Phil Hanley’s frank, vulnerable, funny memoir recounts his journey from struggling student to successful comedian who wears his dyslexia “like a badge of honor.”
Phil Hanley’s frank, vulnerable, funny memoir recounts his journey from struggling student to successful comedian who wears his dyslexia “like a badge of honor.”
Preventable and curable, tuberculosis is still the world’s deadliest disease. John Green illuminates why in Everything Is Tuberculosis.
Preventable and curable, tuberculosis is still the world’s deadliest disease. John Green illuminates why in Everything Is Tuberculosis.
Previous
Next

All Nonfiction Coverage

Filter by genre
Review by

On the other hand, The CollegeHumor Guide to College is the book a graduate might get from a friend who’s already in college an ironic, inside look at college life today. Written by Ethan Trex and Streeter Seidell, two columnists from CollegeHumor.com, a website that posts funny photos, cartoons and videos from college students across the country, this book is nothing if not irreverent. Instead of presenting the parent-sanctioned aspects of college (Finding Yourself! Education!) The CollegeHumor Guide focuses on the side of college life that many high school graduates are looking forward to (Parties! Spring Break! Alcohol!). Though the language and subject matter are over-the-top at times, the authors have their tongues firmly in cheek, gently mocking the hard-partying college student lifestyle even as they give advice on living it. Take their comments on Spring Break: Spring Break is all about knowing your limits, then pushing past those limits. But it’s not just about partying the guide also helps you interpret course names and find homework help ( Haitian and Asian sound alike, so you want to verify which one he is before forcing him to do your math homework. ). If you want your recent grad to put you on their cool list, this book might be the perfect gift.

On the other hand, The CollegeHumor Guide to College is the book a graduate might get from a friend who's already in college an ironic, inside look at college life today. Written by Ethan Trex and Streeter Seidell, two columnists from CollegeHumor.com, a website…
Review by

With a string of wildly successful books behind her, communications expert Deborah Tannen turns to the emotionally charged topic of sisterhood. Written in a conversational style, You Were Always Mom’s Favorite! offers a look into the passionate dynamics that occur in the relationships between sisters, a visceral connection that can be both symbiotic and suffocating, life-changing and joyful. No one can relate to you like a sister, no one can share your experiences like a sister and conversely, no one can push your buttons like a sister.

Tannen bases her work on interviews—or as she prefers to say, focused conversations—with more than 100 women, ranging in age from late teens to their early 90s. One of the many strengths of this powerful book is the way she highlights the stories the women tell about their lives. We learn how their sisters were there for them in a time of crisis, how they converse in a unique way (“sisterspeak”) and how they provide a lifeline for each other. Many subjects felt that their sisters were someone “to talk to and laugh with,” someone who shares the same childhood memories. In the interviews, Tannen skillfully weaves the poignant (“I can’t imagine life without her”) with the mundane (“I love her to death but she drives me crazy”) and a fascinating picture emerges. Is sisterhood a bond or bondage?

In The Other Boleyn Girl, Anne says to Mary, “I was born to be your rival. And you, mine. We’re sisters, aren’t we?” A sisterly relationship can be challenging, fraught with peril and misunderstandings. One misstep, one false note in a heart-to-heart conversation, and the connection is severed or irreparably damaged.

Tannen, one of three sisters herself, has written a captivating book that offers a window into this fascinating topic.

Mary Kennedy is a psychologist and mystery writer in Delaware. Her new series, The Talk Radio Mysteries, will be released in January.

With a string of wildly successful books behind her, communications expert Deborah Tannen turns to the emotionally charged topic of sisterhood. Written in a conversational style, You Were Always Mom’s Favorite! offers a look into the passionate dynamics that occur in the relationships between sisters,…

Review by

Rhoda Janzen was having a really bad year. Following her recovery from a hysterectomy, Janzen’s handsome, charismatic, but mercurial husband of 15 years abruptly left her for “Bob the Guy from Gay.com,” leaving her with conflicted feelings—and an expensive lakefront home she couldn’t afford. Just days later, Janzen was involved in a crippling car accident. What was this sophisticated, confident woman in her early 40s to do? With a six-month sabbatical scheduled, Janzen made a most unexpected choice—to head back home, into the welcoming arms of the Mennonite family and community she thought she had nothing in common with.

Janzen’s period of healing—in both body and spirit—forms the backdrop of her memoir, as she utilizes her quasi-outsider perspective to reflect on her own story of growing up Mennonite (and the social ostracism that sometimes resulted), on her often troubled marriage and on her sometimes strained relationships with her siblings. Even as she affectionately pokes fun at such things as her father’s bold demands and her mother’s unflaggingly earnest optimism, Janzen reflects on how her Mennonite upbringing might have affected her own relationships and on how she’s managed to incorporate the cabbage- and starch-laden cuisine of her youth into her cosmopolitan, foodie lifestyle.

Readers will find themselves laughing out loud at Janzen’s wry commentary on themes that shouldn’t really be funny at all. The playful humor is balanced, however, with genuine thoughtfulness, especially as Janzen reconnects with childhood companions and reflects on how different her own life might have been, had she chosen to remain in the Mennonite community instead of embracing an intellectual life. Mennonite in a Little Black Dress will resonate with any reader who has ever thought about how such choices shape our futures, or with anyone who has struggled to recapture faith—in God, in other people or in oneself. 

Norah Piehl is a freelance writer and editor in the Boston area.

Rhoda Janzen was having a really bad year. Following her recovery from a hysterectomy, Janzen’s handsome, charismatic, but mercurial husband of 15 years abruptly left her for “Bob the Guy from Gay.com,” leaving her with conflicted feelings—and an expensive lakefront home she couldn’t afford. Just…

Review by

James Monroe served in more public positions than anyone else in American history. He was both a U.S. congressman and a senator, a governor of Virginia, secretary of state and secretary of war, ambassador to France and Great Britain and minister to Spain, and the fifth U.S. president, serving two terms. A hero of the American Revolution, Monroe served at Valley Forge and was seriously wounded in battle at Trenton. Despite such an imposing resume, Monroe’s contributions to the nation are usually overshadowed by those of his close friends Thomas Jefferson and James Madison.

In his compelling new biography, The Last Founding Father: James Monroe and a Nation’s Call to Greatness, Harlow Giles Unger demonstrates that Monroe was a major player with significant achievements, including the Louisiana Purchase. Even his supposed diplomatic failures look like impossible tasks. Unger, an award-winning author of 15 books, including four biographies of other founding fathers, deftly guides us through Monroe’s pre-presidential period, which includes assisting a wounded Lafayette during the Revolution and rescuing Thomas Paine from a French prison.

Unger argues that the three presidents between Washington and Monroe—John Adams, Jefferson and Madison—were merely “caretakers” whose administrations left the country divided and bankrupt, her borders vulnerable and, after the War of 1812, despite the heroic efforts of Monroe as acting secretary of war, the capital seriously damaged. Holding two top cabinet positions (secretary of state was the other) Monroe was hailed for his brilliant military strategy and astute management of peace negotiations. As president, Monroe was a transitional figure, the last of the founding generation, but also responsible for westward expansion and economic recovery. He worked hard to achieve unity, appointing representatives of a wide range of views. He made long tours of the country that helped to bring people together. Despite problems, including the Panic of 1819, there were good reasons to refer to his presidency as “the era of good feelings.”

Unger vigorously refutes those historians who claim that Secretary of State John Quincy Adams wrote what Monroe is best known for, the “Monroe Doctrine.” Monroe had almost eight years of experience as a seasoned diplomat in the most sensitive posts, was a highly regarded lawyer and a gifted politician. Once he decided to include in his seventh annual message to Congress a manifesto about the U.S. staying free of entangling alliances and defining America’s sphere of influence, he conducted a series of cabinet meetings in which he asked for written and oral arguments on the subject. Adam’s diplomatic experience did give him more influence than others, yet, Unger notes, only one of Adams’ submissions appears in the final policy statement.

The Monroes were a close-knit family and James’ beautiful wife Elizabeth was a formidable influence, especially in matters of taste and style. She also demonstrated extreme courage in 1795. Realizing that her husband, who had obtained the release of Americans from French prisons, might jeopardize his diplomatic status if he tried to rescue someone who had only honorary American citizenship, she decided to go herself. She was able to get Lafayette’s wife, Adrienne, freed after 16 months in prison.

Unger’s outstanding biography of Monroe is consistently illuminating and a fine introduction to its subject.

Roger Bishop is a retired Nashville bookseller and a frequent contributor to BookPage.

James Monroe served in more public positions than anyone else in American history. He was both a U.S. congressman and a senator, a governor of Virginia, secretary of state and secretary of war, ambassador to France and Great Britain and minister to Spain, and the…

Review by

Just as he used the pivotal figure of John Paul Vann in A Bright Shining Lie to tie together America’s myriad miscalculations in the Vietnam War, so Neil Sheehan focuses here on Bernard Schriever, another relatively unknown presence, to anatomize America’s arms race with Russia from the end of World War II through the mid-1960s.

A German by birth, “Bennie” Schriever came to the U.S. in 1917 when he was six years old. He grew up in San Antonio, earned a degree in construction engineering from Texas A&M and was commissioned into the fledgling Army Air Force in 1933. That same year he met Lt. Col. Henry “Hap” Arnold, a strong believer in the scientific development of weaponry. Schriever served in the Pacific during World War II, and in 1946, with the war over, Arnold appointed Schriever to serve as liaison between civilian scientists and the Air Force to develop new weapons systems. Although Schriever would rise in rank and responsibility, this essentially would be his mission until he left the service in 1966.

Sheehan argues that the arms race between the U.S. and the Soviet Union was predicated on an erroneous assessment of Joseph Stalin’s comparatively modest territorial ambitions. After Russia got the atomic bomb in 1949, however, the us-versus-them dynamic boiled out of control. Then the question became which side could deliver its A-bombs most effectively. Schriever’s nemesis in this calculation was Gen. Curtis LeMay, the man who had fire-bombed Japan into near submission before the A-bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki finished the job. LeMay’s solution was more, bigger and longer-range bombers, all carrying thermonuclear warheads—and a willingness to use them.

Since Russia couldn’t match the U.S. in number of A-bombs and planes, it turned its attention to long-range rockets. So did Schriever and his civilian teams. Much of Sheehan’s book concerns his circumventing or surmounting the political machinations, corporate greed and personal vanities that stood in the way of creating what would come to be called the “ICBM”— intercontinental ballistic missile—with the capability of delivering a targeted, nuclear-tipped rocket halfway around the world.

In telling his story, Sheehan profiles a gallery of fascinating characters, among them Paul Nitze (whose 1950 report to the National Security Council, Sheehan says, grossly overstated the Soviet threat); hawkish and brilliant mathematician John von Neumann; the Hall brothers, Ed and Ted, the former a member of Schriever’s first ICBM unit, the latter a spy for Russia who wasn’t unmasked until 1995; and Hitler’s morally accommodating rocket man, Wern-her von Braun, who was more interested in space travel than nuclear confrontation. In piecing this narrative together, Sheehan interviewed well over 100 sources, including Nitze, physicist and hydrogen-bomb pioneer Edward Teller, diplomat Richard Holbrooke and Schriever himself, who died in 2005. It is a dazzling display of scholarship.

To some, this book will be a triumphant tale of America once again winning the day, but to others it will read like a tragedy in which the brightest minds of a generation bent themselves to finding the best ways to slaughter people en masse.

Edward Morris writes from Nashville.

Just as he used the pivotal figure of John Paul Vann in A Bright Shining Lie to tie together America’s myriad miscalculations in the Vietnam War, so Neil Sheehan focuses here on Bernard Schriever, another relatively unknown presence, to anatomize America’s arms race with Russia…

Review by

In the tight-lipped tradition of Greta Garbo, J.D. Salinger and Thomas Pynchon, bluegrass legend Ralph Stanley has been verbally parsimonious in disclosing details about his life and art—until now. Here he opens up, talking freely about his shadowy absentee father, his immensely gifted but hard-drinking older brother, Carter, and the heart-wrenching ordeal of trying to make a living playing a kind of music too few people wanted to hear.

Born in 1927 in southwestern Virginia, Stanley was steeped in ancient folksongs, hymns, parlor ballads and the sounds of a newer, jazzier string band music being perfected by the Kentuckian Bill Monroe, who dubbed this emerging genre “bluegrass.” The day he returned from military service in 1946, he and Carter formed the Stanley Brothers band with Carter as front man and chief songwriter. Over the next 20 years, the Stanley Brothers achieved a stature within the bluegrass community that rivaled Monroe’s.

Then, in 1966, Carter finally drank himself to death and in so doing thrust his younger brother into the spotlight. In that role, Stanley mentored such formidable young talents as Ricky Skaggs, Keith Whitley and Larry Sparks, even as he was carving out his own reputation as a stunningly emotional vocalist. Although long revered by bluegrass fans, Stanley didn’t become a superstar until he was featured on the soundtrack album for the Coen Brothers’ 2000 movie, O Brother, Where Art Thou?

His chilling a cappella rendition of “Oh Death” on that album won him a Grammy and sparked two successful arena tours.

As fascinating as Stanley’s personal revelations are, this book’s greatest value lies in his documentary-like descriptions of the hardships rural musicians faced in the 1940s and ’50s—crowded cars, band rivalries, long and dangerous roads and hand-to-mouth living. It’s little wonder then that Stanley can say at age 82, “I ain’t afraid to die, but I am scared of what would happen if my voice were to fail me . . . because singing is really all I’ve got to give anymore.”

Edward Morris writes from Nashville.

In the tight-lipped tradition of Greta Garbo, J.D. Salinger and Thomas Pynchon, bluegrass legend Ralph Stanley has been verbally parsimonious in disclosing details about his life and art—until now. Here he opens up, talking freely about his shadowy absentee father, his immensely gifted but hard-drinking…

Trending Nonfiction

Author Interviews

Recent Features