I’ve been interested in food and reading about food for the last several months. While I’m not a farmer or a gardener myself, I do love the local farmers’ market and how much great, fresh, local produce I can get when it’s not freezing here in the Midwest.
But there are people who do a lot more than just go to the farmers’ market each Saturday — they go all out to change their lives and their food. This Narrative Nonfiction 5 lists is about memoirs and nonfiction written by people who have taken back their food by going back to the farm.
One goal I set for myself this year is to do more with nonfiction on my blog. One way I’ve decided to do that is through a new semi-weekly feature: Narrative Nonfiction 5. Every few weeks or so, Narrative Nonfiction 5 will feature a list of five nonfiction books on a particular theme.
As the title suggests, I’m focusing specifically on narrative nonfiction. That term can encompass a lot of things, but for me it means nonfiction books that use techniques of fiction — plot, characters, dialogue, symbolism — to tell a good, true, story.
One Sentence Summary: In 1920s New York, two forensic scientists started a cat and mouse game with criminals to detect and prove the use of poison for murder.
One Sentence Review: Blum’s book combines murder, mystery, and easy-to-understand chemistry into an easy to read package.
One Sentence Summary: Near the end of WWII, 36 young men volunteered to starve themselves as part of an experiment to understand the basics of human nutrition needs.
One Sentence Review: The book is at it’s strongest when focusing on the experiment and the experiences of the subjects, but loses some momentum when it tries to step out and address too many large issues.
Hunter S. Thompson is one of those writers a reader seems to either love or hate. I’ve never read Thompson for a number of reasons, but I always felt like I should if I planned to blog about literary journalism extensively.
A few months ago Care (Care’s Online Book Club) said she was starting her own John Cusack Reading Challenge, I was a little surprised to see Thompson’s giant book Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72 on that list. I mentioned I wanted to read the book too, and lo-and-behold a mini-read-a-long was born.
I read Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma and Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle back-to-back earlier this year as part of my semester-long class on food writing. While both look at what we eat, they approach the issue from very different directions. Pollan’s book is a more academic look at the structures and politics that make up the food system, while Kingsolver’s memoir applies some suggested reforms to her family’s food choices for a year.
Two Sentence Summary: On November 15, 1959 four members of a prominent family were brutally murdered for no apparent reason. This book reconstructs the crime and follows the investigation of this senseless crime.
One Sentence Review: Capote’s book is chilling and creepy, but reconstructs this crime so fully it’s earned it’s status as one of the central tomes of literary journalism.
One Sentence Summary: To learn to be a chef, journalist Bill Buford follows the path of celebrity chef Mario Batali from the kitchen of Batali’s restaurant in New York back to the origins of Batali’s cooking education in rural Italy.
One Sentence Review: Buford’s profile of a chef and his restaurant were more interesting than Buford’s own attempts to learn the origins of Italian cooking, but the book’s look at what it means to be a chef from the inside was readable, and made me happy I don’t lead that life 
