The World that was Ours by Hilda Bernstein

November 27, 2019 by Christina

Nonfiction — print. Persephone books, 2009. Originally published 1967. 394 pgs. Purchased. Nelson Mandela spent nearly 28 years in prison – 18 years of which were spent on Robben Island – as a result of the Rivonia Trial, which charged him and seven other men with 221 acts of sabotage designed to encourage violent revolution in apartheid South Africa. Among his seven codefendants were Lionel “Rusty” Bernstein, a white man with allegiances to the banned Communist Party and the goal […]

Categories: 2019 Reads, Africa, Nonfiction, Persephone Books, South Africa • Tags: Hilda Bernstein

Lost in Shangri-La by Mitchell Zuckoff

November 22, 2019 by Christina

Nonfiction – eBook. HarperCollins, 2011. 432 pgs. Purchased. Subtitled “A True Story of Survival, Adventure, and the Most Incredible Rescue Mission of World War II”, Mitchell’s book recounts the 1945 effort to rescue an Army officer, a Women’s Army Corps officer, and an enlisted soldier after their plane crashed in present-day Papua, the Indonesian part of the island of New Guinea. The two men and one woman were on board the C-47 plane along with 21 others for a sightseeing […]

Categories: 2019 Reads, Indigenious Peoples, Nonfiction, Oceania • Tags: Mitchell Zuckoff

She Said by Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey

November 15, 2019 by Christina

Nonfiction — print. Penguin Press, 2019. 310 pgs. Library copy. Subtitled “Breaking the Sexual Harassment Story That Helped Ignite a Movement”, Kantor and Twohey’s book recounts the events leading up to their October 5, 2017 publication of a piece in the New York Times outlining how Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein sexual harassed and abused women in his employment for decades. The two show how nondisclosure agreements silenced the women who did come forward, preventing them from sharing their stories or […]

Categories: 2019 Reads, Book Club, Feminism, New York, Nonfiction, North America, United States • Tags: Jodi Kantor, Megan Twohey

Kitchen Essays by Agnes Jekyll

October 14, 2019 by Christina

Nonfiction – print. Persephone Books, 2009. Originally published 1922. 264 pgs. Purchased. First published in The Times during the 1920s, this collection of essays presents the proper setting and occasion for different recipes. There are essays for particular events – the wedding breakfast, the Sunday luncheon, and the country hunt – as well as for certain people – the too thin, the too fat, and the bachelor. I follow a handful of food blogs as I’m always on the hunt […]

Categories: 2019 Reads, Europe, Food, Nonfiction, Persephone Books, United Kingdom • Tags: Agnes Jekyll

21 Lessons for the 21st Century by Yuval Noah Harari

August 9, 2019 by Christina

Nonfiction – audiobook. Read by Derek Perkins. Random House Audio, 2018. 11 hours, 41 minutes. Library copy. Based on the title, I assumed this book would provide 21 ways of how homo sapienswill need to adapt to life in the twenty-first century, as envisioned in Harari’s Homo Deus. Instead, Harari builds from one chapter to the next to explain how the current stories we collectively tell ourselves to orient our outlook and provide social cohesion are no longer accepted by […]

Categories: 2019 Reads, Audiobook, Israel/Palestine, Middle East, Nonfiction, Religion • Tags: Derek Perkins, Yuval Noah Harari

An American Sickness by Elisabeth Rosenthal

July 26, 2019 by Christina

Nonfiction – Kindle edition. Penguin Press, 2017. 412 pgs. Purchased. Subtitled “How Healthcare Became Big Business and How You Can Take It Back”, Rosenthal’s book is neatly split into two parts: one answering how healthcare came a profit-maximizing business and another attempting to offer readers ways to control their own bills. The first section examines all the reasons Americans have been told their healthcare costs so much – cost of innovation, greedy pharmaceutical companies, doctors drowning in debt – and […]

Categories: 2019 Reads, 20BooksofSummer, Economics, Nonfiction, North America, United States

Into the Whirlwind by Eugenia Ginzburg

June 26, 2019 by Christina

Nonfiction – print. Translated from the Russian by Paul Stevenson and Manya Harari. Persephone Books, 2014. Originally published 1967. 344 pgs. Purchased. In February 1937, a professor, journalist, and proud member of the Communist Party in Kazan named Eugenia Ginzburg was arrested for failing to denounce her fellow professor, Nikolay Naumovich Elvov. Ginzburg, whose non-Latinized name is often spelled as Yevgenia or Evgenia, was accused of participating in Elvov’s counter-revolutionary Trotskyist group through her position on the editorial board of […]

Categories: 2019 Reads, 20BooksofSummer, Europe, Nonfiction, Persephone Books, Russia, Russian, Translated • Tags: Eugenia Ginzburg

The Buried by Peter Hessler

May 29, 2019 by Christina

Nonfiction – print. Penguin Press, 2019. 480 pgs. Purchased. After years of living and working in China as a journalist for The New Yorker,Hessler moved with his wife, Leslie, and infant twin daughters to Cairo in 2011. The same year the Egyptian Arab Spring began, resulting in the overthrow of the dictator Hosni Mubarak and the election of the leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, Mohamed Morsi. As Hessler documents in his book, Morsi would serve as president for barely a […]

Categories: 2019 Reads, Africa, Chunkster, LGBTQA+, Nonfiction • Tags: Peter Hessler

The Space Barons by Christian Davenport

May 13, 2019 by Christina

Nonfiction – print. Public Affairs, 2018. 320 pgs. Library copy. I work on the periphery of the aerospace industry, relying on the industry to build and launch optical satellites whose imagery I can process in support of environmental monitoring and natural disaster response. Despite this proximity, my knowledge about the aerospace industry is limited to the photographs NASA shares on Instagram. Which is why I was intrigued when I saw Davenport’s book on display at my local library. Subtitled “Elon […]

Categories: 2019 Reads, Nonfiction, North America, Space, Technology, United States • Tags: Christian Davenport

Kings of the Yukon by Adam Weymouth

May 10, 2019 by Christina

Nonfiction – print. Little, Brown and Company, 2018. 288 pgs. Library copy. Subtitled “One Summer Paddling Across the Far North”, Weymouth’s memoir covers the fourth months he spent canoeing the Yukon River from Canada’s Yukon Territory through Alaska to the Bering Sea. The Yukon is 2,000 miles long, the longest free-flowing river in the United States and the longest salmon run in the world. Each summer, king salmon (known as Chinook in Canada) migrate the distance of the Yukon to […]

Categories: 2019 Reads, Canada, Food, Indigenious Peoples, Nonfiction, North America, United States • Tags: Adam Weymouth

Becoming by Michelle Obama

April 17, 2019 by Christina

Nonfiction – audiobook. Read by the author. Random House Audio, 2018. 19 hours, 1 minutes. Purchased.  In 2009, Michelle Obama became the first African-American First Lady of the United States after her husband, Barack Obama, was elected President. Prior to that, Michelle attended Princeton and Harvard Law and worked as both a partner-tracked lawyer for a prestigious firm in Chicago and as an administrator in the University of Chicago medical system. These impressive achievements were – and continue to be […]

Categories: 2019 Reads, Audiobook, Book Club, Feminism, Nonfiction, North America, ReadDiverse, United States • Tags: Michelle Obama

Shadows on the Tundra by Dalia Grinkevičiūtė

April 15, 2019 by Christina

Nonfiction – print. Translated from the Lithuanian by Delija Valiukenas. Peirene Press, 2018. Originally published 1997. 192 pgs. Purchased. In 1991, a jar filled with scraps of paper was discovered buried in Kaunas, the former capital of Lithuania. The papers document nearly three years in Dalia Grinkevičiūtė after she deported to a Soviet gulag in Siberia in 1941 at the age of fourteen with her mother and older brother. Grinkevičiūtė had buried the papers in 1950, fearing they would be […]

Categories: 2019 Reads, Europe, Genocide, Indigenious Peoples, Nonfiction, Peirene Press, Russia, Translated • Tags: Dalia Grinkevičiūtė, Delija Valiukenas