Category: Non-Fiction

The first time I registered the weight of the Japanese American internment was in a high school history class, when a classmate brought in a letter his grandfather had received. It was an apology from a former president; an apology for the impact and harm that had been caused by the internment. While jarring at…

And yes, home is that house where you no longer live. Home is before and you live in after. But home is also what you’re building and maintaining today… Away from his standard fiction titles (you might know him from The Fault in Our Stars and Looking for Alaska), The Anthropocene Reviewed is a collection…

The Jet-Age Story of the Women of Pan Am While flight attendants still hold a vaguely glamorous role in the back of my mind, I primarily see them through the lens of safety instructions given before flights and pushing the drinks cart up and down the aisle. Unfair? Certainly. Accurate? Maybe nowadays, but certainly not…

I’ll admit that the main reason I listened to this book (yes, listened to it) was because it was three hours long and I was making a last ditch-effort to catch up with my 2023 Goodreads reading challenge (which I have now completed!). What began as a means-to-an-end resulted in the discovery of a hilarious…

When General Motors closed their plant in Janesville, Wisconsin, an entire town – its infrastructure and the lives of its inhabitants – was upended. Janesville is not alone in experiencing the vacuum a factory closing can have on the livelihood of a community, but Janesville had gone through this before and recovered, so why should…

As much as I love words, I’ve never given much thought to their origins or their standardization, and I’ve never considered a time before a dictionary, before a comprehensive “rule book” of words. The Meaning of Everything is a story of just that: a story of the world before, and during the creation of, the…

In this memoir, Paul Holes details the nitty-gritty reality of solving cases, specifically those that have gone cold. With his hunt for the Golden State Killer taking center-stage, Holes takes the reader through his career solving various cases and the impact it had on his professional and personal life. I find crime-documentaries gripping and fascinating,…

This account of the opioid crisis in the United States is eye-opening, heartbreaking, and has radically altered the way I see drug addiction. In a feat of investigative journalism, Macy takes the reader into the heart of Appalachia, where affluent and poor communities alike are struck by the impact of opiods. Digging into the science behind…

When looking at two eggs – shell and all – how can you tell which one is hard boiled and which isn’t? This, among other everyday phenomena, is a mystery that Helen Czerski unpacks in Storm in a Teacup, using the laws of physics to explain our daily life. If you’re thinking, “my brain hasn’t worked…