Category: True Story

Álvarez is the son of Mexican immigrants and grew up in Washington state, working at an apple-packing plant. A first-generation college student, he struggled to find his place, until at 19 he learned about the Native American/First Nations movement called Peace and Dignity Journeys. This is an epic marathon, and Álvarez’s took four months and spanned from Canada to Guatemala. I’ve heard pretty much nothing but good things about this one.

I remember my Victorian lit professor saying, “do you know the female equivalent of flâneur? You do not, because it doesn’t exist, because women weren’t supposed to walk the city alone.” Well, here’s the modern day answer to that. It’s part memoir, as Elkin talks about her life in the subtitled cities, and also a history of “such flâneuses as the cross-dressing nineteenth-century novelist George Sand, the Parisian artist Sophie Calle, the wartime correspondent Martha Gellhorn, and the writer Jean Rhys.” I encourage you to flâneuse it up in your neighborhood.

Do you like food? Do you want to learn more about it, possibly accompanied by a travel theme? Chinese American journalist Lin-Liu gives a culinary tour of today’s (2008’s) China, “from cooking student to noodle-stall and dumpling-house apprentice to intern at a chic Shanghai restaurant.”

Maybe this will make you glad you’re inside? Streever “journeys through history, myth, geography, and ecology in a year-long search for cold–real, icy, 40-below cold.” He looks at hibernation habits, talks about the Clovis people of the Ice Age, what happens when trees freeze, Japanese ama (“sea women”) divers, finding frozen mammoths, and more. This sounds GREAT.

In 1969, Jane Britton, a 23-year-old graduate student in Harvard’s Anthropology Department, was found murdered in her apartment. Forty years later, undergrad Becky Cooper first heard a mythologized version of the story and began a decade of research into Jane Britton’s murder, rumored to be committed by a Harvard professor. This book is EXCELLENT.

I love paleoanthropology. What are humanity’s origins! We don’t actually know that much! It’s so weird! When did things settle into the way we do them and why! So this book goes into the team that discovered “Ardi,” a 4.4 million-year-old likely human ancestor. My assumption (I haven’t been able to access a galley of this one) is that it’s called Fossil Men because the the seven person team credited in the Science article is entirely composed of men. The leader of the Ardi team, Tim White, was helped in his early career by famed paleoanthropologist Mary Leakey, so you’d think he’d maybe have learned something from that, but here we are. Anyway! Here’s the story of Ardi and the impact its discovery and shielded research had on the paleoanthropology community.

I’m not usually into “how [random daily item] CHANGED EVERYTHING” books, but textiles definitely had a huge impact and it’s really just a fun way to say “The History of Textiles,” which one would maybe be less inclined to pick up. “From Minoans exporting wool colored with precious purple dye to Egypt, to Romans arrayed in costly Chinese silk, the cloth trade paved the crossroads of the ancient world. Textiles funded the Renaissance and the Mughal Empire; they gave us banks and bookkeeping, Michelangelo’s David and the Taj Mahal.” This looks super fun.

You’ve maybe seen Dr. Paul Koudounaris on some of mortician and author Caitlin Doughty’s YouTube vids. This history of cats is “dictated” to Koudounaris by Baba the Cat (just go with it), who goes through cats in ancient Egypt, Rome, Victorian England, modern France, and more. Scattered throughout are photos of Baba in pictures like the cover, wearing elaborate costumes. I mean, sign me up.

Originally published in 2013, but with SIX new essays, Carnegie Medal-winner Laymon revises and republishes his work on race, identity, and injustice. The thirteen essays touch on subjects ranging from “family, race, violence, and celebrity to music, writing, and coming of age in Mississippi.”

There are a lot of weird “facts” about animals floating around, some true, some not. Cooke looks into them here — the idea that eels are born from sand, that swallows hibernate under water, and that bears give birth to formless lumps that are licked into shape by their mothers — and breaks down what they say about *us*.

Yes, THAT Susan Orlean. Orchids, libraries, celebrity dogs, she covers them all. Rin Tin Tin was the #1 box office draw in the 1920s. I get it, 1920s. You’d just dealt with a world war, a pandemic, and you just wanted to watch a dog be a hero. Orlean’s biography not only talks about Rin Tin Tin, but the bond between humans and animals.

Dr. Akhtar studies animal ethics AND neurology and in her book looks at how “interspecies empathy enriches our well-being” and is “a vital component of human health.” She says that humans are neurologically designed to empathize with animals, and the love we give to them biologically reverberates back to us.

tw: bullying and abuse from Akhtar’s recounting of past incidents in her life.

Doesn’t this cover just make you FEEL better? Magdalena works at the Royal Botanic Gardens and is known for saving some of the world’s rarest plants. This is why it’s great to have so many humans. They care about so many disparate things, and Carlos Magdalena is HERE for plants. This takes you from Peru to Australia and back to England as he goes on quests to save plant life around the world. A+.

This is alREADY a finalist for the 2020 National Book Award in Nonfiction. It’s “an examination by one of America’s most acclaimed essayists of what it is to grow, parent, write, and exist as a black American male.” It includes essays like “Dragon Slayers,” “Feeding Pigeons,” “The Heritage Room,” and the eponymous “How to Make a Slave.”

Pulitzer Prize-winner Momaday is a member of the Kiowa tribe who has spent his life on reservations in the Southwest. In this new release, he “reflects on his native ground and its influence on his people” and “reminds us that the Earth is a sacred place of wonder and beauty; a source of strength and healing that must be protected before it’s too late.”

Remember travel? Outlander stars Heughan and McTavish travel through Scotland by boat, kayak, camper van, and motorbike. They go from Glencoe (like two hours north of Glasgow) to Inverness and Culloden battlefield (another two hours north!), all while hanging out with fun Scottish people. This book sounds like an A+ respite from 2020.

“Amazon, Google, Facebook, governments. No matter who we are or where we go, someone is collecting our data: to profile us, target us, assess us; to predict our behavior and analyze our attitudes; to influence the things we do and buy—even to impact our vote.” Doss, a privacy expert and former NSA and Senate lawyer, demystifies the digital footprints we leave in our daily lives and reveals how our data is being used. This all feels pretty dang relevant.

Olson and her husband were on vacation when their car was hit by a train. Olson lost both her legs and her right arm. In her memoir, she shares how she finished her residency as a doctor, raised two children, and traveled the world.

Payne was a jewel thief for over 60 years, once arrested “after stealing a diamond ring in Monte Carlo that was valued at more than half a million dollars.” But then she broke out of jail with the help of nuns? This story sounds extremely fun and good for a winter read.

In 2000, the FBI received a package. It was “a series of coded letters from an anonymous sender to the Libyan consulate, offering to sell classified United States intelligence.” What made the code much harder to crack was the sender had dyslexia. This is is billed as a “true-life spy thriller,” which is excellent, and is great for all you code-crackers out there.

A flautist breaks into a museum and steals hundreds of bird skins. Why? Fly fishing. “What?” you correctly say. This not only goes into that super-weird story, but also the history of the man who collected some of the skins in the first place, Alfred Russel Wallace, who was perhaps equally weird (but not in a necessarily bad way).

Ok sure, murder’s in the title, but it’s not the POINT of the book. It’s all about the “American Sherlock Holmes,” Edward Oscar Heinrich. Using forensics (in the 1930s and beyond), he solved over two thousand cases! It’s pretty satisfying to read about how someone found clues and deduced answers, especially in this time of chaos in which we all find ourselves. Facts! How comforting.

Rock and roll! What a genre. And this new release is here to walk you through African American women’s contributions to the genre from the 1950s all the way through the 1980s. Big Mama Thornton, Tina Turner, the Shirelles, they are all here and their “powerful sonic legacy” is laid out.

Know the 1970s hit “Come and Get Your Love”? That’s the work of Redbone, a Mexican-American/Native American rock band of the ’60s and ’70s (it’s still an active band though!). This chronicles their rise to fame, and how “as the American Indian Movement gained momentum the band took a stand, choosing pride in their ancestry over continued commercial reward.”

The memoir of a “guarded, over-achieving, self-lacerating young lawyer who reluctantly agrees to get psychologically and emotionally naked in a room of six complete strangers.” Basically, if you want to read a memoir about group therapy and how it can helpful, here it is! tw: self-harm and eating disorders

This is pushing the “host of Kindred Spirits” thing, but I’m more impressed by Bruni’s past on GHOST HUNTERS. Here she tells stories about her ghostly experiences and “thirteen truths that guide her approach to the supernatural.” If you’re into real life (?) ghost stories and the people who investigate them, here’s a read for you.

Spooky history! Dickey’s book is here to look at the ghost stories of America and what they reveal about society. He travels to the House of Seven Gables in Salem, MA (been there, was not haunted by it), as well as asylums, battlefields, haunted hotels, and more. One particular point he examines is why are so many of our ghosts in America white? Read if you want some history, but also to be just a little bit scared.

This is the only true “here’s a scary story about a possibly real haunting” book in this bunch. Mercado and her family moved into their Brooklyn, NY home in the 1980s and soon dealt with phantom voices, laughter, shadows, and some poltergeist-like behavior. Eventually they discovered “the tragic and heartbreaking secrets buried in the house at Grave’s End.”

Gender rights activist and prolific author Boylan tells the story of growing up in a haunted house in the 1970s. Why do the ’70s feel like a more likely candidate for a haunting than most other decades? Boylan “launches a full investigation with the help of a group of earnest, if questionable, ghostbusters” into what it means to be haunted, as well as doing some thoughtful soul-searching (get it?) into the people we were vs. the people we become.

The ever-curious Roach checks out things like people’s attempts to “see” the human soul, why ectoplasm was so popular, what a psychoacoustics expert does, and more. Are ghosts real?? I mean. Probably. But here we have SCIENCE to check it all out. All through the lens of Mary Roach and her extremely fun voice.

La Llorona (“the Weeping Woman”) is a legend known throughout Mexico, Central, and South America. This looks at her story from ancient oral tradition to her appearance in contemporary material culture and “illuminates her many permutations as seductress, hag, demon, or pitiful woman.” I love examinations of stories that change across time!

WeWork was founded in 2010 and is most recently known for its “gained mainstream media attention in 2019 with its failed IPO.” While “spectacular fall” of Neumann may be an overstatement (he was made to step down from the board, but he was paid $1.7 billion to do so and now gets a yearly salary of $46 million), this still looks pretty good.

There are almost sixty million Latinos in the United States. In this travelogue, Ramos “embarks on a journey to find the communities of people defining the controversial term, ‘Latinx.'” She goes from New York to Texas to Milwaukee and looks at how Latinx “has given rise to a sense of collectivity and solidarity among Latinos unseen in this country for decades.”

You know what you need in these troubled times? Lindy West summarizing classic movies (…and Face/Off). This is West returning to her roots (have you read her Titanic review? because I wanted it framed). It’s hilarious and lighthearted and such a good escapist read.

Co-creator of the Black Lives Matter movement, this is Garza’s guide to building transformative movements. She examines how “making room amongst the woke for those who are still awakening can inspire and activate more people to fight for the world we all deserve.”

Part of the Revisioning History series by Beacon Press, this “challenges the founding myth of the United States and shows how policy against the Indigenous peoples was colonialist and designed to seize the territories of the original inhabitants, displacing or eliminating them.”

The protests at Standing Rock put a spotlight on American Indian 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.”

A finalist for the National Book Award, this is Treuer’s response to the idea that American Indian history ended with the massacre at Wounded Knee in 1890. The book tells their story from that point onward, making the point that “the story of American Indians since the end of the nineteenth century to the present is one of unprecedented resourcefulness and reinvention.”

Mankiller was the first woman elected as Principal Chief of the Cherokee Nation. In her memoir, she tells her story along with the history of the Cherokees. Growing up among the American Indian civil rights struggle, this chronicles her journey to leadership and her fight for their rights.

What is White Reconstruction? It’s “the struggle to reassemble the ascendancy of White Being [that] toxifies the formal disassembly of U.S. (Jim/Jane Crow) apartheid and permeates the political and institutional logics of diversity, inclusion, formal equality, and ‘multiculturalist white supremacy.'” Basically, since the 1960s, there has been work going on to undermine civil rights, and this book points out exactly how that’s been done.

Since the founding of the United States, anti-Indian rhetoric has been a part of American law and policy. From “proportional representation and restrictions on the right to bear arms, to the break-up of tribal property rights and the destruction of Indian culture and family, the attacks on tribal governance and people continue and remain endemic.” A particularly appropriate read in light of Indigenous Peoples’ Day this week.

Parwana is the name of Ayubi’s family restaurant. Her parents fled Afghanistan during the Cold War and started the restaurant “to share an authentic piece of the Afghanistan the family had left behind.” The recipes include ice dishes, curries, meats, dumplings, Afghan pastas, sweets, drinks, chutneys and pickles, soups and breads, all of which sound awesome (except maybe pickles, for I do not care for them).