True Books

The Black Jacobins (Tom)

"Solitude" is a seductive word in our chaotic times, but Johnson doesn't just mean a quiet week in the woods to rejuvenate us for the rat race. His solitude is a lifelong vocation, a choice made by th... (Tom)

The Living Mountain It's hard to imagine that a book this powerful sat unread in its author's drawer for thirty years. Written in the '40s and finally brought out a few years before Shepherd's death,... (Tom)

Unfinished Business: Notes of a Chronic Re (Reader)

I'm one of the few members of our staff who is not from the Midwest, but the region's allegedly bland mysteries are a draw to me as well. The mystery starts with the region itself (does South Dakota c... (Tom)

When an advance copy of Home Baked arrived at the store, I took it home hoping merely to escape into the iconic 1970s San Francisco setting. I never anticipated that this memoir would give me an in-de... (Haley)

Schizophrenia is among the most ruthless of diseases, suddenly erupting in a life, often in adolescence, and turning it inside out in ways few treatments have been able to solve. That's what happened... (Tom)

Barnes has written wonderful historical fiction; this lovely book is nonfiction, but it's written with a novelist's wandering eye. On the face of it a biography—of the celebrity physician Samuel Pozzi... (Tom)

If you're looking for a book that has something useful to say about the current situation that isn't too, you know, on point, look no further. In previous books (The Big Short, Flash Boys, etc.) Lewis... (James)

Rebecca Solnit is one of the best sociopolitical writers we have (she's the coiner of the term "mansplaining") but I like to imagine a better world in which she doesn't feel obligated to take on tyran... (James)

A 42-year-old writer looks at his young sons, considers the recent death of his 84-year-old father, and tries to make sense of it all in the only natural way: by undertaking a round-the-world quest to... (James)

It doesn't seem a stretch to wonder if Wes Anderson makes films (especially The Grand Budapest Hotel) as an excuse to create exquisite fictitious letterhead, and when he wanted someone equally meticul... (Tom)

Matar wrote this book in between books. The one he had just finished, The Return (which won a Pulitzer Prize in 2017), was a memoir of his attempt to discover the fate of his father, who was disappear... (Tom)

It's a subject ripe for satire: a young literary woman leaves publishing to try out tech in San Francisco and gets drawn into the money and ambition of Silicon Valley. But Wiener's memoir, sharp-tongu... (Tom)

One of my favorite books on creativity is this book-length dialogue between a novelist and a film editor, who got to know each other when Murch, best known for his work on The Godfather and Apocalypse... (Tom)

The Gift first appeared in 1983 to immediate acclaim and lasting popularity. Despite the praise, I avoided it for years because I thought it was a long-winded version of those insipid inspirational po... (James)

When your city is changing every time you turn around, history can be something you want to hold onto, and the indefatigable local historians at HistoryLink know that is often best done deep in the ar... (Tom)

You may remember Jack Goldsmith from the Bush-Cheney years (he stood up to Cheney to stop the Stellarwind surveillance program and now is a Harvard law professor), but his life has been shadowed by a... (Tom)

Detectives and detective fiction arose together in the 19th century, and Summerscale, with relish, uses the style of the murder mystery to unravel an infamous true-life crime that helped birth the gen... (Tom)

The diagnosis is obvious, and one I make for myself nearly every day: that marvelous, seductive object, the smartphone, is an addictive parasite (as is my laptop as well), drawing my attention multipl... (Tom)

You'll rarely find a novel so straightforward: a single cyclist, a single race; 137 kilometers in 148 pages. Like the racers themselves, it's stripped down for speed, every gram weighed against necess... (Tom)

How did a corporation conquer one of the world's great civilizations? Dalrymple's storytelling gifts and his mastery of the archives of many nations and languages are on display once again as he shows... (Tom)

Someone on Twitter asked for suggestions of "angry" books just when I was in the middle of reading this one, one of the angriest books I've ever read. It comes in such a deceptive package, with its mo... (Tom)

Even if you've been to New Orleans, it's unlikely you've been to New Orleans East, a sprawling tract reclaimed from marshland in the '60s but suffering from neglect even before Katrina swept many resi... (Tom)

A bad investment causes fifty-year-old Raynor Winn and her husband Moth to lose their family farm and livelihood. Around the same time, Moth is diagnosed with a terminal degenerative illness that leav... (Haley)

This wonderful and strange book may have launched the sub-genre known awkwardly as the "swimoir," but there is much more swimming than memoir here. You hardly learn more about the author than you do f... (Tom)

In Nobel Prize winner Alexievich’s latest book to be translated into English we hear from the most unacknowledged of all war veterans—those who experienced it as children. The physical details of thei... (Liz)

Lawrence Weschler's great and unique talent—and it's great and unique enough that it makes him one of my favorite writers—is as a conduit for the obsessive ideas of others, from cartoonist Ben Katchor... (Tom)

I will, at some point, shut up about Robert Macfarlane, but while it's fresh in my mind I wanted to recommend an earlier book of his that I've just gotten to know. I like books about nature, but I rea... (Tom)

More Old Books of the Week Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees: Over Thirty Years of Conversations with Robert Irwin and True to Life: Twenty-Five Years of Conversations with David Hoc... (Tom)

Macfarlane is often called the great nature writer of his generation, but his vision of nature is not one of a pristine, unpeopled wilderness: his wilds are, for better or worse, deeply human, connect... (Tom)

Paul Le Roux is a Zimbabwean-born software coder who might have built the Uber of prescription painkillers—exploiting the complexity and anonymity of the internet to create a massive business in the g... (Tom)

In Robert Mueller's short statement this morning, he more or less pleaded, "Uh, have you read my report?" I recently have, and I can state that it is both refreshing and depressing to actually read th... (Tom)

One of the great mysteries of American literature—what was Harper Lee working on for the fifty years after To Kill a Mockingbird?—was left mostly unanswered after her death in 2016, but Casey Cep has... (Tom)

In one of my future dream scenarios, I become a therapist at age 55. This idea becomes even more alluring while I read the memoir Maybe You Should Talk to Someone by psychotherapist Lori Gottlieb. In... (Nancy)

Imagine a history of Europe, from the Middle Ages through the Industrial Age, that makes little or no mention of Martin Luther, or Newton, or Queen Elizabeth, or Columbus. Instead, the main figures in... (Tom)

"Sometimes, you don't know how confused you are about something important until you try explaining it to someone else." Starting with a premise similar to Ta-Nehisi Coates's in Between the World and M... (Tom)

In our mixed household, the Jewishness of certain foods (and other items) is a subject of frequent debate. Noodle kugel? Obviously. Marshmallows? Apparently not. (I'm not the expert.) In this fun and... (Tom)

Any expectations that a memoir by a member of a legendary gospel country duo might be squeaky clean ends on its first pages, with Charlie's foul-mouthed account of kicking his older brother Ira's ass... (Tom)

This is absolute candy for me. Caro, the buttoned-up, indefatigable biographer of Robert Moses and—in five volumes—Lyndon Johnson, has, in his 80s, become a cultural hero weighted with some of the sam... (Tom)

Last month I read the U.S. Climate Report, but only when I read this book did our predicament come devastatingly to life. Why? The facts are, mostly, the same; Wallace-Wells has only gathered existing... (Tom)

I read How to Be Loved in two days' time, but I’ve been carrying to book with me for weeks. I mean literally putting it in my bag so I can pop it open any time, to reread one of the 30 pages I've fold... (Nancy)

How did Hettie Cohen become Hettie Jones? By marrying the poet LeRoi Jones, who later marked his own transformation by changing his name to Amiri Baraka and leaving his mixed-race family behind. That'... (Tom)

You might think a memoir of growing up in the middle of Detroit's illegal underground numbers racket might be gritty and grim, but Davis's story is, pointedly, just the opposite. Told through a loving... (Tom)

I believe story is how we make sense of the world. This is not an original thought, but it is why I read books. Author Emily Bernard is a masterful storyteller. She makes writing her life look easy in... (Nancy)

Even as the president uses snowstorms to mock the science of climate change, the scientists working for his government quietly do their work, producing a report buried on that most deadly of news days... (Tom)

I must acknowledge that this is the most unattractively published of any book I've chosen for Phinney by Post, but don't let the cover (or typeface inside) turn you aside: there is superb storytelling... (Tom)

Being copyedited well—having a wise and sympathetic reader improve your sentences—is one of life's great pleasures, and perhaps the highest praise I can give Dreyer's English is to say it made me desp... (Tom)

Tressie McMillan Cottom is a very public intellectual. A sociologist by trade, she tweets with great volume and skill and has been placing essays across the internet since grad school—writing too much... (Tom)

I’ve read and loved all of Dani Shapiro’s memoirs, so I brought high expectations to Inheritance: A Memoir of Genealogy, Paternity and Love. Shapiro has a firecracker of a storyline: when she whimsica... (Nancy)