Category: True Story

If you’ve listened to For Real (or possibly read this newsletter), you know I am into memoirs trying something different, if only because we just have so many memoirs that it’s neat to see a new take on them. Mohabir grew up in the U.S. and in his memoir, “blends literary genres to tackle questions of caste, ethnicity, and sexuality, and to explore the author’s experiences as an Indo-Guyanese queer poet.” That’s so many things! He goes from India to Florida to New York City, where a cousin derogatorily calls him “antiman.” This just looks really good and interesting.

Sure, we’ve heard of cults, but do we understand their appeal? Like reeeeally understand it? Montell says nope! And that the appeal of cults does not lie in some nebulous brainwashing concept, but in the word choices of their leaders. She also discusses how many groups that could be described as cults are pretty harmless, and how humans tend towards them because we love to belong to groups (seems about right). It’s a pretty fascinating book, from the author of Wordslut.

Belc’s memoir looks at the gendered treatment of giving birth, and what nonbinary parenthood can look like. When he gave birth to his son, it “clarified his gender identity and allowed him to project a more masculine self. And yet, when his partner Anna adopted Samson, the legal documents listed Belc as ‘the natural mother of the child.'” I love the idea of how having a body can influence the perception of a family, and what shifting the way that has been can look like, and this just seems excellent.

I love landmarks and historical markers and anything drawing attention to the past and how it shaped our present. We don’t have many of those in America when it comes to our history with the enslavement of human beings. Smith takes you around the country to Monticello (Jefferson’s home), the Whitney Plantation, Angola Prison, a Confederate cemetery, and more, as he examines the legacy of slavery.

This literally just came out last month and is described as a SLIM VOLUME (I love a slim volume). Gordon-Reed is a Harvard history professor who “provides a historian’s view of the country’s long road to Juneteenth, recounting both its origins in Texas and the enormous hardships that African-Americans have endured in the century since, from Reconstruction through Jim Crow and beyond.” In 144 pages!

When people talk about women being trapped as housewives, they implicitly mean white women. Mitchell looks at Black families “asserting their citizenship in domestic settings while the larger society and culture marginalize and attack them, not because they are deviants or failures but because they meet American standards.” As the title indicates, it spans the time of slavery to Michelle Obama in the White House. Mitchell has recently been talking more about “know-your-place aggression” on Twitter, and I highly recommend following her, because she is great.

What would this newsletter be if I didn’t include an academic press book from 1990? Wiggins looks at the beginnings of Emancipation celebrations, takes four field trips to Texas, Kentucky, Georgia, and Pennsylvania, and writes vividly of his experiences. It starts off looking like a somewhat daunting academic text, but if you can read his descriptions of “Texas melon patches, endless acres of gnarled vines,” “sagging russet-rusted roofs,” and “freshly plowed rows glistening in the hot afternoon sun like rolls of licorice,” then you quickly and happily realize your error.

This came out in the mid-2010s, and argues that rather than American slavery being isolated in a distant past, we are currently living in a society whose economy was immensely shaped by it. This might sound like “well, yeah,” but I would argue that (in popular culture anyway) systemic thinking has taken hold pretty recently. If you’re interested in getting more facts behind why this was and how “the expansion of slavery in the first eight decades after American independence drove the evolution and modernization of the United States,” then pick this up.

I love diving into a subject, because I end up running across so many titles I’ve somehow missed for years. Camp writes about enslaved Black women in the South, and “discusses the multiple dimensions to acts of resistance that might otherwise appear to be little more than fits of temper.” I love her thesis that these (sometimes) small and bodily acts of everyday resistance “helped foment and sustain the more visible resistance of men in their individual acts of running away and in the collective action of slave revolts.” I also love the phrase “everyday resistance.”

This was referenced in Aubrey Gordon’s What We Don’t Talk About When We Talk About Fat and I’ve been interested in it for a while, so I wanted to make sure and highlight it. Strings looks at art, magazine articles, medical journals, etc, and says that fat phobia, “as it relates to black women, did not originate with medical findings, but with the Enlightenment era belief that fatness was evidence of ‘savagery’ and racial inferiority” and that “it was not until the early twentieth century, when racialized attitudes against fatness were already entrenched in the culture, that the medical establishment began its crusade against obesity.” It is so important to be conscious of these sorts of things! Our current cultural values have not been the same forever and they will continue to change, but we (if we can) should spend a little time examining why they are what they are.

When I got this galley, I was SURPRISED how many people were like “omgggg new tree book.” But people really, really liked The Hidden Life of Trees. In his newest book, Wohlleben looks at humanity’s connection with trees and how we can increase our own awareness of it. Have I hugged a tree in my life? Yes. Yes, definitely. Trees are AMAZING and I am pro-any book that wants us to spend more time around them.

Brunson became known through her Instagram series Girl Who Has Never Been on a Nice Date. She then was in iZombie (which I’ve seen one episode of, but it was enjoyable!) and starred in A Black Lady Sketch Show on HBO. In her debut essay collection, she talks about “what it was like to go from a girl who loved the World Wide Web to a girl whose face launched a thousand memes” and essays ranging from the comic to those covering her struggles with depression.

Heumann was paralyzed due to polio and, at the age of five, not allowed to attend school. This is the Young Readers version of her memoir Being Heumann, which came out early last year. It covers her achievements, from “fighting to attend grade school after being described as a ‘fire hazard’ because of her wheelchair, to suing the New York City school system for denying her a teacher’s license because of her disability,” as well as her famed sit-in protest in San Francisco. This is a middle grade version, so for kids 10 and up.

What was it like being a Black member of America’s first generation raised after the civil rights era? What can we learn from the extremely-recent-to-white-America revelation that the country did not, in fact, end racism? In his book, Ross looks at this as well as things like “how we were all educated with colorblind narratives and symbols that typically, albeit implicitly, privileged whiteness and denigrated Blackness.” As an elder Millennial, absolutely this.

Do I love that this cover looks like Moss from The IT Crowd? Yis. These are essays by the creators of the eponymous website, who write about “everything from Mario Kart and The Wire to issues of representation and police brutality across media” (side note: should I watch The Wire or is it too late to be culturally relevant?) If you want pop culture, social commentary, and NERD things, look forward to this.

OCEAN LINERS. So vast. So oceanic. This feels very crafted to appeal to the Titanic viewer, with emphases on the class differences and experiences between decks (and yes, of course they talk about the Titanic and “The Unsinkable Stewardess” aboard her). I’m an absolute sucker for books focused around a specific workplace and for women-centered history books, so this is really hitting all the right notes, including the phrase “golden age of ocean liners.”

There have been a lot of pieces about what “essential work” is and how we define it and how that became incredibly pressing during the pandemic. This book 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. I expect this book to be thought-provoking and I am glad it was written.

Can’t have a list of books without a weird nature one! This is also a university press book, so +2. Brown asks “how a tiny blue fish—confined to a single, narrow aquifer on the edge of Death Valley National Park in Nevada’s Amargosa Desert—has managed to survive despite numerous grave threats.” How has it! I’m invested now! Nature is so strange!

Cashin has written a number of nonfiction books, including Loving: Interracial Intimacy in America and the Threat to White Supremacy and Place Not Race: A New Vision of Opportunity in America. In her newest, she talks about the spreading of the ghetto myth to concentrate poverty in Black spaces and create “high opportunity white spaces.” She calls for “investment in a new infrastructure of opportunity in poor Black neighborhoods, including richly resourced schools and neighborhood centers, public transit, Peacemaker Fellowships, universal basic incomes, housing choice vouchers for residents, and mandatory inclusive housing elsewhere.” Love it.

Sometimes you need a silly adventure nonfiction book. They pitch it as Lost City of Z meets The Da Vinci Code, and the basic premise reads like that; look at this: “This book tells the untold true story of Monty Parker, a British rogue nobleman who, after being dared to do so by Ava Astor, the so-called ‘most beautiful woman in the world,’ headed a secret 1909 expedition to find the fabled Ark of the Covenant.” Don’t you want to read that?? I do! What happened! Did he find it? I mean, evidently not, but the STORY still sounds great.

We’re living in a second Gilded Age, so this feels pretty relevant. There’s a love triangle, there’s poetry, there’s social reform movements, there’s a real estate developer; it’s just got All the Things. I also love a story where it was HUGE in the news at the time, and then almost no one today has heard of it. This is one of those!

Ok, I got so psyched for this as soon as I saw it. White is a descendant of Jefferson and Hemings’ families, something she found out for certain after she was named a Jefferson Studies Fellow. She’s the the Public Relations & Community Engagement Officer at Monticello, Jefferson’s famed home, which makes me even more interested in reading it, because I want to know why she likes him.

Brammer was first called “Papi” on Grindr. Then, “what started as a racialized moniker given to him on a hookup app soon became the inspiration for his now wildly popular advice column “¡Hola Papi!”” In his memoir, he talks about growing up biracial in Oklahoma, and shares some of the advice he regularly doles out in his column. Not to be all about covers (again), but I love this cover. #HappyPrideMonth

I hope you’re ready for a teenage Northern Irish naturalist, because here we go. McAnulty is only 16 years old, and is part of the youth climate activist movement. His diary “captures his perspective as a teenager juggling exams, friendships, and a life of campaigning.” McAnulty himself says, “In sharing this journey my hope is that people of all generations will not only understand autism a little more but also appreciate a child’s eye view on our delicate and changing biosphere.” He is the youngest winner of the RSPB Medal (Royal Society for the Protection of Birds).

Ok, if you don’t love this part of this book’s blurb, I don’t know what appeals to you. Henderson grew up “Black, weird, and overwhelmingly uncool in a mostly white neighborhood in upstate New York.” She was left by her mom in the care of her grandparents when she was 10, and her grandmother was tough but hilarious (frequently a winning combo). Henderson now is a TV writer who cohosts the film podcast I Saw What You Did and “reluctantly lives in Los Angeles.”

HAPPY PRIDE MONTH, here’s a gay classics book. This is the story of the Theban Sacred Band, “an elite 300-man corps recruited from pairs of lovers” in the 300s BCE. Plutarch says they made vows to each other at the shrine of Iolaus. When I saw this title, I was very confident that I’d be sharing it here, because how often do you see something like that? Romm is the director of the Classical Studies Program at Bard College.

This graphic history looks at how we “came to view sex, gender and sexuality in the ways that we do; how these ideas get tangled up with our culture and our understanding of biology, psychology and sexology; and how these views have been disputed and challenged.” It’s kind of like, how do we look at queer theory and some Big Ideas, but do it in an illustrated and more comprehensible way.

Rustin was the organizer of the 1963 March on Washington (yes, the “I Have a Dream” event) and had an enormous influence on Martin Luther King, Jr, but he is not as well known as others in the Civil Rights movement. Why? Because he was openly gay. While it is near-impossible to truly know a person, I would argue that reading their letters is a better way than reading a biography. This collection gathers over 150 of Rustin’s letters, spanning almost four decades of his life (he died in 1987). What a way to learn more about him.

I really love the family aspect of this. Selenis Leyva, known from Orange Is the New Black, co-writes this book with her sister about growing up in the Bronx in a Latinx household, about Marizol transitioning, their relationship as sisters, how Caitlin Jenner does not stand for all trans experiences, their relationship with Laverne Cox, and more.

June 28, 2019 was the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall uprising, and if you love primary sources, boy is this great for you. Edited by the New York Public Library, it compiles “first accounts, diaries, periodic literature, and articles from LGBTQ magazines and newspapers that documented both the years leading up to and the years following the riot.” A lot of accounts about this seminal event in American queer history.

Historian Anderson, who previously wrote White Rage and One Person, No Vote, looks at the history and impact of the United States’s Second Amendment, “how it was designed, and how it has consistently been constructed to keep African Americans powerless and vulnerable.” Through her research, she demonstrates that “the Second Amendment is not about guns but about anti-Blackness.” Anderson consistently uses history to illuminate and explain issues of our time, which IMO, is the best use of history.

Williams, formerly an anti-LGBTQ+ evangelical leader and president of a church-planting organization, transitioned in her sixties after a “call to authenticity.” In an other-side-of-the-coin to Thomas Page McBee’s book Amateur, instead of being listened to more post-transition, she finds herself ignored, sidelined, and overlooked. She “urges men to recognize the ways in which the world is tilted in their favor and validates the experiences of women who have been disregarded based solely on their gender, while also acknowledging how she was once like those men who are blind to their privilege.”

This graphic memoir and history of women-led slave revolts rejects the popularly-held idea that slave revolts were solely led by men. Hall, the granddaughter of enslaved people, combs through “old court records, slave ship captain’s logs, crumbling correspondence, and even the forensic evidence from the bones of enslaved women from the ‘negro burying ground’ uncovered in Manhattan. She finds women warriors everywhere.” I love Martínez’s art, which makes this history even more evocative.

One hundred years of “glamour and high society” told through the lives of the Savoy Hotel’s founders! It talks about Gilbert and Sullivan, it talks about P.G. Wodehouse, it talks about electric lights like Moulin Rouge did, it talks about Oscar Wilde, Marilyn Monroe, The Beatles, and basically everyone incredibly famous in the 20th century.

This is a short nonfiction classic. It’s so short! I read it during a lunch break at work! And not only is it short, but it’s got some A+ points by a great writer. Adichie’s feminism is something that benefits everyone (the patriarchy harms all! it is only superficially beneficial to men! this is an important fact!). You can knock this out on Saturday afternoon and still have time to watch some Star Trek: Discovery. Or…whatever people watch. It should probably be that, though.

This title reminds me of Tracy Jordan talking about mind grapes, and I had to get that out of the way because this book is intense! Lots of serious topics! But also it’s v. short, so you can delve into Feelings and then come back out. Mailhot grew up on the Seabird Island Indian Reservation in the Pacific Northwest. As an adult, she is simultaneously diagnosed with PTSD and bipolar II disorder. She takes to a notebook to write out her feelings, which turns into exploring memory, family, and maybe give yourself a tiny recovery window from this one.

This is shorter than 250 pages! And pretty breezy. I’ve talked about this on the podcast, but I happened to bring this to a tough family holiday, and I retreated to a room with it and it was SUCH an amazing break. I will forever love this book. Kaling talks about working in writers rooms, creating her two women show (two woman show?) about Matt Damon and Ben Affleck, and how she’s a huge nerd and figured out what she wanted to do with her life.

Remember Katherine Johnson, the amazing central character of Hidden Figures?? She wrote a book! It’s about her path from growing up in the mountains of West Virginia to becoming a “human computer” for NASA. An AMAZING human computer. Her story “is centered around the basic tenets of her life—no one is better than you, education is paramount, and asking questions can break barriers.” Ngl, the asking questions one made me tear up. I love questions. She seems like such a fantastic person and I’m so glad she got to tell her own story.

Wow, remember when everyone was like, boy, Nixon sure was the worst? I’m not saying he wasn’t real bad, but boy. Things have happened. ANYWAY, 1) I love this cover, 2) ever since the movie Dick, I have been interested in Watergate (what a great movie), 3) this was on some “most anticipated” lists for 2021, so if you’re like, “WOW, cannot wait to learn more about mid-20th century American political scandals” then do I have a new release for you.

Bailey, who coined the term “misogynoir,” defines it as “the ways anti-Black and misogynistic representation shape broader ideas about Black women, particularly in visual culture and digital spaces.” Here, she focuses on the many ways Black women resist misogynoir on YouTube, Facebook, Tumblr, and other platforms. It “highlights Black women’s remarkable efforts to disrupt mainstream narratives, subvert negative stereotypes, and reclaim their lives.” Sounds amazing.

How can a chef get her own restaurant? Hamilton’s memoir goes from rural Pennsylvania to New York City and across Europe as she gathers cooking knowledge, gets married, and starts her restaurant Prune. This was a NYT bestseller that has been described as “gritty.” Also, look at that cover. It is A+.

Samuelsson was born in Ethiopia, grew up in Sweden, and moved to America. He cooked in Switzerland, on cruise ships, and “became the youngest chef ever to be awarded a coveted three-star rating from the New York Times.” He also cooked for Obama and won Top Chef Masters, which I have not SEEN, but it sounds very impressive. I’m gonna be honest, the part of his extremely varied life I am most fascinated by is cooking on a cruise ship. The writing immediately draws you in and if you’re going to read a chef book, this one is great.

This has recipes! Tan was born in Singapore in the Year of the Tiger (hence the title!). At eighteen, she moved to the U.S. and became a fashion writer, but in her 30s, she began to seriously miss Singaporean cooking. By cooking with her family, she not only learns the recipes of her childhood, but the stories of her family. You meet her parents, aunts, uncles, and grandmother. She “learns to infuse her New York lifestyle with the rich lessons of the Singaporean kitchen, ultimately reconnecting with her family and herself.”