Category: True Story

This is one of several books about white feminism that came out this year! Others include Against White Feminism and The Trouble with White Women. Koa Beck’s looks at how popular feminism has historically centered white women (predominantly those in the middle-to-upper classes) and the issues central to them. This is important to know about! Especially if you are a white lady like me. This one came out in January, so if you get it for your 2022 reading, you can read it on its one year birthday. Exciting.

I listened to this on a road trip with my wife and sister-in-law, and it’s hilarious, but also starkly sobering. Amber Ruffin’s sister Lacey has to deal with a huge number of microaggressions on a daily basis, and having them laid out in story after story (some are macro, just as a side note) is extremely impactful. This sticks out as one of the books from 2021 that will stay with me the most.

SHEEP. Sheep and their wool have had a tremendous impact on civilization and this book is here to tell you all about it. The number of times I started thinking about the properties of wool after this book, I cannot tell you. This is for if you want a nice relaxing book that’s just here to tell you some sheep facts. That’s its whole aim. I love it. More animal fact books, please.

Obviously I am highlighting the queer people with their cats book. Look, we’ve got Alison Bechdel, we’ve got James Baldwin, Marlene Dietrich, JUJUBEE (see: cover). It has “amewsing” anecdotes and “impawtent” moments, language I would probably have found insufferable before I adopted my cats, and now I am completely charmed by it. This is clearly a perfect book for any queer person you know who is v into cats.

This memoir, targeted specifically at women, is a call to action to let go and do less. Tiffany Dufu, a self-described “poster child for doing it all,” writes about realizing how difficult it felt to pursue her career and personal goals after the birth of her first child. Eventually, she came to the realization that the only way to move forward was to let go – change expectations, reduce her to-dos, and get help from others. This is the most achievement-oriented of the books on my list, but I suspect it will resonate with many people. 

Devon Price is another recovering overachiever. After finishing college and graduate school early, they were diagnosed with anemia and heart complications from overexertion. This prompted an exploration into the “laziness lie” – an idea that began with the Puritans and continues to this day. The book looks at how people today work more than ever but feel like we’re not doing enough and how digital tools have contributed to this feeling of overwork. 

This book is an exploration of leisure and an exploration of people who have found ways to disconnect from the demands of their lives to pursue lives of leisure in their own ways. In the book, Hampl goes off on pilgrimages to visit historical figures, as well as traces her own history and fascination with doing nothing and the things that letting go can bring. I loved this line from the description: “The real job of being human, Hampl finds, is getting lost in thought, something only leisure can provide.”

Although I’ve mentioned it in past newsletter editions, I want to give another call out to John Carreyrou’s new podcast Bad Blood: The Final Chapter. The 11 episodes, so far, have been a satisfying extension of the work he did writing about Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos in Bad Blood. Each episode explores a new angle of the story, incorporating new reporting, additional audio sources, and testimony from the trial happening right now. It’s fascinating and highly recommended!

BALLROOM. The “underground subculture founded over a century ago by LGBTQ African American and Latinx men and women of Harlem,” now occasionally referenced on RuPaul’s Drag Race, but here laid out in all its fascinating glory. Tucker splits the chapters up into “categories,” like Vogue, Realness, Body — i.e. Ballroom categories — and features an interview with Ballroom members. Read this and watch Paris Is Burning. Sounds like an excellent weekend.

Remember when someone found Maier’s photographs in a Chicago storage locker? They went viral in 2009, which I remember because Chicago especially went bonkers over them. The history museum had an exhibit where you could wander through giant versions of the photographs, and she’s just so good. Maier worked as a nanny for apps. 40 years and took over 150,000 photos during that time. And now there is a biography of her!

Oh man, what’s better than a book on Juana of Austria, someone we definitely all know about? A book of ESSAYS on Juana of Austria. Ok yeah, I definitely did not know who this was, but #womenshistory. If anyone knows about Philip II of Spain being Elizabeth I’s brother-in-law and then later sending the Spanish Armada after her — ok, so this is his sister. She became Princess of Portugal, a very fun title. “Wait, why is she ‘of Austria'” you might very rightly ask. It’s because the Habsburgs interbred TOO MUCH, and with her other titles, she was “Archduchess of Austria, Infanta of Castile and of Aragon, and princess of Burgundy.” THIS IS WHY YOUR JAWS ARE LIKE THAT. Anyway, she was smart and a good ruler (according to Wikipedia) and this looks like a delight.

Did you know Greta Garbo stopped making films at age 36? Just like that, her reputation — solidified. If I stopped doing my stuff now, people would be like “oh yeah, didn’t she say something funny once about some person from history? Oh, that was Sarah Vowell, nm.” But GARBO. She came to Hollywood from Sweden at nineteen and did her Garbo thing and made an extremely great impression and everyone loved her and now she’s mainly known for “I vant to be alone,” which is real relatable for 2021. GARBO.

Hannah Gatsby is releasing a memoir in 2022! Ten Steps to Nanette will be released in March and “explore Gatsby’s path from the open mic to the global stage.” In addition to her professional and personal accomplishments, it will also explore her growth as a queer person and her struggles with autism and ADHD. 

One of my favorite email newsletters is Here for It w/ R. Eric Thomas, which arrives every Sunday. A couple weeks ago he wrote about the cultural ceremony around a new Adele album, which made me feel seen and teased all at the same time and I don’t even mind it. This summer, he wrote a whole piece on artistic swimming, which was a hoot if you, like me, also love the Olympics. 

Sirisena is an English professor who was born in Sri Lanka but grew up in North Carolina. In her essay collection, she looks at the places where personal identity meets history, including “the 1961 plane crash that left a nuclear warhead buried near her North Carolina hometown, juxtaposed with reflections on her father’s stroke,” her coming to grips with her queer identity while in Chicago, and “the ways that the permanent aftereffects of a severe eye injury have shaped her thinking about disability and self-worth.” This looks really, really good, and side note: I love the cover.

Williams is a Canadian poet and author of fiction and nonfiction, as well as a professor at the University of British Columbia. I know I just said I loved the cover of the previous new release, but I love this one too! Excellent job, designers. Williams was “[s]purred by the police killings and street protests of 2020” and here “offers a perspective that is distinct from that of U.S. writers addressing similar themes. Williams has lived in Trinidad (where he was never the only Black person in the room), in Canada (where he often was), and in the United States (where as a Black man from the Caribbean, he was a different kind of ‘only’).” These experiences all lend to his views on living life as a Black man in different environments.

Yeah, like I’m not gonna include an obscure history new release in this list. Elizabeth Stuart was the daughter of James VI and I, the first monarch to reign over a united England and Scotland. She married someone who became King of Bohemia, but only for a year, garnering her the nickname “the Winter Queen” due to her husband’s reign lasting one winter (harsh but fair). Anyway, this is a bio of her, so if that’s your sort of thing, have at it!

In this book, Aja Barber digs into the fast fashion industry to explore how a culture of consumption is creating an environmental crisis. She also looks at how social media algorithms push shopping and purchasing, the racist and dangerous history of the textile industry, and how we can unlearn our habits about consumption for a better future. This one seems absolutely great – but if you’re interested in a sneak peek first, I suggest this interview with Barber on the Forever35 podcast.

The premise of this book is a bit of a thought experiment – what would happen if we just stopped shopping? To answer, journalist J.B. MacKinnon set out to find answers from big box stores to tribal communities that consume at a perfectly sustainable rate. But then, of course, the COVID-19 pandemic happened… creating an opportunity to see the impacts of less consumption in real time. 

There are more than 500 federally recognized Indigenous nations in the United States, descendants of the more than 15 million Native Americans who once lived here. In this book, historian and activist Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz presents a history of the United States from the perspective of Indigenous people. She also connects this history of resistance to current events and struggles being led by Indigenous peoples.

A common idea about Native American history is that it basically ended in 1890 with the massacre at Wounded Knee. In this book, Ojibwe historian David Treuer explores a different narrative – that the story of contemporary Native Americans is “one of unprecedented resourcefulness and reinvention.” The book blends history, reporting, and memoir to look at actions taken against Indigenous people and how they have pushed back.

Turns out I can finish reading books! Last week I sped through The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why It Matters by Priya Parker. Parker is a facilitator and conflict resolution expert who has facilitated gatherings for a variety of complex groups and gatherings. In this book, Parker argues that when we rely on routines and conventions we end up with gatherings that are boring or don’t meet their intended purpose.

It’s a collection of BIPOC writers from Minnesota! Such a cool project. Indigenous, Black, and writers of color share essays and poems focused on the year 2020, from the pandemic to the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis by police officers. Contributors include people from an array of cultures, including “Indigenous Dakota and Anishinaabe, African American, Hmong, Somali, Afghani, Lebanese, Korean, Vietnamese, Japanese, Puerto Rican, Colombian, Mexican, transracial adoptees, mixed race, and LGBTQ+ perspectives.”

Love nonfiction aimed at kids. This is for children ages 9-12, and focuses on twenty-six contemporary artists from Africa and of African descent. These include “American artists Kerry James Marshall, Faith Ringgold, portraitist to Michelle Obama Amy Sherald, and Kehinde Wiley; British Turner Prize–winning painters Lubaina Himid and Chris Ofili; renowned South African visual activist and photographer Zanele Muholi; Nigerian sound artist Emeka Ogboh” and more. Are there amazing images of the art? Yes, there are.

Part of Melville House’s Last Interview series, this (short!) book contains interviews of civil rights activist and decades-long congressman John Lewis. Honestly, this feels like an amazing end of year read: “From a young activist testifying in the aftermath of Bloody Sunday to recounting the violence he met as a Freedom Rider to an elder statesman inspired by today’s civil rights activists, this collection forms a portrait of a man whose life was spent fighting for a better world and never lost hope.” It’s the right kind of inspiration to end 2021 with.

The winners of the National Book Awards were announced on Wednesday! This is one of my favorite awards to follow – I feel like the winners always suggest something interesting about what is happening in the world at any given time. This year’s winner in nonfiction is All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley’s Sack, a Black Family Keepsake by Tiya Miles. I am so jazzed about this – and I happen to have it checked out from the library right now. Weekend reading, here I come!

This week I want to highlight an episode of author Adam Grant’s podcast WorkLife (or maybe it’s called Taken For Granted – I can’t totally tell). Anyway! In this episode, he interviews Lin-Manuel Miranda and his father, Luis Miranda, about “finding harmony between creativity and productivity.” The interview is from back in July, around the time In the Heights was entering movie theaters, but it’s all evergreen content about creative process, family, and advocacy.

Professor Abdur-Rahman’s parents were both Black Power–era converts to Islam, who left their mosque when they divorced in her adolescent years. Her memoir recounts her father’s history and her own, going from “the Christian righteousness of Adam Clayton Powell Jr.’s 1950s Harlem, through the Malcolm X–inspired college activism of the late 1960s, to the unfulfilled potential of the early 1970s Black American Muslim movement.” A look at the Black Power movement and American Muslims from the mid-20th century to today.

I talked about this in the nonfiction preview for 2021 and it’s now out! Jessup White is the Public Relations & Community Engagement Officer at Thomas Jefferson’s home, Monticello. In her book, she talks about her discovery that she was related to both Jefferson and Hemings and “explores America’s racial reckoning through the prism of her ancestors—both the enslaver and the enslaved.”

To find out how and why Americans eat the way they do, Fielding-Singh — a sociologist and ethnographer — looks at dozens of families, and does a deep dive into four: “the Bakers, a Black family living below the federal poverty line; the Williamses, a working-class white family just above it; the Ortegas, a middle-class Latinx family; and the Cains, an affluent white family.” What is the meaning of food and how does it change depending on your context? Really excited about this one; I haven’t seen a lot of books like it.

Until two years ago, I had seen no Supernatural. Then I had a really gay moment on Tumblr where I saw a gifset of Ruth Connell who plays the season ten witch Rowena, and I decided to just watch all the way through to get to her. So I have now seen ten seasons of this show. Which is still only 67% because the show ran for fifteen seasons whattt. This history goes through the show’s “predecessors, characters, major storylines, and fan activism.” This show and its fandom are something else, and if you like it, you’ll probably like this.

This week I started reading The Second: Race and Guns in a Fatally Unequal America by Carol Anderson. I love her approachable but critical histories about race in the United States, and this book is no exception. In it she explores “the history and impact of the Second Amendment” and how it’s been used to “keep African Americans powerless and vulnerable.” It’s a fascinating look and citizenship and how laws are applied unequally, resulting in deadly consequences.