We’re back! We took the summer off but are ready to resume our list of notable nonfiction books arriving in September – in addition to our stellar line-up of Peak Picks.
We’re kicking it off with cookbooks, including two from celebrities: Dolly Parton teams up with her sister Rachel for a year of meals, friends and fun with Good Lookin’ Cookin’, and Stephen Colbert joins his wife Evie McGee Colbert to deliver heartwarming and humorous family recipes in Does This Taste Funny? Danielle Walker’s latest, Make it Easy, is a meal prep and menu planning guide for stress-free cooking, while Monique Volz presents 125 ridiculously good for you, sometimes indulgent, and absolutely never boring recipes for every meal of the day in The Ambitious Kitchen Cookbook. From Nisha Vora comes Big Vegan Flavor, with techniques and 150 recipes to master vegan cooking; Tue Nguyen (aka Twaydabae) debuts with Di An, highlighting the salty, sour, sweet and spicy flavors of Vietnamese cooking; and Michael Solomonov & Steven Cook invite you to cook the way they do at home with 125 simple, achievable recipes in Zahav Home.
In the celebrity corner, Connie Chung spills the tea as she recounts her career as the first Asian woman to break into the television news industry in Connie; Kelly Bishop revisits her career spanning six decades in show business from Broadway to Hollywood with A Chorus Line, Dirty Dancing, Gilmore Girls, and more in The Third Gilmore Girl; journalist Don Lemon reveals his complicated search for God in America in I Once Was Lost; Rapper and actress Eve explores her inspirational rise to stardom in Who’s That Girl? ; Orange is the New Black star Uzo Aduba pens a memoir of Black immigrant identity as a Nigerian American in The Road is Good; Eric Roberts pulls no punches about the ups and downs of his career and his sometimes stormy relationship with his famous sister, Julia, in Runaway Train; Kristian Nairn shares the epic journeys, enduring friendships, and surprising tales on his way to fame on Game of Thrones with Beyond the Throne; Wilder Valderrama tells the remarkable tale of his life from Venezuelan immigrant to his role as Fez on That 70s Show in An American Story; and from Tayler Mahan Coe comes the epic American saga of country music’s legendary royal couple – George Jones and Tammy Wynette – in Cocaine & Rhinestones.
In memoir/essay, Mary Trump chronicles her heartbreaking family history at the hands of a tyrannical patriarch in Who Could Ever Love You? ; Honduran-Ecuadorian writer Jessica Hoppe chronicles her survival and recovery while interrogating the American Dream in First in the Family; Marian Schembari reveals how an autism diagnosis finally made her whole in A Little Less Broken; Nemonte Nenquimo, born into the Waorani tribe of Ecuador’s Amazon rainforest, delivers an impassioned memoir about an indigenous childhood, a clash of cultures, and the fight to save the Amazon rainforest in We Will Be Jaguars; Sonia Purnell (A Woman of No Importance) reexamines the life of Pamela Churchill Harriman, one of the 20th century’s greatest unsung power players, in Kingmaker; Amy Reading brings to life Katharine S. White, who transformed The New Yorker magazine into a powerhouse, in The World She Edited; and disability activist Johanna Hedva challenges our collective understanding of care and illness in How to Tell When We Will Die.
Science-minded readers will enjoy Ayana Elizabeth Johnson’s joyous visions of climate futures, What If We Get It Right?; Peter Godfrey-Smith’s examination into forests, corals, consciousness and the making of the modern world, Living on Earth; and Cara Giaimo and Joshua Foer’s guide to the world’s living wonders, Atlas Obscura Wild Life.
Politicos can look forward to On Freedom, Timothy Snyder’s exploration of what it is, how it’s been misunderstood, and why it’s our only chance for survival; Lucky Loser, Russ Buettner and Susanne Craig’s exposé of how Donald Trump squandered his father’s fortune and created the illusion of success; and A Return to Common Sense, Leigh McGowman’s impassioned plea to fix America before we really blow it. In current events, Lee Yaron pens a definitive account of the 10/7 Hamas attack on Israel through 100 human stories, and Amir Tibon tells a gripping first-person account of how one Israeli grandfather helped rescue two generations of his family on that fateful day in The Gates of Gaza. Kate Conger and Ryan Mac illustrate how Elon Musk destroyed Twitter in Character Limit, Kat Timpf challenges us to consider how binary thinking divides us in I Used to Like You Until…, and Aaron Zebley, James Quarles and Andrew Goldstein team up to tell the inside Story of Trump, Russia, and the Mueller Investigation in Interference.
History buff? Consider How the World Made the West, Josephine Quinn’s reexamination of 4,000 years of history; The Barn, Wright Thompson’s shocking and revelatory account of the murder of Emmett Till; Ben Macintyre’s The Siege, a thrilling tick-tock recounting of a six-day hostage crisis and the daring special-forces operation that shocked the world; Jack Carr’s Targeted Beirut, which explores the 1983 Marine barracks bombing and the untold origin story of the War on Terror; Yuval Noah Harari’s Nexus, a brief (100,000 years) history of information networks from the Stone Age to AI; and Rebecca Nagle’s By the Fire We Carry, a powerful work of reportage about the generations-long fight for justice on native land.
Looking for a lighter read? Join Annie Zaleski as she explores the discography of the voice of a generation in Taylor Swift: The Stories Behind the Songs, or Joe Posnanski’s moving celebration of a North American sport in Why We Love Football. Kyle Prue provides readers with 106 things to say to shatter the male ego in the riotous How to Piss Off Men, while Emily C. Hughes tells you everything you need to know about the films you’re too scared to watch in Horror for Weenies. Finally, for those in need of some positive motivation, check out Hope for Cynics, Jamil Zaki’s narrative on the science of human goodness; Gabriel Reilich & Lucia Knells’ Upworthy Good People, which features 100 stories that highlight the best of humanity; and Debra Whitman’s The Second Fifty, which answers the seven big questions of midlife and beyond.
~posted by Frank. All descriptions provided by publishers.
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