Category: True Story

I am so excited about this book? Hinton makes a clear case that the 2020 protests over the murder of George Floyd did not exist in isolation. They were part of a history of police violence and public reaction, specifically on the part of the Black community. In it, Hinton says “the word riot was nothing less than a racist trope applied to events that can only be properly understood as rebellions—explosions of collective resistance to an unequal and violent order.” Love this reframing. Love adding context to current events.

Adams emigrated to the US from Poland in 1912, where she hung out with anarchists and ran queer speakeasies in NYC and Chicago. It’s like Emma Goldman, but gay. In 1925, she published a book called Lesbian Love, which is included as part of the biography. She was convicted of publishing an obscene book, because it was America in the 1920s, and eventually deported to Europe, where she later died in Auschwitz. I tell you all these details so you know what you’re getting into, but also dang, I thought I knew my US lesbian history, and I did not.

ACT UP was founded in 1987 at the Lesbian and Gay Community Services Center in NYC. At a time when the AIDS crisis was being ignored, they made it impossible to ignore. Author Schulman has been working on the ACT UP Oral History Project since 2001, and here highlights how “a broad and unlikely coalition of activists from all races, genders, sexualities, and backgrounds, changed the world.”

Poet Broome writes this extremely interesting memoir, framed around Gwendolyn Brooks’s ‘We Real Cool.’ It covers his “early years growing up in Ohio as a dark-skinned Black boy harboring crushes on other boys,” his increasing drug use, his family, and “the true depth of vulnerability for young Black boys,” which is a phrase that just cuts right to your heart. Also, bonus points for the title, which is SO good.

Dating apps. Real annoying. Real helpful. Lot to unpack there probably. Sales not only talks about the data around dating apps, but as an almost-50-year-old, went on TENS of dates through them, which she covers in the book. She says that these apps do little to foster real connection, but in a world where more and more people are meeting their longtime partners through them, what’s the alternative? (side note: I met my wife through Tinder and she is great.)

Did I pick this because I A) love the cover, B) love Diane Guerrero and her story, or C) all of the above? YES, C wins the day. This is an adaptation of Guerrero’s memoir In the Country We Love, which is about her parents’ deportation and the push for immigration reform in the United States. This is listed as ages 10-14, which I agree with because it clocks in at over 200 pages. If you have some ambitious 10-year-olds, check this out.

I like that we’re in an age when we’re adding more context about the Founders of America, which includes George and Martha Washington enslaving people. Ona Judge was among these people, and her story of escape and ability to elude captors is amazing. This is for kids age 9-13 and is also just over 200 pages.

I LOVE this because it not only adds knowledge, it prompts curiosity. The world is so interesting and there’s so much going on that we can’t even see! This is 20 pages and for ages 5-8, but there’s so much going on in the pictures, that it could take up a good amount of time.

Fun fact: this book was one of our picks in Kim’s and my first episode of the nonfiction podcast For Real. It’s a board book! And 97 pages, but lists at ages 8-12. IMO, you can go younger with it? Especially if you read it out loud. There are 18 stories and each features an illustration of the woman featured.

Okay. I wouldn’t normally START by quoting the book description, but look at this: “In 1897, Britain responded to the killing of a group of officials by razing an empire to the ground.” Like, what?? That’s an amazing intro. Horrifying, but amazing. The kingdom of Benin (now Nigeria) was destroyed by the British and they carried off the Benin Bronzes, which still sit in the British Museum. Author Phillips is also working to shut down the ivory trade and save Africa’s elephants. Great job, sir.

This title refers to the Spiritualist movement and the women who made their names off it. This includes the Fox sisters, who started the movement with the knocking sounds they claimed to hear in their Hydesville, NY home, to Victoria Woodhull, Georgina Weldon, and others. More books about women in the 19th century! All the books.

It’s a food book, it’s a memoir, it’s a “sociological investigation.” There’s a lot going on here. Cho grew up with a white American father and a Korean mother. In Cho’s teens, her mother was diagnosed with schizophrenia. In “her mother’s final years, Grace learned to cook dishes from her parent’s childhood in order to invite the past into the present, and to hold space for her mother’s multiple voices at the table.”

Winner: 2020
I know. I know! What a year+ we have had, and this is a very sad-sounding book. But I have only heard raves about it. Boyer was diagnosed with breast cancer right after her 41st birthday. She was a single mother living paycheck to paycheck. From that experience, she writes this expansive book (in not that many pages) covering “the experience of illness as mediated by digital screens, weaving in ancient Roman dream diarists, cancer hoaxers and fetishists, cancer vloggers, corporate lies, John Donne, pro-pain ‘dolorists,’ the ecological costs of chemotherapy, and the many little murders of capitalism.” Man.

Winner: 2018
Forman is a former public defender who focuses on the disproportionate representation of people of color in our system of mass incarceration. The title refers to how he “seeks to understand the war on crime that began in the 1970s and why it was supported by many African American leaders in the nation’s urban centers.” One of his focuses, which he adds as a layer to the systemic racism that has led to mass incarceration, is classism. I usually don’t point to Goodreads ratings, since they typically sit at an unhelpful 3-3.5, but this has a 4.38 from over 3,000 reviews. Which is pretty impressive.

Winner: 2011
I KNOW, another cancer book. This is from the perspective of a doctor and not a patient, though, and it is a history of cancer rather than someone’s specific experience of it. So maybe read both. Mukherjee starts 4,600 years ago in Egypt, all the way to the 21st century, detailing the history of cancer treatment around the world. This is a modern nonfiction classic.

Winner: 1996
This won the Pulitzer AND the National Book Award. I had literally never heard of it before. Because nonfiction is frequently unsung! Rosenberg travels across Eastern Europe, looking at East Germany, the Czech Republic, and Poland and how their citizens responded to the way communism was managed in their countries.

CAN YOU EVEN. Jujubee is on the cover! Famed drag artist and lover of cats! The description of this is filled with cat puns like “amewsing” anecdotes and “impawtent” moments (I was especially impressed by the latter) from the lives of queer heroes. If you love queer icons and also photos of cats, this feels like a must. *looks at the cover again* Ahahaha I love it so much.

Otele is Professor of the History of Slavery at Bristol University and the first Black woman to be appointed to a professorial chair in history in the United Kingdom. Here she tells the story of African Europeans, “from Emperor Septimius Severus, to enslaved Africans living in Europe during the Renaissance, and all the way to present-day migrants moving to Europe’s cities.” So much history! I’m so glad this book exists!

My work bestie loves the WNBA so THIS IS FOR YOU, LINDSEY (she doesn’t subscribe to this newsletter). Rodgers was recruited out of high school to play college basketball, and was then drafted by the Minnesota Lynx in 2013. She was the first of her family to attend college and “speaks of her struggles both academically and as an athlete with raw honesty.” TW for early mom death (Rodgers was 14), but more WNBA books, please. They do amazing work!! And they deserve for their stories to be told.

This won best picture, best director (Chloé ZHAO!), and best actress, so that feels like a pretty good sweep. The book came out in 2017 and covers the phenomenon of older Americans who, following the Great Recession of the late 2000s, started traveling around the country looking for seasonal work. Journalist Bruder traveled with the “houseless” for years. I’ve heard nothing but positives about this book.

Remember Argo? It was the secret rescue of six Americans from Tehran in the early 1980s. Which was accomplished under the guise of filming a sci-fi movie, which if you think about it is perfect, because what was going on at this time? Star Wars. Anyway, this story is wild and such a weird thing to have happened. And yet it did!

I could not watch this movie because I heard it was difficultttttt to watch. But it was very lauded! And Chiwetel Ejiofor and Lupita Nyong’o are supposed to be very good in it! The book it’s based on is an 1853 memoir by formerly enslaved Solomon Northrup, who was born a free man, tricked into going to Washington D.C., and sold to a plantation in Louisiana. He manages to get free, but good Lord. The things that have happened and continue to happen.

This came out in 1998, which terrifying enough was 23 years ago. It’s a biography of Nobel Prize-winning economist and mathematician John Forbes Nash, Jr. It won the National Book Critics Circle Award and was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. It goes from his childhood to his time at Princeton and MIT, his Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences, and his schizophrenia diagnosis. Nash did not die until 2015, which I did not know until just now. but when the book was published, he was 70.

Ok first of all, I love this cover. Now, what’s it about? Wong’s memoir is about “a childhood amid revolutionary times, where boyish adventures and school days mixed with dire poverty and political persecution.” His father, a “patriotic Chinese official” was caught by Mao’s Hundred Flowers Campaign, which was a time when people were encouraged to express their true feelings about the government, and then later hundreds of thousands were sent to prison camps for “re-education.” Wong was one of half a million Freedom Swimmers who swam to Hong Kong to escape.

A Hungarian ghost hunter! A suburban housewife! A possible poltergeist! This story takes place in 1930s London when Alma Fielding started experiencing things flying off the shelves, tortoises appearing in her car, etc. Y’know. Ghost stuff. This is the story of her, ghost hunter Nandor Fodor (fun name), and an imminent war.

Is it possible to talk about Freedom Riders without getting emotional? Freedom Riders were incredibly brave men and women who rode interstate buses into segregated states to “challenge the non-enforcement of the U.S. Supreme Court decisions that ruled that segregated public buses were unconstitutional.” Charles Person was the youngest of the original Freedom Riders, being 18 when they started. The bus he rode was attacked by a mob, with several Riders severely beaten. This is his story.

Like I’m not highlighting this book. In the 1880s, James Vick spent $100,000 a year on advertising, publishing full-color floral guides multiple times a year, and getting rave reviews for his magazine. He employed 150 people and received 3000 letters a day. If you were into flowers and lived in the mid-to-late 19th century, you knew about Vick’s Illustrated Floral Guide.

Reporter Schlossberg relates environmental change and impact to every decision you make. Which can sound overwhelming! But she breaks it down into the categories Technology and the Internet, Food, Fashion, and Fuel, and uses surprisingly (in a good way!) informal, fun language for what can be seen as a stressful topic.

The protests at Standing Rock put a spotlight on Indigenous environmental activism, but it has been going on for decades and decades. This is a history of “Indigenous resistance to government and corporate incursions on their lands and offers new approaches to environmental justice activism and policy.” It connects Native people’s history with the environmental justice movement and looks at opportunities for change in the future.

Journalist Washington examines the impact of environmental racism on Black, Indigenous, and Latinx communities. Released in 2019, this covers the water crisis in Flint, where water has had lead levels high enough to be classified as hazardous waste; forced contraception that has a toxic effect on the pregnant parent; and the way waste products like toxins and heavy metals are disproportionately leeched into communities of color.

This is Kolbert’s newest release after her very successful and Pulitzer Prize–winning The Sixth Extinction. Sticking with her excellent formula, she spends each chapter focusing on a different area, including “biologists who are trying to preserve the world’s rarest fish, which lives in a single tiny pool in the middle of the Mojave; engineers who are turning carbon emissions to stone in Iceland; Australian researchers who are trying to develop a “super coral” that can survive on a hotter globe” and more. I’ve said this a lot with Kolbert, but her work makes me really happy that there is someone to care about everything. Including the tiny Mojave fish!

The Red Nation is a coalition advocating Native liberation. Here they explain their platform and offer a toolkit for how we can unite and, in the next decade, work to avert climate disaster. They describe their work as “a program for Indigenous liberation, life, and land—an affirmation that colonialism and capitalism must be overturned for this planet to be habitable for human and other-than-human relatives to live dignified lives.”

Can you imagine having a life where you have weekly martini meetings at the Ritz? If you’re like me and not supes into alcohol, that would be weekly Shirley Temple meetings at the Ritz, but STILL. The hugely talented Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton met at a workshop and had a kind of up-and-down, friends/rivals/friends arc that involved aforementioned martini meetings. This talks about their friendship, their rivalry, and their literary acclaim. Both Plath and Sexton died by suicide, so be aware going in.

A memoir! Nyamayaro, a former senior adviser at the United Nations and co-founder of HeForShe (a solidarity movement for gender equality), grew up in Zimbabwe and went on to become a world-traveling humanitarian. Throughout the book is the “African concept of Ubuntu – ‘I am because we are'” and her story of creating change in communities around the world. Don’t you love reading about contemporary people’s career trajectories? Maybe that’s a me thing. Anyway, her work is amazing and you should check this out.

Cooper Hewitt was an heiress whose grandfather founded The Cooper Union in NYC. The book begins with the story of her forced sterilization due to the actions of her mother, and then gets into eugenics and how the case against her mother and the medical professionals involved proceeded. The larger picture is how society’s perceptions of women changed in the 1930s and the evolving state of reproductive rights.

People hit each other for money and so sometimes they need a doctor. And Linda Dahl is one of those doctors! She grew up in the Midwest, her parents having immigrated from Syria, and fell in love with boxing while she was a surgical resident. She then rearranged her career to be more in line with her passion, which is very inspiring!

I love a funeral home memoir. Booker started working at a Baltimore funeral home when she was 15, where “along with the sadness, Booker encountered moments of dark humor: brawls between mistresses and widows, and car crashes at McDonald’s with dead bodies in tow.” She also discusses how AIDS and gang violence impacted the Black men in her community and how what started as a summer job impacted her formative years.

Do you know that legend about how if the ravens leave, the Tower of London will fall down? I mean, it’s probably not true, but why chance it? Yeoman Warder Skaife is the Ravenmaster of the Tower, and he tells you all about ravens, the personalities of the particular ones he works with, and what it’s like working at the Tower of London.

I admit to having a lot of curiosity as to what goes on working at a hotel. It can’t be like Hotel Babylon (or can it??). Tomsky started as a “valet parker” (which took me a sec to work out, but it’s literally just someone who parks the cars for the valet service) and then worked in hospitality for ten years. He covers “the unwritten code of the bellhops, the antics that go on in the valet parking garage, the housekeeping department’s dirty little secrets” etc.

Belva Davis is the first African American woman to become a television reporter on the U.S. West Coast! She has won eight Emmys! She began her career with a freelance assignment for Jet and then became a reporter in the 1960s (hence the amazing hairstyle on the cover of the book). “From being verbally and physically attacked while reporting on the 1964 Republican National Convention in San Francisco to witnessing the historic election of Barack Obama in 2008,” she’s seen it all. The foreword author is unfortunate, but chalk that up to the book coming out in 2011.

Remember that Bob’s Burgers episode where they were freaked out because an undercover food critic was reviewing restaurants? That’s Ruth Reichl’s job! She puts on wigs and eats food! Which you can also do from the comfort of your own home, but you might not get paid for it. Her most famous instance of this was doing a double review of renowned restaurant Le Cirque — one review was her in disguise and one from when she went as herself, a New York Times food critic.

Did you know Major League Baseball has a Department of Investigations?? It was created in response to the congressional hearings on steroid usage in baseball. Eduardo Dominguez Jr. was a founding member of the DOI, where they investigated “gambling, age and identity fraud, human trafficking, cover-ups, and more.” Boy. So many jobs out there.