Instagram Facebook X-twitter Linkedin
Science Fiction & FantasyNonfictionFictionSocial ScienceLiterary FictionLifestylesHorrorHistoryHistorical FictionGraphic Novels & ComicsFantasyCultural HistoryCultural CriticismArts & Culture

What to read this Halloween, based on your ideal spooky activity

Whether you’re a homebody or a thrill-hunter, we’ve got a seasonal, spine-tingling read for you.
Whether you’re a homebody or a thrill-hunter, we’ve got a seasonal, spine-tingling read for you.
NonfictionLifestylesCookbooks

Bodega Bakes

In the personable Bodega Bakes, pastry chef Paola Velez presents just that: sweets that can be made solely from the ingredients found at a corner store.
In the personable Bodega Bakes, pastry chef Paola Velez presents just that: sweets that can be made solely from the ingredients found at a corner store.
Previous
Next

All Nonfiction Coverage

Filter by genre
NonfictionHumorEssays

The Wreckage of My Presence

Review by Linda M. Castellitto

Casey Wilson’s The Wreckage of My Presence kicks off with an essay that zigzags from archly funny to matter-of-fact to poignant and back again, nicely setting the tone for the 20 essays that follow. In “Bed Person,” Wilson explains that she “wants to recline at all times,” whether in Pilates class, at parties or in a movie theater. She and her husband routinely eat dinner in bed, and baths are a regular part of her routine. “I am simply a person of comfort and excess,” Wilson writes, which she learned from her parents, an intelligent and eccentric duo prone to displaying big emotions in ways that made her feel humiliated or exhilarated, sometimes simultaneously.

It was devastating when Wilson’s beloved mother died suddenly at 54, not least of all because her passing came at a time of great professional and personal change for Wilson, who’d just left “Saturday Night Live” and was newly cast in the show “Happy Endings.” Overwhelmed, she found solace in watching “The Real Housewives” of various cities. The reality TV franchise became an emotional and career-augmenting lifeline: Wilson's obsession helped her to reckon with her grief, and she now co-hosts the beloved Housewives podcast “Bitch Sesh.”

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Summer reading 2021: 9 books to soak in this season

Fans who want more deets about “Happy Endings” will enjoy Wilson’s behind-the-scenes tidbits about the show and its stars. She also provides a list of amusingly pointed don’ts in “People Don’t Know How to Act” (e.g., “don’t not know if you aren’t funny”), details her fascination with Scientology in “Flyentology” and shares a tear-jerkingly lovely Louie Anderson story in “Cool Girl.”

Throughout, Wilson is forthright about everything from her romantic regrets to her experiences with depression and anxiety. She’s successful in many arenas (screenwriting, comedy, movies, TV, podcasting) but views herself as a work in progress, whether as a mother of two, wife, colleague or friend. Her voice in The Wreckage of My Presence is funny and bold, occasionally manic or melancholy, and always hilarious and heartfelt. Fans will turn the last page wanting more.

The Wreckage of My Presence is funny and bold, occasionally manic or melancholy, and always hilarious and heartfelt. Fans will turn the last page wanting more.
NonfictionBiographyAnimals

The Ride of Her Life

Review by Alice Cary

Road trip sagas can be unforgettable, whether it’s Jack Kerouac crossing the country in On the Road or Cheryl Strayed hitting the trail in Wild. That’s definitely the case with Annie Wilkins, a 63-year-old widow from Maine who made a bold decision when life handed her way too many lemons. In 1954, she suddenly found herself with no money, home or family, and her doctor had just told her she had only two years to live. 

Determined not to become a charity case, Wilkins remembered that her mother had always dreamed of saddling a horse and heading to California to see the Pacific Ocean. So, improbable as this sounds, that’s what Wilkins decided to do—never mind the fact that she had no horse and hadn’t even sat on one in at least 30 years. Elizabeth Letts tells Wilkins’ amazing story in The Ride of Her Life: The True Story of a Woman, Her Horse, and Their Last-Chance Journey Across America, drawing on Wilkins’ extensive diaries, postcards and more.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Elizabeth Letts discovered the freedom of the open road—in the midst of lockdown.

Wilkins is an extraordinary woman with an abundance of grit and wit—imagine Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge, or Frances McDormand’s character in Nomadland. She managed to buy a horse named Tarzan and set out with her beloved mutt, Depeche Toi—French for “hurry up,” which is something this unusual trio certainly couldn’t do. Wilkins wore layers of men’s clothing, had no map or flashlight, and only kept about 32 bucks in her pocket. Undaunted, she wrote in her diary, “I go forth as a tramp of fate among strangers.”

Wilkins was repeatedly hospitalized and encountered all sorts of weather and hardships, but she never gave up. Sometimes she slept in stables with Tarzan, and she often spent nights in jail cells—a somewhat common occurrence for thrifty travelers at the time. However, she also became famous as reporters shared her story, and many communities and households began to excitedly await her arrival. They showed her endless hospitality, putting her up in their homes and sometimes in fancy hotels. As Letts writes, “That was when Annie realized she wasn’t just riding for herself—she could carry other people’s hopes and dreams along with her.”

This is a feel-good story in every way, and Letts keeps the momentum lively, sprinkling in interesting historical tidbits that enrich the drama. The Ride of Her Life is an altogether quirky, inspiring journey that’s not to be missed.

This is a feel-good story in every way, and Elizabeth Letts keeps the momentum lively, sprinkling in interesting historical tidbits that enrich the drama.
NonfictionNatureAnimals

The Blue Wonder

Review by Henry L. Carrigan Jr.

Although oceans cover over two-thirds of our planet’s surface, we’ve spent more time and money probing the deep blue of the stratosphere than we have diving into the waters that lap at our shores, to our detriment. With a passionate love for and fervent desire to educate us about the depth of the ocean’s resources, as well as about our lack of understanding and mismanagement of them, Frauke Bagusche’s captivating The Blue Wonder: Why the Sea Glows, Fish Sing, and Other Astonishing Insights From the Ocean plunges us into the mysteries of the ocean. Along the way, Bagusche shares stories of the fascinating creatures that dwell there, as well as the increasing dangers the oceans face from human misuse.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Summer reading 2021: 9 books to soak in this season

As Bagusche points out, many of us only see the ocean from the sands of a beach and therefore never discover the teeming life and unbelievable animals that swim beneath that surface. Guiding readers below the waves, Bagusche introduces them to the microplankton that move, often in phosphorescent schools, throughout the waters, providing food for animals from shrimp to blue whales. She takes us on a journey to the coral reefs, the nurseries of the sea, where we meet clown mantis shrimp and learn about the appendages they develop to help them adapt to the reefs. We also learn why some seas taste saltier than others and about the difficult but wondrous journey of sea turtles, the singing of whales and the giant squids and isopods that are the denizens of the bathysphere, the ocean’s deepest and darkest waters.

The Blue Wonder takes its place alongside Carl Safina’s Song for the Blue Ocean in revealing the marvelous marine world and the urgent need to preserve a dazzling ecosystem we too often neglect.

With a passionate love for the ocean, Frauke Bagusche plunges readers into the dazzling mysteries of the sea.

Super Fly

From wound-healing maggots to flies that helped overturn wrongful convictions, there’s much to learn about the heroism of these tiny creatures.
NonfictionMemoirFamily & Relationships

Notes on Grief

Review by Sarojini Seupersad

What is the shape of grief? For writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, grief takes the shape of her father’s absence: the hole he left behind when, in the summer of 2020, he suddenly died of kidney failure. In her slim memoir, Notes on Grief, Adichie pays homage to her father’s remarkable life while observing her own surprising emotions as she moves through the messy process of bereavement, completely unprepared. She writes, “How is it that the world keeps going, breathing in and out unchanged, while in my soul there is a permanent scattering?”

By any measure, James Nwoye Adichie lived an extraordinary life. The first professor of statistics in Nigeria, he also lived through the Biafran War and had his books burned by soldiers. He was an honorable and principled man who was naturally funny. When he visited Adichie at Yale, she asked him if he would like some pomegranate juice, and his response was, “No thank you, whatever that is.”

Adiche lovingly describes such details about her father, from his ease with humor to his discomfort with injustice. Upon learning of a local billionaire’s desire to take over ancestral land in their Nigerian town, he immediately looked into ways to stop him. But what is most memorable in this tribute is Adichie’s father’s love for his family and their enduring love for him. Adichie simply calls him “the loveliest man.”

Processing grief is difficult enough, but Adiche learned of her father’s death in Nigeria while she was home in the U.S. during the COVID-19 pandemic. One day, they were having family Zoom calls; the next, he was gone. Arrangements had to be made through phone calls and Zoom, and the funeral was postponed for months because the Nigerian airports were closed. Honoring Igbo traditions and arranging a funeral with her siblings during a worldwide pandemic was enough to make Adichie come undone. The hole her father left behind began to fill with guilt, denial, loneliness, panic and eventually bottomless rage.

A raw, moving account of mourning and loss, Adichie’s memoir reminds us there is no right or wrong way to grieve and that celebrating life every day is the best way to honor our loved ones.

In her slim memoir, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie pays homage to her father’s remarkable life while observing her own surprising grief.

Napoleon

Ruth Scurr’s Napoleon gives intriguing and novel insight into a man about whom we thought everything had already been said.
NonfictionMemoirFamily & Relationships

Little and Often

Review by Sarah McCraw Crow

Trent Preszler’s memoir, Little and Often, opens with a phone call. It’s from his dad, Leon, from whom Trent has been estranged for years, inviting him to come home to South Dakota for Thanksgiving. At 37, Trent is at a high point professionally. He’s the CEO of a Long Island vineyard, he mingles with celebrities and his house has an idyllic view of Peconic Bay. But his personal life tells a different story: Divorced after a brief marriage, he’s working too much, drinking too much and has distanced himself from his friends.

As Trent makes the long drive home, he contemplates his years growing up in flyover country. His parents eked out a marginal existence raising cattle on a South Dakota ranch, 145 miles from the nearest McDonald’s. Leon was always the strong one, a former rodeo champion whose favorite book of the Bible was Job. Long ago, Leon made it clear that he didn’t accept Trent’s sexuality as a gay man—but during this visit, Leon surprises Trent by asking about his ex. Not long after this, Leon dies from cancer, and Trent loses his chance to reconnect.

Leon has left Trent two items, his toolbox and a taxidermied duck. As he ponders his dad’s tools, Trent makes an odd decision: He will build a canoe. The remainder of the memoir details Trent’s quixotic project as he teaches himself about different kinds of wood, power-tool skills and the patience to fail and try again. “Little and often makes much,” he remembers his dad saying, coaching teenage Trent through a difficult project. Throughout the book, the narrative returns to such father-son episodes, evoking ranch life with its biblical weather, rattlesnakes, long horseback rides, cattle auctions and rodeos.

The writing in Little and Often is lucid and sometimes lyrical, building on unexpected connections, such as the geological links between South Dakota and Long Island. As the narrative walks the reader through the process of hand-building a canoe, we see Trent reconsidering his parents’ lives and his own, and finding calm and trust in himself.

This lucid, lyrical memoir recalls father-son episodes in South Dakota, with its biblical weather, rattlesnakes, long horseback rides and rodeos.

King Richard

King Richard is an engrossing account of Richard Nixon’s downfall and a valuable addition to the literature of this dramatic era in American political history.
NonfictionBlack HistoryAmerican History

How the Word Is Passed

Review by Alden Mudge

Clint Smith's gifts as both a poet and a scholar make How the Word Is Passed a richly provocative read about places where the story of American slavery lives on. This vital book originated in poetic meditations on the memorials of the Confederacy after Smith’s hometown of New Orleans removed many of those statues in 2017.

Smith began visiting some of the sites where enslaved people once lived and worked. He took the guided tour at Monticello that focuses on Jefferson’s relationship to slavery. He traveled to New York City to visit the African Burial Ground National Monument. He toured Louisiana’s notorious state prison at Angola, where formerly enslaved people were often held on the flimsiest of charges and forced to labor in its vast agricultural fields as part of the post-Reconstruction effort “to funnel Black people into the convict leasing system.”

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: From a Louisiana native to a D.C. high school teacher to a Harvard Ph.D. candidate to a staff writer for The Atlantic—Clint Smith shares the journey that led to his brilliant nonfiction debut.

At each stop, Smith’s vivid descriptions of the landscape and his response to the site give readers a visceral sense of place. He also reports on his conversations with tour guides, employees and other visitors. At Monticello, one person shares her journey of learning and unlearning history. It’s quite moving.

But at other locations, the guides and visitors are less willing to acknowledge slavery’s continuing impact on our country or the intentional romanticization of the Confederacy. At Angola, there’s almost no acknowledgment that the land was worked by enslaved people as a plantation before it was converted into a state prison for mostly Black prisoners. The reader feels “the prickled heat” Smith experiences as the only Black person attending a Memorial Day event hosted by the Sons of Confederate Veterans at Blandford Cemetery in Petersburg, Virginia. There, Smith is an open, polite, somewhat nervous listener. Even in print, he doesn’t call out the people he speaks with. But ever the educator and poet, he lets the Confederate states’ own avowals destroy the animating myth of the Lost Cause.

Smith has an appreciation of nuance. He wields few cudgels here. And yet, How the Word Is Passed succeeds in making the essential distinction between history and nostalgia.

Clint Smith's gifts as both a poet and a scholar make How the Word Is Passed a richly provocative read.

Want more BookPage?

Stay on top of new releases: Sign up for our newsletter to receive reading recommendations in your favorite genres.

Sign up now

Trending Nonfiction

All Nonfiction

Author Interviews

More Interviews

Recent Features

All Features