Posts tagged with nonfiction
Castles and crappy parents
The trailer is out for the upcoming film adaptation of Jeannette Walls’s memoir The Glass Castle. I tend to get this book confused with I Capture the Castle (another story about poverty and sub-par parenting), and I doubt this movie will do much to keep the stories separate in my mind...
Grocery: The Buying and Selling of Food in America, by Michael Ruhlman
We mostly review fiction here at Wordcandy, but there are a handful of nonfiction topics we consider of universal interest: money, history, and (most of all) food. Michael Ruhlman's recent book Grocery: The Buying and Selling of Food in America actually touches on all three of these subjects, so it's right up our alley...
Weekly Book Giveaway: Grocery: The Buying and Selling of Food in America, by Michael Ruhlman
It's been a while, so it's time for one of our rare nonfiction reviews: this week's Book Giveaway is Michael Ruhlman's Grocery: The Buying and Selling of Food in America. (That's a biiiig subject for a short book, but whatever.) A full review will follow shortly...
More Mindy
According to Deadline, Mindy Kaling has optioned the TV rights to Who Thought This Was a Good Idea? And Other Questions You Should Have Answers to When You Work in the White House, the memoir by Alyssa Mastromonaco, Barack Obama's former White House deputy chief of staff for operations...
Fascinating (but also grim)
I'm finally reading up on the new movie The Lost City of Z. I had a vague (and 100% incorrect) idea that it had something to do with zombies, but it turns out it is based on David Grann's 2009 nonfiction book of the same name. Grann's book focuses on the story of British explorer Percy Fawcett, who made numerous attempts to find a lost indigenous city in Brazil's Mato Grosso region...
Ugh
According to The Wall Street Journal, Richard Hickock—one of the two Kansas murderers made famous by Truman Capote’s true-crime story In Cold Blood—wrote his own book with a Kansas journalist, which was never published...
Bring hankies
Oprah Winfrey is starring in a HBO adaptation of the 2010 nonfiction bestseller The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. (Oprah will be playing Lacks's daughter. Lacks herself died when she was only 31.) Lacks's story...
Good deal
According to Entertainment Weekly, Barack and Michelle Obama have both signed deals to publish books with Crown Publishing Group. Crown has already published books by both Obamas: the former President’s 1995 memoir...
Life in the virtual woods
I... really don't know how I feel about this. A video game based on Henry David Thoreau's Walden? It's not that I'm opposed to a game that aims to "reinforce our connection to the natural world and to challenge our hurried culture" or "achieve work-life balance", but doesn't doing that via a $20 video game...
Immortalized!
This is great news: according to NPR, Lego has just announced their "Women of NASA" set, which will include Katherine Johnson, the NASA mathematician whose story was featured in Margot Lee Shetterly's book Hidden Figures...
Unfamiliar Fishes, by Sarah Vowell
Reading Sarah Vowell's 2011 book Unfamiliar Fishes is like skimming through a 230-page-long magazine article. It's a witty, easily digestible take on a fascinating element of American history—but I would have preferred less wit and more dry facts...
Weekly Book Giveaway: Unfamiliar Fishes, by Sarah Vowell
In times of politically-induced stress, I frequently find it soothing to read about the politically-induced stress of Olden Times. (Sometimes I need to be reminded that humanity is cockroach-level resilient.) So this week's Book Giveaway is Sarah Vowell's 2011 book Unfamiliar Fishes, about the American annexation of Hawaii in 1898...
Apropos
I've been seeing a number of people linking to this 2015 Washington Post article about Anne Frank and her family being denied entry as refugees into the U.S. in 1941. It's a long (and terribly depressing) read, but...
Maybe there are CliffsNotes?
According to Quartz, Hannah Arendt's The Origins of Totalitarianism is now sold out on Amazon. I've read The Origins of Totalitarianism, and all I can say is: if people are buying it in hopes of a quick, comprehensible explanation of Trump's rise to power...
Holiday Gift Pick #4
Gift Idea #4: Jason Porath's Rejected Princesses: Tales of History's Boldest Heroines, Hellions, and Heretics
Porath is a former professional animator, and his website Rejected Princesses is a fascinating, informative, and frequently genuinely moving read. This book tie-in features...
Getting creative
Quartz recently published a fascinating article about Mei Fong, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter whose book, One Child: The Story of China’s Most Radical Experiment, has been unable to find a Chinese-language publisher...
Clash of the Titans
Heh: Lainey Gossip informs me that Sean Penn and Mel Gibson are going to star in a movie adaptation of The Professor and the Madman, Simon Winchester’s book about the creation of the Oxford English Dictionary...
Convenient
Well, this worked out nicely: after recently reading and reviewing Jane Mayer's Dark Money, I've been wondering what the Koch brothers have been up to during this most tumultuous of election cycles, and Gawker was kind enough to...
Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me?, by Mindy Kaling
In 2011, actress and comedian Mindy Kaling released a collection of essays called Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? (And Other Concerns). Her book is 242 pages of the easiest reading on the planet: short, witty, ridiculously charming essays on everything from Kaling's weird affection for diet plans to her career goals to her ideal level of fame...
Weekly Book Giveaway: Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me?, by Mindy Kaling
This week's Book Giveaway is Mindy Kaling's Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me?, a collection of comedic essays about everything from Kaling's childhood to her unique path to stardom (which apparently involved writing and starring in a play based on Matt Damon and Ben Affleck's friendship)...
Dark Money, by Jane Mayer
On August 30, 2010, Janet Mayer published an article in the New Yorker called 'Covert Operations', an in-depth look at the political influence of Charles and David Koch, two American billionaire brothers who have devoted over a hundred million dollars to promoting libertarian causes. Over the next few years Mayer deepened and expanded her research on the subject, transforming her article into...
Weekly Book Giveaway: Dark Money, by Jane Mayer
This week's Book Giveaway is Jane Mayer's Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right, which I read and enjoyed during my recent vacation. (There's nothing to beguile away a three-hour-long ferry ride like reading about the political fixations of creepy billionaires, in my opinion.) A full review will follow shortly...
No sympathy
In a twist that will shock absolutely no one, Gerald Foos, the subject of Gay Talese's upcoming nonfiction book about a hotel owner who claims to have spent decades spying on his guests having sex, is possibly a liar, as well as a bonafide Grade-A creeper...
Sure...
I was interested in—although not 100% convinced by—Suki Kim's essay "The Reluctant Memoirist" in New Republic. Kim is the author of Without You, There Is No Us: My Time With the Sons of North Korea’s Elite, a nonfiction account of Kim's time spent teaching ESL at an evangelical university in Pyongyang. While Kim viewed her work as investigative journalism, her publisher...
My mom will watch this (but she'll cover her eyes a lot)
Slate tells me that Sarah Polley is adapting Margaret Atwood's 1996 novel Alias Grace into a six-hour-long miniseries for Netflix. The novel is a fictionalized account of the life of Grace Marks, a Canadian housemaid who was convicted of murder in 1843...
I would have pushed him down a well.
I normally avoid movies that scream OSCAR BAIT!!! this loudly, but I'm mildly intrigued by the new film Genius, about the relationship between notoriously verbose writer Thomas Wolfe and his long-suffering editor Maxwell Perkins. The trailer looks...
Murderously adorable
Man, Jonathan Franzen really doesn't like cats. According to this article in New Republic, Franzen thinks the time has come for cat genocide: “The bird community’s position is, we need to get rid of the feral cats, and that means cats must die.” He's also a big fan of the upcoming book Cat Wars: The Devastating Consequences of a Cuddly Killer...
Salacious! (But not really.)
THR recently posted a juicy excerpt from Canadian filmmaker Barry Avrich's recently-released book Moguls, Monsters and Madmen: An Uncensored Life in Show Business. It's well-worth checking out, particularly if you enjoy behind-the-scenes gossip...
I'm sure he really needs the money.
According to Page Six, former Sony CEO Tommy Mottola is accused of running off with a $150,000 advance for a book he never actually wrote, according to a lawsuit filed by Hachette Book Group yesterday...