Posts tagged with nonfiction
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...
Another show I will be skipping
I can't see any way for this to avoid being absolutely horrible, but maybe that's what makes for must-see TV: according to The Hollywood Reporter, FX is developing an "event series" based on Kim MacQuarrie's book The Last Days of the Incas, which focuses on...
A three-million-dollar book deal seems like the least the world can do
Pakistani education activist, youngest-ever Nobel Peace Prize nominee, shooting victim, and fifteen-year-old girl Malala Yousafzai has closed a book deal, according to The Guardian. The nonfiction title I Am Malala will be published by Little, Brown and Company this fall, and describe Yousafzai's life to date...
The evil trio
I'm thinking of requesting a review copy of Michael Moss's Salt Sugar Fat, which was recently the subject of an in-depth NPR story. I'm always interested in books about food or money, and this one's about both...
Bad teachers
I read this article about Tennessee preacher Michael Pearl's book To Train Up a Child with horrified fascination. Pearl apparently believes that children should be treated like "stubborn mules", and argues with the right (read: abusive) persuasion, parents can have the little whippersnappers potty-trained by the time they're two weeks old...
NBC takes to the high seas
Hugh Laurie (best known as the star of House, but he'll always be Bertie Wooster to me) has signed on to play Edward Teach—a.k.a. the famous pirate Blackbeard—in NBC's Crossbones, an upcoming 10-episode drama based on Colin Woodard's nonfiction book The Republic of Pirates...
Alfred and Alma
The trailer is out for Hitchcock (the other Alfred Hitchcock-related project, which is not to be confused with the TV show about a young Norman Bates or The Girl, the HBO film about his treatment of Tippi Hedren). This is the film adaptation of Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho...
Cognitive skills vs. character
There's been a lot of online buzz recently about Paul Tough's new nonfiction book How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character. You can listen to a NPR interview here...
Black Gold: The Story of Oil in Our Lives, by Albert Marrin
The vast majority of the books we receive here at Wordcandy are fiction, but every few weeks the odd nonfiction title turns up. I usually choose to review the ones on subjects I enjoy reading about (read: food preparation and money management, both of which I love... in theory, anyway, if not in practice), but Albert Marrin's informative-yet-totally-readable Black Gold: The Story of Oil In Our Lives is the kind of thing everyone should read...
Self-help on the big screen (again)
According to Vulture, Reese Witherspoon is going to star in a fictionalized movie adaptation of Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus. I'm frankly amazed that What To Expect When You're Expecting made enough money to encourage still more self-help-book-inspired movies, but I guess things could be worse...
Another one I'll be skipping
Rupert Everett is planning to make his directorial debut with a movie about Oscar Wilde's final days. According to Variety, the biopic The Happy Prince will be a "comedy with tragic undertones", but if it's really a nonfiction account, I'm not sure where the comedy's going to come from...