Category Notable Nonfiction

A Piece of Cake Cupcake Brown Orphaned by the death of her mother and left in the hands of a sadistic foster parent, young Cupcake Brown learned to survive by turning tricks, downing hard liquor, and ingesting every drug she…

Born Lucky Leland Vittert If you’re channel surfing and happen upon Leland Vittert during his nightly national cable show on NewsNation, he comes off as a poised journalist prying nuggets from guests. If you watched him for years as an…

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings Maya Angelou Here is a book as joyous and painful, as mysterious and memorable, as childhood itself. I Know Why the Caged Bird Singscaptures the longing of lonely children, the brute insult of…

Somewhere Sisters Erika Hayasaki It was 1998 in Nha Trang, Việt Nam, and Liên struggled to care for her newborn twin girls. Hà was taken in by Liên’s sister, and she grew up in a rural village with her aunt,…

White Walls A Memoir about Motherhood, Daughterhood and the Mess In Between Judy Batalion Judy Batalion grew up in a house filled with endless piles of junk and layers of crumbs and dust; suffocated by tuna fish cans, old papers…

The Other Woman My Years with O.J. Simpson Paula Barbieri  The former girlfriend of O.J. Simpson reveals the “real” O.J., describing what happened during the explosive days before the trial and her daily visits with him during the criminal trial

The New York Nobody Knows William B. Helmreich Travel As a child growing up in Manhattan, William Helmreich played a game with his father called “Last Stop.” They would pick a subway line, ride it to its final destination, and…

The Devil in the White City Erik Larson  Two men, each handsome and unusually adept at his chosen work, embodied an element of the great dynamic that characterized America’s rush toward the twentieth century. The architect was Daniel Hudson Burnham,…

Seabiscuit An American Legend Laura Hillenbrand  Seabiscuit was one of the most electrifying and popular attractions in sports history and the single biggest newsmaker in the world in 1938, receiving more coverage than FDR, Hitler, or Mussolini. But his success…

Braiding Sweetgrass Robin Wall Kimmerer Drawing on her life as an indigenous scientist, and as a woman, Kimmerer shows how other living beings―asters and goldenrod, strawberries and squash, salamanders, algae, and sweetgrass―offer us gifts and lessons, even if we’ve forgotten…