Instagram Facebook X-twitter Linkedin
NonfictionArtLifestylesArt

The Work of Art

The Work of Art is a visionary compendium of ephemera that makes visible the bridge between idea and artwork.
The Work of Art is a visionary compendium of ephemera that makes visible the bridge between idea and artwork.
NonfictionBiography

Ingenious

Richard Munson’s splendid biography of Benjamin Franklin provides an insightful view of the statesman’s lesser known accomplishments in science.
Richard Munson’s splendid biography of Benjamin Franklin provides an insightful view of the statesman’s lesser known accomplishments in science.
NonfictionLiteratureBiography

Didion and Babitz

Lili Anolik’s Didion and Babitz is a freewheeling and engaging narrative about two iconic literary rivals and their world in 1970s Los Angeles.
Lili Anolik’s Didion and Babitz is a freewheeling and engaging narrative about two iconic literary rivals and their world in 1970s Los Angeles.
Previous
Next

All Nonfiction Coverage

Filter by genre
NonfictionHistory

Friendship and survival in occupied France

Review by Elisa Muñoz

With the Arab Spring occupying much of the media lately, resistance and liberation are not far from anyone’s mind these days. Caroline Moorehead looks at the topic from a new angle in A Train in Winter, which tells the story of 231 women of the French Resistance imprisoned during the German invasion of World War II. Moorehead weaves a historically accurate narrative of women banding together for survival in the face of death and deprivation.

The women’s story begins at the start of the German invasion, with teachers, students, chemists and writers printing anti-Nazi newspapers, transporting weapons, helping Jews to safety and relaying messages of the resistance. They were young and old, from cities and villages, and all determined to save their France. This defiance led to their eventual capture by the Gestapo, bringing them together first in a fort-turned-prison outside Paris and later, in the end, at Auschwitz in 1943.

With cooperation and resourcefulness, these women kept themselves educated, informed and safe, often hiding the sickest among them and putting on plays to maintain hope, as well as to remember who they were and were determined to be again. As many of the women died or heard of relatives and friends who died, their bond strengthened. “We didn’t stop to ask ourselves whom we liked and whom we didn’t,” one woman later explained. “It wasn’t so much friendship as solidarity. We just made certain we didn’t leave anyone alone.” This solidarity is what kept some alive and made sure that this story of terror, starvation and death was told.

By using original sources and giving each woman a name, the book can occasionally make the mind spin. However, the knowledge that these were real women makes the atrocities all the more real and their identities essential. The personal interviews and archival research are woven seamlessly into the narrative, making this war chronicle unforgettable. An appendix gives the names and stories of life and death of all 231 women.

Unforgettable and riveting, A Train in Winter is not an easy read. It is, however, an essential read for those who believe—or long to believe—in the power of friendship.

With the Arab Spring occupying much of the media lately, resistance and liberation are not far from anyone’s mind these days. Caroline Moorehead looks at the topic from a new angle in A Train in Winter, which tells the story of 231 women of the…

Biography

For better or worse, near or far

Review by bookpagedev

In this era of Twitter and texting, it’s hard to imagine the marital experience of John and Abigail Adams. Separated frequently by John’s political activity–for as long as five years, when he was advancing American interests in Europe during the Revolution–they communicated only by letter. The post was erratic, to the point that they often had no idea of each other’s circumstances for months at a time. Luckily, their bond was strong–probably both cause and effect of their copious correspondence. In Abigail & John: Portrait of a Marriage historian Edith B. Gelles becomes the latest to plumb this by now well-known epistolary archive.

Abigail & John begins with Abigail Smith’s decision to marry John Adams, tracks back to the colonial origins of their families and ends with John’s death in 1826, eight years after Abigail’s demise drew 54 years of marriage to a close. In between, Gelles covers familiar moments such as Abigail’s exhortation to "Remember the Ladies!" and John’s longstanding feud and eventual reconciliation with Thomas Jefferson, but the marital bond’s strength and fruitfulness is her primary interest.

Gelles offers the marriage as a model of shared endeavor and mutual support, and her depiction is largely persuasive. Their letters reveal how each was intimately involved in the activities and decisions of the other, even across miles and oceans, and how domestic events influenced political decisions, as well as vice versa.

Despite the book’s double focus, Gelles, who has written two academic books about Abigail, betrays an evident preference for the wife. Abigail comes off as a paragon, and John sometimes suffers in comparison, though Gelles takes pains to explain away his shortcomings, albeit not always convincingly. Although the book itself suffers from occasionally plodding prose, it presents an engaging portrait of an exemplary marriage.

In this era of Twitter and texting, it's hard to imagine the marital experience of John and Abigail Adams. Separated frequently by John's political activity--for as long as five years, when he was advancing American interests in Europe during the Revolution--they communicated only by letter.…

NonfictionSports

100 years of Fenway Park

Review by Martin Brady

In Fenway 1912, veteran sportswriter and self-confessed Red Sox fanatic Glenn Stout essentially offers a blow-by-blow account of the historic season in which the Sox posted their best record ever (105-47), won the World Series, and did it all immediately after their new home, Fenway Park, had been freshly built and newly christened. While effectively dramatizing the behind-the-scenes negotiations that spurred the construction of the famous venue, Stout’s volume is mostly a rundown of the Red Sox players and their achievements in that special year, with legendary Hall of Fame outfielders Tris Speaker and Harry Hooper leading the way, not to mention the pitching triumvirate of Smoky Joe Wood, Buck O’Brien and rookie Hugh Bedient, who won 74 games among them. (Wood was an astonishing 34-5 that year, with 10 shutouts.) There are also many interesting side stories involving player-manager Jake Stahl, reserve catcher Forrest (“Hick”) Cady and other, less familiar but no less hallowed names from the Red Sox record book.

Stout’s text reflects the distinctive nature of a baseball era that included all-time greats like Walter Johnson, Ty Cobb, and Christy Mathewson and Rube Marquard of the New York Giants, the team that proved to be the Sox’s worthy foes in a tight battle for the world championship. As for the illustrious ballpark that continues to stand today, Stout relates a lot of interesting technical details via narrative, photos and architectural drawings, while setting the stage for the April 20 opening game, when 24,000 fans witnessed a 7-6 Red Sox victory over the American League’s eventual cellar-dwelling Yankees.

Stout further details the structural changes effected for the 1912 Series, which more or less fixed the park’s famously eccentric angularity from then on. Yet he doesn’t shy away from his frank assessment that modern-day fiscal policies “have priced most middle-class fans out of Fenway Park and done little to address cramped seating in the grandstands and bleachers.” The author further concludes bittersweetly that “nearly one hundred years after the first fans passed through the turnstiles, Fenway Park remains. It has been saved, but it has not, except in the most general sense, been preserved. Very little of the ballpark that opened in 1912 is still visible. What little that does remain has essentially been built over, built under and built on top of until the original design is almost unrecognizable.”

Baseball fans will surely gravitate to this volume, but Red Sox lovers will especially appreciate it, including its somewhat esoteric aspects.

In Fenway 1912, veteran sportswriter and self-confessed Red Sox fanatic Glenn Stout essentially offers a blow-by-blow account of the historic season in which the Sox posted their best record ever (105-47), won the World Series, and did it all immediately after their new home, Fenway…

Memoir

A childhood of sounds and silence


Review by bookpagedev

Imagine you are a boy growing up in Brooklyn in the 1940s. Your world is full of sound. Buses growl, subways thunder, horns honk, people talk, laugh, yell, cry. Radios blare music from open windows. Neighbors babble around you. Weekends at Coney Island fill your ears with everything from the creak and rattle of carnival rides to the endless roar of the ocean surf. Every moment of your life is overwhelmed with sound. But for your parents, every day is silent.

This was the life of Myron Uhlberg, born in 1933 to Louis and Sarah Uhlberg, both deaf since childhood. Into their silence came a boy fully capable of experiencing the sounds they could not, a boy who became a vital link to the hearing world. Enlisted at an early age to translate his parents’ sign language, the young Myron grew up within two worlds, hearing and deaf, facing challenges and responsibilities that most adults never face. But amid those challenges he still found time to be a boy, and discovered the possibilities in language that led him to success as a writer and children’s author (Dad, Jackie, and Me).

Heart-achingly beautiful, Hands of My Father is a richly textured memoir of both sight and sound, a tale of life in all its range, from the pain of prejudice to the wonder of love in a family tightly knit by the rejection of the outside world. Uhlberg skillfully mixes poignancy with humor, creating a book that brings laughter as readily as tears. Through narrative and vignettes of memory, Hands of My Father offers both a flowing story and delightful nuggets, moments of life captured and held, to be viewed and savored. Under Uhlberg’s pen, words take form, like the shapes his father scribed into the air, his hands dancing as they spoke to Myron, and through him to the world at large. By the end, Uhlberg becomes not only his father’s interpreter, but also the reader’s, translating the richness and depth of his parent’s exquisitely expressive language down into printed words. It is a message of memory, struggle and love—and it is a message worth receiving.


Howard Shirley writes from Franklin, Tennessee.

Imagine you are a boy growing up in Brooklyn in the 1940s. Your world is full of sound. Buses growl, subways thunder, horns honk, people talk, laugh, yell, cry. Radios blare music from open windows. Neighbors babble around you. Weekends at Coney Island fill your…

Sports

The great game that wasn’t so great

Review by bookpagedev

A lot of good came out of the 1979 NCAA championship game between Earvin “Magic” Johnson’s Michigan State Spartans and Larry Bird’s Indiana State Sycamores. For one thing, it kicked off the storied rivalry between the two players, one that pretty much saved the floundering NBA. And as Seth Davis writes in When March Went Mad: The Game that Transformed Basketball, the game “helped to catapult college basketball, and especially the NCAA tournament, into the national consciousness.” The great irony is that such a meaningful contest was “not a very good game,” according to Davis. Michigan State won by 11 points as the can’t-miss Bird missed almost 70 percent of his shots.

Davis, a college basketball analyst for CBS Sports and a longtime writer for Sports Illustrated, doesn’t spend a lot of time detailing the game, nor does he just revel in Magic/Bird anecdotes. This entertaining, revealing book examines two very different teams’ journeys in getting to the final. Michigan State’s head student manager, Darwin Payton, was invaluable to coach Jud Heathcote, who relied on Payton for insight on his own players. Sycamores’ coach Bill Hodges discovered that bringing an unheralded small school to national prominence did not guarantee future success.

As for the basketball legends, it’s remarkable to see them as young men. Bird may have been at ease on a basketball court, but dealing with the media throngs was hell. Not only did the former garbage man want certain aspects of his personal life kept secret—his father’s suicide, an ex-wife who filed a paternity suit—he felt inept doing interviews. Johnson, he of the smiley persona and affable nature, was always comfortable being the man; twice a week as “E.J. the Deejay,” he’d spin records at an off-campus disco.

Davis’ decision to go beyond the superstars is what makes When March Went Mad work. By highlighting the stories and thoughts of the players and staff on both teams, Davis shows that everyone contributes, especially when it comes to producing a fine piece of sports journalism.

Pete Croatto owns a deadly jump shot and a Patrick Ewing replica jersey.

A lot of good came out of the 1979 NCAA championship game between Earvin “Magic” Johnson’s Michigan State Spartans and Larry Bird’s Indiana State Sycamores. For one thing, it kicked off the storied rivalry between the two players, one that pretty much saved the floundering…

NonfictionBiography

Dickens’ path to greatness

Review by Catherine Hollis

Award-winning biographer Claire Tomalin now turns her attention to Charles Dickens in a substantial new work. Building on her earlier biography of Ellen Ternan—the young actress Dickens left his wife for—Tomalin surveys the broad expanse of Dickens’ life, from his professional successes to his personal failings. The result is an engaging, clear-eyed account of a most complex writer and man.

Tomalin gives each of Dickens’ biographical personae its due: We meet the child-laborer son of a bankrupt father, the energetic and talented young man sketching sympathetic portraits of London workers, the actor and performer, the champion of the poor and finally the writer, dipping his head in cold water to keep working through the night. Dickens’ preternatural energy as an author—seen in his ability to write two novels, The Pickwick Papers and Oliver Twist, simultaneously for monthly serial publication—and his lifelong concern for the underdog brought him acclaim, wealth and enthusiastic readers in both England and America.

Haunted, however, by his lonely and impoverished childhood, Dickens could also drive a hard bargain, alienating friends and publishers in his single-minded pursuit of financial security. And despite claiming that his marriage to Catherine Dickens was unhappy, he nonetheless fathered 10 children in 20 years by her, increasing the domestic and financial stresses he felt so keenly. His attraction to innocent girl-women resulted not only in the creation of impossibly virtuous characters like Little Dorrit, but also in an abiding interest in London prostitutes.

Dickens’ affair with Ternan ultimately tore apart his family and dissolved some of his professional relationships. Tomalin carefully and fairly considers the evidence for the birth and death of an illegitimate child born to the couple, shedding light on a biographical secret that went unspoken for decades. In doing so, she brings the light and dark of Dickens’ personality into focus, the virtue he pursued and the vice that bedeviled him.

Tomalin’s Charles Dickens is a masterful balancing act, presenting the great artist as a fallible human without ever losing sight of the miracle of his literary achievements and the generosity of his spirit.

Award-winning biographer Claire Tomalin now turns her attention to Charles Dickens in a substantial new work. Building on her earlier biography of Ellen Ternan—the young actress Dickens left his wife for—Tomalin surveys the broad expanse of Dickens’ life, from his professional successes to his personal…

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