True Books

I first read this elegant memoir by a Bay Area software developer when it came out a quarter century ago, at a moment of technological optimism that seems far away now. But the book itself hardly feel... (Tom)

An excellent companion to Rachel E. Gross's Vagina Obscura and Liz Stromquist's Fruit of Knowledge. With warm, witty writing, thorough research, and inclusive language, journalist-midwife-mother Leah... (Anika)

If, like me, your idea of fun is reading stories of others going through almost unfathomable hardship, you can hardly do better than David Grann (the expert nonfiction yarnspinner behind Killers of th... (Tom)

"Don't write about your childhood," someone told Lucinda Williams when he heard she was writing this memoir. "Just write about your music." Well, as anyone who loves her music knows—"Child in the back... (Tom)

I love, love, love this book. Simply as an anthology of contemporary and classic writing about nature, it's an absolute treasure. It features contributions by Jorge Luis Borges, Robin Wall Kimmerer, U... (Tom)

Reading Under the Henfluence is a lot like hanging out with your most enthusiastic and knowledgeable chicken-loving friend. You're sure to be entertained and to learn something—even if, like me, you'r... (Anika)

Boss: Richard J. Daley of Chicago (Tom)

“The history of medicine was filled with 'fathers'—the father of the C-section, the father of endocrinology, the father of ovariotomy—but, ironically, there were no mothers.” Rachel E. Gross is basic... (Anika)

Phinney Boss: Richard J. Daley of Chicago Mayors, even the most powerful, recede in our historical memory almost as quickly as newspaper columnists do, and this compact biography of Chicago's most fam... (Tom)

I think of Love's Work like the small hunk of tungsten I once held, so dense that it immediately sank my hand to the desktop beneath. It's a short book, with few words on each page, but it carries wei... (Tom)

Having abandoned an earlier attempt at an autobiography, out of her journalist's frustration with the slipperiness of memory, Malcolm, the longtime New Yorker writer who died in 2021, left behind this... (Tom)

How do you describe a book as singular as this one? Writing in the wake of family tragedy—the sudden deaths of two sisters—Raffles, a British anthropologist living in New York City, is drawn to the so... (Tom)

New Book of the Week by Darryl Pinckney In 1973, as a Columbia undergraduate, Pinckney talked his way into Elizabeth Hardwick's writing class, and—at least for the decade and a half covered by this wo... (Tom)

As a teenager in the ’80s, the music—the very existence—of Prince had a profound effect on me. Purple Rain (the movie, as well as the album) totally blew my mind. Seeing him in concert in 1985 was a h... (Doree)

It's a too-familiar American story: a city—New Haven, Connecticut, in this case—divided by race, a young black man falsely imprisoned. To it, Dawidoff, who was raised in the city and who has written b... (Tom)

You might know the late Mary Rodgers as the author of the kidlit classic Freaky Friday, or as the composer of the musical Once Upon a Mattress (her one big hit in a long career of trying), or—her most... (Tom)

What is there to say about a story as simple as this one? "This is the story of a man who took part in a dance contest," its first line declares, and that's what it is: a short portrait, told in the p... (Tom)

Murray's life story is a remarkable one, as an often behind-the-scenes influence on the Civil Rights Movement, a co-founder of the National Organization for Women, and one of the first women ordained... (Tom)

Reang was her mother's youngest, with a special bond founded between them when she barely survived their escape from the war and the coming genocide in Cambodia in her mother's arms in 1975. But once... (Tom)

If many of our favorite recent nature books celebrate the complex and often surprising intelligences of particular organisms—trees, mushrooms, octopuses, birds—Yong's new book is like a sense-by-sense... (Tom)

This is my favorite kind of non-fiction book—a failure. Which is to say that it isn't a biography of the influential mid-century poet Frank O'Hara, although it's full of biographical detail and wise a... (James)

This travelogue of three months Levine, a Canadian expat who had migrated semi-permanently to England, spent tramping across his native land in 1956 proved so unpopular in Canada it took two decades t... (Tom)

When Amy Bloom's husband, a vigorous ex-jock architect in his mid-60s, learned he had Alzheimer's, he knew immediately he wanted to end his life well before full dementia could have its own way. Doing... (Tom)

From 2018-2019 Iris Graville served as the first writer-in-residence aboard the Washington State Ferries, spending a couple days a week writing on the route that travels between Lopez, Orcas, Shaw, an... (Haley)

You Tell the Stories You Need to Believe In the season of her life when she is gathering her work, Brown has brought together occasional essays she wrote for the Stranger in the previous decade into a... (Tom)

I was first drawn to this under-the-radar book by its cover, with its fascinatingly odd photo of Sergius Pankejeff, the patient Freud called the "Wolf Man," as a child, and by its premise: short portr... (Tom)

There's a reason that Act One, a massive bestseller when it came out in 1959, is still beloved by theater kids everywhere as the great Broadway memoir. Hart himself was as stage-struck as they come, a... (Tom)

Josiah Wedgwood might be remembered best now as a venerable fine-china tradename and, perhaps, as Charles Darwin's grandfather, but in his tirelessly eventful life he put himself at the center of a ra... (Tom)

I should say first that Dazed and Confused is one of those movies that went straight into my bloodstream when I first saw it and has never left, a miracle of ensemble acting and pitch-perfect attentio... (Tom)

Jarre was always an outsider: raised speaking German in Latvia, where her Jewish father was killed by the Nazis in 1941, she learned Italian after she moved to her mother's country but spoke French at... (Tom)

I've often flattered myself that my love for the music of Thompson and his formative band, Fairport Convention, is some obscure passion, but it's clear at any show you go to that his fans are legion,... (Tom)

I didn't need much convincing to read a book about those chubby, flat-tailed rodents: their industrious ingenuity has always made them among the most appealing of animals. But what Goldfarb does in hi... (Tom)

A review quoted on the back of The Names calls it "a Native American version of Roots," an obvious comparison at the time (both books came out in 1976, and Roots was an immediate blockbuster) for an A... (Tom)

You open a Michael Lewis book knowing it will be full of Michael Lewis characters—brainy, contrarian visionaries—and here they include a California public health official, a Zuckerberg-funded biochemi... (Tom)

No book could capture the endless chaos, ambition, and struggles for survival of our biggest city, but you can get a hint of its millions of voices here. Working in the Studs Terkel oral-history tradi... (Tom)

Gordon-Reed made her name, and won a Pulitzer, as a historian of Virginia, and specifically of Thomas Jefferson's estate of Monticello, as she told the history of its black residents alongside its whi... (Tom)

When it comes to books about Seattle and its surroundings, there's one must-read writer as far as I'm concerned, and that's David B. Williams. I've long been telling recent arrivals and lifetime resid... (James)

Jo Ann Beard doesn't write—or at least publish—a lot, but, boy, when she does... She's in her mid-sixties, and this is just her third book; her first, The Boys of My Youth, made her a bit of a cult he... (Tom)

In the funniest of his often droll footnotes, Bailey notes that, after he finished his Zuckerman trilogy, Roth had to have his typewriter repaired because the "I" had worn off. Through 31 books, inclu... (Tom)

One of our favorite novels to recommend in recent years has been Happiness, Forna's story of two people meeting in London: Jean, an American woman in her 40s, and Attila, a wonderfully appealing Ghana... (Tom)

Shorto is an acclaimed historian (you can usually find his modern classic, Amsterdam, on our Cities shelf), but he was reluctant to tell his own family history, specifically that of his namesake grand... (Tom)

When Bill Barich decided, "with the same hapless illogic that governed all my actions then," to spend the spring of 1978 at a second-rate racetrack in Northern California, he might have been looking f... (Tom)

Having read The Black Jacobins, C.L.R. James's still-classic 1938 account of the Haitian Revolution, earlier this year, I was curious what a modern version could add to the story. Even more than James... (Tom)

Too often in our discussions about diversity, we leave disability out of the conversation. In this memoir-in-essays, Rebekah Taussig brings her fresh and incisive voice to the table, sharing her story... (Anika)

Who knew that the finest chronicler of the modern conservative movement would be a writer from the left? Or that his four massive volumes of history, taking us from Goldwater's landslide defeat to Rea... (Tom)

During the trial of Brock Turner, Chanel Miller was known as Emily Doe, “the unconscious intoxicated woman” Turner attacked on Stanford’s campus. Now, in this stunning and unapologetic memoir, Miller... (Anika)

This short, unconventional memoir is an account of Sarah Manguso’s meticulously kept diary: eight hundred thousand words written over twenty-five years. I am fascinated by people who keep daily record... (Anika)

All of Ernaux's work blurs the line between fiction and memoir, but The Years blurs it further, into history. The book covers a lifetime—hers, from 1941 to the present—but it is the history of a "we"... (Tom)

The "girl" of the title is Ernaux herself, at age 18, marked by her bookishness for a life outside the working class in which she was raised. And the story is, in essence, that of a single moment and... (Tom)

You may know Erica C. Barnett from her dogged local reporting in the Stranger or PubliCola or on her current blog, The C Is for Crank, or her appearances on KUOW, but what you may not have known was t... (Tom)