead of starting a family right away. After breaking this family norm, Smarsh begins to think about her life as a working class girl from Kansas and tries to better understand where she comes from. Focusing on the different generations of women in her family, she looks at the history of the heartland and the people who live there. Her prose is intimate, practical, and straightforward. Every word pulls its weight as Smarsh describes her childhood living with a family just trying to scrape by.

I appreciated Smarsh’s take on her hometown, both the good and the bad. She perfectly captures the feeling of not being able to stay home and achieve your dreams. But having left, you know you will never be able to return and nothing will ever be the same.