Ease into August with the month’s best nonfiction. And don’t forget to check out the month’s Peak Picks!
Biography and Memoir.
The ever prolific James Patterson tells “the most heartbreaking story of our time” in Diana, William and Harry on the 25th anniversary of Princess Di’s death, while biographer David Maraniss covers the complicated life of Native American Jim Thorpe, America’s greatest all-around athlete, in Path Lit By Lightning. Screen star Jenifer Lewis, the “Mother of Black Hollywood,” returns with a new collection of stories in Walking in My Joy while a memoir from the late Michael K. Williams, best known as Omar Little from “The Wire,” will reward fans mourning his early death in Scenes From My Life. “iCarly” star Jennette McCurdy reveals how she overcame struggles as a child actor under the watchful eye of a controlling mother in I’m Glad My Mom Died while “The Hills” star Audrina Partridge reflects on tabloid fame in Choices. Casey Parks examines queer life in the South in Diary of a Misfit and Michelle Tea chronicles her road to parenthood as a queer, uninsured fortysomething in Knocking Myself Up. Heather Morris, author of The Tattooist of Auschwitz, discusses how we can learn from other people’s stories in Listening Well while Frances Mayes (Under the Tuscan Sun) reflects on the meaning of home in A Place in the World. Finally, James Beard-award winner Michael Twitty discusses his faith and food journey as an African American Jew in KosherSoul.
Current Events.
In On Critical Race Theory, Victor Ray explains what it is, why it matters and why we should all care. In The Mamas, Helena Andrews-Dyer discusses what she’s learned as as a Black mother about moms not like her. Dana Milbank chronicles the twenty-five year crack-up of the Republican party in The Deconstructionists. And Beth Macy follows up Dopesick with Raising Lazarus, where she profiles everyday heroes trying to address opioid addiction in their communities.
History.
Rinker Buck (The Oregon Trail) returns with a wooden flatboat that he sails down America’s most fabled river in Life on the Mississippi while Daniel Stone investigates why it took seven decades for the Titanic to be discovered in Sinkable. In the latest entry in the Revisioning American History series, Catherine Ceniza Choy illuminates Asian American Histories of the United States while Beverly Lowry reckons with a murder in the heart of the Mississippi Delta in the 1940s in Deer Creek Drive. In Empires of the Normans, Levi Roach profiles the people who conquered England, and eventually much of Europe, and in Come to This Court and Cry, Linda Kintsler wonders how history will remember the Holocaust now that there are few survivors left.
Science.
Seattle-based Madeline Ostrander provides a vivid account of people working to protect their communities in the wake of climate change in At Home on An Unruly Planet and Gaia Vince details how climate migration will reshape our world in Nomad Century. Marlene Zuk examines how animal behavior evolves in Dancing Cockatoos and the Dead Man Test, and Sabine Hossenfelder wrestles with physics to reveal what it says about our existence in Existential Physics.
~posted by Frank
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