True Books

The hit new TV series Watchmen, adapted from Alan Moore's comic of the same name, opened its first season with dramatic scenes of widespread white-on-black violence in 1920s Tulsa, Oklahoma, that were... (James)

This is a young man's book, written at a particular time (the late '80s) about a subject that, in our own time, is almost impossible not to see in a different way. Before Bass moved to remote Montana... (Tom)

I am, for better or worse, not usually a cryer. Heather Christle is, and at first I thought her book would be a defense of that maligned, female-aligned activity. And in some ways it is, but it quickl... (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)

When I sat down to write the little introductory card I include in our Phinney by Post selections for what I had planned would be this month's choice—Jamaica Kincaid's A Small Place (see below)—I real... (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)

illustrated by Joseph R. Tomelleri To say this is the perfect gift for the fish fan in your life is both an understatement and an assumption that you have $150 to throw around. Over two decades in pre... (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)

For all my fellow Blitz Lit fans out there: have I found a book for you! This thrilling memoir of WWII London is written with such immediacy and attention to detail that I swear I could hear my heartb... (Liz)

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)

For twenty years, Park has spent the summers tracking the rare and regal Siberian tiger through Russia's eastern wilderness, and for each of those twenty winters he has hidden himself in tiny undergro... (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)

This innovative book of history comes with a history of its own: as a legendary PhD thesis shared for three decades among scholars but never published for a wider audience until now. Its innovation? P... (Tom)

"What's that thing?" Brian Hayes's daughter used to ask from the back seat. You might have asked the same, when seeing some strange man-made object sticking out of the ground or on the side of a build... (Tom)

For almost forty decades, and over 1,800 installments, Paul Dorpat's Seattle Now and Then series, pairing a historical city photo with a current one and a short essay, has been one of the most beloved... (Tom)

At some point in the previous decade, news filtered back to me that Glen Berger, the most talented person I knew in college, was writing a Spider-Man musical with U2 and Julie Taymor. What a break for... (Tom)

As someone who thinks about death more than is probably average or healthy, I couldn’t resist diving into Maggie O’Farrell’s unconventional memoir. Told in non-chronological order, each chapter is the... (Anika)

This tiny book is made up of tiny sketches of the departed, their brevity a reminder of the brevity of all of our lives. They are known only by the nicknames Winik gives them—the Clown, the Junkie, th... (Tom)

Return with Gabrielle Moss to what she calls a "pastel parallel universe," the moment in teen and tween fiction between the '70s heyday of Judy Blume and the millennial rise of J.K. Rowling. In that i... (Tom)

What is Seattle? Anyone who has lived here more than a year has watched the city transform under our feet, as it has many times before. The three creators of Seattleness use their expertise in design,... (Tom)