Category: True Story

As a kid I was absolutely obsessed with codebreaking, but it wasn’t until recently that I really got to explore the contributions women made to the entire codebreaking enterprise of World War II. In this book, Liza Mundy tells the story of the more than 10,000 women who were recruited to work for the Army and Navy to break codes. As part of their work they also tested American codes, ran machines, worked as translators, and much more to help the war effort – without ever being able to tell their friends and family what they were doing.

This book is a mix of genres, a tribal history of the California Mission Indians and a memoir of author Deborah Miranda’s family. It uses different media to tell this story, including oral histories, newspaper stories, poems, and personal reflection. It also covers a huge range, from the early experiences of California’s Indigenous people interacting with Spanish missions through today. The book also recontextualizes these histories by looking at curricula in California public schools. This looks fascinating!

This book tells the story of communities of Black women in Philadelphia and New York in the early 1900s who embraced “free love, common-law and transient marriages, serial partners, cohabitation outside of wedlock, queer relations, and single motherhood” – huge changes that challenged traditional Victorian beliefs. Pushing against social tradition, these urban Black women pushed boundaries while seeking lives unlike what society expected for them and helped lead social change.

In this book, historians Daina Ramey Berry and Kali Nicole Gross dig deep to tell the stories of Black women in American history. They approach the book by trying to find hidden stories, or illuminating stories adjacent to the ones we often hear about. The book features a variety of voices – “enslaved women, freedwomen, religious leaders, artists, queer women, activists, and women who lived outside the law” – to create a celebration of black womanhood in the United States.

I am a huge fan of books that explore the contributions women have made in a particular area that we are only now really learning about. In this book, Nathalia Holt tells the story of the pioneering female animators who “infiltrated the boys’ club of Disney’s story and animation departments” to influence movies as we know them today. In addition to fighting against internal sexism, they also lobbied to improve the representation of female characters on screen.

This all about the Battle of Actium! After Caesar was assassinated, Antony and Cleopatra got involved and Egypt battled with Rome. Hundreds of ships fought! This battle determined who would rule the Roman Empire, and ended in the deaths of Antony and Cleopatra. Ancient world drama, right here.

Noorani is the executive director of the National Immigration Forum, an immigrant advocacy group that works for increased immigration and acceptance of refugees. In his newest book, he focuses on Honduras, Mexico, and Texas, focusing on why immigration happens and how we can be more compassionate.

Ok here’s a confession: I’ve only seen two seasons of Buffy. But I know people love it! So here’s a book about it. This is all about the history and cultural impact of a show my coolest professors were all really into. Katz interviews the cast, creators, and crew and talks about his own time in the Buffy fandom. Hurray, TV history!

Based on Sekyiamah’s blog of over ten years, she interviews African women around the world about sex. This includes talking to members of a queer community in Egypt, what it’s like to be polyamorous in Senegal, and chatting with “a pansexual Canadian of Malawian heritage.” The women range from ages 21 to 71 and are from thirty-one countries. Super cool.

You may recognize Alicia Malone from her hosting work on FilmStruck. Here she examines the representation and impact of women on film. Each chapter “looks at a female character representative of a stereotype or trope,” which is awesome and very helpful for people like me. I’m still using the phrase “Smurfette principle,” because it easily illustrates an issue. Hoping for more like that from this book!

Khalida Brohi grew up living in a remote tribe in rural Pakistan. Her tribe believed in arranged marriages and strict family structures, but her father was determined she would not be married off as a child. In her teens, Brohi learned that a beloved cousin had been murdered as part of a tradition known as honor killing. This inspired Brohi to become an activist working to end this custom by empowering women and educating men around the world.

This beautiful illustrated memoir tells the story of one family’s journey from war-torn Vietnam to the United States in the 1970s. Thi Bui started to learn more about her parent’s experience when she was a graduate student doing oral history interviews with her parents. Those stories, along with her own experiences as a young mother, anchor the book, while also touching on themes like sacrifice, rebuilding, and the experience of refugees. It’s beautifully done!

This memoir is about Azar Nafisi’s experiences as a professor in Iran during and after the Iranian revolution. For two years in the 1990s, Nafisi hosted a book club for some of her most dedicated students where they read Western classics that had been banned in Iran. This is a bit older, but it’s still one of my favorite books to recommend because of the ways it shows life in Iran and the lessons we can all take from literature.

In December 2004, Sonali Deraniyagala, her husband, her sons, and her parents, were vacationing in Sri Lanka. When a tsunami hit their resort, everyone but Deraniyagala was killed. This memoir is about how she lost her family and how she grapples with that shattering loss afterwards. It’s also the story of her family, filled with beautiful moments from her childhood, marriage, and motherhood. This book is both deeply sad and a very moving meditation on grief and what comes after unimaginable loss. 

Can you imagine seeing a crowd of people in a field and you ask an excited woman passing by what’s up and she says “it’s a mania! Balloonmania!” Sophie Blanchard was a French balloonist in the early nineteenth century who, you might not be surprised, died in a balloon accident. Learn more of her tale here!

Adams’s book profiles eight young Black women who are “leading, organizing, advocating, and creating.” These include Ssanyu Lukoma, who founded Brown Kids Read when she was thirteen years old and Hannah Lucas, a teenager who co-created a mental health app. What a balance to strike today between praising Gen Z for their excellent work and not making them feel like the weight of the future is on their shoulders! But I do love when we praise them. They are dealing with a lot.

Coast Salish is “a group of ethnically and linguistically related Indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest Coast, living in British Columbia, Canada and the U.S. states of Washington and Oregon.” Sasha taqʷšəblu LaPointe blends her Coast Salish heritage with her love of punk culture in her autobiography. LaPointe’s great-grandmother helped preserve the Indigenous language Lushootseed, which is super cool.

Omg yeeeess give me this weird 1970s throwback cover! Thomas highlights the links between environmentalism, racism, and privilege, and how we cannot achieve real environmental progress “without uplifting the voices of its people — especially those most often unheard.” I can’t get over this cover. But also this message is important! Thomas founded the Intersectional Environmentalist platform, a “climate justice community and resource hub centering BIPOC and historically under-amplified voices in the environmental space.” Amazing.

Former U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder will be releasing a book in May about the history of the right to vote in the United States. Our Unfinished March looks at the history of voting for three groups – white men, white women, and African Americans – as well as the challenges to voting today.

Claire Foy is set to play Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg in a limited-series adaptationof An Ugly Truth by Sheera Frenkel and Cecilia Kang. This 2021 book tells the history of Facebook, with a particular emphasis on the years between 2016 and 2020 (intense times!). This was one of my favorite books last year, so I’m excited about an adaptation.

It’s time for a book recommendation! I just finished reading a great 2022 memoir, Tiffanie Drayton’s Black American Refugee: Escaping the Narcissism of the American Dream. As a kid, Drayon followed her mother from Trinidad and Tobago to New Jersey where the family hoped to pursue the American Dream. After several moves to communities across the country, Drayton eventually begins to see the ways systemic racism and trauma make it impossible for Black people to achieve that dream.

Avashia is a teacher and writer who grew up in West Virginia and identifies as a queer, Desi, Appalachian woman. She expands the stereotypical notions of Appalachia to show its true complexity, while exploring its “foodways, religion, sports, standards of beauty, social media, gun culture, and more.”

Author Bird looks at one particular block in New York City and tells its history, from the time of the Lenape, through Dutch colonization, the nineteenth century (including the Gilded Age — how relevant!), to the twentieth. This covers theaters, factories, gambling dens, and colorful characters of the time.

Journalist and producer on This American Life, Foo looks at complex PTSD (C-PTSD) and how it has impacted her life. She travels to her hometown in California and examines the impact of immigrant, as well as inherited, trauma. Be aware that this book discusses physical and emotional parental abuse.

The big news this week in the world of nonfiction is the death of Dr. Paul Farmer, a humanitarian, anthropologist, physician, and pioneer of global public health who was profiled in Tracy Kidder’s amazing book Mountains Beyond Mountains: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, a Man Who Would Cure the World. Farmer, age 62, died of an “acute cardiac event” on the grounds of a hospital and university in Rwanda.

This week I want to recommend a raw and vulnerable essay by author Nicole Chung from her newsletter I Have Notes. In this week’s piece, “We All Deserve to Be Safe,” she writes about grappling with how to talk to her teenage daughter about violence against Asian women. I don’t want to say much more than that, just urge you to read it. Or pick up Chung’s equally wonderful memoir All You Can Ever Know.

Weinman, author of The Real Lolita, which was very good, returns for another true crime book. This is about Edgar Smith, a man who in the ’60s was put on death row for murder. National Review founder William F. Buckley championed his cause, eventually resulting in Smith’s release, and then — yep, he tried to murder someone else. The whole story is here in Weinman’s book, so check out how on earth this happened.

Robertson tells his story as the first Black man to run for the Virginia General Assembly, his work to integrate a white school, and his support of the Black Lives Matter movement in his eighties. Robertson passed away in 2021, and the University of Virginia Press is publishing his memoir.

Is Shelley Puhak a historian? No! She is a poet and a professor of creative writing. BUT. This is a really fun story about a time popular culture never talks about — sixth century Merovingian France! I’m talking about Brunhild, I’m talking about Fredegund, I’m talking about Chilperic unfortunately (Chilperic sucks). It’s a really fascinating time in history and I totes recommend this.

Are you a teacher? Do you teach BIPOC students? This is a resource for K-12 educators serving BIPOC and/or first-generation students that’s all about inclusive pedagogy. The three teachers who contributed “draw on their experiences as immigrants and educators to address racial inequity in the classroom.” Teachers are amazing, and this book can maybe help them be even more amazing. Hurray!

In this book, critic Lauren Michele Jackson dives deep into the idea of cultural appropriation, specifically why American culture loves blackness but only allows white people to benefit when “Black aesthetics are converted into mainstream success.” Each chapter explores an example of appropriation through the lens of power – who benefits, why, and what does this to do existing inequalities. She also specifically looks at the role white people play, and how specific celebrities and artists have used Black culture in their work. It’s fascinating so far.

Ida B. Wells was a pioneering Black journalist, suffragist, and crusader in the United States. In her lifetime she fought against discrimination on trains, exposed the horrors of lynchings, and help co-found the NAACP. This book tells her story in a beautiful and accessible way, clearly connecting her experiences with contemporary activism for Black lives. She’s amazing, and I’m embarrassed I haven’t read her biography sooner!

In June 1921, a white mob marched into the Black Greenwood District of Tulsa, Oklahoma, an affluent neighborhood known as America’s Black Wall Street. In just a few hours they destroyed 35 square blocks, killing hundreds of people. In this book, young adult author Brandy Colbert tells the story of this horrific event, unearths the underlying tensions, and connects it to America’s history of racial violence. I want to read more YA nonfiction this year, and so this one is high on my list.

It’s a nonfiction picture book! Brew-Hammond is an American-Ghanaian author/novelist and illustrator Minter is a Caldecott Honoree. It covers the history of the color blue, how it was made over time, and the human labor that has gone into making it. But also how it’s been used in cultures throughout the world! Super neat, love nonfiction for younger people.

Davis grew up running to get water for her family in The Bahamas, going sideways to avoid bullies. She navigated astonishing challenges to compete in five Olympics and win two Olympic gold medals, becoming the first individual gold medalist in sprinting from the Caribbean. She went on to become the first Black woman on the World Athletics council. Did I mention she didn’t win her gold medals until age 34? 34! Amazing.

Well this looks fun. Chadwick was a late nineteenth century con artist who defrauded banks for literally millions of dollars. This was when women weren’t even allowed to get loans from banks. Because of sexism. She also opened a brothel in Cleveland because sure. Her biggest con was saying she was Andrew Carnegie’s “illegitimate” daughter. She got millions of dollars from banks based on this lie! To learn more including how she got away with this for eight years check this out.