Posts tagged with nonfiction

Jul 30 2018

The Poisoned City, by Anna Clark

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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...

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Jul 30 2018

Weekly Book Giveaway: The Poisoned City, by Anna Clark

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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...

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Jul 19 2018

Far-seeing

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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...

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Jul 17 2018

Seriously, he was the worst.

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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...

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Jun 28 2018

From one jerk to another

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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...

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May 22 2018

Big ideas, illustrated

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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...

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May 15 2018

An overdue honor

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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...

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May 1 2018

Wow

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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...

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Apr 19 2018

And that's a low-budget cover, too.

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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...

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Apr 17 2018

Ugh, lady.

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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...

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Mar 22 2018

Grim but intriguing

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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...

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Mar 21 2018

Oscar bait

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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...

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Jan 4 2018

Weekend plans

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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...

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Jan 4 2018

Anglophile foodies

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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...

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Dec 5 2017

Sure, okay.

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According to Variety, Christina Ricci and Judith Light will co-star in a Lifetime biopic about famous journalist Nellie Bly. Ricci will play Bly...

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Dec 4 2017

We Are Never Meeting In Real Life, by Samantha Irby

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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...

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Dec 4 2017

Weekly Book Giveaway: We Are Never Meeting in Real Life, by Samantha Irby

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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...

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Nov 30 2017

Wow.

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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...

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Nov 28 2017

Science!

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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...

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Nov 27 2017

Bubbly on Your Budget, by Marjorie Hillis

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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...

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Nov 27 2017

Weekly Book Giveaway: Bubbly On Your Budget, by Marjorie Hillis

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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...

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Nov 15 2017

This looks massively stressful.

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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...

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Nov 8 2017

Holiday Gift Pick #6

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Gift Idea #6: Guns, Germs, and Steel: 20th Anniversary Folio Society edition, by Jared Diamond ($73.95)

Grade-A dad present...

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Oct 25 2017

I can hold myself back.

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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...

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Oct 17 2017

Terrifying but handy?

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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...

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Oct 4 2017

Promo-worthy

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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...

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Sep 26 2017

Mad props

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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

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Sep 19 2017

Back and forth

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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...

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Sep 18 2017

Half Baked Harvest, by Tieghan Gerard

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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...

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Sep 18 2017

Weekly Book Giveaway: Half Baked Harvest, by Tieghan Gerard

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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...

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