Posts tagged with nonfiction
An overdue honor
Uh, I'm really not sure how I feel about the actual look of this portrait, but I thoroughly approve of the subject matter: Henrietta Lacks, unwitting cell donor and the subject of Rebecca Skloot's award-winning nonfiction book...
Wow
According to The New York Times, Zora Neale Hurston's first book, a nonfiction title called Barracoon, was rejected by publishers in 1931. Barracoon was the story of Cudjo Lewis, believed to be the last living person captured in Africa and brought to America on a slave ship...
And that's a low-budget cover, too.
The fine women at GoFugYourself just posted a lengthy review of Andrew Morton's most recent royal tell-all, Meghan: A Hollywood Princess. Unsurprisingly, they sound underwhelmed. I'm still amazed this dude's books sell in hardcover...
Ugh, lady.
Slate recently posted an interview with author Barbara Ehrenreich, and (like nearly everything I've ever read featuring Barbara Ehrenreich) it has some Big Problems...
Grim but intriguing
Esquire recently put together an list of the 25 best True Crime novels. True Crime isn't my favorite genre, but some of these books look intriguing (and a lot of the covers are great). I'm adding...
Oscar bait
It's a little weird to see Melissa McCarthy in a serious period picture, but the movie Can You Ever Forgive Me? has awards-show-bait written all over it: it's an adaptation of a memoir, it features an impressively de-glammed actress, and appears to have been filmed mostly in the dark...
Weekend plans
For the second week in a row, we are ending our news coverage with a story I personally find hilarious: after receiving a cease-and-desist order from President Donald Trump’s lawyers, publisher Henry Holt & Co. has actually moved up their publication date of...
Anglophile foodies
I'm always attracted to yearly round-up posts, and this list of 2017's best food books is intriguing: I like the use of the word "splenetic", the cover art for The Folio Book of Food & Drink, and I definitely want to know more...
Sure, okay.
According to Variety, Christina Ricci and Judith Light will co-star in a Lifetime biopic about famous journalist Nellie Bly. Ricci will play Bly...
We Are Never Meeting In Real Life, by Samantha Irby
I have never understood why people buy crappy stuff to read on airplanes. I need something great to read on a plane—a book instantly absorbing enough to distract me from the many, many things that suck about flying. A People article about Chris Pratt is not going to cut it, so I was delighted to run across an A+ plane book recommendation for this upcoming holiday season: Samantha Irby's essay collection We Are Never Meeting in Real Life...
Weekly Book Giveaway: We Are Never Meeting in Real Life, by Samantha Irby
This week's Book Giveaway is We Are Never Meeting in Real Life, a collection of essays by Samantha Irby (best known as the author of the "bitches gotta eat" blog.) The book is a little less stream-of-consciousness than her online writing—and all the font is the same color—but just as awesome. A full review will follow shortly...
Wow.
I'm both amused and horrified by this Buzzfeed headline: "An Ivy League Food Scientist Is Retracting Yet Another Paper". According to the article, Cornell University food behavior scientist Brian Wansink has been forced...
Science!
GeekWire recently put together their Holiday Science Book Guide for 2017, and their choices look amazing. I'm particularly attracted to Kimberly Arcand and Megan Watzke's Magnitude: The Scale of the Universe. As a person with literally no sense of physical perspective...
Bubbly on Your Budget, by Marjorie Hillis
For a book written in 1937, Marjorie Hillis's Bubbly on Your Budget has some surprisingly timely advice. Sure, the details might need to be adjusted for a 21st century lifestyle, but her basic message—that you should spend your money on what you actually value—is just as valid today as it was 80 years ago...
Weekly Book Giveaway: Bubbly On Your Budget, by Marjorie Hillis
In honor of this season of furious consumerism, this week's Book Giveaway is Marjorie Hillis's Bubbly on Your Budget, a reprint of a financial advice guide first published in 1937 under the title Orchids On Your Budget. This volume is used (and looks it), but still an unexpectedly modern and entertaining read. A full review will follow shortly...
This looks massively stressful.
There's a new trailer out for the upcoming miniseries Waco, which apparently is relying heavily on the accounts of two nonfiction books: Stalling for Time: My Life as an FBI Hostage Negotiator, by Gary Noesner, and A Place Called Waco: A Survivor's Story, by David Thibodeau...
Holiday Gift Pick #6
Gift Idea #6: Guns, Germs, and Steel: 20th Anniversary Folio Society edition, by Jared Diamond ($73.95)
Grade-A dad present...
I can hold myself back.
Great news, guys: you can now read Stephen Hawking's 1966 Ph.D. thesis! For free! And people were so excited by this news (or optimistic about their own ability to understand a 134-page-long paper on "“Properties of Expanding Universes”) that...
Terrifying but handy?
For those of us who are obsessing over President Trump's tweets about North Korea, Politico recently posted an article about T. R. Fehrenbach’s 1963 book This Kind of War. Apparently, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis is a big fan of the book, and has been relying upon it to develop the US's military strategy...
Promo-worthy
I rarely use the website Thread Reader, but occasionally it's super useful. I was fascinated by this thread (by nonfiction author Jason Fagone) about Elizebeth Smith Friedman, a Shakespearean scholar-turned-codebreaker who spent decades working on some of the most complicated codes of the 20th century...
Mad props
Last week, NASA dedicated the new Katherine G. Johnson Computational Research Facility with a ribbon-cutting ceremony attended by Katherine Johnson herself, one of the key figures in Margot Lee Shetterly's bestselling nonfiction book Hidden Figures. In 2015, Johnson was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom
Back and forth
There's an interesting article on Jezebel about a New York Times review of Vanessa Grigoriadis’s new book, Blurred Lines: Rethinking Sex, Power and Consent on Campus. From the Times' perspective, the book was fundamentally flawed—full of critical reporting errors. But as other reviewers and the author pointed out, the Times critic had to go back...
Half Baked Harvest, by Tieghan Gerard
I have a daily ritual: every morning, when it's still too early for me face the news, I skim glossy cookbooks while I groggily eat my breakfast. Sure, my actual breakfast is totally boring (black tea and an English muffin), but I find looking at pictures of beautiful food to be extremely soothing. That is why I am so fond of the popular website Half Baked Harvest, and why I decided to review author Tieghan Gerard's new cookbook...
Weekly Book Giveaway: Half Baked Harvest, by Tieghan Gerard
This week's Book Giveaway is a little unusual: we're giving away Tieghan Gerard's new cookbook, Half Baked Harvest. But even if you're not the huge fan of Gerard's pretty, pretty website that we are, might we recommend her cookbook as an excellent coffee table option? There's something so soothing about staring at pictures of beautifully-presented food, and this book has 'em in spades...
My hat is off to the casting director
The trailer is out for the upcoming film adaptation of Molly's Game, based on Molly Bloom's memoir of the same name. The movie will be out on November 22nd, and while I don't understand a damn thing about poker...
Where The Water Goes, by David Owen
A note to new readers: while Wordcandy mostly reviews fiction, we do make space for the occasional post on nonfiction books we consider to be of general interest. Previous nonfiction picks have focused on food, money, or (as in this case) the environment. Hopefully you find these featured books as interesting as we do...
Weekly Book Giveaway: Where the Water Goes, by David Owen
It's been a while since we've reviewed any nonfiction, so this week's Book Giveaway will be David Owen's Where the Water Goes. I'm only a few chapters in, but thus far it's interesting, although Owen (or his editor) appears to be a little confused about how commas work. A full review will follow shortly...
Sorry, but no.
Check out this juicy article over on Pajiba: "Truman Capote and the Confessed Killer He Might Have Murdered". A word of warning, however: the story behind that eye-catching title is both tragic and of obvious interest to Capote fans, but...
I dunno...
The trailer is out for Netflix's adaptation of Margaret Atwood's 1996 novel Alias Grace, which was inspired by the life of Grace Marks, an Irish-Canadian maid who was convicted in 1843 of murdering her employer, Thomas Kinnear, and his housekeeper, Nancy Montgomery. The adaptation looks extremely well-made and acted and everything...
Skipping this.
Aaaand in completely different film news: check out the trailer for Professor Marston and the Wonder Women, the upcoming biopic inspired by the polyamorous relationship between William Marston (the creator of Wonder Woman, his wife Elizabeth Holloway Marston, an attorney and psychologist, and...