New Nonfiction Roundup – January 2022

Happy 2022! The new year in nonfiction starts with guides to self-improvement, assessments of current events, momentous memoirs, and scenes from history.

In Already Enough, Lisa Olivera empowers readers to reframe their life stories in order to master self-acceptance. Robin Berzin helps women end the epidemic of burnout, anxiety and stress in State Change, while Amanda White shows women how to have a new relationship with alcohol in Not Drinking Tonight and Gin Stephens shows readers how to live a (mostly) healthy lifestyle in Clean(ish). Michael Schur, creator of Parks & Recreation and The Good Place answers all of our moral dilemmas in How to Be Perfect. Madeleine Dore encourages us to let go of productivity guilt in I Didn’t Do the Thing Today while Johann Hari’s examination into why we’re unable to pay attention (and how to get it back) is examined in Stolen Focus (a Peak Pick!). And if you’re often baffled by mathematics and data, then Chip Heath & Karla Starr’s Making Numbers Count is the book for you (and it’s a Peak Pick!)

2022 promises to be a tumultuous year, and Barbara F. Walter cautions against the rise of extremism in How Civil Wars Start while Mark Bowden (Black Hawk Down) recounts efforts to overturn the presidential results in the 64 days between the election and January 6th in The Steal; meanwhile, Trump aide Peter Navarro reveals the race for a vaccine to combat the coronavirus with In Trump Time. Patrisse Cullors, a co-founder of Black Lives Matter, presents activists with the tools to enact change in An Abolitionist’s Handbook, while Imani Perry urges us to understand life below the Mason-Dixon line in order to understand the United States in South to America.

Carl Bernstein (one half of the duo behind All The President’s Men) chronicles his life as an investigative reporter in Chasing History. Nobel Prize-winner Amartya Sen looks at what it means to belong in Home in the World while Wajahat Ali takes a humorous look at Islamophobia in Go Back To Where You Came From! (a Peak Pick!) In Lost & Found, Kathryn Schulz recounts how she lost her father and met the woman she would marry within a year; meanwhile, Lindsey Vonn reveals how she broke barriers to become the greatest female skier of all time in Rise. In Things I Should Have Said, Jamie Lynn Spears (little sister to Britney) tells her life story so far, while Jenny Pentland shares what it was like growing up in the shadow of her mother, Roseanne, in This Will be Funny Later. And writer Peter Bacho pays tribute to Filipino Seattle in Uncle Rico’s Encore.

In The Betrayal of Anne Frank, Rosemary Sullivan teams up with a retired FBI agent to reveal the mystery behind who brought the Nazis to her door (a Peak Pick!) while Harald Jähner looks at the decade after the fall of the Third Reich in Germany in Aftermath. Danielle Friedman traces the origins of women’s exercise culture to the 1950s in the energetic Let’s Get Physical while readers can revisit Black life during the first half of the 20th century by the Harlem Renaissance great Zora Neale Hurston in You Don’t Know Us Negroes.

~posted by Frank B.