Category: True Story

If you want to learn more about India and would like an on-the-ground view, here you go. Stories range from “children playing a cricket match in no-man’s-land, to an elderly man living in complete darkness after sealing off his home from the floodlit border; from a woman who fought to keep a military bunker off of her land, to those living abroad who can no longer find their family history in India.” I’m amazed this is shorter than 400 pages, because there’s so much to encompass here, but she did it. There’s also some truly gorgeous photography included.

Kim talked this up on this week’s episode of For Real! If you listen to her talk about it, you will want to buy this immediately. McGhee is an expert in economic and social policy, and this book explains how we got to such raging inequality: “[t]his is the story of how public goods in this country—from parks and pools to functioning schools—have become private luxuries; of how unions collapsed, wages stagnated, and inequality increased; and of how this country, unique among the world’s advanced economies, has thwarted universal healthcare.” Ahhh I’m so excited about this book! Tell me why things are and what we should do!

Hello, I am in love with this cover. This is a women’s history/women friendship book! Art Nouveau dancer Loie Fuller used radium (I know) in her performances, and through that, became friends with Marie Curie. This is about that friendship, the Art Nouveau movement, and Paris at the turn of the century.

Of course, of COURSE I have to start with this one. Hosts of the Call Your Girlfriend podcast write about the “Big Friendship” that has been part of their lives for the last decade. “They have weathered life-threatening health scares, getting fired from their dream jobs, and one unfortunate Thanksgiving dinner eaten in a car in a parking lot in Rancho Cucamonga.” They interview others about their deep friendships and find common themes, like choosing to continue to be there for each other time after time. YAY FRIENDSHIP.

Haha this title hits me right in the feels (do people still say that??) every time. It’s such a THING. Like, think about people in the distant future where violence against women is somehow not a thing seeing that and being like, oh wow, they liked to text each other back in the day. And then you have to add in all the CONTEXT about it meaning “I care about you and what happens to you and making sure you get home okay.” Anyway! This is a book about friendship between women and why it is great.

The description for this opens with “Women in Victorian England wore jewelry made from each other’s hair and wrote poems celebrating decades of friendship.” I mean. Do you need anything else? Okay, it also talks about Victorian sexual relationships between women, as well as longterm “partnerships described as marriages.” This one’s a bit more academic, so be forewarned, but also — get into it.

I picked this one because of this VICE article by Tarisai Ngangura entitled “‘In Search of The Color Purple’ and Why Black Women Look For Each Other,” which says “[i]n going back to rediscover The Color Purple, Tillet gives readers a look into the thoughts of Black women of that era who embraced the book as a personal and public statement of their most intimate desires and pains.” It’s intergenerational, artistic friendship. If that makes sense. This book also JUST came out last month, so #2021NewRead.

Keeler is an activist of Dineh and Yankton Dakota heritage who co-founded Eradicating Offensive Native Mascotry, which launched and trended the hashtag #NotYourMascot. 2016 saw the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe’s protest against an oil pipeline in North Dakota and the armed takeover of Oregon’s Malheur Wildlife Refuge led by the Bundy family. Keeler “examines these episodes as two sides of the same story that created America and its deep–rooted cultural conflicts.”

A true crime book about the 1910 murder of 10-year-old Marie Smith, the dawn of modern criminal detection, and the launch of the NAACP. Tresniowski tells the story of Smith’s murder in New Jersey and the attempt to tie the crime to an innocent Black man, making this the third legal case ever handled by the NAACP. This one’s recommended by Kim of the For Real podcast!

A “study of the intersections between Jewish and Latin American culture,” Lomnitz’s family memoir goes back to his grandparents’ immigration to South America as Jewish emigrants, and “the almost negligible attention and esteem that South America holds in US public opinion.” Lomnitz is an anthropologist and historian who was born in Chile and currently teaches at Columbia University.

A handbook for the youth climate movement! I love an anthology, and this is a collection of pieces on the climate justice movement using a “feminist, indigenous, antiracist, internationalist” lens. If you’re interested in the Green New Deal or in learning more about it, this could be an easy primer or way to hear new voices.

Activist and lawyer Pauli Murray was the first African American to earn a law degree from Yale (1965!), worked with Betty Friedan, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and argued that “the same reasons used to condemn race discrimination could be used to battle gender discrimination.” I love legal arguments so much (evidence! reason!) and Murray was all about them.

I also love an anthology! This collection comprises pieces from forty-nine writers, ranging from “Sojourner Truth, Hannah Crafts, and Harriet Jacobs, as well as lesser-known writers like Ella Sheppard, who offers a firsthand account of life in the world-famous Fisk Jubilee Singers.” The subjects are wide-ranging, but include nineteenth-century social issues such as abolition, women’s suffrage, temperance, and the ever-relevant civil rights.

We don’t just cover adult nonfiction here! Okay, I mostly do. This focuses on 40 Black women who changed the world, including Phillis Wheatley, Bessie Coleman, and Dr. Mae Jemison. Each profile includes an excellent portrait and a brief biography. I would have loved this book when I was a kid and I love it now.

Davis does something super cool here and “demonstrates how the roots of the blues extend beyond a musical tradition to serve as a consciousness-raising vehicle for American social memory.” She does this by looking at three extremely influential blues singers through a feminist lens and providing “the historical, social, and political contexts” you need to interpret their music.

This. Is. So. Cool. Blain and Kendi have brought together 90 writers, each of whom takes on a five-year period of the 400 years from 1619-2019. Writers explore their time period through “historical essays, short stories, personal vignettes, and fiery polemics. They approach history from various perspectives: through the eyes of towering historical icons or the untold stories of ordinary people; through places, laws, and objects.” This book seriously looks so good. Really excited for it.

Berdis Baldwin, Alberta King, and Louise Little. All grew up among Jim Crow and all “passed their knowledge to their children with the hope of helping them to survive in a society that would deny their humanity from the very beginning.” A celebration of Black motherhood well in time for Mother’s Day and just in time for Black History Month.

The essays in this book cover topics like “how Black Panther has created a shared fantasy for Black audience members—and why this is groundbreaking; what we can learn from Black Panther’s portrayal of a culture virtually untouched by white supremacy; and how Nakia, Shuri, Okoye, and Ramonda—all empowered, intelligent, and assertive women of color—can make a lasting impression on women and girls.” If you’ve never stopped thinking about this movie or if you’re interested in diving in and thinking more about what it means, check this out.

I am currently obsessed with this book. As a journalist, McGarrahan witnessed the prison execution of a man convicted of the murder of two police officers. Years later, she discovered the condemned man might have been innocent. This book is her exhaustive search into what really happened, which takes her across the country from Florida to Washington.

Wiking is the CEO of the Happiness Research Institute in Copenhagen, which is a real thing. “Hygge is about an atmosphere and an experience,” Wiking explains. “It is about being with the people we love. A feeling of home. A feeling that we are safe.” This little book has advice and ideas on how to incorporate this vibe into your life. Get into it (y’know, if you want).

This newsletter endorses a variety of ways to practice self-care. Also I like the leaves on the cover. Wiccan author Murphy-Hiscock covers Green Space Meditation, DIY body butter, how to magically cleanse things and a ritual to release guilt. I actually might get this one, despite not doing anything witchy in my daily life.

Conscious breathing! Mindfulness! How to be present and peaceful when the world around you is chaos. It “contains commentaries and meditations, personal anecdotes and stories from Nhat Hanh’s experiences as a peace activist, teacher, and community leader.” There are so many exercises to incorporate into your life. Exciting.

This “offers radical self-love as the balm to heal the wounds inflicted by [systems of oppression]” and awakening “to our own indoctrinated body shame.” Body shame can take up a LOT of personal energy, and this is a step to counteracting it and being able to spend that energy doing other things. Like playing video games!

Ok, this cover is stunning. Written by the great-granddaughter of Wells, this brief (less than 200 pages) biography is a “visual celebration of Wells’s life, and of the Black experience.” I particularly love this promo line: “In 1862, Ida B. Wells was born enslaved in Holly Springs, Mississippi. In 2020, she won a Pulitzer Prize.” A+.

This is blurbed by Hidden Valley Road author Robert Kolker as “[r]emarkably intimate, fair-minded, and trustworthy reporting,” which as a nonfiction editor, I love to see. Chammah is a journalist for The Marshall Project. Here he looks at “the rise and fall of capital punishment through the eyes of those it touched,” by interviewing lawyers, judges, and death row prisoners.

Anthropologist Grinker “chronicles the progress and setbacks in the struggle against mental-illness stigma” from the 17th century to the 21st. Looking at “cutting-edge science, historical archives, and cross-cultural research in Africa and Asia, Grinker takes readers on an international journey to discover the origins of, and variances in, our cultural response to neurodiversity.” Looks INteresting.

University press book! MacArthur fellow Willis examines over SEVENTY images of Black soldiers in the Civil War and not only dives into the lives of Black Union soldiers, but also includes stories of other African Americans involved with the struggle—from left-behind family members to female spies.

Everyone loves an essay collection. This gathers twelve Didion essays from 1968-2000 that range from the news to fabled William Randolph Hearst property San Simeon to the act of writing. My 2021 thing for this newsletter is going to be pointing out shorter nonfiction, and this clocks in at fewer than 200 pages.

In 2013, Biden’s oldest son Beau was diagnosed with a malignant brain tumor. The title of the book comes from Beau’s request of his father that “no matter what happens, you’re going to be all right.” “For twelve months, while Beau fought for and then lost his life, the vice president balanced the twin imperatives of living up to his responsibilities to his country and his responsibilities to his family. And never far away was the insistent and urgent question of whether he should seek the presidency in 2016.”

Vice President Harris’s 2019 memoir about growing up as the daughter of immigrants in Oakland, CA, becoming a prosecutor, District Attorney for San Francisco, attorney general for the state of California, and senator for California, the latter of which she served from 2017 until January 2021 when she became vice president of the United States (she typed, subduing her all-caps). The promo copy describes it as “a master class in problem solving, in crisis management, and leadership in challenging times,” which feels appropriate.

Susan Rice is the new Director of the Domestic Policy Council and was previously National Security Advisor to President Obama and US Ambassador to the United Nations. This 2019 memoir discusses issues as wide ranging as “Black Hawk Down” in Somalia, the genocide in Rwanda, the East Africa embassy bombings in the late 1990s, Libya, Syria, a secret channel to Iran, the Ebola epidemic, and the opening to Cuba during the Obama years.” So. Quite a lot. Her Goodreads bio also says she serves on the board of Netflix (??), so try piecing those things together.

Nominee for Surgeon General, Murthy previously served in the position from 2014-2017. He founded the nonprofit Doctors for America, was the first surgeon general of Indian descent, and in this 2020 release, he argues that “loneliness is the underpinning to the current crisis in mental wellness and is responsible for the upsurge in suicide, the opioid epidemic, the overuse of psych meds, the over-diagnosing and pathologizing of emotional and psychological struggle.” This came out in April 2020, and 10 months into lockdown, this message feels very “yep, seems right.” Fortunately, he doesn’t only diagnose the problem, he also offers actionable solutions.

The Black Panthers were founded in 1966 in Oakland, California and quickly became a hugely influential group in America. This graphic novel “explores the impact and significance of the Panthers, from their social, educational, and healthcare programs that were designed to uplift the Black community to their battle against police brutality through citizen patrols and frequent clashes with the FBI, which targeted the Party from its outset.”

Elizabeth Blackwell was the first woman in America to receive a medical degree (which she was able to achieve in part because the students voting her into the school thought it was a joke). She and her sister Emily, also a physician, founded the New York Infirmary for Indigent Women and Children, the first hospital staffed entirely by women, and were very interesting figures. Check this out if you’re looking for some new women’s history reads.

Ok, this is awesome. McKinley, a writer and curator, looked at how images of African women were primarily seen from an anthropological perspective or exoticized, and so in this book, she “draws on her extensive collection of historical and contemporary photos to present a visual history spanning a hundred-year arc (1870–1970) of what is among the earliest photography on the continent. These images tell a different story of African women: how deeply cosmopolitan and modern they are in their style; how they were able to reclaim the tools of the colonial oppression that threatened their selfhood and livelihoods.” Awesome.

Once again: fwoof. Patricia Highsmith was a…hm. Lot going on there. Author of Carol (aka The Price of Salt), Strangers on a Train, and The Talented Mr. Ripley, she was an acclaimed writer. But in this new biography, Bradford “considers Highsmith’s bestsellers in the context of her troubled personal life; her alcoholism, licentious sex life, racism, anti-Semitism, misogyny and abundant self-loathing.” He also points out that “her status as an LGBT icon is undermined by the fact that she was excessively cruel and exploitative of her friends and lovers.” If you want to learn more about Highsmith and what on earth her deal was, here’s this new bio.

I continue to be very into the James Baldwin Renaissance we all seem to be living through. Originally written in 1963, a year that I think we can relate to in this upside-down time, it 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 at 130 pages, one you can fit into your reading sched.

I really admire when someone can tell a story in the number of pages it should be told. This story’s really neat! But I don’t need a padded-out 350 page book about it. We just straight-up didn’t have longitude at sea figured out for most of human history. You could figure out your position based on the stars (hey there, Polynesian wayfinding), but if you were trying to calculate longitude, couldn’t do it. UNTIL THIS GUY. He invented a way to figure out where you were at sea, which meant you had less of a chance of being completely lost/shipwrecked. This is the story of how he did it.

This book! So short! So good! Such an iconic cover. I read this over my lunch break at a women’s history museum, because they sold it in the gift shop. It’s adapted from Adichie’s TEDx Talk, which was given in 2012. Remember in 2014 when Emma Watson gave a speech in the U.N. and people were like, “Emma Watson said she’s a feminist!!” Because that word was still associated with the scorn that people had been piling on it for years? Adichie saying “We should all be feminists” was pushing all that baggage off it and saying something unusual and extremely impactful. It’s an important read!

When Murakami was training for the New York City marathon, he decided to keep a journal. This resulting book is about “his intertwined obsessions with running and writing, full of vivid recollections and insights, including the eureka moment when he decided to become a writer.” I’m not a runner in the slightest, but this is getting bumped way up in my TBR pile.

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, but in a limited number of pages, because she doesn’t need a lot of fluff and nonsense to make herself understood. This clocks in around 136 pages and seems like an excellent read for 2021.