Category: True Story

If you are able — vote.

Ready for some non-stressful news? Here are your new releases nonfiction highlights for the week!

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That is IT for this week’s new releases. Doesn’t the recent chill in the air (if you live in a place that experiences cold temperatures) just make you want to read more? Thank goodness new books get published every week. As always, you can find me on social media @itsalicetime and co-hosting the nonfiction For Real podcast with Kim here at Book Riot. Until next time, enjoy those facts, fellow nerds.

Well, readers, I got married. So we’re gonna look at nonfiction about different kinds of relationships. There are so many kinds! Live your truth! Let’s look at some books:

Big Friendship: How We Keep Each Other Close by Aminatou Sow and Ann Friedman. FRIENDSHIP. The most lasting of the relationships? Probably. Sow and Friedman co-host the podcast Call Your Girlfriend and are also best friends. In their book, they go into what “Big Friendship” means. It is “a strong, significant bond that transcends life phases, geographical locations, and emotional shifts.” If you want to reflect on your own friendships and how to make them last (or just want to read about other people’s friendships!), check this out.

 

Gracie: A Love Story by George Burns. If you don’t know who George Burns and Gracie Allen are, they were radio and television stars of the ’30s through the ’50s. And married! George Burns was the straight man to Gracie Allen’s off-kilter view of the world. In this account of their marriage, he makes it clear that he 1) loved Gracie so much. 2) No like, so so much. 3) Thought she was the greatest thing on earth. I was semi-obsessed with this book when I was 13.

 

Naturally Tan: A Memoir by Tan France. It’s Queer Eye‘s Tan! This came out only last year and covers not only his childhood growing up gay and as a person of color in England among a South Asian family, but also his fashion journey and his relationship with his husband. Who did he marry? Yes, that’s right, a gay Mormon cowboy. They’ve been married for almost fifteen years! So here you have a book about a relationship and also a life story.

 

Then Comes Marriage: United States v. Windsor and the Defeat of DOMA by Roberta Kaplan. Remember when marriage equality was suddenly recognized by the federal government (which is why I can get married today!). This is the story of how that happened, which lies in the long relationship between Edie Windsor and Thea Spyer, as well as the behind-the-scenes of its journey to the Supreme Court, told by the lawyer who brought it there.

 

Have a truly amazing weekend! As always, you can find me on social media @itsalicetime and co-hosting the nonfiction For Real podcast with Kim here at Book Riot. Until next time, enjoy those facts, fellow nerds.

Happy end-of-September! We’re moments from Halloween Time. And we have new nonfiction releases!

The Meaning of Mariah Carey by Mariah Carey with Michaela Angela Davis. There are some memoirs you want to read just because the author could say anything. What did Mariah Carey dictate to her co-writer for this book? She says “it’s been impossible to communicate the complexities and depths of my experience in any single magazine article or a ten-minute television interview.” I frankly cannot WAIT.

 

Big Dirty Money: The Shocking Injustice and Unseen Cost of White Collar Crime by Jennifer Taub. Ok, I cannot put it better than this: “Selling loose cigarettes on a city sidewalk can lead to a choke-hold arrest, and death, if you are not among the top 1%. But if you’re rich and commit mail, wire, or bank fraud, embezzle pension funds, lie in court, obstruct justice, bribe a public official, launder money, or cheat on your taxes, you’re likely to get off scot-free (or even win an election).” Taub looks at how we got to this “post-Enron failure of prosecutorial muscle.” Yes, Jennifer Taub! Tell me.

 

Black Fatigue: How Racism Erodes the Mind, Body, and Spirit by Mary-Frances Winters. Black fatigue is “the intergenerational impact of systemic racism on the physical and psychological health of Black people,” i.e. racism creates an exhaustion that gets passed down and compounded through the generations. Winters talks about how from economics to education, work, criminal justice, and health outcomes—”for the most part, the trajectory for Black people is not improving.”

 

As always, you can find me on social media @itsalicetime and co-hosting the nonfictionFor Real podcast with Kim here at Book Riot. Until next time, enjoy those facts, fellow nerds.

We’ve had all sorts of Ruth Bader Ginsburg reading lists as of late, so let’s look at Supreme Court nonfiction reads:

The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court by Jeffrey Toobin. This came out in 2008 (wow, remember 2008?) and looks at the Supreme Court from Reagan and on, covering not only the Court itself and how it works, but the justices themselves. This includes Sandra Day O’Connor, the first woman nominated and confirmed, as well as a frequent swing-voter for the Court, who retired in 2006. Get a view of the inner workings of the Court, as well as a snapshot from the Bush years.

 

My Own Words by Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Well we have to have at least one RBG book. Coming out as recently as 2016, this isn’t so much a straight-up memoir as a collection of RBG’s writings. Her authorized biographers introduce each chapter and add some biographical context and quotes from some of the many interviews they conducted with Justice Ginsburg. Well-known for her intellect and humor, this was a woman whose words will live on long after her passing.

 

My Beloved World by Sonia Sotomayor. Justice Sotomayor was the first Hispanic and third woman appointed to the Supreme Court. If you’re looking for a memoir, this is the memoir-iest of the bunch. She talks about growing up in the Bronx, deciding to become a lawyer, and how her career led her to the highest court in the country. She’s been on the Court now for over ten years, which, honestly, I still think of her (and Kagan!), as “new,” which is just false. Anyway. Memoir!

 

Showdown: Thurgood Marshall and the Supreme Court Nomination That Changed America by Wil Haygood. We don’t have a lot of Thurgood Marshall references nowadays, at least in pop culture, but he was the first Black Supreme Court Justice, serving from 1967 to 1991. He “brought down the separate-but-equal doctrine, integrated schools, and not only fought for human rights and human dignity but also made them impossible to deny in the courts and in the streets.” Haygood frames his narrative around Marshall’s nomination process, and through it, tells the story of his life. We should all probably talk more about Thurgood Marshall.

 

As always, you can find me on social media @itsalicetime and co-hosting the nonfiction For Real podcast with Kim here at Book Riot. Until next time, enjoy those facts, fellow nerds.

Welcome to your new release nonfiction Wednesday! Got some great new picks for you here, let’s check ’em out:

Can’t Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation by Anne Helen Petersen. Man. This book rings true. Petersen argues “that burnout is a definitional condition for the millennial generation, born out of distrust in the institutions that have failed us, the unrealistic expectations of the modern workplace, and a sharp uptick in anxiety and hopelessness exacerbated by the constant pressure to “perform” our lives online.” She shows how burnout affects the way we work, parent, and socialize. Want to put that exhausted feeling into words? Here it is.

 

God-Level Knowledge Darts: Life Lessons from the Bronx by Desus & Mero. Authors Desus Nice and The Kid Mero are comedians who co-host the Showtime show Desus & Mero and the podcast Bodega Boys. Here they answer the important questions of life, such as “How do I talk to my kids about drugs if I do them, too? What are the ethics of ghosting in a relationship? How do I bet on sports? How should I behave in jail? How much is too much to spend on sneakers?” Etc. Jia Tolentino thinks they’re hilarious. So does Malcolm Gladwell! There’s a pair for you.

 

Good Morning, Monster: A Therapist Shares Five Heroic Stories of Emotional Recovery by Catherine Gildiner. How can someone overcome trauma? Therapist Gildiner has those stories. Here she recounts the stories of five patients’ struggles and paths to recovery. Each patient goes to therapy “to overcome an immediate challenge in their lives, but discover that the source of their suffering has been long buried.” Man, I love therapy.

 

Create Your Own Calm: A Journal for Quieting Anxiety by Meera Lee Patel. Are you possibly feeling anxious as of the last few months? Just maybe? Here is a way to help deal with that! It’s filled with exercises and spaces for you to write or draw things like what your anxiety feels like, as well as quotes from writers and thinkers to ruminate on. If there’s ever been a time to journal, now seems like it.

 

As always, you can find me on social media @itsalicetime and co-hosting the nonfiction For Real podcast with Kim here at Book Riot. Until next time, enjoy those facts, fellow nerds.

Mysteries and crime! There are many books about them and here, I am highlighting a select five. Happy Friday, here are your picks:

The Invention of Murder: How the Victorians Revelled in Death and Detection and Created Modern Crime by Judith Flanders. The detective fiction of today owes a lot to the Victorian era. Wilkie Collins, Charles Dickens, etc. popularized the detective novel, and the nineteenth century’s weirdness really leaned into sensationalizing murder (much like today! #truecrime). This books talks about all these beginnings and recounts the stories of some of the most infamous crimes of that era in Great Britain.

 

The Golden Thread: The Cold War and the Mysterious Death of Dag Hammarskjöld by Ravi Somaiya. If you were not around yet in the 1960s, here’s the center of this story: On Sept. 17, 1961, Dag Hammarskjöld boarded a Douglas DC6 propeller plane on the sweltering tarmac of the airport in Leopoldville, the capital of the Congo. Hours later, he would be found dead in an African jungle with an Ace of Spades tucked in his collar. Do you need more info than that to read this book? Probably not.

 

Forensics: What Bugs, Burns, Prints, DNA and More Tell Us About Crime by Val McDermid. As someone who watches a whole lot of Forensic Files, I was relieved to see this came out as recently as 2014, as various branches of forensic science have basically been declared a lot of bunk over the years. Crime writer McDermid delves into the world of forensics and “discovers how maggots collected from a corpse can help determine one’s time of death; how a DNA trace a millionth the size of a grain of salt can be used to convict a killer; and how a team of young Argentine scientists led by a maverick American anthropologist were able to uncover the victims of a genocide.”

 

A Massacre in Mexico: The True Story Behind the Missing 43 Students by Anabel Hernández. In September, 2014, 43 male students from the Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers’ College went missing in Iguala, Guerrero, Mexico (about a three hour drive south of Mexico City). In the wake of the students’ disappearances, protestors in Mexico took up the slogan “Fue el estado”–“It was the state.” Author Hernández backs this up with her research, which points to a massive governmental cover-up.

 

Dead Mountain: The Untold True Story of the Dyatlov Pass Incident by Donnie Eichar. If you’re familiar with the Dyatlov Pass Incident, you know it was deeply weird. In 1959, a group of nine experienced hikers in the Russian Ural Mountains died mysteriously on an elevation known as Dead Mountain. Incidents such as “unexplained violent injuries, signs that they cut open and fled the tent without proper clothing or shoes, a strange final photograph taken by one of the hikers, and elevated levels of radiation found on some of their clothes—have led to decades of speculation over what really happened.” Check this out to learn more.

 

Have a truly amazing weekend! As always, you can find me on social media @itsalicetime and co-hosting the nonfiction For Real podcast with Kim here at Book Riot. Until next time, enjoy those facts, fellow nerds.

Welcome to new release nonfiction highlights, including home organization, weird animals, and JUSTICE.

The Home Edit Life: The No-Guilt Guide to Owning What You Want and Organizing Everything by Clea Shearer and Joanna Teplin. YES, these are the people from that Netflix show. Most of us are stuck at home, so why not figure out a system that works for you. That seems to be this book’s organizational philosophy, and it focuses on things from your office space and holiday storage to luggage and pet supplies. Maybe you want to organize your things in rainbow-fashion like this book cover, I don’t know your life.

 

Great Adaptations: Star-Nosed Moles, Electric Eels, and Other Tales of Evolution’s Mysteries Solved by Kenneth Catania. Have you SEEN a star-nosed mole? It’s wild. Their nose has 22 “tendrils”! Like an alien, but a mole. Anyway, this book looks at that weird animal and others like it, like how eels use electricity to control other animals, and why emerald jewel wasps make zombies out of cockroaches. If you’d like to distract yourself from 2020 with strange things in nature and how they work, here y’go.

 

Once I Was You: A Memoir of Love and Hate in a Torn America by Maria Hinojosa. Recommended by Kim on For Real! Hinojosa is a journalist and the anchor of NPR’s Latino USA. In her memoir, she “shares her intimate experience growing up Mexican American on the south side of Chicago and documenting the existential wasteland of immigration detention camps for news outlets that often challenged her work.” Check this out, and check out Latino USA, the longest running Latino-focused program on U.S. public media, having started in 1993.

 

A Knock at Midnight: A Story of Hope, Justice, and Freedom by Brittany K. Barnett. Are you interested in the reformation of the criminal justice system? So is Brittany K. Barnett! Barnett is an attorney committed to social impact investing. While still a law student, she became deeply involved in freeing a woman whose story she identified with and who she saw as unjustly punished. In her day job, she “moved billion-dollar deals, and by night she worked pro bono to free clients in near-hopeless legal battles.” Her book is about what it takes to bring hope and justice to a system built to resist them both.

As always, you can find me on social media @itsalicetime and co-hosting the nonfiction For Real podcast with Kim here at Book Riot. Until next time, enjoy those facts, fellow nerds.

Happy Friday! Let’s talk about spaaaaaaace.

Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void by Mary Roach. How do you negotiate daily life without gravity? What happens when you throw up? How do you do hygiene in space? Mary Roach is curious as ever, but this time, about space, and she’s here to ask all the semi-awkward questions you might be too polite to ask astronauts should you ever encounter them. Pick this up if you’ve got some real specific, real practical questions about a potential trip to Mars.

 

Hidden Figures by Margo Lee Shetterly. Sure, people go to space, but what about the MATH. If you’re unfamiliar with the stellar (ha!) movie based on this book, they’re both about the Black women mathematicians who worked at NASA during the Space Race of the 1950s and ’60s (although the book starts in the ’30s) and did things like calculate space shuttle trajectories. Fun fact: Shetterly’s father was a research scientist at NASA and worked with some of the women she writes about here.

 

The Glass Universe: How the Ladies of the Harvard Observatory Took the Measure of the Stars by Dava Sobel. It’s the 19th century. Vassar, Wellesley, and other women’s colleges have sprung into being. And their graduates begin “studying the stars captured nightly on glass photographic plates.” This means that Harvard’s half a million plates could be used to discover things like what stars are made of and how you measure the distance between stars.

 

Asteroid Hunters by Carrie Nugent. It’s that classic “what happens if an asteroid is headed towards earth” problem. Or it WAS, but scientists now think we have a solution. And Carrie Nugent is here to walk you through it. And what asteroids are! And how they work. And who the only person in U.S. history is to have been hit by an asteroid (can you IMAGINE?). This is a less-than-200-page quick dive into asteroids, why they’re cool, and how we can stop them from hitting us.

 

The Future of Humanity: Terraforming Mars, Interstellar Travel, Immortality and Our Destiny Beyond Earth by Michio Kaku. Ok, so we’ve been to the moon, but what about in the FUTURE. Futurist Kaku “shows us how science fiction is becoming reality: mind-boggling developments in robotics, nanotechnology, and biotechnology could enable us to build habitable cities on Mars; nearby stars might be reached by microscopic spaceships sailing through space on laser beams; and technology might one day allow us to transcend our physical bodies entirely.” Futurism!

 

That’s it for this week! You can find me on social media @itsalicetime and co-hosting the nonfiction For Real podcast with Kim here at Book Riot. Until next time, enjoy those facts, fellow nerds.

September releaseeees! What a time. So many books coming out; better get crackin’ with that reading. Start hoarding books up for winter like some very literary squirrels.

Just Us: An American Conversation by Claudia Rankine. If you’ve read Rankine’s Citizen, you’re familiar with the poet’s juxtaposition of essays, images, and poetry to create a powerful message. In her newest book (out now!), she asks you to look at “what it takes to stay in the room together, even and especially in breaching the silence, guilt, and violence that follow direct addresses of whiteness.” An extremely timely new release from an extremely acclaimed author.

 

Good Blood: A Doctor, a Donor, and the Incredible Breakthrough that Saved Millions of Babies by Julian Guthrie. This is “a tale of discovery and invention, the progress and pitfalls of medicine, and the everyday heroics that fundamentally changed the health of women and babies.” It centers around Rh disease, a type of anemia that impacts pregnant women and fetuses. The doctor, John Gorman, made “one of the most important medical discoveries of our generation” with the help of a single donor.

 

Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote, and Insisted on Equality for All by Martha S. Jones. It’s finally here!! I have recommended this book I don’t know how many times on For Real, in suffragist book lists, and here. Jones is “Professor of History at The Johns Hopkins University” and here offers the story of Black women’s fight for the vote, going from the beginning of the nation to the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The fight didn’t end in 1920! And you can read about it here.

 

What Can I Do?: My Path from Climate Despair to Action by Jane Fonda. It’s easy to get overwhelmed by climate change news. So what does this have to do with Jane Fonda? She got overwhelmed by climate change news and decided to find out what she could do. And she passes it on! She offers protest tools “so that everyone can work to combat the climate crisis,” and talks about her history as an activist. I’m early into reading this one, but she credits a LOT of other people and I’m very impressed with how she handles not making it all about her.

You can find me on social media @itsalicetime and co-hosting the nonfiction For Real podcast with Kim here at Book Riot. Until next time, enjoy those facts, fellow nerds.