Category: Nonfiction

(by Christina Thompson) This book isn’t just about the settlement of the Polynesian Triangle—it’s also about history and anthropology and archaeology and epistemology: it’s about what non-Polynesian people have known (or not known, or guessed, or tried to figure out) about Polynesia and how (and when) it might have been settled, and how sources of…

(by Annie Ernaux, translated by Alison L. Strayer) There are family secrets and then there are family secrets: when she was ten, Annie Ernaux heard her mother telling someone about having had “another daughter who died of diphtheria at age six.” She described this child as having “died like a little saint,” and having been…

(by Hanif Abdurraqib) In her introduction to this essay collection, Eve L. Ewing writes that this “is a book about life and death—in particular, though not exclusively, Black life and Black death.” Many of the essays use music as a through-line or a jumping-off point, but the book isn’t a collection of music criticism per…

(by Jun’ichirō Tanizaki, translated by Thomas J. Harper and Edward G. Seidensticker) Some parts of this 1933 essay on Japanese aesthetics have definitely not aged well (the parts about race and skin color, the parts about women’s bodies) and some parts are about things that I don’t know enough about to have opinions on (costumes…

(by Kim Phillips-Fein) This was an interesting book to read after having seen the documentary Drop Dead City back in May. The book and the movie cover the same time period/events (the fiscal crisis in 1970s New York City) but each has its own slant, the slant of the book being that the crisis gave…

(by Yoko Tawada, translated by Lisa Hofmann-Kuroda) I found this series of essays about language (and, more specifically, about speaking/writing in a language other than one’s first language) to be really pleasing even though I speak neither Japanese nor German, which are two of the languages that come up most. (Tawada was born in Japan…

(by Nicola Twilley) There are so many interesting/unexpected/fun facts and anecdotes in this book (subtitle: How Refrigeration Changed Our Food, Our Planet, and Ourselves); I definitely could not shut up about all the stuff I was learning while I was reading it. Twilley takes readers on a global tour of the largely-unseen spaces of the…

(by Jon Krakauer) Disaster/survival nonfiction is not generally my genre—in fact, I think this book may be the only one of its sort that I’ve ever read. This is an account of a 1996 guided expedition to climb Mount Everest that the author was on that ended in tragedy, with multiple people dying on the…

(by Bill Buford) I definitely groaned when I saw that this book was my non-fiction book club’s choice for June—I wasn’t sure I wanted to read about English football hooligans in the 1980s. But as it turned out, I actually liked this one. Buford’s writing is very good, and I like how the structure and…

(by Nina MacLaughlin) There are, for sure, things I like about summer: evening walks, swimming in the ocean, stepping out the door without having to think about whether I’m wearing enough clothing. But also, this is not really my season. I’m a pale redhead who requires lots of sunscreen; heat and humidity are challenging for…