True Books

When she moved from the U.S. to South Africa, Van Der Leun became obsessed with the story of Amy Biehl, a young white American women whose death at the hands of a black mob in the last days of aparthe... (Tom)

When Michael Herr died this week, this book, one of the few he wrote, understandably dominated his obituaries. Published in 1977, a decade after his year spent reporting in Vietnam—and after he weathe... (Tom)

My love affair with gorgeous, fact-heavy, oversized picture books continues with this beautiful new item. Braun's portraits of fauna from across the Northern Hemisphere go beyond the usual (you'll lea... (Tom)

Lara Feigel's work of WWII history and literary criticism, The Love-Charm of Bombs, made my personal Top 10 books of 2015. Her latest, The Bitter Taste of Victory, has done it again—but a little bit d... (Liz)

New and Old Books of the Week The Bitter Taste of Victory: Life, Love, and Art in the Ruins of the Reich The Love-Charm of Bombs: Restless Lives in the Second World War by Lara Feigel Lara Feigel's wo... (Liz)

Twenty-nine inches tall, born without hands and feet, husband of four and father of fourteen, and celebrated throughout 18th-century Europe not only for his rare condition but for his remarkable skill... (Tom)

Fans of the late Wallace are often divided between those who like his novels (in other words, Infinite Jest) best and those who prefer his essays, but there is another, narrower group (which includes... (Tom)

Want to get angry? Dayen's character-driven expose takes up where Michael Lewis's Big Short left off, in the chaotic, greedy aftermath of the real estate collapse. Among the millions—millions!—of home... (Tom)

Gerald Murnane is a particular man: he doesn't like travel, or the ocean, or computers, and he's never been on a horse. And for over seventy years, even as he's become one of Australia's most acclaime... (Tom)

You might imagine why I picked this year to finally read this classic political portrait, but the further I got into it, the fainter the echoes of Trumpism became. Wallace is a portrait less of a type... (Tom)

You might pass by this book with a funny title about a forgotten episode in a region that brings more terrible news every day, but don't. If "Orwellian" were a term not of horror but praise—meaning a... (Tom)

Oh, this is a good one, the sort of book you feel has been welling up inside its author, waiting to burst out. An unlikely but wonderful amalgam of plant science (Jahren's specialty and passion) and m... (Tom)

When The Argonauts came out last year, I was intimidated by Nelson's genre-fluid book about her life with a gender-fluid partner, not wanting to be schooled on a topic about which I'm curious but some... (Liz)

Old Books of the Week The Argonauts and The Red Parts by Maggie Nelson When The Argonauts came out last year, I was intimidated by Nelson's genre-fluid book about her life with a gender-fluid partner,... (Liz)

It's expensive being poor. The struggle for decent (often barely livable) housing is a full-time job, and even in a depressed city like Milwaukee holding on to the worst places to live, with no workin... (Laura)

I would never have picked this book up if I hadn't read a very funny essay Sernovitz wrote for the New Yorker website recently, where his bio identified him as both a novelist and an oilman. Intrigued... (Tom)

There seems to be a lot of death in the books a lot of us are reading these days. There is as much life as death in this memoir—it's a story of births, and of the birth and rebirth of love—but it's ha... (Tom)

Over twenty-five years later, one of the central events in Northwest history finally has its storyteller. Timber tycoons, a maverick governor, intrepid geologists, loggers, conservationists, gawkers,... (Tom)

What a tale: two brothers, both writers, found themselves in a plot beyond their own imagining, accused of a casino blackjack scam. But the real story, as those brothers tell it in Double Down, comes... (Tom)

Our front window this week is full of faces, in tribute to a new series started by Restless Books: beautiful, inexpensive little books on a subject we all share, but one that defines us most distinctl... (Tom)

You wouldn't think that the easy-going life of Dean Martin, who skated through a haze of booze, broads, and untold millions with a wink and a shrug, would provide such depths, but for Tosches, drawn t... (Tom)

As I often say when I recommend this in the store, this is Laura's favorite book ever, but, really, it's one of my favorites too. Fadiman's story of the tragic misunderstandings between American medic... (Tom)

Some true-crime classics, like In Cold Blood or The Executioner's Song or The Stranger Beside Me, conduct a sort of horrified romance with their charismatic killers. Sanders's new book, which might be... (Tom)

Did you get drawn into the Netflix true-crime binge phenomenon, Making a Murderer? If so, you likely recall Dean Strang, the defense lawyer whose wry, earnest intelligence and "normcore style" have ma... (Tom)

Growing up in the Kentucky hills, boys ended up doing what their father did: a plumber's son became a plumber, a writer's son, like Offutt, became a writer. But only after his dad's death in 2013 did... (Tom)

McCarthy's 1957 memoir of her first dozen or so years just gets better every time I reread it. There's plenty of drama—she was orphaned, maltreated, and rescued—but the real thrill comes from her bril... (Tom)

Paul Kalanithi's plan was to spend the first twenty years of his working life as a neurosurgeon, and the next twenty as a writer, but fate had other ideas. Just as he was finishing his residency, he r... (Tom)

The Paris Luc Sante loves, like the old, dirty, and dangerous New York he exhumed in his marvelous history Low Life, is not the one you can glimpse from the Eiffel Tower or in the corporate boutiques... (Tom)

Beard came to writing late, and this collection of autobiographical essays was the only book she published until her late fifties, but clearly she was paying attention all along. She's drawn by a rest... (Tom)

I think Utopia Parkway must have been one of the first biographies I read for pleasure. (That is, after all the sports bios of my youth.) Lightly written and deeply appreciative, Solomon's 1997 book m... (Tom)

Nowhere is the truism "everything old is new again" truer than in pop music, where all the upheavals of the digital era have brought us back to the hit-factory days of Tin Pan Alley, the Brill Buildin... (Tom)

Unpublished until 1995, these diaries of a German Jew who survived the Nazi years have become one of the most essential records of the era. Klemperer, a scholar of language and literature, was ultimat... (Tom)

This is one of the most beautiful books of the year, and to me one of the most joyous. Paz traveled the world photographing record collectors with their vinyl, and the result is a gorgeously and thoug... (Tom)

Many admirers of Stegner will argue that his finest book is not one of his most acclaimed novels, Angle of Repose or Crossing to Safety, but this book, a biography of the great expedition leader that... (Tom)

The title alone has an aspirational allure (at least for book hoarders like me), but the book inside is even better: it's a beautiful, subtle, and knowledgeable portrait of a singular man, Chimen Abra... (Tom)

Thank goodness for strange, little books. This one, almost 25 years old already (!), may not be for everyone, but if you have the smallest bit of fascination with how one writer thinks about another,... (Tom)

The Goncourt brothers were snobs, egotists, misogynists, reactionaries, and not, as it turned out, the immortal novelists they desperately hoped they would be, but their words (and those they recorded... (Tom)

I love the 33 1/3 series of little books, each on a single record album (we have a sizable stack of them in the store), but this one is easily my favorite, even though I had never heard the record it'... (Tom)

It's still hard for me to believe Marilynne Robinson has become so famous the president quotes her as his "friend." For nearly twenty years after her great debut novel, Housekeeping, she nearly disapp... (Tom)

I've never surfed, and I'm not about to start now. But Finnegan's memoir of fifty years of surfing (while building an acclaimed career as a journalist) is a thrilling immersion in both the wonder and... (Tom)

This might be the funniest—or the truest—book in the store. Fourier, you may recall, was the French utopian socialist from your economics classes who influenced Marx and predicted the seas would somed... (Tom)

Midway on their life's journey together, Sonya Lea's husband Richard became another person. After an experimental (and successful) surgery to remove a rare cancer, he found himself nearly without memo... (Tom)

One of the most appealing things about Ta-Nehisi Coates as a writer is his humility: his openness to change, to self-education, to acknowledgment of his constantly reforming knuckleheadedness. But as... (Tom)

Suddenly it seems I'm on a roll (or a jag) of reading (or wanting to read) books by men about their uncommon professions (airline pilot Mark Vanhoenacker's Skyfaring, neurosurgeon Henry Marsh's Do No... (Tom)

Consider my breath taken. I'm not much of a follower of fashion (you may have seen how I dress), and we haven't featured many art and fashion books in the store (for one thing, I'm not sure how to dis... (Tom)

Does your heart, like mine, quicken at the thought of entire chapters on the hyphen, the objective case, and the best pencil for marking proof? Oh, you'll get all the grammar porn you could hope for h... (Tom)

After her popular illustrated compendium, Farm Anatomy, Julia Rothman has expanded her curiosity to take in the entire natural world. In over 200 colorful pages, she shares facts on everything from th... (Tom)

Are you one of those whose hearts the word "infrastructure" sets a-fluttering? Who find the anonymous, unglamorous work that keeps our world running at least as compelling as more traditional derring-... (Tom)

This giant item was the holy book of my adolescence, which says a lot about both my adolescence and this book. James has a (justifiable) reputation as the oddball Kansas stathead who transformed and/o... (Tom)

Our second "True" selection for the Phinney by Post book subscription service (subscribe here!) might be more precisely categorized as "Strange but True." J.S.G. Boggs is an artist both fine and con,... (Tom)