#nonfiction

Sep 18, 2020

Six Illuminating Memoirs I've Read This Year

01 Leaving the Witness In Leaving the Witness: Exiting a Religion and Finding a Life, Amber Scorah takes the reader into her confidences and lays bare her sheltered experiences, religious indoctrination, societal and gender pressures, hearty evangelism, and her eventual questioning and subsequent freezing out from the Jehovah’s Witnesses—which meant she was cut off permanently from almost everyone she knew. Scorah retraces her steps from being a covert, illegal proselytizer i

Sep 13, 2020

Review of A Very Punchable Face: A Memoir by Colin Jost

Colin Jost retraces his journey toward and through his fifteen seasons at Saturday Night Live and offers insights that I found absorbing.

Sep 12, 2020

Three Wackily Different Books I'm Reading Right Now, 9/12/20 Edition

01 Surrender Your Sons This summer stinks. Teenage Connor's elderly friend died, his boyfriend talked him into coming out, and now his mother thinks he's going to hell because he's gay, and she's grounded him indefinitely. But Connor doesn't know that things are about to get a lot worse. Middle-of-the-night kidnapping-to-a-conversion-camp-level worse. I don't have a bead on the tone of this one yet; Connor is a little snarky, but I believe the plot is going to include mystery

Sep 4, 2020

Review of Raising White Kids: Bringing Up Children in a Racially Unjust America by Jennifer Harvey

Harvey emphasizes the urgency of the need for change and offers age-appropriate examples to help build young advocates equipped to work toward racial equality. "What strategies will help our children learn to function well in a diverse nation? What roles do we want them to play in addressing racism when they encounter it? How do we equip them for these roles? How do we talk about race honestly with our children, which means naming white privilege...?" Harvey explores how to m

Jul 8, 2020

Review of So You Want to Talk About Race by Ijeoma Oluo

Oluo offers specific steps we can take toward "talk[ing] our way to understanding...and using that understanding to act."

Jul 4, 2020

Review of Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family by Robert Kolker

Hidden Valley Road by Robert Kolker is a fascinating, disturbing, heartbreaking, and ultimately hopeful book.

Jun 27, 2020

Review of White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism by Robin DiAngelo

"A stirring call to conscience and consciousness in white brothers and sisters."

May 15, 2020

Review of The Spy and the Traitor: The Greatest Espionage Story of the Cold War by Ben Macintyre

Macintyre presents a wonderfully paced and skillfully recounted Cold War-era story of spy intrigue, paranoia, bravery, and twists and turns.

May 14, 2020

Review of Tombstone: The Earp Brothers, Doc Holliday, and the Vendetta Ride from Hell by Tom Clavin

Clavin's nonfiction book "Tombstone" traces the tensions and factors as they build to pivotal events that make Tombstone live on in infamy.

May 11, 2020

Review of Catch and Kill by Ronan Farrow

Carefully researched and documented by Farrow, with twists and turns that feel so disturbingly outlandish as to seem like fiction at times.

Apr 24, 2020

Review of Just Mercy by Bryan Stevenson

The issues Stevenson raises may make readers uncomfortable, but they're all worth looking at under a microscope and demanding change.

Feb 16, 2020

Review of Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland by Patrick Radden Keefe

The most fascinating parts for me were the late-in-life reflections from those who had been involved in the IRA's brutal and unrelenting violence. Patrick Radden Keefe, a journalist with an Irish name but without a dog in the fight, fantastically shapes the endless trails and tales from the Irish Troubles into a narrative, and he lays out the web of motivations and passionate beliefs behind the conflicts so that an outsider can begin to comprehend what occurred and why. Towar

Feb 15, 2020

Review of The Unwinding of the Miracle: A Memoir of Life, Death, and Everything that Comes After

This book is Yip-Williams's powerful farewell to her family, but it's also valuable for anyone considering meaning in their own life.

Jan 23, 2020

Review of Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis by J.D. Vance

Vance shares his unlikely, circuitous route to an emotionally and financially stable adult life. In Hillbilly Elegy, Vance mainly shares the story of his own many, varied, and enormous life challenges and disadvantages and his unlikely, circuitous route from a childhood that often centered around upheaval, danger, and despair to an emotionally and financially stable adult life. But he also explores hillbilly and Appalachian culture and how as an insider he feels it contribute

Jan 1, 2020

Review of The Unexpected Spy: From the CIA to the FBI, My Secret Life... by Tracy Walder

I love a peek at a secret world, and here Walder offers fascinating glimpses of her life as a CIA and an FBI agent.

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