Shelf Talk Blog: New Nonfiction Roundup For November 2021

Press release from Shelf Talk Blog:

November 2, 2021

Peak Picks.

Five nonfiction titles join Peak Picks this month. Brené Brown has inspired millions with her willingness to explore shame and vulerability; in Atlas of the Heart, Brown gives readers the tools to forge meaningful connections. Joshua McFadden follows up the James Beard-award winning Six Seasons with the beautiful and practical Grains for Every Season. Seattle-based Peter Robison’s investigative report into Boeing’s downfall is chronicled in Flying Blind.

And two honest and raw memoirs round out Peak Picks: rapper, actor and household name Will Smith joines forces with Mark Manson (The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck) in Will, and Faith Jones’s escape from the Children of God is told in harrowing detail in Sex Cult Nun.

Biographies, Memoirs, and Essays, Oh My!

In These Precious Days, novelist Ann Patchett reflects on her life in a deeply felt essay
collection. Chinese artist Ai Weiwei recalls a century of Chinese history through his remarkable life and that of his family in 1000 Years of Joys and Sorrow, while the almost century-old Mel Brooks looks back on a lifetime of making people laugh in All About Me! Huma Abedin chronicles her life from a childhood raised in several countries to becoming Hillary Clinton’s top aide in Both/And, while Kal Penn looks at his career from actor to Obama staffer and back to actor again in You Can’t Be Serious. Model Emily Ratajkowski explores feminism and sexuality in her incisive debut My Body, while Mayukh Sen considers the impact of seven immigrant women who influenced the way we eat in Taste Makers. In The Deeper the Roots, Michael Tubbs recounts his life in Stockton, California, from poverty to becoming the city’s first Black mayor and the youngest mayor of a major city in the U.S. And, Rachel Held Evans, a Christian writer who was unafraid to question the Church, has the final word in the posthumously published Wholehearted Faith.

History and Politics.

In The 1619 Project, Nikole Hannah-Jones argues that American history can be best understood
not with the nation’s independence in 1776 but the arrival of the first slave ship in 1619; in a similar vein, Kyle T. Mays looks at the shared history and conflict between Black and Native Americans in An Afro-Indigenous History of the United States.

Supreme Court expert Linda Greenhouse takes a deep dive into the momentous year when Ruth Bader Ginsberg was replaced by Amy Comey Barrett, cementing a conservative bloc, in Justice on the Brink, while Jonathan Karl recounts the final months of the Trump presidency and its aftermath in Betrayal. And in The Hidden Case of Ewan Forbes, Zoe Playdon reveals the impact that a secret verdict had on transgender rights.

One of a Kind.

Are you a fan of the Oscar-winning documentary My Octopus Teacher? If so, be sure to check out Underwater Wild for an immersive journey to the depths of the ocean; if you’re more interested in land vs sea, Atlas of the Invisible uses data to create beautiful maps that show us everything from levels of happiness to the most at-risk because of geopolitical struggles.

Haruki Murakami is famous for his novels; now he’ll also be known for his eclectic and extensive t-shirt collection in Murakami T. Lowbrow culture is rarely taken seriously, if not maligned altogether; in Tacky, Rex King finds that it’s a cause for celebration. And finally, poet Kate Baer takes vitriolic messages from online trolls and turns them into uplifting and hopeful poems in I Hope This Finds You Well.

This press release was produced by Shelf Talk Blog. The views expressed here are the author’s own.