Posts tagged with nonfiction
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...
Scandalous!
I recently picked up a copy of Jane Mayer's nonfiction book Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right. I love books about financial scandals, and this one is even juicier when you take into account the contents of this New York Times article, which...
Joy, sparked
There's been a lot of discussion about Spark Joy, the companion book to Marie Kondo's The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up. We reviewed Kondo's first book last year, and while we enjoyed reading it, the best organizational/tidying-up advice I've ever encountered...
Useful!
I'm totally in love with this Random Illustrated Facts Instagram, featuring artwork by children's illustrator Mike Lowery. (I already knew that thing about the national animal of Scotland being the unicorn, though, and it has always upset me. I mean, if...
Big stuff worth sweating
The Telegraph recently posted a totally creepifying story about self-help author Kristine Carlson, who has endured years of stalking after...
Gross, creepy, no thank you.
This is... discomfiting. Newsweek informs me that the College Board has bowed to conservative political pressure, and is revising their A.P. U.S. History standards to "emphasize American Exceptionalism"...
Another fine candidate for the $10 bill
If you were impressed by the recent Google Doodle featuring Ida B. Wells, I encourage you to check out Kate Beaton's Hark! A Vagrant strip about her, too...
Grim death/Oscar bait
The first trailer is out for Everest, the upcoming film based on Jon Krakauer’s book Into Thin Air, about the 1996 Mount Everest disaster...
Skin Cleanse, by Adina Grigore
The world wasn't exactly crying out for another book extolling the benefits of drinking less coffee, eating more dark leafy greens, and laying off the donuts, but Adina Grigore's Skin Cleanse condenses and simplifies about ten health blogs' worth of information into a fresh, cheerful, immensely readable guide to skin health...
Weekly Book Giveaway: Skin Cleanse, by Adina Grigore
This week's Book Giveaway is Adina Grigore's Skin Cleanse, which meets my "of general interest" standard for reviewing nonfiction. (Plus, it appeals to the same part of me that enjoys reading fancy cookbooks while eating, like, toast. I'm a big fan of theoretical self-improvement.) I haven't quite finished Ms. Grigore's book, but thus far it seems like a chattier, more grown-up version of...
The section about Dickens is great, too.
I've finally seen the trailer for the movie Effie Gray, written by Emma Thompson and inspired by the life of Euphemia Chalmers Millais, the one-time wife of the famous critic John Ruskin...
And people say her work is self-absorbed
Lena Dunham has produced an HBO documentary about illustrator Hilary Knight (best known for his work on Kay Thompson's Eloise stories), and the trailer is really heavy on... Lena Dunham. I'm happy someone is honoring Knight's career, but this movie appears to be less about him, and more about how much his art means to her...
Alphabet background check
NPR has an interesting article up about Michael Rosen's new nonfiction book Alphabetical, which claims to explain the history behind all 26 letters. Rosen is not the world's most convincing interviewee...
Added to my to-be-read pile
Last week, the Guardian published an article about the release of The Debs of Bletchley Park, a new collection of stories by Michael Smith. The book focuses on the largely female group of World War II code-breakers who worked at the UK's Government Code and Cypher School, which was run out of Buckinghamshire's Bletchley Park mansion...
The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, by Marie Kondo
My birthday was this week, and my mother gave me a copy of Marie Kondo's The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing. No, this was not a pointed hint—I have done some work as a professional organizer, and I am a huge, huge nerd, so my mom thought I would legitimately enjoy reading it...
Congratulations, mom!
My mother is prone to long, ongoing obsessions with totally random subjects, where she reads everything she can on the issue and accumulates an encyclopedic knowledge of details of no interest to anyone but herself. Her latest fixation is on Scientology's ongoing legal disputes, so...
Hokey or not, I'm out.
The trailer is out for In The Heart of the Sea, the movie based on the true(ish) story that inspired Herman Melville to write Moby Dick. Setting aside my usual eye-rolling over the obvious CGI, I think this movie looks terrifying...
Step One: Avoid the bulls entirely.
In a move that will, ironically, probably raise his book's profile and generate way more sales, writer Bill Hillmann, co-author of the how-to-not-get-gored-by-a-bull advice guide Fiesta: How To Survive The Bulls Of Pamplona, has been gored by a bull...
Attempting to upgrade
NPR recently posted an article about the difficulty schools are having in finding textbooks that qualify as meeting the "Common Core State Standards"—the new educational benchmarks that 44 states and the District of Columbia have adopted...
Father's Day is coming.
According to NPR, NASA's new (and free!) 300-page e-book Archaeology, Anthropology, and Interstellar Communication is a fascinating exploration of the question of what would happen if...
Some things should not become brands.
Okay, this news makes me MEGA uncomfortable: there are apparently THREE Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl adaptations in the works, one of which is going to be animated movie(?!?), one of which is a live-action feature film, and one of which is apparently unauthorized...
Breaking off a piece of the historical drama action
According to the Christian Science Monitor, Robert K. Massie's biography Catherine the Great is being adapted into a "limited series" for ABC. The book was well-received by critics, so I'm assuming ABC is hoping for something a little more high-brow than the CW's Reign...
Salt Sugar Fat, by Michael Moss
Journalist Michael Moss has made a career out of terrible food: his 2009 reporting about the safety of ground beef earned him a Pulitzer Prize, and he has recently published a book about the activities of processed food companies, aptly titled Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us...
How To Create the Perfect Wife: Britain's Most Ineligible Bachelor and His Enlightened Quest to Train the Ideal Mate, by Wendy Moore
Most of the critical coverage of Wendy Moore's How To Create the Perfect Wife: Britain's Most Ineligible Bachelor and his Enlightened Quest to Train the Ideal Mate, a stranger-than-fiction account of the life of the 18th century radical Thomas Day, has focused on the biggest scandal of Day's life: his attempt to transform a 12-year-old orphan into his ideal of the perfect woman. This is totally understandable—that element of the story is pretty juicy...
Evil Pygmalion
There have been several articles released recently about Wendy Moore’s new nonfiction title How to Create the Perfect Wife: Britain’s Most Ineligible Bachelor and His Enlightened Quest to Train the Ideal Mate, which sounds absolutely mind-blowing...