Elyse Graham’s thrilling history of how scholars and librarians helped the U.S. outsmart the Nazis is a pulpy delight.

Lifestyles, Nonfiction, Social Science

Eerie Legends

Bold, offbeat illustrations by Ricardo Diseño lead the way in the spooky-fun Eerie Legends.

Essays, Nature, Nonfiction

This Is How a Robin Drinks

Naturalist Joanna Brichetto uncovers the beauty of urban landscapes in her wonder-inducing debut, This Is How a Robin Drinks.

All Nonfiction Coverage

Filter by genre

The politics of a lasting marriage

by Amy Scribner

One of the unlikeliest marriages in American history—between a staunch conservative and a diehard liberal—is still going strong after 20 years.

American History, Literature

Literature American History

A slice of 20th century life in literature

Review by Anne Bartlett

by Anne Bartlett

When The Great Gatsby was published in 1925, it got a decidedly tepid reception. Reviews were mixed, sales were deeply disappointing. F. Scott Fitzgerald just couldn’t get it together to write anything serious, some critics said. The book seemed too ephemeral to many readers—ripped from the headlines, like an episode of “Law and Order” today.

Of course, opinion has changed, and we now see Gatsby as a timeless classic. To Americans educated on the symbolism of the green light on the dock, the early response seems mysterious. But, as literary historian Sarah Churchwell explains in her fascinating Careless People: Murder, Mayhem and the Invention of The Great Gatsby, it really wasn’t.

Gatsby was actually much more rooted in its contemporary scene than we remember. Fitzgerald got his ideas for the novel in a particular time and place: New York City and environs in late 1922, when he and wife Zelda were very young, very famous and usually drunk out of their minds. The self-destructive tendencies that soon destroyed them were already sadly in evidence.

Churchwell guides us through the formation of Fitzgerald’s Gatsby ideas, as much as it can be recreated, by following the couple’s lives during that time, and blending their story with what was going on around them. Fitzgerald himself noted a number of the influences, in a terse outline he wrote years later. But Churchwell also takes particular interest in the then-notorious Hall-Mills double murder in New Jersey.

What a murder it was: An adulterous couple, a minister and a choir singer, were found slain under a lover’s lane apple tree. The minister’s wife was rich; the choir singer’s husband was a janitor; a weird person known as “the Pig Woman” claimed to have seen the crime. New Jersey authorities so botched the case that it was never solved (though Churchwell pretty clearly has her own suspect.)

Fitzgerald only mentioned it once in an interview, but Churchwell makes a good case that it subtly underlies Gatsby. Think about it: A downmarket Madame Bovary has an affair with an upper class guy and ends up dead. Her husband is a hapless working-class stiff. Sound anything like Myrtle, Tom and George from Gatsby?

As Churchwell emphasizes, Myrtle’s death is not the Hall-Mills case any more than newspaperman Bayard Swope’s parties are Gatsby’s parties or Gatsby is a bootlegger named Gerlach. Fitzgerald was an artist, not a writer of romans a clef. But Churchwell has produced an intriguing glimpse into how his mind worked, as he mined the Jazz Age innovations that still shape our world.

Henry’s journey to Walden Pond

by Catherine Hollis

Wild, irregular and free, Henry Thoreau cut a distinctive figure in 19th-century Concord, Massachusetts, whether carving “dithyrambic dances” on ice skates with Nathaniel and Sophia Hawthorne or impressing Ralph Waldo Emerson with his “comic simplicity.” More at home in the woods than in society, Thoreau began the first volume of his celebrated journals with a simple word that also functioned as his motto: solitude.

Memoir, Nonfiction

Nonfiction Memoir

Missing mom

Review by Alice Cary

by Alice Cary

Cheryl Strayed wrote about how the death of her mother changed her life in the best-selling Wild. In a similar and yet very different vein, Kelly Corrigan writes about the effects of her mom’s presence in a wonderful new memoir, Glitter and Glue.

In an earlier book, The Middle Place, Corrigan paid tribute to her larger-than-life father, “Greenie.” In contrast to her optimistic cheerleader of a father, Corrigan’s mother has always been a practical, worrying realist. As this steadfast woman once explained to her daughter, “Your father’s the glitter but I’m the glue.”

Corrigan remembers as a child longing for a more lively, upbeat mom, but over the years, she’s come to realize what an essential and anchoring influence this glue has been, especially now that she’s a mother herself.

Corrigan first began truly appreciating her mother in 1992, when she ran out of money during an after-college backpacking trip around the world. She ended up as a nanny for John Tanner, an Australian widower with two children: 7-year-old Milly and 5-year-old Martin. There was also a handsome stepson in his early 20s named Evan, who adds a romantic interest to Corrigan’s Down Under adventure.

As Corrigan takes on a motherly role for the Tanner children, she constantly thinks about their late mother, a cancer victim, as she gains new insight into the challenges her own mother faced raising Corrigan and her two brothers. As she eloquently explains: “God knows, every day I spend with the Tanners, I feel like I’m opening a tiny flap on one of those advent calendars we used to hang in the kitchen every December 1, except instead of revealing Mary and Joseph and baby Jesus, it’s my mother. I can’t see all of her yet, but window by window, she is emerging.”

Young Corrigan set out on her journey in search of adventure, but along the way learned that many of life’s greatest rewards occur during everyday moments at home. And while this is indeed a “quiet” book in contrast to Strayed’s wild exploits, Glitter and Glue is both riveting and highly readable. Framed by a tight structure and compelling writing, this memoir is refreshingly non-dysfunctional.

The pleasures and perils of parenting today

by Kelly Blewett

What are the effects of children on their parents? Academics have long studied the question, and most readers have some back-of-the-hand knowledge of the subject. But rarely have those two groups been in conversation—until now. Jennifer Senior successfully connects a barrage of scholarship with the real experiences of moms and dads, and the resulting book, All Joy and No Fun: The Paradox of Modern Parenthood, is completely fascinating.

Environment, Nonfiction

Nonfiction Environment

A terrifying glimpse of the future

Review by Alden Mudge

by Alden Mudge

Few writers engage readers in thinking about the meaning of scientific discoveries as well as Elizabeth Kolbert, a staff writer at The New Yorker. Kolbert’s enviable talents, her wit and intelligence, the clarity of her prose, are on full display in The Sixth Extinction, a fascinating and alarming book that examines mass extinctions of life forms, past and present.

The very idea of species extinction is relatively recent. It “finally emerged as a concept, probably not coincidentally, in revolutionary France,” Kolbert writes in an early chapter about the discovery of bones of the American mastodon. Since then, naturalists and scientists have debated the mechanism of mass extinction—do species evolve, so to speak, into extinction, or do they disappear rapidly, catastrophically? (The answer, Kolbert writes with customary wit, is that “as in Tolstoy, every extinction event appears to be unhappy—and fatally so—in its own way.”)

In the first half of her book, Kolbert explores these scientific debates by looking at five previous mass extinctions, times when “conditions change so drastically or so suddenly (or so drastically and so suddenly) that evolutionary history counts for little.” Her strategy here and throughout the book is to focus on an emblematic species—the great auk, for example—and build a layered narrative about each mass extinction event.

In the second half of the book, Kolbert focuses on threatened but not-yet-extinct species to make her most telling point: that humans have become a—perhaps the—force of nature, capable of changing the world “faster than species can adapt.”

What our massively disruptive power means, we cannot fully know. But, as Kolbert writes at the end of the book, “Among the many lessons that emerge from the geologic record, perhaps the most sobering is that in life, as in mutual funds, past performance is no guarantee of future results.”

The Sixth Extinction is a must-read for anyone concerned in any way, shape or form about the future of life on planet Earth.

Rejecting religion, finding faith in herself

by Henry L. Carrigan Jr.

Leah Vincent is a good girl who loves her rabbi father. In her Yeshivish community—a sect within ultra-Orthodox Judaism—she’s a girl “who would never sneak a kosher candy bar that did not carry the extra strict cholov Yisroel certification.”

American History, History, Nonfiction

Nonfiction History American History

A presidential posse

Review by Roger Bishop

by Roger Bishop

At the time of his death, Abraham Lincoln was immensely popular with the Northern public. The country’s political elite, however, regarded him as a good country lawyer ill-suited to deal with the heavy responsibilities of a wartime presidency. Influential writers and politicians of all stripes blamed him for a series of political blunders.

Early in their tenure as President Lincoln’s private secretaries, John Nicolay and John Hay began to plan for a joint biography of their boss. Lincoln’s assassination and Nicolay and Hay’s service in diplomatic positions for the next five years put the idea on hold, but it was not forgotten. When the two men did complete their work, in 10 volumes, the Lincoln they wrote about is the one we know today. That is to say, he was the Great Emancipator, the brilliant political tactician, the military genius, the greatest orator in American history.

Joshua Zeitz tells the story of their deliberate work of historical creation, grounded in evidence and fact, in his superb Lincoln’s Boys: John Hay, John Nicolay, and the War for Lincoln’s Image. “The boys,” as Lincoln called them (both were in their 20s at the time) knew him as president more intimately than anyone outside his family. They lived in the White House and worked seven days a week.

Zeitz emphasizes that Hay and Nicolay were quite different personalities. Nicolay had been deeply involved in politics and was a Lincoln loyalist well before 1860. Hay, who had many other interests, drifted into politics and developed a growing admiration for the president during the White House years.

Nicolay and Hay spent 15 years researching and writing their multi-volume biography. One of the highlights of Lincoln’s Boys is to show how their views on slavery evolved over time. Their book emphasizes that the Civil War was rooted in the moral offense of slavery, a view they did not hold in 1861, or even as late as 1865.

This is a fascinating and extremely well-written account of the central role played by Lincoln’s private secretaries in determining how the 16th president would be regarded by future generations.

The art of losing

by Heather Seggel

The Up Side of Down: Why Failing Well Is the Key to Success is true to its title, flipping an entrenched view of success on its ear. Author Megan McArdle argues for the value of failure, not just in business but law enforcement, job hunting, even love. Writers like to toss around the Samuel Beckett advice to “fail better,” but what does that mean in practice?

Social Science

Social Science

Serving justice in Kosovo

Review by bookpagedev

by Edward Morris

In 2001, Philip Kearney took a leave of absence from his job as a district attorney in San Francisco to serve as a war crimes prosecutor for the United Nations in Kosovo. Although he knew next to nothing about international laws of war or the way they manifested themselves within the diverse legal systems of other countries, his sense of adventure led him to accept the assignment—albeit with some trepidation for his own safety. He arrived in Pristina, a bleak and dangerous city where the animosities between Kosovo’s Albanians and Serbians were still explosive and such justice as there was tended to be frontier justice. The UN was there to bring order, openness and fairness to judicial proceedings. It was, as Kearney recounts in Under the Blue Flag, the most rigorous kind of on-the-job training.

Complicated cases were dropped in his lap at the last minute. He had to work through translators and under the protection of armed bodyguards. Moreover, he was left to conduct his own investigations with only a minimum of support personnel. The courtroom practices gave him much less latitude than American courts to aggressively prosecute cases.

Despite these setbacks, Kearney soon became obsessed with seeing justice done. His passion grew in no small part from face-to-face contacts with tragic victims—women sold into sex slavery, broken men who had survived brutal prison camps, survivors of villages virtually eradicated by ethnic cleansing. After his six-month term ended, Kearney was so impassioned by his cause that he enlisted for another term, a decision that both imperiled his regular job and further strained his marriage.â€©Without being didactic, Kearney inserts enough history into his narrative to clarify the fiendishly complex Kosovo situation to a degree that news stories seldom do. The chief value of this book, however, is not its specificity, but its demonstration that without a transparent, balanced and politically impervious legal system there can be no hope for justice.

Edward Morris writes from Nashville.

Making waves in the Roaring ’20s

by Catherine Hollis

Memoir, Nonfiction

Nonfiction Memoir

What death teaches us about life

Review by John T. Slania

by John T. Slania

David R. Dow has spent his life dealing with death. He is an attorney who specializes in death penalty issues as a professor at the University of Houston Law Center. He also founded the Texas Innocence Network, which has represented more than 100 death row inmates. Dow picked a good place to practice: Texas has long been the top state for executions.

When you spend your time filing court appeals and clemency petitions for death row inmates—and almost always losing—you learn to embrace life. Things I’ve Learned From Dying, Dow’s latest book, is a guidebook for living life to the fullest. Dow likes to drink, smoke cigars and kayak when the Gulf Coast waves kick up in Galveston. He also embraces the love of his wife, Katya, his son, Lincoln, and their dog, Winona.

Witnessing the execution of a steady stream of clients also has a way of hardening you to death, Dow writes. But the author’s perspective on death suddenly changes when his father-in-law, Peter, is diagnosed with cancer. Meanwhile, Winona, a dog that has been at Dow’s side for almost 13 years, suddenly becomes ill. At the same time, Dow is filing appeals to stop the execution of Eddie Waterman, who was convicted of shooting a man during a home burglary.

Dow lends his perspective on these three lives, and death suddenly evolves from being purely professional to profoundly personal. Dow is fond of his father-in-law, Peter, with whom he has spent countless hours kayaking and hiking. And the sorrow experienced by Dow’s wife makes Peter’s deteriorating condition even more painful. Dow admits that Winona’s declining health is even more heart-wrenching because she has always been at his side, and she is protective of his son. The sadness experienced by 8-year-old Lincoln makes Winona’s downslide more difficult. Conversely, Dow feels little sympathy toward the death row inmate. Ironically, the convict’s fate is the only one that Dow has any opportunity to change.

Things I’ve Learned From Dying would seem like a depressing book to read. But Dow’s sardonic, yet humorous writing softens the edges. And Dow is a gifted author, writing in short, staccato sentences that keep the prose moving with rhythm and pace. Indeed, Things I’ve Learned From Dying really is a book about life, and how one man who deals with death learns to appreciate living.

Want more BookPage?

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

Trending Nonfiction

Nonfiction Politics Memoir

How to Stand Up to a Dictator

Maria Ressa

By Sarojini Seupersad

Maria Ressa’s book is a political history of the Philippines and an intimate memoir, but it’s also a warning to democracies everywhere: Authoritarianism is a threat to us all.