Category: True Story

I am interested in almost every book about how Florida is weird. I enjoy the specificity of it. We have 50 states, but THIS one — this one’s got its own thing goin’ on. The twist on this is that it’s an academic press book, but that just means its facts have probably been actually checked (hurray!). Gillespie takes you to “gator pits, rattlesnake rooms, and clothing-optional campgrounds, where he meets eclectic and unconventional Floridians.” I mean, it sounds good already, right? He interviews “storm chasers, Civil War reenactors, cattle ranchers, drag queens, python hunters, and pet smugglers. His conversations delve into serious issues such as addiction, Florida’s racist past, and care options for the state’s LGBTQ senior citizens.” I’m just saying, maybe add this to your Florida books list.

I would say the release of this book is particularly timely due to the murder of Daunte Wright and the trial of George Floyd, but in America, it is perennially relevant. Hattery and Smith say that these individual experiences of police brutality are connected to “the regulation of African American people in many settings, including the public education system and the criminal justice system.” It looks at the school-to-prison pipeline, mass incarceration, and how Black women and trans people are treated. Our global conversations around solutions have been shifting from individual to systemic, and this points out the systemic problem of policing Black bodies.

In 1972, Texaco began extracting oil from Amazonian Ecuador. It left behind “millions of gallons of spilled oil and more than eighteen million gallons of toxic waste.” “What?” you say. Yes. Oil was everywhere, in the water, on the roads, impacting health, and killing people. Fajardo is an Ecuadorian lawyer and activist who worked in the oil fields as a teenager and later became lead counsel for a group of over 30,000 people “who continue to fight for reparations and remediation to this day.”

In the 1880s and ’90s, newspapers were cutthroat and always looking for a new angle. At the same time, women were entering the workforce and gettin’ things done. This was the time of Nellie Bly and her compatriots, who traveled the world, posed as sanatorium residents, and were known as “girl stunt reporters.” Todd looks at their decades of popularity and the impact they had on journalism.

Of course of COURSE this is on here. Obama’s 700+ page memoir is the first in a two-volume set. This volume goes from Obama’s early years through the killing of Osama bin Laden in 2011, so before he was elected for his second term. According to Wikipedia, Obama took the longest of any president writing a memoir since it started being a regular “thing” with Calvin Coolidge. But it’s a massive book, so we get it, Obama. We get it.

Doyle’s previous books include Love Warrior and Carry On, Warrior. Her most recent memoir “is the story of how one woman learned that a responsible mother is not one who slowly dies for her children, but one who shows them how to fully live.” She discusses her divorce, her marriage to Abby Wambach, and their blended family. The book is divided into three sections: Caged, Keys, and Freedom. It’s all about empowerment for women and finding courage. My wife loves this book.

This was on so many antiracism lists last year, so it’s not a huge surprise it was one of the top sellers! Kendi talks about antiracism as “a transformative concept that reorients and reenergizes the conversation about racism” and “points us toward liberating new ways of thinking about ourselves and each other.” He relates how racism creates false hierarchies in society and makes everything actively worse. So we should stop that.

Pulitzer Prize–winning Wilkerson’s new book was a big, big release of last year. Despite America’s proclamation of being based in the notion that all people are created equal, all people are not treated equally. Wilkerson posits that there is a hidden caste system, which can be defined through eight pillars, including divine will and bloodlines. You know. The things people have used for millennia to say why they’re inherently better than other people. This came out last August, which both feels forever ago and “what, only eight months ago?”

This one surprised me, so I looked into it! For those of you in the know, forgive me, but I was shocked to see this has been a NYT bestseller for a full decade, so it made the top nonfiction list for 2020. All the reviews are very either “this book immediately changed my life” or “this book is garbage nonsense!” So sounds like something to arrive at your own opinion about!

In 1982, a Chinese American man named Vincent Chin was beaten to death in a Detroit bar. The two men who killed him were given a $3,000 fine and three years’ probation. This is about the case “that took the Asian American community to the streets in protest, and the groundbreaking civil rights trial that followed.”

Do you remember that Facebook group called like “Disney gave me unrealistic expectations about relationships”? Ok, so this Oxford University Press book (that’s right, it’s acaDEMIC) by social historian Dyhouse is about “the reshaping of women’s lives, loves and dreams since 1950,” the year Disney’s Cinderella came out, and how that changed in the next 60 years (the book ends with 2013’s Frozen). How have women’s lives transformed since 1950? Check this out to get into it.

Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright Hudes writes a coming of age memoir about growing up in a Philadelphia barrio with her Puerto Rican family. Yes, Lin-Manuel Miranda definitely blurbed this book, and he did so with his characteristic enthusiasm, saying, “Her sentences will take your breath away. How lucky we are to have her telling our stories.”

tw: drug use

Canning has been a paramedic for 25 years, and went from seeing those who use drugs as “victims only of their own character flaws” to individuals with different stories and paths. He now fights against their stigmatization and advocates for harm reduction, which includes safe-injection sites and community naloxone. His book includes personal stories, his journey to empathy, and ways we can reduce the severity of the opioid epidemic.

Of course the second science started being the “it” thing, dudes decided to start using it to prove they were awesome. Well, their science was bad and they should feel bad. This book explains why this was all nonsense and what contemporary science is in fact telling us about how things work.

The Lewis chess pieces are awesome. Ninety-three separate pieces carved from walrus ivory, found on a beach in Scotland in the early 1800s. Really distinctive and just so cool to look at. And apparently made by not only a woman in the 12th century, but a woman named “Margret the Adroit.” From Iceland! I’d never heard of this book or of Margret and this looks so interesting.

We’ve got some more nonsense science! Including the Idea That Actual Doctors Believed about how Black women could feel pain less than white women. Because of this, Black women were used as test subjects for procedures like experimental caesarean sections, ovariotomies, and obstetric fistula repairs. In the midst of some actual advancements in medicine, “these doctors were legitimizing, for decades to come, groundless theories related to whiteness and blackness, men and women, and the inferiority of other races or nationalities.”

Love a series-of-profiles book. From Mecca in the 600s to present day Europe and America, Kamaly tells the stories of 21 Muslim women and their impact on society, including “first believer” Khadija, Mughal empress Nur Jahan, and acclaimed architect Zaha Hadid, who “liberated architectural geometry,” which is a pretty cool thing to be said about yourself.

Have you ever lived in a city or area where there’s a university? Things can get expensive! Housing goes way up, things get gentrified, and frequently those on the margins end up paying for other people’s future. Baldwin highlights the ways universities can make cities inequitable and what we can do about it.

If this sounds familiar, it might be because it was on a whole bunch of “books we’re psyched about in 2021” lists. It’s a mix of reporting, research, and memoir, and looks at how “values she and so many other women had learned in girlhood did not prioritize their personal safety, happiness, or freedom, and she set out to reframe those values and beliefs.” So basically how, in girlhood, you’re taught a bunch of lies that you later either have to unlearn or just live with.

Boy, the royal family. Lots going on there. If you’re wondering about the background of the current queen and her close-in-age sister, this biography examines their lives from the angle of their sisterly relationship. As someone who was solely interested in Margaret for the approximately two episodes of The Crown that I made it through, this looks great.

In 1899, there were five times as many post offices in the United States than McDonald’s today. How? Where were they? When did they explode into such high numbers (appx 100,000)? Blevins looks into how the US Post was tied to western expansion by white settlers and how the country as we know it today started to form.

If you’re working remotely during the pandemic, or even did so beforehand, you’re familiar with the challenges. How do you build trust, maintain connections without in-person interactions, and keep a firm work/life balance when your computer and therefore office is always a few feet away? Neeley writes for employees and managers, offering action items (I love an action item) and interactive tools for a better remote work experience for everyone.

History professor Lee tells the story of Asians in America, including Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Hmong (among others) from the 16th century (when people came to what is now California from Manila) to now when Asian Americans are treated as America’s “model minorities.” This was published in 2015, so it goes up to pretty recent events, but just misses the last presidency.

Activist and beloved actor Takei shares the painful story of his family’s time in multiple Japanese internment camps during World War II. Ever since I read Maus, I’ve been a proponent of the graphic novel as memoir/biography, and this is an example of how the genre can be used to illustrate the more visual impressions of childhood. The story is a reminder of an extremely harmful and recent event in our nation’s history that is nevertheless rarely taught in school.

Yu Hua picks ten common Chinese words and, through each one, illustrates something about Chinese history and culture, using anecdotes and facts. The words and phrases — people, leader, reading, writing, lu xun, revolution, disparity, grassroots, copycat, and bamboozle — each reveal something unique about “the Chinese experience over the last several decades.” Yu Hua has written novels and short story collections. This is his only book of essays.

When Koh was fifteen years old, her parents left America (where they had arrived ten years earlier) and went back to South Korea, leaving her and her brother in California. Over the years, her mother writes her letters in Korean, apologizing, “letters Eun Ji cannot fully understand until she finds them years later hidden in a box.” This is a story of “hard-won selfhood and our deep bonds to family, place, and language” told by an acclaimed poet.

What if you used your knowledge of tax law to fight evil? Brown was doing her parents’ tax returns one day and realized they were paying a weirdly high amount for their jobs. Then when she became a law professor, she started researching why that happened. Surprise, turns out “American tax law rewards the preferences and practices of white people while pushing black people further behind” for things from going to college to buying a home.

I love a travel and history book. Sociologist and novelist Villoro walks Mexico City, recounting its history from indigenous antiquity to the Aztecs, the Spanish conquistadors, and modern day. Mexico City is the largest Spanish-speaking city in the world, built on a tectonically-active plateau and growing at a tremendous rate.

In the 1960s, Clara Park’s daughter three-year-old daughter Jessy was diagnosed with autism, and Clara was blamed for it. At the time, the idea of the “refrigerator mother” was huge: “a cold, intellectual parent who starved her children of the natural affection they needed to develop properly.” Clara decided to document her daughter’s development and challenge this myth. This biography tells the story of how Clara and others “fought against medical and popular attitudes toward autism while presenting a rich account of major scientific developments in the history of autism in the US.”

Did you know a plant neurobiologist was a thing? I definitely did not. Mancuso states that in the last three hundred thousand years, humans have wreaked chaos in the plant world. He responds to this by writing a plant constitution. Yes, it’s a constitution written on behalf of plants, presenting “eight fundamental pillars on which the life of plants—and by extension, humans—rests.”

Love a Mary Roach. Her examination of humans at war “tackles the science behind some of a soldier’s most challenging adversaries—panic, exhaustion, heat, ​flies, ​noise,” and looks at the scientists who are trying to create answers to all of it. Want to know why a zipper creates a problem for a sniper? How a wedding gown is like a bomb suit? Why shrimp are dangerous to sailors? Check this out.

We know a little about women baseball, basketball, and soccer players, but what about extreme sports? The sections of this read like energy drinks from the ’90s, with titles like “Maximum Sky,” “Extreme Ocean,” and “Radical Rides.” Each section highlights three different women, like ultrarunner Courtney Dauwalter and racing driver Sneha Sharma.

Irby’s third book of essays continues her themes of blunt observational humor and memoir. This book chronicles scenes from her life post-marriage, and her move to a more country than urban setting, as she describes herself as a “cheese fry-eating slightly damp Midwest person.” Which many of us can relate to. I love books like this for when I’m stressed. They’re great to dip in and out of, and Irby is a wonderful voice to spend time with.

TW for domestic abuse, which is the central theme of the book. Machado’s innovative memoir chronicles the arc of her unhealthy relationship as she “struggles to make sense of how what happened to her shaped the person she was becoming.” Every section is a different way of writing and viewing the situation, and includes titles like “Dream House as Time Travel,” “Dream House as Memory Palace,” “Dream House as Perpetual Motion Machine.”

Called “the feminist sports book we’ve all been waiting for” by Jessica Valenti, this goes from the minimizing of and condescension towards women’s sports to “athletes who abuse their partners and face only minimal consequences” (see: Hope Solo). DiCaro is a sports journalist and covers the sexist online environment of Barstool Sports, the horrifically racist treatment of Serena Williams, and the fight for equal pay. I do not really get into sports, but this looks really good.

Greene, a constitutional law expert at Columbia, writes about how we can build a better system of justice, ridding ourselves of our current system of legal absolutism and “how we can recover America’s original vision of rights, while updating them to confront the challenges of the twenty-first century.”

Hot chicken or “Nashville style” has become popular worldwide, but its roots belong in Nashville’s Black communities, where it goes back 70 years. Martin tells the story of this dish, and of Nashville’s Black history, “from the Civil War, when Nashville became a segregated city, through the tornado that ripped through North Nashville in March 2020.” This feels like a good counterbalance to Netflix’s Marriage or Mortgage, which is doing crap like showing potential brides a former Nashville plantation as a wedding locale.

Winfrey-Harris created the Letters to Black Girls project, where she asked Black women to write letters of hope and support to teenaged and young adult Black girls. Topics covered include identity, self-love, parents, violence, grief, mental health, sex, and sexuality. This selection of letters provides “a balm for the wounds of anti-black-girlness and modeling how black women can nurture future generations.”

What happens if you can’t sleep? Neurologist Leschziner studies people dealing with insomnia, narcolepsy, night terrors, apnea, and sleepwalking. Here he shares stories of cases like the woman who, while sleepwalking, got dressed, got in her car, and drove several miles. He also shows “the neuroscience behind our sleeping minds.” Stories + science!

This came out only last September! Black fatigue is here defined as “the intergenerational impact of systemic racism on the physical and psychological health of Black people.” Winters demonstrates how systemic racism impacts every aspect of life, including economics, education, work, and health. If you want to learn what you can do about it, pick this up.

So what’s up with sleeping? It leaves you so VULnerable. All unconscious for multiple hours. But also sleeping is awesome, so. Why? Walker “explains how we can harness sleep to improve learning, mood and energy levels, regulate hormones, prevent cancer, Alzheimer’s and diabetes, slow the effects of aging, and increase longevity.” He also gives you action items (I love an action item) for how you can improve your sleep. As someone who does that “revenge bedtime procrastination” thing, I am extremely interested in said items.

Kim from For Real liked this! This is focused on how women experience burnout from stress differently than men, why, and what you can do to address it. I am extremely interested in the answer to “what you can do to complete the biological stress cycle—and return your body to a state of relaxation.” It’s probably not “watch Arrested Development over and over again.” Or IS it?