Category: True Story

Before he was a full time graphic novelist, Gene Luen Yang was a high school teacher in California. In this book, he chronicles a single season of his school’s varsity basketball team, the Dragons, as they try to win the California State Championships. I love this comic so much – it’s like an inspirational sports movie in book form.

For a decade, figure skating was the center of Tillie Walden’s life and identity. But after switching schools, discovering art, and falling in love with a girl, she started to question whether she really fit into that world anymore. Eventually, she finds the courage to quit and see what else might be out there. 

In the last few months, I’ve gotten very into collecting bookmarks, I think because they can be both beautiful and useful. I particularly loved this resin bookmark – how luxurious does that

This 2018 winner is about the origins of the “war on crime” in the 1970s, specifically why this movement was supported by many African American leaders at the time. He explores that era’s surge of crime and drug addiction, and how Black leaders felt that gains of the civil rights movement were being undermined by those crimes. Few anticipated how those decisions would lead directly to the mass incarceration problems we see today. 

This winner of the 2017 Pulitzer Prize is an incredible book. Matthew Desmond is a Princeton sociologist who sought to understand housing insecurity in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. In the book, he follows eight families trying to keep a roof over their heads, showing how precarious life can often be. It’s a deeply upsetting and eye-opening book absolutely worth picking up. 

Siddhartha Mukherjee is a physician, researcher, and science writer, who uses his considerable talents to tell a story about cancer. This expansive book explores cancer through the lenses of biology, history, and biography. The stories Mukherjee shares about the cancer patients he treats are deeply moving and balanced out with stories about the scientists trying to eradicate this disease. Even though it won the 2011 prize, I know a 608-page book about the history of cancer might seem daunting. But Mukherjee’s gift for storytelling and illustrating complicated science makes it well worth the effort. 

This book, originally published in 1998, gives a comprehensive look at the history of abortion, examining the entire period in which abortion was illegal in the United States. It explores “how abortion was criminalized and policed” and how women sought care outside the law. A reissue in February 2022 includes a new preface looking at contemporary threats to abortion access. From what I can tell, this is a widely-regarded and comprehensive overview of the topic.

This book, also a bit on the older side, “exposed America’s systemic abuse of Black women’s bodies.” It begins all the way back with how slave owners exercised an economic stake in Black women’s fertility. It also covers forced (or coerced) sterilizations as recently as the 1970s, as well as how the reproductive needs of Black women have been excluded from mainstream political agendas. Again, this seems like a necessary and useful primer on this subject. 

Dr. Willie Parker grew up in a fundamentalist Christian household in the South. A practicing obstetrician, Parker eventually quit his practice to focus exclusively on providing safe abortions for women who needed his help the most in his community. In this memoir, he shares both his experiences and the complex stories of women seeking access to reproductive care. At the same time, he makes a Christian case in support of reproductive rights and pushes back against many of the rules and regulations being placed on abortion access. This seems like an extremely useful perspective. 

In this book, feminist Katha Pollitt argues against abortion being presented as bad or agonizing, and against turning it, a normal medical procedure, into “something shameful and secretive.” Instead, she makes the case that it’s “a moral right and a social good.” I added this one to my list because I think it provides an important reframe of abortion as just one piece of a larger need for women to have access to safe, effective, and personal reproductive care no matter their circumstances.

“But Alice,” you say, “hasn’t this been out for thirty years?” Yes! But now, this 1990 music memoir has a new postscript by the late Ronnie Spector. Spector’s book covers her time as lead singer of the Ronettes (who sing the eponymous excellent song) and her emotionally abusive marriage to music producer Phil Spector. Rolling Stone named this one of the best rock memoirs of all time, and there are so many of those!

Trilobites!! So many of them in the past. So weird. They lived from over 500 million years ago (again, Neanderthals were around like…35,000 years ago) to over 250 million years ago. They were alive so long ago but also alive for so long! You can find their fossils in Siberia, Morocco, Australia. This tells their history and has hundreds of photos of them. The author is a “field associate in paleontology at the American Museum of Natural History” and personally owns more than 4,000 trilobite fossils. Again — there’s someone for every interest.

Ooo this is all about what it’s like to be a Myanmar person, in yet another interesting release from Catapult. Pyae looks at the “knots and complications of immigration status, eating habits, Western feminism in an Asian home, and more, guiding us toward an expansive idea of what it means to be a Myanmar woman today.” Also things like “the patriarchal Myanmar concept of hpone which governs how laundry is done,” and just, dang. Catapult is definitely a newer press and they keep publishing things I want to read.

Sarah Kurchak, who grew up in a small town in Ontario, always seemed to know that she was different from the people around her. To fit in, she adopted behaviors so she could perform being like everyone else, but these coping mechanisms caused her significant challenges. When she was finally diagnosed with autism at 27, she realized that these same coping mechanisms contributed to her anxiety and depression. In this memoir she challenges stereotypes and ideas about autism and shares what she believes will help “make the lives of autistic people healthier, happier and more fulfilling.”

Journalist Eric Garcia started to write more about what it’s like being autistic in America after growing frustrated with the way the media wrote about autistic people. In the book, he uses his own experiences as an autistic person to look at the social and policy gaps that exist when trying to support autistic people. He also shared the stories of a range of autistic people, including people of color and those in the LGBTQ community.

At 35 years old, Jennifer O’Toole was diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome which, for the first time, helped her life make sense. In this book she writes about “the constant struggle between carefully crafted persona and authentic existence” while specifically calling out the experiences of women with an autism spectrum disorder diagnosis. In addition to autism, she writes about everything from body image to self-esteem and more.

In this book, activist Holly Robinson Peete partners with her twins, R.J. Peete and Ryan Elizabeth Peete, to share stories about what it is like to be an autistic teen. Through this family perspective, they’re able to share what it’s like to have autism (R.J.), support an autistic sibling (Ryan Elizabeth) or support an autistic child (Holly). The book covers everything from family vacations, playdates, body changes, high school drama, and more.

From the author of The Hidden Life of Trees comes another book about trees. Hurray! As the title says, this is about walking in the forest and learning “how to be a forest detective.” Forest detective! It tells you how to understand the nature around you and awaken to “the ancient past and thrilling present of the ecosystem around you.” I love it.

Extremely acclaimed actress Viola Davis tells her story of growing up in poverty with an abusive and alcoholic father, being inspired by Cicely Tyson, finding her feet in acting, and fighting against the harmful, stereotypical roles offered her by Hollywood. We talked about this on For Real and can you believe the breadth of Davis’s work? As Kim suggested, this is probably going to be great on audio.

Author Lim was raised in Hong Kong with Chinese and English parents. After being a reporter there for over ten years, she writes a history of the city, including “the British takeover in 1842, the negotiations over the 1997 return to China, and the future Beijing seeks to impose.” Also she talks about guerrilla calligraphers? Which is so cool.

A history of gender and sexuality in Native North America! “Two-Spirits” is “an umbrella term denoting feminine and masculine qualities in one person.” When Europeans came to America and forced changes to the Indigenous ways of life, this cultural understanding was at risk of disappearing. Smithers traces its history from early Spanish invasion to the present day. Another excellent release from Beacon Press!