Category: True Story

Children’s author Bolden tells the story of Dovey Johnson Roundtree, famous for her “successful defense of an indigent Black man accused of the murder of Mary Pinchot Meyer, a prominent white Washington, DC, socialite, in 1965.” Roundtree also was the first lawyer to bring a bus desegregation case before the Interstate Commerce Commission, “the first Black women to enter the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps, and was one of the first ordained female ministers in the African Methodist Episcopal Church.” Dovey Undaunted indeed!

Know that I pick this having the Funko Pop of Lagertha from Vikings on my bookshelf. In this history, Brown “lays to rest the hoary myth that Viking society was ruled by men and celebrates the dramatic lives of female Viking warriors.” Take that, hoary myth! It combines archaeology, history, and literature (amazing) to tell the story of a female Viking warrior found in a grave in Sweden. You also learn about medieval women like Queen Gunnhild Mother-of-Kings, the Viking leader known as The Red Girl, and Queen Olga of Kyiv. So cool.

Alexander’s website describes himself as “a theoretical physicist specializing in cosmology, particle physics and quantum gravity.” Which is fancy. He emphasizes the importance of intuition and thinking outside the box (four dimensions! forget the three dimensional box) for great physics. Also how much we need diversity in science, which, as someone who regularly covers science/nature books in her newsletter/podcast, YES PLEASE. Give diverse scientists book deals!

In this book, journalist Gigi Georges tells the story of five teenage girls as they come of age in Washington County, Maine, one of the most isolated communities on the Eastern seaboard. Near Acadia National Park, the town is adjacent to a lot of wealth, but residents are distant from that opportunity. The girls Georges profiles – a photographer, a writer, a softball player, a basketball star, and a valedictorian – struggle to find their place, thrive amidst poverty and drugs, and celebrate where they are from. Mare of Easttown has so many great female characters and explores the lives of teenage girls, so this felt like a great connection.

Growing up Ashley C. Ford always wished she could turn to her father for guidance and support – particularly when her relationship with her mother was at its most fraught. The problem was that Ford’s father was in prison, no one in her family would tell her why, and she didn’t know when he’d get out. This beautiful memoir is about growing up poor, female, and Black in the Midwest, with family close by but always feeling on the outside. Mare’s relationship with her daughter, Siobhan, is complicated but loving, and I think Siobhan’s journey has a lot in common with what Ashley writes about. 

For months, the people of Accomack County, Virginia, went to bed each night wondering which abandoned building in their community would burn down next. The volunteer firefighters took turns sleeping at the station and vigilante groups started hunting the arsonists, as local police struggled to investigate and protect the buildings. Poverty and what happens when people feel left behind are a big part of Mare of Easttown, themes that this true crime book explores with a lot of compassion. 

This weekend I’m excited to jump into a new memoir out this week, Seeing Ghosts by Kat Chow, the story of how Chow lost her mother when she was 13 years old. Chow used to work for NPR, so I remember her from being on podcasts like Code Switch and Pop Culture Happy Hour, and have been waiting anxiously for her book to come out. I love memoirs about complicated families, and the reviews of this one so far have been really good – USA Today, Shondaland, Kirkus.

This was inspired by the Yves St Laurent sardine dress, which basically looks like the cover (fish scales!) and “celebrates the fading crafts, industries, and artisans that have defined communities for generations.” She looks at Manhattan dressmakers of the nineteenth century and “the fishermen on Grand Manan Island, a community of 2,500 residents, where the dignity of work and the bounty of the sea ruled for hundreds of years.” Grand Manan is in Canada!

Chinese diaspora! Gold! Ngai covers the gold rushes of the nineteenth century and how they led to “the Chinese Question,” namely: “would the United States and the British Empire outlaw Chinese immigration?” Spoiler: they did. Ngai links themes from “Europe’s subjugation of China to the rise of the international gold standard and the invention of racist, anti-Chinese stereotypes that persist to this day.” Basically, we are always being influenced by events and decisions of the past, and here are some you might not have known about that impact you.

Chemerinsky is dean of the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law. His new book “reveals how the Supreme Court has enabled racist policing and sanctioned law enforcement excesses through its decisions over the last half-century” and how “its conception in the late eighteenth century until the Warren Court in 1953, the Supreme Court rarely ruled against the police.” If you like deep dives into Supreme Court history (I do) and again, why we do the things we do (history!), then check this out.

Ok yeah, this came out in June, but I am only HEARING about it now. In the Heights is my wife’s favorite musical and this behind-the-scenes look offers “untold stories, perceptive essays, and the lyrics to Miranda’s songs—complete with his funny, heartfelt annotations. It also features newly commissioned portraits and never-before-seen photos from backstage, the movie set, and productions around the world.” SO NEAT.

Soccer legend Megan Rapinoe is starting a book club! The first pick for her “new and exclusive” book club with Literati will be Unbound by Tarana Burke, founder of the #MeToo movement. In an interview with People, Rapinoe said she plans to read the books right alongside book club members, choosing titles that will help readers learn from experts in a variety of areas. I haven’t dug into Literati subscriptions much, but I can’t help but be a fan of Megan Rapinoe – awesome first pick!

Huma Abedin has revealed the cover of her upcoming memoir. Titled Both/And: A Life in Many Worlds, the book is, I believe, the first time Abedin will share at length about her ex-husband’s sex scandal and her time working for Hillary Clinton. Abedin is the daughter of Indian and Pakistani intellectuals and advocates, and has worked with Clinton since 1996 as a college intern. I’m most curious about how forthright Abedin will be in this book – memoirs by politicians can be bland, but she’s not exactly in politics anymore. It could be fascinating! Both/And will be released on November 2.

This weekend I am hoping to finish up An Ugly Truth: Inside Facebook’s Battle for Domination by Sheera Frenkel and Cecilia Kang. The book is a behind-the-scenes look at the reasons Facebook has come under fire over the last five years – everything from data privacy issues to election manipulation. Frenkel and Kang are both reporters for the New York Times, and bring their extensive knowledge of cybersecurity, technology, and regulatory policy to the table, along with some really extensive and knowledgeable interviews with Facebook insiders.

It’s an absolutely fascinating read that really shows the extensive and fundamental flaws with Facebook as a platform and a tool. I’ve been feeling a lot of ambivalence about social media lately, and this book has just reinforced that the true goals of the people running the company go deeply against the public good in a whole host of ways.

Described as a “radically inclusive, intersectional, and transnational approach” to women’s rights, written by an American Muslim woman, attorney, and political philosopher. This centers women of color and is a “counter-manifesto to white feminism’s global, long-standing affinity with colonial, patriarchal, and white supremacist ideals.” This is part of a literature of recent work that notes the importance of decentering white women — particularly upper middle class white women — from feminism and from being seen as the de facto leaders of the movement.

This makes you reexamine or even just examine what we can take for granted, but which comes at the price of someone else’s safety, physically and, I’m gonna say it, spiritually. It looks at jobs that “society considers essential but morally compromised,” like drone pilots, prison guards, and slaughterhouse workers, and how the majority of Americans are shielded from the ethically troubling work we expect unnamed others to do.

While Afghanistan borders the Middle East, this short (less than 250 pages) read can maybe be something of a background on the region for those of us shielded from the on-the-ground realities of what is happening. El Baghdadi and Gatnash “tell the story of the modern Middle East as a series of broken promises. They chart the entrenchment of tyranny, terrorism and foreign intervention, showing how these systems of oppression simultaneously feed off and battle each other.”

This feels a little like the vibe of The Nanny Diaries, but instead of a nanny, it’s a tutor. They’re still talking about “the inner circle of New York’s richest families” though, so if you’re looking for something escapist and to I guess learn some kind of thing about how it’s hard to be rich (but probably not that hard), here y’go. It’s under 200 pages!

It’s like a Mary Roach deep dive, but into taxidermy! Journalist Milgrom goes from “the anachronistic family workshop of the last chief taxidermist for the American Museum of Natural History to the studio where an English sculptor, granddaughter of a surrealist artist, preserves the animals for Damien Hirst’s most disturbing artworks.” And beyond! Obviously I bought this. How could you not.

This university press American women’s suffrage history book is apparently not the first thing you’d maybe reach for. BUT. This is the story of Adella Hunt Logan, a Black suffragist who “taught at Alabama’s Tuskegee Institute but also joined the segregated woman suffrage movement, passing for white in order to fight for the rights of people of color.” Alexander is Logan’s granddaughter, and she grew up hearing her family refer to Tuskegee as “the Hither Isles.”

I have multiple histories of Germany. One is because it has a very fun cover (Germania) and this one because it promises up front that it’s gonna be short. It asks questions like how Roman did Germania ever become? How did Prussia come about (and whatever happened to Prussia)? And more modern questions, but I like things before people stopped wearing fun hats.

I have a lot of books about the history of women in America! They are on some of my “no, we can’t donate books in this genre” shelves. I’m proud of this one because it feels like a deep cut of the work of Daina Ramey Berry, also known for co-authoring A Black Women’s History of the United States. No, you’re right, a real deep cut would be 2007’s “Swing the Sickle for the Harvest is Ripe”: Gender and Slavery in Antebellum Georgia. I don’t have that one. YET. But this one “shows the lengths to which enslavers would go to maximize profits and protect their investments.” Berry researched this for over ten years! And she “resurrects the voices of the enslaved and provides a rare window into enslaved peoples’ experiences and thoughts, revealing how enslaved people recalled and responded to being appraised, bartered, and sold throughout the course of their lives.”

Did you know they used clamshell razors in colonial America? And that at least 85% of American women regularly remove hair from their bodies? Historian Herzig examines what’s up with that. She also shows how over time, mainstream American beliefs about visible hair changed, and how its existence — “particularly on young, white women—came to be perceived as a sign of political extremism, sexual deviance, or mental illness.” Wow! That seems bad. We should probably think about that more.

After the unexpected death of an in-law, Buist “decided to confront death head-on by visiting seven death festivals around the world.” She goes to Mexico, Nepal, Sicily, Thailand, Madagascar, Japan, and Indonesia (they seem to throw in New Orleans as a bonus site), looking for “the answers to both fundamental and unexpected questions around death anxiety.” As someone who reads a bunch of Caitlin Doughty books, I’m glad more people are writing about death and the way cultures respond to it. America is overall bad at it! Let’s look at other places.

Get ready, m’nerds, because here’s a dive into New Orleans architecture (awwwww yeah). The Creole architecture of New Orleans is iconic, but what about the people behind it? Dudley “examines the architectural activities and influence of gens de couleur libres—free people of color—in a city where the mixed-race descendants of whites could own property.” Not specific enough? She also writes “an intimate microhistory of two prominent families of Black developers, the Dollioles and Souliés.” So neat! So historical.

This book, with a foreword by Kiese Laymon, explores the intersections of “Blackness, gender, fatness, health, and the violence of policing.” Harrison is a a fat, Black, disabled, and nonbinary trans writer who examines anti-fatness as anti-Blackness, and offers strategies for “dismantling denial, unlearning the cultural programming that tells us ‘fat is bad,’ and destroying the world as we know it, so the Black fat can inhabit a place not built on their subjugation.”

OCEAN LINERS. So vast. So oceanic. This feels very crafted to appeal to the Titanic viewer, with emphases on class differences and experiences between decks (and yes, of course they talk about the Titanic and “The Unsinkable Stewardess” aboard her). Ocean liners occupy a very particular stretch of time in world history. I admit to being jealous of the people who got to experience them and pretend they were living out Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (is there a version of that where I end up with Jane Russell?). I’ve been psyched about this one for a while, and now it’s out!

I just read something (maybe on Twitter?) that was worrying about the defanging of Baldwin the way the culture has done so with Martin Luther King, Jr. Given his recent resurgence in popularity and the spreading of out-of-context quotes, this feels possible. So read him in context! Originally written in 1963, The Fire Next Time contains two essays: “My Dungeon Shook: Letter to my Nephew on the One Hundredth Anniversary of the Emancipation” and “Down at the Cross: Letter from a Region of My Mind.” It’s a modern classic AND only 130 pages.

What motivates the human tendency to construct Others? Why does the presence of Others make us so afraid? Toni Morrison is here to get into those and other Giant Questions, delivered as part of a lecture series. Sections include “Romancing Slavery,” “Being or Becoming the Stranger,” and “Narrating the Other,” among others. She “looks at configurations of blackness, notions of racial purity, and the ways in which literature employs skin color to reveal character or drive narrative.” Ta-Nehisi Coates writes the foreword.

Pulitzer Prize-winner Dillard “explores and celebrates moments of spirituality, dipping into descriptions of encounters with flora and fauna, stars, and more, from Ecuador to Miami.” The reviews on this are people basically going into ecstasies over her writing about nature. I like that the first essay is “Living Like Weasels.” And it’s just over 200 pages! So short.

Okay, I have three words for you: Katherine. Mansfield. Tourism. Young grew up in New Zealand and writes about her youth, “fantasizing about Paul McCartney, cheering on her older brother’s fledging music career, and yearning for a larger and more creative life.” Then we go onto things like the Mansfield fandom. This is about 250 pages, so a BIT longer, but it’s also a more sort of literary nonfiction, if you’re not feeling the “facts, only facts” urge.

You know about horse girls. They’re the ones who would pretend to be horses at slumber parties and jump over a pile of pillows. Or maybe that was just me and my friends. ANYWAY, this collection of essays written by self-professed horse girls includes Carmen Maria Machado, Jane Smiley, and Sarah Enelow-Snyder, who writes about growing up as a Black barrel racer in central Texas. I love essay collections by an assortment of people! Psyched about this one.

Hwang Sok-yong is a South Korean novelist and activist. In 1989, he traveled to Pyongyang, then went into voluntary exile in New York, and when he finally returned to South Korea, he “was sentenced to five years in the Seoul Detention Center” for breach of national security. This is his memoir, written at age 78, which covers his childhood, his life “as a young activist protesting South Korea’s military dictatorships, as a soldier in the Vietnam War, as a dissident writer first traveling abroad” and more.

A WASP, or White Anglo-Saxon Protestant, is defined as “a member of the privileged, established white upper middle class in the U.S.” or, as Urban Dictionary puts it, “this usually refers to affluent people in the new england area, but also whites of ‘old money’ in other areas throughout the country.” Here they are referred to as the American aristocracy (probably true) and Beran traces them from the nineteenth century to the death of George H.W. Bush in 2018. Here are the Roosevelts, the Kennedys, their frequently disaffected lives, and how they impacted the culture.

You’ve probably heard about inflammation and how we’re supposed to be dealing with it. Patel and Marya’s new book “illuminates the hidden relationships between our biological systems and the profound injustices of our political and economic systems.” Yes! Our endocrine system and our trauma. They are LINKED (according to this book; I myself know nothing). If you’re interested in medicine, anatomy, OR injustice, check this out.

Two-time Olympian Felicien is a retired hurdler from Canada. Wow, hurdling. Running is hard enough, but let’s add jumping over things to that. I looked up the height of Olympic hurdles, and it is 3’6″, which is 67% of my height. In her memoir, Felicien talks about her mother’s immigration to Canada from St. Lucia, and how despite the many obstacles they faced as a family, her mother Catherine pulled them through.

Yeah, like I’m doing an Olympian list of books and NOT including this one. This is about the University of Washington rowing team that represented the United States at the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin (the same games where Jesse Owens won FOUR GOLD MEDALS). It details their backgrounds, their growing up during the Great Depression, and how they beat Italy and Germany to win gold.

Thorpe was the first Native American to win a gold medal for the United States in the Olympics, winning TWO gold medals at the 1912 Olympics for classic pentathlon and decathlon. He also played football, baseball, and basketball. He grew up in the Sac and Fox Nation, and after his Olympic wins, played with the New York Giants baseball team (yes, baseball) and played professionally for six seasons! You might have seen the story floating around the internet that someone stole his shoes before the decathlon. He found a mismatched pair of shoes, competed in them, and won gold. Amazing.

Robinson was the winner of the first Olympic 100 meter dash for women at the 1928 Summer Olympics. This history encompasses her career, as well as that of early Olympians like Babe Didrikson (won “two gold medals in track and field at the 1932 Summer Olympics, before turning to professional golf and winning 10 LPGA major championships”[x]) and Stella Walsh (represented Poland at the 1932 Olympics in the 100 m dash and won gold).