Posts tagged with nonfiction
Holiday Gift Pick #7
Gift Idea #7: The 1619 Project
This year marks the 400th anniversary of the first enslaved people being brought to the United States from Africa. In August, The New York Times Magazine devoted an entire issue to the subject, featuring essays, photos, poetry, and fiction. It immediately sold out, but copies can be found on sale online...
Blowout, by Rachel Maddow
Reading Rachel Maddow's Blowout: Corrupted Democracy, Rogue State Russia, and the Richest, Most Destructive Industry on Earth is like listening to an exceptionally long monologue for her MSNBC show. Her voice is genial, her subject important, and her arguments carefully researched and informative—but her laid-back, rangy, coolest-professor-on-campus style undermines the urgency of her subject...
Weekly Book Giveaway: Blowout, by Rachel Maddow
This week's Book Giveaway is Rachel Maddow's latest book, Blowout: Corrupted Democracy, Rogue State Russia, and the Richest, Most Destructive Industry on Earth. (Nothing but good times ahead!) A full review will follow shortly, and this review will run through 11/17/19...
Bloody Business, by H.P. Jeffers
I purchased my copy of H. Paul Jeffers's Bloody Business: An Anecdotal History of Scotland Yard solely because of its Edward Gorey-illustrated cover art. True Crime is not my preferred style of nonfiction, but I started flipping through the book one evening and found myself unexpectedly absorbed—for a small island, Britain has seen a lot of famous evildoing...
Weekly Book Giveaway: Bloody Business, by H.P. Jeffers
Our current Book Giveaway is H.P. Jeffers's 1992 book Bloody Business: An Anecdotal History of Scotland Yard. (Is this the first true crime book we've reviewed here in 10+ years of blogging? Possibly.) A full review will follow shortly, and this giveaway will run through 11/09/19...
How-to
There's a great article in The Atlantic about raising your children to become avid readers. The whole things is worth reading (and I enthusiastically second the tip about seeding your house with books, particularly if you have very young children...
If it works, it works
This is probably the most interesting article I've seen about Marie Kondo's work: an essay in Business Insider about using the KonMari method to get rid of credit card debt. The author takes Kondo's tidying-up tips and applies them to her financial life, and the whole thing...
Edible Schoolyard: A Universal Idea, by Alice Waters
In 1995, celebrated chef Alice Waters joined forces with the principal of a public middle school in Berkeley to found The Edible Schoolyard, an on-site organic garden that allowed students a chance to explore food as a scientific and social experience. This process was documented by Waters in Edible Schoolyard: A Universal Idea. Ignore that lofty subtitle...
Weekly Book Giveaway: Edible Schoolyard: A Universal Idea, by Alice Waters
Our latest Book Giveway is Alice Waters's Edible Schoolyard, which, should you be in need of one, would make an awesome coffee table book. A full review will follow shortly, and this giveaway will run through 7/5/19...
The Queen 2.0
I'm so pleased to see this has been expanded (although the original article was not exactly a quick read): according to The New York Times, Josh Levin has fleshed out his article...
A little adjustment
HAH: according the Huffington Post, Tony Schwartz (the man who ghost-wrote Donald Trump's The Art of the Deal) recently suggested that Random House either take the book out of print...
Solid suggestions from a guy who knows
There's a great tip buried in this New York Times interview with James Holzhauer, the dude who has been busily cleaning up on Jeopardy! during the past few weeks...
Truth in advertising
LitHub recently posted an excerpt from Margaret Leslie Davis's recently published book The Lost Gutenberg: The Astounding Story of One Book's Five-Hundred-Year Odyssey. I've read several complaints that this title is misleading...
The Water Will Come, by Jeff Goodell
It has been more than six months since my last review of a gloomy nonfiction book about water, so I'm clearly way overdue. Today's pick is The Water Will Come: Rising Seas, Sinking Cities, and the Remaking of the Civilized World, the latest effort from Rolling Stone contributing editor Jeff Goodell...
An Everlasting Meal: Cooking with Economy and Grace, by Tamar Adler
As longtime readers know, while Wordcandy usually sticks to reviewing fiction, I make the occasional exception for nonfiction titles about stuff I consider to be of general interest—usually books about food, money, or the environment. Tamar Adler's An Everlasting Meal is touches on all three of those subjects, so it jumped to the top of my-to-be-read pile...
Shimmy shimmy shimmy
LitHub recently featured a snippet of writing and several illustrations from Lulu Hunt Peters’s Diet and Health: with The Key to the Calories, a best-selling exercise book from the early part of the 20th century...
Original sources
This is fascinating, from The Guardian: "Spanish academic gets €1.5m EU grant to rescue 'women's writing'." Apparently, the European Research Council has given Carme Font, an English literature professor at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, a €1.5m grant to...
Carbs and environmental disasters!
I was interested in this crowd-sourced list of the 100 "Must-Read" nonfiction books of the year. Their subjects are limited (and please note that the list includes several titles that haven't been released in the US yet), but I found at least three books I really want to read...
Even more required reading
I've said it before and I'll say it again: every resident of the American West should read Cadillac Desert. This article (part of a series tellingly titled "PARCHED") in...
Girl Waits With Gun, by Amy Stewart
I usually avoid novels about historical figures, because I'm constantly wondering how much of the story is real and how much is invented. But as far as I can discover, there is very little known about Constance Kopp, the heroine of Amy Stewart's novel Girl Waits With Gun, so the author was able to let her imagination run wild—something she does with wit, style, and charm...
The Poisoned City, by Anna Clark
As longtime readers of the site know, every once in a while we review nonfiction books on subjects that we consider to be of general interest: money, food, education, the environment. Our latest pick is Detroit journalist Anna Clark's The Poisoned City, a convincing and devastating look at the water crisis in Flint, Michigan...
Weekly Book Giveaway: The Poisoned City, by Anna Clark
It's summer, so it must be time for me to find a depressing nonfiction book to read on vacation! This week we're giving away a copy of Anna Clark's The Poisoned City, about the water crisis in Flint, Michigan. A full review will follow shortly...
Far-seeing
There's an article on Buzzfeed about Rona Jaffe’s The Best of Everything, a novel written in 1958 that offered a prescient look at the eventual #MeToo crisis. The book was reissued about a decade ago, and I'm...
Seriously, he was the worst.
Town and Country magazine recently posted an absolutely fascinating essay by Paula McClain about the career of Martha Gellhorn, a journalist and war correspondent who was also Ernest Hemingway's third wife. Gellhorn sounds...
From one jerk to another
According to LaineyGossip, Russell Crowe has been cast as Roger Ailes in the upcoming film adaptation of Gabriel Sherman's The Loudest Voice in the Room: How the Brilliant, Bombastic Roger Ailes Built Fox News—and Divided a Country. This is, uh, really inspired casting...
Big ideas, illustrated
io9 has an interview up with Jim Ottaviani, an author (and former nuclear engineer) who has written about several well-known scientists: Jane Goodall, Niels Bohr, and Richard Feynman...
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...