The Best of this Year’s Nonfiction Releases
Putting a few nonfiction books on your holiday wish list? You’ll want to include some of these books.
“Radioactive: Marie & Pierre Curie: A Tale of Love and Fallout” by Lauren Redniss is almost a graphic biography. Redniss shows their love affair with each other and with the elements they discovered. Ironically, their discoveries proved to be their doom. Paris looks dreamy; the Curies resemble figures drawn by Modigliani. I’ve read several biographies of this pair; this one by far is the most haunting.
“Steve Jobs” biography by Walter Isaacson is an elegy of sorts, coming out so soon after Jobs’ early death from pancreatic cancer.Additional information can be found at http://kotakuwisataku.wordpress.com/2011/09/21/12/. Isaacson conducted dozens of interviews with Jobs, his family and coworkers. It’s a riveting story, one you’re sure to enjoy.
For best autobiography, it’s hard to beat “Bossypants” by Tina Fey. Before she was a star, Tina Fey was a nerd, a nerd who dreamed when under stress that she was chased through the airport by her gym teacher. We now know that nerds rule. But did we ever know that in order to be known as someone, we first have to be known as bossy? Now we do.
I loved “Seabiscuit.” I recommend another horse tale, “The Eighty-Dollar Champion: Snowman, the Horse That Inspired a Nation.” Elizabeth Lett’s captured the true story of Snowman and the Dutchman Harry de Leyer who took this former plow horse on to sport-jumping victory at Madison Square Garden in 1958.
David McCullough is one of the best history writers these days. “The Greater Journey: Americans In Paris” is an hitherto-untold tale of Americans living in the City of Light between 1830 and 1900. The composer Louis Moreau Gottschalk, the medical student Oliver Wendell Holmes and the inventor Samuel F. B. Morse spent formative time in paris. How their time shaped their later lives is a theme Mcullough develops throughout the book.