Instagram Facebook X-twitter Linkedin
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.
NonfictionPhotographyLifestylesAnimals

Faithful Unto Death

Faithful Unto Death is a thoughtful investigation into the bonds of pets and their owners that chronicles the ways in which we grieve and remember the animals we love.
Faithful Unto Death is a thoughtful investigation into the bonds of pets and their owners that chronicles the ways in which we grieve and remember the animals we love.
Previous
Next

All Nonfiction Coverage

Filter by genre

Hope in the ashes

Poet Karen Auvinen’s memoir, Rough Beauty, opens on a beautiful March morning, when Auvinen, out delivering the mail on her rural Colorado route, notices the deep blue of the sky, the signs of early spring and smoke from a fire—a fire that turns out to be her own house burning. She’d recently settled outside the Rocky Mountain town of Jamestown, but now, Auvinen can only watch as firefighters work to contain the fire, which destroys everything she owns.

NonfictionHistory

Life on the border

Review by Deborah Hopkinson

In 2010, historian and author Graham Robb and his wife found themselves at the railway station in Carlisle, in the far northwest part of England near the Scottish border. They had just purchased a house in the area. But the move didn’t herald long, exploratory car trips. Instead, the couple brought only their bicycles.

On their journeys, they meet people like Wattie Blakey, an elderly mole catcher, just one of the many characters—some from history—who spring to life in Robb’s new book about a desolate border tract known as the Debatable Land, the oldest territorial division in Great Britain.

While the Debatable Land itself is only 13 miles long, the region is a site of legend, conflicts, battles and mystery. In digging up its history, Robb covers a large swath of time. But in true cyclist fashion, the telling is not rushed but leisurely: The author stops to show us points of interest and sights along the way. We learn about the terrain, the wind and the seasons as we accompany Robb on research trips by bicycle, or even as he passes a band of Scottish sheep while scrunching through the snow to his mailbox. This intimate portrait of the land helps us imagine its colorful past of rebellious clans and border raiders.

In this way, readers become part of this erudite historian’s own process of discovery. Robb doesn’t end his exploration in the distant past. Instead, he ventures into the 21st century, when the Brexit vote has raised the possibility of a new referendum on Scottish independence. For Anglophiles, history lovers and, yes, cyclists, The Debatable Land is a journey worth taking.

 

This article was originally published in the June 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

In 2010, historian and author Graham Robb and his wife found themselves at the railway station in Carlisle, in the far northwest part of England near the Scottish border. They had just purchased a house in the area. But the move didn’t herald long, exploratory car trips. Instead, the couple brought only their bicycles.

Meditations on seeds planted and green thumbs

You need not be a devoted gardener to enjoy this slim, lovely volume from the consistently superb Penelope Lively. Life in the Garden is an ode to “chocolate earth in our nails,” as Virginia Woolf said. Lively has been a voracious gardener her entire adult life, and it shows in her nearly encyclopedic knowledge of gardening.

NonfictionHistoryAmerican History

The human stories behind a natural disaster

Review by Priscilla Kipp

Al Roker, co-host and weather anchor of NBC’s “Today,” vividly re-creates the tragedy of the Johnstown Flood in Ruthless Tide. In what he calls an “unnatural disaster,” 20 million tons of water hurtled past a failing dam and into a Pennsylvania valley on the afternoon of May 31, 1889, tossing animals and trees, crushing houses and killing 2,209 men, women and children. By supplying plenty of detail, Roker brings the reader so deeply into the moment (it took about 10 seconds for most of Johnstown to be utterly destroyed) that you can almost hear the water’s roar and feel the thundering crashes as rooftops and locomotives banged into buildings ripped from their foundations.

Roker makes it clear that this disaster was created by humans. A frequent recreational retreat for wealthy members, the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club in Pennsylvania resisted any local concerns about the club’s dam, which was built to create a private lake. Stocking the lake with premium fish was more important than relieving water flow. Landscapes were deforested in the name of industry, but without trees, the hillsides had no resistance against flooding. Worries were ignored, warnings went unheeded, and bad decisions trumped the advice of those who knew better.

Today, one may think we are environmentally aware enough to ensure that such a catastrophe could never happen again. But one must ask if any lessons have been learned. Consider, for example, the levees and Hurricane Katrina—and remember the Johnstown Flood.

 

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our Q&A with Al Roker about Ruthless Tide.

This article was originally published in the June 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Al Roker, co-host and weather anchor of NBC’s “Today,” vividly re-creates the tragedy of the Johnstown Flood in Ruthless Tide. In what he calls an “unnatural disaster,” 20 million tons of water hurtled past a failing dam and into a Pennsylvania valley on the afternoon of May 31, 1889, tossing animals and trees, crushing houses and killing 2,209 men, women and children. By supplying plenty of detail, Roker brings the reader so deeply into the moment (it took about 10 seconds for most of Johnstown to be utterly destroyed) that you can almost hear the water’s roar and feel the thundering crashes as rooftops and locomotives banged into buildings ripped from their foundations.

Under the wheels of “progress”

The grim story Eliza Griswold tells in Amity and Prosperity will seem familiar to readers who know the tale of New York’s Love Canal or have read Jonathan Harr’s prize-winning book A Civil Action. Griswold’s penetrating story explores the consequences of our nation’s ill-advised zeal for exploiting abundant natural resources and features rapacious corporations, inept—if not complicit—regulators and hapless victims in a small Pennsylvania town. Hapless, that is, until they hire an unlikely husband-and-wife legal team to help them seek justice.

NonfictionBiography

The mother of monsters

Review by Deborah Mason

The cultural impact of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is undeniably huge. It’s difficult to think of a book that has been adapted, copied or parodied more than this 1818 novel. But if you ask anyone about its author, you are likely to receive a blank stare. Some might be able to identify her as the wife of Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, but little else is generally known about the young, almost girlish author who took up Lord Byron’s challenge to “write a ghost story” during literary history’s most consequential slumber party.

In Search of Mary Shelley is Fiona Sampson’s attempt to pin down this elusive woman. It’s not a conventional biography; instead of trying to reconstruct every stage of Shelley’s life, Sampson focuses on key episodes that provide essential clues to understanding the author. Each episode is like a tile in a mosaic, beautifully crafted and essential to Shelley’s complex portrait. Or, given Sampson’s status as one of England’s pre-eminent living poets, perhaps it is more apt to say that each chapter is like a stanza, resulting in a poetic exploration of one of the most influential novelists in English literature.

Wracked with guilt for causing her mother’s death, who died shortly after giving birth to her, rejected by her adored father upon his second marriage and passionately in love with the feckless and narcissistic Percy Shelley, Mary Shelley was practically doomed to sacrifice her happiness, reputation and talent in service to others. She suffered the deaths of all but one of her children, the humiliation inflicted by her faithless husband and many betrayals by supposed friends. Yet she somehow managed to write Frankenstein, a novel that continues to engage and challenge readers.

Sampson’s biography illuminates a woman whose genius enabled her not only to survive but also to triumph.

 

This article was originally published in the June 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

The cultural impact of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is undeniably huge. It’s difficult to think of a book that has been adapted, copied or parodied more than this 1818 novel. But if you ask anyone about its author, you are likely to receive a blank stare. Some might be able to identify her as the wife of Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, but little else is generally known about the young, almost girlish author who took up Lord Byron’s challenge to “write a ghost story” during literary history’s most consequential slumber party.

Life’s a beach and then you die

Reading Calypso, Sedaris’ latest collection of essays, is like settling into a glorious beach vacation with the author, whose parents, siblings and longtime boyfriend, Hugh, feel like old friends to faithful readers. Family gatherings at Sedaris’ North Carolina beach house are featured frequently in this collection of 21 essays, and at the Sea Section (his chosen moniker for his beach house), games of Sorry! become delightfully vicious and the clan gets gleefully nosy when James Comey is said to be renting 12 doors down.

NonfictionHistoryAmerican History

The man who would be president

Review by Keith Herrell

It's not your father's Father of His Country at the forefront of Peter Stark's Young Washington. Think more along the lines of a rash nephew. That's because in his pre-Revolutionary War days, George Washington was anything but the placid aristocrat gazing forth from the dollar bill. He was, as Stark puts it, “a very different Washington from the one we know and hold sacred.” Young Washington is Stark's explanation of how the gap was bridged.

Stark, a historian and adventure writer, gives us plenty of both as he starts with a vivid depiction of Washington deep in the Ohio Valley wilderness, carrying a message from Virginia's colonial administrator to a French military officer. (Stark skips over Washington's boyhood, so no cherry tree is harmed in the production of this book.) It's 1753, and the British and French are jostling for supremacy in the region. Later, Washington's surprise attack on a French reconnaissance party becomes the opening salvo in the French and Indian War. He serves alongside the British, fighting rough terrain, reluctant colonial soldiers and the occasional bout of “bloody flux” (dysentery) as well as the French and their tribal allies.

Stark, at one point using 11 uncomplimentary adjectives in one sentence, doesn't sugar-coat his subject. The young colonel is vain and frequently threatens to resign his commission, and he isn't above bending the facts in letters to authorities. He also unapologetically hangs two deserters “for example's sake,” in his words. Along the way, he finds time to court wealthy widow Martha Custis while professing love for the unattainable wife of a friend. But that's just a sidelight in Young Washington. In the crucible of war, he learned to control his passion in more ways than one.

It's not your father's Father of His Country at the forefront of Peter Stark's Young Washington. Think more along the lines of a rash nephew. That's because in his pre-Revolutionary War days, George Washington was anything but the placid aristocrat gazing forth from the dollar bill. He was, as Stark puts it, “a very different Washington from the one we know and hold sacred.” Young Washington is Stark's explanation of how the gap was bridged.

The president’s man

Stuart E. Eizenstat was one of President Jimmy Carter’s closest aides. Although nominally the president’s domestic policy director, he was also involved with many other issues. He took copious, often verbatim, notes, totaling over 5,000 pages, to keep up with his workload. Those notes, combined with access to now declassified documents, over 350 interviews and his own rich insights reveal important aspects of an often underrated administration in Eizenstat’s extraordinarily detailed and compelling insider's account.
NonfictionEssays

Essays on math, genius and reality itself

Review by Deborah Mason

Let’s be clear: Jim Holt is not afraid of tackling the big questions. His 2012 book, Why Does the World Exist?: An Existential Detective Story, made that fact certain. His latest book, When Einstein Walked with Gödel: Excursions to the Edge of Thought, is a collection of essays previously published in several distinguished periodicals, including The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine and the London Review of Books. A noted American philosopher and TED talk speaker, Holt is at home whether he is discussing the history of science, the state of play in modern philosophy or the impact of quantum mechanics.

Consequently, it is no surprise that the essays in this book explore a complex array of subjects: string theory, the nature of the infinite and the infinitesimal and the impact of computers upon human intelligence, to name a few. But there are lighter moments as well, such as Holt’s essay on the overabundance of overconfidence, or the lowdown on Ava Lovelace’s self-proclaimed mathematical genius (Holt’s verdict on whether Lord Byron’s daughter was a mathematical prodigy: not so much). There are many poignant moments, too, and several of his biographical essays serve as cautionary tales—apparently, mathematical obsession can be dangerous to sanity and health.

This book does not dawdle. Holt is a complex and rigorous writer examining complex and rigorous subjects. Readers whose mathematical and analytical logic skills are a tad rusty might need to google Gödel’s incompleteness theorem or the Riemann zeta conjecture. Trust me, it’s worth the effort. As his subtitle suggests, Holt is pushing us to explore the ideas that have revolutionized how we see the world, the universe and truth itself. They are messy, complicated affairs, but Holt’s intellectual clarity and lucid writing illuminate them. These concepts are mind-boggling, literally. Like the fractals Holt writes about in “Geometrical Creatures,” these ideas are as wild and jagged as a rocky coastline, but therein lies their beauty—and their fun.

Let’s be clear: Jim Holt is not afraid of tackling the big questions. His 2012 book, Why Does the World Exist?: An Existential Detective Story, made that fact certain. His latest book, When Einstein Walked with Gödel: Excursions to the Edge of Thought, is a collection of essays previously published in several distinguished periodicals, including The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine and the London Review of Books. A noted American philosopher and TED talk speaker, Holt is at home whether he is discussing the history of science, the state of play in modern philosophy or the impact of quantum mechanics.

A wildly entertaining tale of scandal

In her previous book, How Paris Became Paris, Joan DeJean charted the transformation of Paris into a modern, alluring city. Here, DeJean, trustee professor of French at the University of Pennsylvania and author of a number of books on French literature and history, turns her attention to a tale of intrigue and finance in 18th-century France. And what a story it is!

Nonfiction

A fascinating survey of modern marvels

Review by Sarah McCraw Crow

Prolific and bestselling writer Simon Winchester (The Professor and the Madman, Krakatoa, The Map That Changed the World) returns with The Perfectionists, turning his focus to precision engineering—in a nutshell, the story of machines that make other machines. Without precision engineering, we’d have had no Industrial Revolution, no steam engines, no cars, jet airplanes, GPS or the ever-more-miniscule silicon chips inside our phones, laptops and countless other devices.

As with some of Winchester’s previous books, The Perfectionists combines social history and science. Each chapter opens with a short bit of memoir, such as an incident from Winchester’s 20s when he was a geologist on a North Sea oil rig, or a compelling anecdote, like a horrifying engine failure on a super-jumbo jet, to illustrate a larger point. Along the way, Winchester incorporates profiles of innovators both familiar and unknown, among them Thomas Jefferson, Charles Rolls and Henry Royce, and Gordon Moore, the Intel founder who in 1965 predicted that computer components would shrink by half every year, a prediction now known as Moore’s Law. The book’s complicated scientific explanations have the potential to be tedious (at least to nonengineers like me), but Winchester’s prose is engaging, describing concepts like the role of precision time-keeping in the development of GPS, and the mind-boggling set of factors that allow a jet engine to power an enormous airplane without the engine overheating and melting.

A late chapter gets a little philosophical, weighing the gains and losses that precision has brought us as Winchester delves into the history of the Seiko Watch Company in Japan, where craft and precision work side by side. But what remains with me are the stories from Winchester’s life, as well as those of the men (yes, almost all men) who measured, tinkered and persevered to build, for better or worse, our ultraprecision-driven world.

Prolific and bestselling writer Simon Winchester (The Professor and the Madman, Krakatoa, The Map That Changed the World) returns with The Perfectionists, turning his focus to precision engineering—in a nutshell, the story of machines that make other machines. Without precision engineering, we’d have had no Industrial Revolution, no steam engines, no cars, jet airplanes, GPS or the ever-more-miniscule silicon chips inside our phones, laptops and countless other devices.

The life of a beloved, troubled icon

Addiction is a catchall phrase these days, and Robin Williams, who killed himself in 2014, was certainly an alcoholic and addict off and on throughout his life, but his real cravings were emotional and psychological. His explosive comedic energy, which at times poured out as if he had plunged a needle into some secret vein of creativity, rushed him toward success just as it pushed him continually to get higher. He idolized many who admired him, but rarely felt secure in their estimation. Ultimately, his desire for laughter and critical affirmation—despite the peer and public acclaim for his work—escalated to a level that could never be fulfilled.

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