Nonfiction Archives - Page 7 of 56

Sweet Taste of Liberty: A True Story of Slavery and Restitution in America by W. Caleb McDaniel [in Booklist]

09 Jul, by Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in Adult Readers, Audio, Black/African American, Nonethnic-specific, Nonfiction, Repost

Winner of the 2020 Pulitzer Prize in History, W. Caleb McDaniel’s 2019 debut gets a 2020 aural adaptation, helmed by prolific Paul Heitsch, who adds solemn gravitas to an utterly compelling narrative. Born enslaved in 1818/1820 in Kentucky, Henrietta Wood was freed in 1848 and...

The Toni Morrison Book Club by Juda Bennett, Winnifred Brown-Glaude, Cassandra Jackson, Piper Kendrix Williams [in Booklist]

08 Jul, by Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in Adult Readers, Audio, Black/African American, Memoir, Nonfiction, Repost

*STARRED REVIEW In their joint introduction, four The College of New Jersey colleagues – three African American women, one gay white man, all PhD-ed – declare, “Toni Morrison is our greatest living historian about love, race, nation, and just about everything else of consequence.” The Nobel...

Fairest: A Memoir by Meredith Talusan [in Shelf Awareness]

01 Jul, by Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in Adult Readers, Filipina/o American, Memoir, Nonfiction, Repost

For Meredith Talusan, transformation looks like this: "Sun Child," "Harvard Man," "Lady Wedgwood." In the nimbly titled Fairest, award-winning journalist Talusan shares an unflinching exploration of identity. "Mirrors were not just mirrors to me," she writes in her prologue, "but bridges made of light to fantastic...

Little Josephine: Memory in Pieces by Valérie Villieu, illustrated by Raphaël Sarfati, translated by Nanette McGuinness [in Booklist]

26 Jun, by Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in Adult Readers, European, Graphic Title/Manga/Manwha, Memoir, Nonfiction, Repost, Translation

For Parisian nurse Valérie Villieu, the proverbial City of Lights is “filled with solitude, isolation, and confinement” – especially for the elderly. Villieu meets soon-to-be-84 Josephine, trapped in her tiny apartment with a stuffed dog and bear as her only constant companions. For months, Josephine...

The Madwoman and the Roomba: My Year of Domestic Mayhem by Sandra Tsing Loh [in Shelf Awareness]

15 Jun, by Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in Adult Readers, Chinese American, Hapa/Mixed-race, Memoir, Nonfiction, Repost

*STARRED REVIEW Despite the "golden years" promised by many, for writer, performer, and University of California, Irvine, professor Sandra Tsing Loh, her "fifty-fifth year was more like living a disorganized twenty-five-year-old's life in a malfunctioning eighty-five-year-old's body." With the same self-deprecating wit and sardonic charm with...

Uncanny Valley by Anna Wiener [in Booklist]

14 Jun, by Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in Adult Readers, Audio, Jewish, Memoir, Nonfiction, Repost

Once upon a time, Anna Weiner was a literary agency assistant, living on “the edge of Brooklyn with a roommate [she] hardly knew, in an apartment filled with so much secondhand furniture it almost had a connection to history.” She was “broke” but “never poor,”...

Apeirogon by Colum McCann [in Booklist]

11 Jun, by Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in Adult Readers, Audio, Biography, Fiction, Irish American, Israeli, Middle Eastern, Nonfiction, Palestinian, Repost

*STARRED REVIEW When Colum McCann first considered narrating his books, he offered to audition for his own National Book Awarded Let the Great World Spin: “...

The Undocumented Americans by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio [in Booklist]

02 Jun, by Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in Adult Readers, Audio, Latina/o/x, Memoir, Nonfiction, Repost, South American, Young Adult Readers

*STARRED REVIEW Making both her print and audio debut, Karla Cornejo Villavicencio is a double powerhouse. As a writer, she gifts readers her “creative nonfiction, rooted in careful reporting, translated as poetry, shared by chosen family, and sometimes hard to read.” She’s anything but hard to...

Food Rules: A User’s Manual by Michael Pollan [in Booklist]

24 May, by Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in Adult Readers, Audio, Nonethnic-specific, Nonfiction, Repost, Young Adult Readers

*STARRED REVIEW Lauded (worshipped?) food journalist/activist Michael Pollan has seven simple words for us here: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” In the third iteration of his 2009 bestseller (#2 was a charming 2011 illustrated collaboration with artist Maira Kalman), Pollan takes the mic 11...

Paying the Land by Joe Sacco [in Booklist]

22 May, by Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in Canadian, Graphic Title/Manga/Manwha, Native American/First Nations/Indigenous Peoples, Nonfiction, Repost

Best known for his Palestine books – most notably, Footnotes in Gaza (2010) – frequent Eisner Award-winner Joe Sacco’s nonfiction titles share essential overlapping features: talking heads given agency to speak their truths, exquisitely detailed artwork, meticulously revealed events. Here Sacco heads to Canada’s Northwest Territories, home...

Running with Sherman: The Donkey with the Heart of a Hero by Christopher McDougall [in Library Journal]

17 May, by Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in Adult Readers, Audio, Memoir, Nonethnic-specific, Nonfiction, Repost, Young Adult Readers

*STARRED REVIEW What began as a New York Times series becomes a captivating book – and with Chris McDougall narrating, quite the aural gift. Sherman arrived on McDougall’s Pennsylvania farm close to death, rescued from an (unintentionally) abusive hoarder. A supportive herd – McDougall’s family (human...

Five More to Go: Kim Hyun Sook’s Banned Book Club [in The Booklist Reader]

15 May, by Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in Adult Readers, Biography, Canadian, Cuban, Cuban American, European, Fiction, Graphic Title/Manga/Manwha, Jewish, Korean, Latin American, Lists, Memoir, Native American/First Nations/Indigenous Peoples, Nonfiction, Repost, Young Adult Readers

Banned Book Club by Kim Hyun Sook with Ryan Estrada, illustrated by Ko Hyung-Ju Busan-based wife-and-husband team Kim and Estrada mine Kim’s young adult experiences to expose a chilling period of Korean history so antithetical to the globally addictive entertainment of K-dramas and K-pop currently synonymous...

Something That May Shock and Discredit You by Daniel Mallory Ortberg [in Booklist]

30 Apr, by Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in Adult Readers, Audio, Memoir, Nonethnic-specific, Nonfiction, Repost

“Just because you have a testosterone prescription and a new sense of exhilaration doesn’t mean you have to go around setting down your life story,” Daniel Mallory Ortberg writes (and thankfully narrates), disguised as “Paul and Second Timothy: The Transmasculine Epistles.” His response to his...

Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You by Jason Reynolds and Ibram X. Kendi [in Booklist]

19 Apr, by Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in Audio, Black/African American, Middle Grade Readers, Nonfiction, Repost, Young Adult Readers

*STARRED REVIEW The rest of that subtitle goes “A Remix of the National Book Award-winning Stamped from the Beginning,” with the keyword being Remix, thanks to Jason Reynolds’ (Long Way Down) remarkable synthesizing of Ibram X. Kendi’s 600-page, 19-plus-hour original. Kendi reads his introduction, lauding Reynolds’ superb...

Five More to Go: Cho Nam-Joo’s Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982 [in The Booklist Reader]

17 Apr, by Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in Adult Readers, British, Canadian, Chinese, Chinese American, Fiction, Japanese, Korean, Memoir, Nonfiction, Repost, Translation, Young Adult Readers

Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982 by Cho Nam-Joo and translated by Jamie Chang Cho’s narrative is part bildungsroman and part Wikipedia entry. She opens with “August, 2015,” immediately divulging the fragile mental state of her titular Kim Jiyoung, who now as a wife and mother has...

Oil by Jonah Winter, illustrated by Jeanette Winter [in Shelf Awareness]

14 Apr, by Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in Children/Picture Books, Nonethnic-specific, Nonfiction, Repost

Three decades after the Exxon Valdez ran aground on March 24, 1989, in Alaska's Prince William Sound, author Jonah Winter (Thurgood) and his author/illustrator mother, Jeanette Winter (Malala/Iqbal), present the environmental catastrophe in a straightforward manner ideal for younger audiences. With a similar display of transparency...

Year of the Rabbit by Tian Veasna, translated by Helge Dascher [in Booklist]

26 Mar, by Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in Adult Readers, Cambodian, European, Graphic Title/Manga/Manwha, Memoir, Nonfiction, Repost, Southeast Asian, Translation, Young Adult Readers

*STARRED REVIEW The U.S.’s April, 1975, withdrawal from Vietnam enabled the so-called Vietnam War to spread into Laos and Cambodia, where Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge regime stormed Phnom Penh and dispersed its inhabitants – mostly to brutal labor camps – eliminating 1.7 to 2 million Cambodians....

Last Boat Out of Shanghai by Helen Zia + Author Interview [in Bloom]

10 Mar, by Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in Adult Readers, Author Interview/Profile, Chinese, Chinese American, Nonfiction, Repost

“We have to learn from history and stop repeating its mistakes” As the child of two Chinese refugees, Helen Zia can personally speak to the effects of displacement, separation, adaptation, and reinvention. In her memorable career as activist/journalist/writer/Asian American icon, Zia turns inward for the first time in...

Tightrope: Americans Reaching for Hope by Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn [in Booklist]

06 Mar, by Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in Adult Readers, Audio, Chinese American, Nonethnic-specific, Nonfiction, Repost

After successfully reporting on global hot spots, mostly in Asia, the Pulitzer Prized, bestselling power couple Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn (Half the Sky, 2008) turn westward to Kristof’s hometown, Yamhill, Oregon, a rural community where a quarter of Kristof’s Number 6 school bus...

A Map Is Only One Story: Twenty Writers on Immigration, Family, and the Meaning of Home edited by Nicole Chung and Mensah Demary [in Shelf Awareness]

26 Feb, by Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in Adult Readers, African, Arab American, Australian, Black/African American, Canadian, Caribbean American, Chinese American, European, Indian American, Latina/o/x, Memoir, Nonfiction, Persian American, Repost, Southeast Asian American

The title originates in poet Jamila Osman's essay, "A Map of Lost Things": "A map is only one story," writes the Canadian-born daughter of Somali immigrants who now lives in Portland, Ore. "It is not the most important story. The most important story is the...

BookDragon Nonfiction