Nonfiction November Reading List

Nonfiction November is a month-long nonfiction reading initiative meant to encourage readers to enjoy as much nonfiction as possible during November, and to incorporate more nonfiction reading into your TBR pile throughout the year. Below we’ve curated a reading list of history, memoir, essays, biography and more.

Black Gun, Silver Star

ART T. BURTON

Black Gun, Silver Star sifts through fact and legend to discover the truth about Bass Reeves, one of the most outstanding peace officers in late nineteenth-century America—and perhaps the greatest lawman of the Wild West era.

Son of Apollo

CHRISTOPHER A. ROOSA

Christopher A. Roosa grew up the eldest son of Apollo 14 astronaut and command module pilot Stuart A. Roosa. As a child of the space program, Christopher had a ringside seat at the dinner table of one of twenty-four Americans who had either entered lunar orbit or landed on the moon. In Son of Apollo, Christopher A. Roosa tells the inside story of the life of his father.

Molyvos

JOHN WEBB

In the summer of 2015 Molyvos became an epicenter of the mass migration of some 450,000 refugees, mainly Syrians, Afghans, and Iraqis, who crossed from Turkey, fleeing war and brutal dictatorships in their home countries in search of safety in the European Union. John Webb chronicles the dramatic and fearless efforts of a small band of people who carried out a homemade yet full-fledged, around-the-clock rescue operation until international NGOs began to arrive.

So, How Long Have You Been Native? is Alexis C. Bunten’s firsthand account of what it is like to work in the Alaska cultural tourism industry. An Alaska Native and anthropologist, she spent two seasons working for a tribally owned tourism business that markets the Tlingit culture in Sitka. Bunten’s narrative takes readers through the summer tour season as she is hired and trained and eventually becomes a guide.

Acetylene Torch Songs

SUE WILLIAM SILVERMAN

At times writers—from the unpublished to jaded lifers—need a fire lit under them to pursue the complex work of self-exploration. Acetylene Torch Songs provides that spark for memoirists and essayists seeking mentor-based instruction and inspiration.

Latinx Writing Los Angeles

Edited by IGNACIO LÓPEZ-CALVO and VICTOR VALLE

Latinx Writing Los Angeles offers a critical anthology of Los Angeles’s most significant English-language and Spanish-language (in translation) nonfiction writing from the city’s inception to the present. Contemporary Latinx authors focus on the ways in which Latinx Los Angeles’s nonfiction narratives record the progressive racialization and subalternization of Latinxs in the southwestern United States.

Almost Somewhere

SUZANNE ROBERTS

It was 1993, Suzanne Roberts had just finished college, and when her friend suggested they hike California’s John Muir Trail, the adventure sounded like the perfect distraction from a difficult home life and thoughts about the future. But she never imagined that the twenty-eight-day hike would change her life. Part memoir, part nature writing, part travelogue, Almost Somewhere is Roberts’s account of that hike.

Baseball Rebels

PETER DREIER and ROBERT ELIAS

Since baseball emerged in the mid-1800s to become America’s pastime, the nation’s battles over race, gender, and sexuality have been reflected on the playing field, in the executive suites, in the press box, and in the community. Baseball Rebels tells stories of baseball’s reformers and radicals who were influenced by, and in turn influenced, America’s broader political and social protest movements, making the game—and society—better along the way.

A reader might mistake It’s Fun to Be a Person I Don’t Know for a juicy Hollywood tell-all, given Chachi D. Hauser’s background as the great-granddaughter of Roy Disney. But family history is only one strand in this intricate and variegated weave that interlaces the social and environmental history of New Orleans, intimate reflections on love and navigating open relationships, and a searing self-examination that reveals a gender fluidity chafing against social barriers.

Asphalt: A History

KENNETH O’REILLY

In Asphalt: A History Kenneth O’Reilly provides a history of this everyday substance. By tracing the history of asphalt—in both its natural and processed forms—from ancient times to the present, O’Reilly sets out to identify its importance within various contexts of human society and culture.


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