CategoryReviews of Non-fiction Books

Jeanne Theoharis is a professor at Brooklyn College and has written eleven books on the topics of civil rights and Black Power movements. This one was written in 2013 and is the first definitive political biography of Rosa Parks. The audiobook I listened to was recorded in 2024 and has a substantial introduction, occasioned by newly available papers, photographs, and other materials of Rosa Parks...

I don’t remember where I saw a reference to this very new book; the only major newspaper review I have seen was done by The Guardian and only 29 people have written about it in Goodreads. I’m hoping it will receive the appreciation I believed it deserves. I was intrigued by the unique idea of 101 readers, many you’ve heard of, reading seven or eight minute descriptions of a wide...

It’s hard to imagine a better audiobook than this one; hearing a deeply personal memoir read by the author reflecting on his brother’s death and on being a guard for ten years in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York as he healed was great. The author had been a staffer at The New Yorker at the time of his brother’s death in 2008. His job was to work with eminent writers as...

I have read almost all of Nina Stibbe’s books. This one is non-fiction, like her first, Love, Nina, about moving to London to be a nanny for the two sons of Mary-Kay Wilmers, founder and former editor of The London Review of Books, and Stephen Frears, filmmaker (My Beautiful Laundrette and Philomena). That book is a compilation of her letters to her sister Vic; this one is in the form of a...

Lynne Olson has found another brave and impressive woman to write about. I was enthusiastic about Madame Fourcade’s Secret War, about a resistance warrior in World War II, as well as Citizens of London. Christiane Desroches-Noblecourt, born in 1913, became an Egyptologist for the Louvre in the mid-1930s. She was a rare, perhaps unique, female figure in digs and was unusual in making good...

It has taken me weeks to listen to this 66-hour audiobook and it’s been a grueling, but fascinating undertaking. This three-volume work about Robert Moses, written in the 1970s, is about an extremely unusual figure, a man who for nearly 40 years was a powerful figure in New York City and State politics who was never elected to any office. It is about how he amassed power, what he did with...

It was a recommendation by James Fallows that took me to Beaverland:  How One Weird Rodent Made America. I’m not so sure about that subtitle, but there were some great tidbits to be found here. The author describes beavers as a keystone species, a species that like that block in the center of a medieval archway is vital to the archway, is key to the survival of a biological community. They...