Edna Bonhomme’s frank, timely A History of the World in Six Plagues reveals how infectious diseases have been leveraged by colonialism and capitalism.

Design, Nonfiction

Defining Style

Emphasizing personal style, Joan Barzilay Freund’s Defining Style is a freeing, inspiring and extremely innovative look at interior design.

History, Nonfiction, Women's History

Nonfiction Women's History History

Expect Great Things!

The inspiring, companionable Expect Great Things! celebrates the legacy of the Katharine Gibbs School for women and its tenacious scholars.

All Nonfiction Coverage

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Have I Told You This Already?

by Becky Libourel Diamond

Actor Lauren Graham’s second collection of essays is fresh, sharp and very funny, with staccato sentences that evoke what it must be like to have a conversation with her.

Cookbooks, Nonfiction

Nonfiction Cookbooks

Cookbooks for an unforgettable holiday meal

Feature by Susannah Felts

by Susannah Felts

★ Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking

An Italian-born friend, who is a very fine cook, once texted me a recipe for Bolognese sauce. The recipe, she explained, was by Marcella Hazan, and the meal we made from it was a gorgeous triumph. You can find that recipe on page 210 of the new edition of Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking, a classic tome now outfitted in cheerful bright yellow for its 30th anniversary. Hazan, who died in 2013, is often credited as the most significant teacher of northern Italian cooking in the United States, and her guidance on fresh pasta, sauces and vegetables is without match, her objective “not to astonish, but to reassure.” Hazan’s cooking is unfussy, powered by good, fresh ingredients (which she explains in loving detail) and firmly rooted in family memories.

A Dish for All Seasons

A Dish for All Seasons: 125+ Recipe Variations for Delicious Meals All Year Round is a collection of 26 recipe templates and suggestions for how to mix them up for each season—in other words, a brilliantly useful concept. For example, quesadillas: an easy weeknight favorite, but possibly a bit boring? Not so when stuffed with steamed root veggies in winter or grilled corn kernels in summer. Or consider pesto four ways, depending on what’s in season. Kathryn Pauline, a Saveur award-winning writer, provides a meal-making approach suitable for all levels of kitchen wizardry. Beginners can develop fluency through repeating familiar go-tos with simple twists, while those with kitchen skills will jump at the opportunity to improvise within constraints. “Use what you’ve got” is advice that never grows old, and this book puts a clever, adaptable spin on it.

For something uniquely comforting, check out these four cookbooks perfect for browsing while you’re snug as a dormouse.

I Am From Here

In Vishwesh Bhatt’s cooking, the flavors and foodways of Mississippi and India converge in dishes like okra chaat, saag-style collards and succotash with garam masala. Until now, one had to visit Snackbar in Oxford, Mississippi, where Bhatt is executive chef, to experience that fare. Now, I Am From Here: Stories and Recipes From a Southern Chef showcases the inventive cuisine on which the James Beard Award-winning chef has made his name. A dinner might include grown-up stir-fried rice (based on a snack from Bhatt’s childhood in Ahmedabad, India), collard-wrapped catfish and Mom’s rice pudding. Stories of Bhatt’s mother, who kindled his early interest in food, pepper these pages. The book beautifully represents an individual immigrant’s experience through food; at the same time, it is a welcome addition to the canon of elevated Southern cooking.

Chinese-ish

Rosheen Kaul and Joanna Hu, the two young Asian Australians behind the delightful Chinese-ish: Home Cooking Not Quite Authentic, 100% Delicious, encompass a wealth of identities and influences between them: Kashmiri, Singaporean, Filipino, Malaysian, Indonesian and, of course, Chinese. Their collaboration, born during the COVID-19 pandemic, dances merrily through all of that territory with insouciant verve and a dash of humor. There are sections called “Chinese-ish snacks that feel kinda wrong” (including Beijing hot chicken and prawn toast) and “A few desserts we don’t hate” (such as mango pudding and pumpkin cakes). Hu’s watercolor illustrations play so nicely with the vivid photography throughout, and the recipes are remarkably accessible. Get yourself a carbon steel wok (as my husband did recently; he’s loving it), hit up the supermarket’s international aisle or your local Asian market, and you’ll be dishing up variations on fried rice, Sichuan-style noodles and chiffon omelets in no time.

Bread Head

“The bread I’m going to teach you to make is a little rough around the edges, a little louder than is polite, and stupid good.” That’s Greg Wade, head baker at Chicago’s Publican Quality Bread, in Bread Head: Baking for the Road Less Traveled. Wade’s bread is “an eff-you to the factory-farmed, industrially made versions” ubiquitous in supermarkets, as he often forges standard wheat for organic heritage whole grains such as barley, buckwheat and millet. Or how about a sorghum and rosemary ciabatta, or a rye naan? Wade’s creations pull from around the globe; for example, there’s khachapuri, a fermented dough stuffed with cheese and eggs that sounds like the stuff of my wheatiest dreams. Even if you burned out on sourdough during the pandemic, this book will make you want to try again.

Kiss the cook—but maybe buy them a present too. These five gorgeous cookbooks will wow any culinary artist worth their salt.

Personality and Power

by Roger Bishop

Ian Kershaw’s excellent in-depth profiles of 12 major leaders from 20th-century Europe help us better understand why the world is as it is today.

Audio, Memoir, Nonfiction

Nonfiction Audio Memoir

Making a Scene

Review by Maya Fleischmann

by Maya Fleischmann

Actor Constance Wu (known for her lauded roles in “Fresh Off the Boat,” Crazy Rich Asians and Hustlers) narrates her thoughtful and revealing memoir in essays with an endearing blend of passion and playfulness.

Throughout her career, Wu has learned that life is a series of scenes that shape us; we don’t shape the scenes. She shares memories of people and events that have influenced who she is, including humorous and heartwarming tales of her parents’ assimilation into American culture, humbling mistakes she’s made in love and work, an unexpectedly touching goodbye to her black Toyota Prius and insightful commentary on technology, American culture and Asian diaspora.

Evocative, provocative and always heartfelt, Making a Scene (8 hours) is worthy of an encore. It’s a great match for fans of Michelle Zauner’s Crying in H Mart.

Evocative, provocative and always heartfelt, Constance Wu’s Making a Scene is worthy of an encore.

Weightless

by Claire Fallon

Evette Dionne braids the personal with the political in Weightless, breaking down society’s beliefs about fat people and advocating for new standards that allow them to thrive.

History, Literature, Nonfiction

Nonfiction Literature History

Portable Magic

Review by Harvey Freedenberg

by Harvey Freedenberg

In Portable Magic: A History of Books and Their Readers, Oxford University Shakespeare studies professor Emma Smith offers a lively and engaging survey of the history of the book, focusing on the “material combination of form and content” she calls “bookhood.” It’s a “book about books, rather than words,” that describes with both insight and affection the enduring power of the book as a physical object.

Organized thematically (Smith even suggests the self-contained chapters can be read in any order), Portable Magic covers an impressive amount of ground with efficiency. The opening essay, on Gutenberg’s “invention” of movable type in the 15th century, sets the book’s often iconoclastic tone. Pointing out that this method was used in Asia almost a century before Gutenberg, Smith argues that the idea that print is a Western innovation is a myth, invoked primarily in the service of European colonization.

In subsequent chapters, Smith ranges widely across literary history, unafraid to express strong opinions without dogmatism. Some of the topics she takes on include the history of paperback books and the practices of giving books as gifts and book collecting. In the latter, she tells the story of Harry Elkins Widener, a well-known book collector from Philadelphia who sank to the bottom of the ocean with the Titanic, carrying a 1598 collection of Francis Bacon’s essays in his pocket. Other essays consider the depiction of books in works of art and the central role of religious scriptures, as well as oddities like books bound in human skin and the 17th-century Venetian book containing a small pistol that could be fired using its silk bookmark.

Smith devotes a chapter to the subject of the destruction of books, too, noting that book burning is “powerfully symbolic and practically almost entirely ineffectual.” The publishing business’s practice of pulping books returned from retailers (some 30% to 40% of those shipped), she explains, has eliminated far more books than any conflagration. In two chapters, one centered entirely on Hitler’s Mein Kampf, Smith reviews some of the contentious, and not always unambiguous, issues surrounding free expression and censorship.

Though Portable Magic reflects the work of a careful scholar, it will delight the thoughtful general reader. Any bibliophile will come away from it with a renewed appreciation for books and the central role they still play in our lives.

Though Emma Smith’s lively and engaging history of the book reflects the work of a careful scholar, it will delight general readers and bibliophiles everywhere.

Portable Magic

by Harvey Freedenberg

Though Emma Smith’s lively and engaging history of the book reflects the work of a careful scholar, it will delight general readers and bibliophiles everywhere.

Audio, Nonfiction

Nonfiction Audio

3 audiobooks for readers with a lot of feelings

Feature by the editors of BookPage

Two of the weepiest BookPage editors share a few of their favorite 2022 audiobooks, read masterfully by the authors, that deliver all the emotion.

★ Inciting Joy

For readers invested in learning more about communities of care—informal collectives centered on the praxis of love—Ross Gay’s sixth book, Inciting Joy (Hachette Audio, 8.5 hours), is essential. The poet and essayist reads his own book in a comforting, softly gravelly voice, inviting us to consider not only joy but also every emotion around it, including sorrow and rage. Such wholeness is a matter of survival, Gay urges, and to allow for it is an elemental act of care both for ourselves and the people we love.

—Cat, Deputy Editor

★ In Love

What a gift it is when writers transform their sorrow into art. In Love (5 hours), Amy Bloom’s memoir of her marriage, is just such a gift. The book moves back and forth between her initial years of boisterous happiness with her husband, Brian, and later, Brian’s diagnosis of early-onset Alzheimer’s disease.

As Bloom narrates the process of helping Brian seek a medically assisted suicide before his mental faculties had fully declined, you can feel the urgency bound up with the author’s grief. The prose is restrained, creating a sturdy foundation for the memoir’s emotional heft. Likewise, Bloom’s narration is simple and even-keeled, except for small cracks in her voice during the narrative’s most harrowing moments. In Love shows, more powerfully than any other memoir this year, that love and grief are two sides of the same coin.

—Christy, Associate Editor

Read our starred review of the print edition of In Love.

I’m Glad My Mom Died

Before her confessional memoir became an instant bestseller, Jennette McCurdy was best known for her role as a child star in Nickelodeon’s “iCarly.” In I’m Glad My Mom Died (Simon & Schuster Audio, 6.5 hours), she offers an honest look at how her mom coerced her into entering the acting world at only 6 years old—and how this was only one of many deeply damaging manipulations. As McCurdy unpacks years of childhood abuse, her narration moves along at quite a clip—at several points, I double-checked to make sure I wasn’t playing the book at 1.5 speed—but is still crystal clear. This swift pacing brings an almost upbeat, childlike (and thus, profoundly heartbreaking) spirit to the telling. It also makes the moments when she slows down to conjure the volatile voices of her mother and other characters all the more crushing.

—Cat, Deputy Editor

It’s an unavoidable fact that sometimes listening to an outstanding audiobook means crying in public with your headphones in.

The World Deserves My Children

by Sarah McCraw Crow

In her debut essay collection, comedian and actor Natasha Leggero muses, often hilariously, about what it’s like to have a baby at 42.

Nonfiction, Science, True Crime

Nonfiction True Crime Science

The Forever Witness

Review by Alice Cary

by Alice Cary

“What an amazing world we live in today,” Laura Baanstra said. She was speaking at a 2018 press conference to announce the scientific process that had been used to solve the 1987 murders of her brother and his girlfriend. The Forever Witness: How DNA and Genealogy Solved a Cold Case Double Murder details this brutal crime, the failed efforts to solve it and how its eventual unraveling led to the first genetic genealogy murder trial. Fans of Michelle McNamara’s acclaimed I’ll Be Gone in the Dark should clear their schedules, because Edward Humes’ riveting account is nearly impossible to put down.

Pulitzer Prize winner Humes is no stranger to true crime writing. His 16 books include Mississippi Mud: Southern Justice and the Dixie Mafia and Burned: A Story of Murder and the Crime That Wasn’t. In The Forever Witness, he takes on the murders of 20-year-old Jay Cook and 18-year-old Tanya Van Cuylenborg, who set out by van from Victoria Island, Canada, to Seattle, Washington, to pick up a furnace for Jay’s father. Baanstra vividly remembers waving goodbye to her brother as he drove away in the family van for what was meant to be a quick overnight trip. Instead, Tanya’s body was dumped alongside a lonely road in Washington, Jay’s body was tossed over a bridge, and the van was abandoned. There were no eyewitnesses, no way of knowing what happened and little physical evidence, except for semen and a palm print on one of the van’s rear doors.

Hume’s account brings the young victims alive: Tanya, a photography buff planning to head to Europe as an au pair, and Jay, a kindhearted soul toying with becoming a marine biologist. Their families’ ongoing anguish is palpable, and details of the police investigation offer sharp reminders of how difficult such cases were to solve before the advent of technology such as cell phones and surveillance cameras, not to mention widespread DNA processing.

Deputy Sheriff James Scharf had been working the graveyard shift in Snohomish County, Washington, when he got an alert to be on the lookout for the missing Canadian couple. Decades later, after becoming a cold case investigator, he would take the case to CeCe Moore, a self-taught genetic genealogist featured on the PBS show “Finding Your Roots With Henry Louis Gates, Jr.” Her amazing detective work—done in just two hours from her couch—led the authorities to William Earl Talbott II, a truck driver with no criminal convictions or known connection to the victims. Along the way, Hume explains the advent of DNA technology and databases in highly readable terms and examines the continuing debate about their use.

With over 30 years separating the crime from the arrest and trial, Hume does an exceptional job of navigating the vast time frame and re-creating the victims’ last journey. The results are heartbreaking as well as heart pounding. The Forever Witness has earned a well-deserved place among top-notch true crime reads.

Fans of Michelle McNamara’s acclaimed I’ll Be Gone in the Dark should clear their schedules, because Edward Humes’ The Forever Witness is nearly impossible to put down.

How to Stand Up to a Dictator

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.

Essays, LGBTQ+, Nonfiction, Science

Nonfiction Science LGBTQ+Essays

How Far the Light Reaches

Review by Henry L. Carrigan Jr.

by Henry L. Carrigan Jr.

Science journalist Sabrina Imbler dives deep into the waters of human and marine life in their luminous essay collection, How Far the Light Reaches.

In the book’s 10 essays, Imbler cannily observes the lives of sea creatures, drawing out lessons about resilience, survival and wildness and tying those insights to their own experiences as a biracial, queer writer. For example, goldfish that survive being thrown from a tiny fishbowl into a larger pond revert to a feral state. When Imbler encountered these wild fish, they saw “something that no one expected to live not just alive but impossibly flourishing, and no longer alone.” Imbler compares a female octopus who starves herself in order to nourish and protect her eggs to their own efforts at dieting to please their mother. Imbler eventually started to feel good in their body, learning to “revel in queer bodies and the endless and inventive ways we crease into ourselves.” In the deep rivers of China, sturgeon forage for food to survive in the murky waters, just as Imbler’s grandmother foraged for food to survive after fleeing Japanese-occupied Shanghai during wartime. In perhaps the most brilliant chapter of the book, Imbler alternates the necropsy of a whale with the necropsy of a relationship. Like the carcass of a whale, the threads of a dead relationship—“once so staggeringly alive”—float through space and time with no sense of what is to come.

How Far the Light Reaches meditates radiantly on the ragged ways we adapt to the world around us, probing the lives of marine animals for strategies for our own survival. Imbler’s first-rate science writing glistens with the same sheen as the best of Oliver Sacks’ essays.

How Far the Light Reaches dives deep into the waters of human and marine life, glistening with the same sheen as the best of Oliver Sacks’ essays.