One Sentence Summary: Opposition researchers Alan Huffman and Michael Rejebian share details about their work, digging through public records to reveal the secrets that political candidates and their opponents may or may not use during the course of a campaign season.
One Sentence Review: Huffman and Rejebian’s book suggests dark secrets but delivers a slightly bland celebration of opposition researchers as relentless truth seekers with no control over how their work is ultimately used (or misused).
Review: There’s nothing like finding a book that tells a previously unknown or misunderstood story, and the tale of Jeanne Baret is definitely one of those. Set on the high seas, and full of romance, intrigue and adventure, it’s exactly the sort of narrative history book that I find deeply fascinating.
Since I hosted the first BAND discussion last July, we’ve passed discussion around to a bunch of awesome bloggers. In my first discussion, I asked about your favorite type of nonfiction. This month, I want to go the other direction…
When I first heard that there was going to be a documentary made about what it is like to work at the New York Times, I may have squealed. Loudly and repeatedly. Just maybe.
Although I’ve never wanted to work at the Times, that newspaper — for better or for worse — is the standard of journalism in the United States. During my first visit to New York for the Book Blogger Convention in 2010, I was one of those total dorks that took a photo in front of the New York Times building (well, Care took the photo, I just posed like a total fan girl).
I think one of the reasons I’ve procrastinated on writing this review is because I just don’t quite know what to say about What It Is Like to Go to War. Karl Marlantes’ nonfiction follow-up to his widely-regarded novel Matterhorn a fascinating hybrid of a nonfiction book — part memoir, part history, part manifesto — that explores a central conflict from Marlantes’ time as a Marine:
The Marine Corps taught me how to kill, but it didn’t teach me how to deal with killing.
Fresh from her stint at Le Cordon Bleu culinary school in Paris (chronicled in her first memoir, The Sharper Your Knife, the Less You Cry) author/chef Kathleen Flinn isn’t sure where her path leads. The idea for her next project comes after a chance encounter in the grocery store. Flinn notices a woman filling her cart full of processed foods. When she gets up the nerve to ask the customer about it, Flinn discovers that the customer wants to eat better, but feels overwhelmed choosing and preparing healthier options.
The host for January’s BAND discussion is Joy (Joy’s Book Blog). Because January is a time of new beginnings when people set goals and channel hopeful energy “into communities around interests like reading 100 books in a year or training for a marathon or taking a photo every day.” Joy asks:
What book or books have you used or are you using to support a goal, resolution, or project?
Confession time: I picked up this book because I fell in love with the subtitle. I have this readerly weakness for a great subtitle, and Moby-Duck by Donovan Hohn has one of the best that I’ve read in awhile:
The True Story of 28,800 Bath Toys, Lost at Sea and of the Beachocombers, Oceaongraphers, Environmentalists, and Fools, Including the Author, Who Went in Search of Them
Doesn’t that make your heart flutter a little bit? Just me?
I bookmarked so many fantastic passages from The Emperor of All Maladies by Siddhartha Mukherjee, it’s hard for me to pick just one to start this review with. But really, if there’s one quote that epitomizes the things I loved best about this book, I think it would be this one:
This image — of cancer as our desperate, malevolent, contemporary doppelganger — is so haunting because it is at least party true. A cancer cell is an astonishing perversion of the normal cell. Cancer is a phenomenally successful invader and colonizer in part because it exploits the very features that make us successful as a species or as an organism.
Now that 2011 is gone and we’re trucking along into 2012, I can finally share with you the nonfiction short list for the Indie Lit Awards. This year, Biography/Memoir got split off from the Nonfiction category, which means our nonfiction list is chock full of intensely long and serious nonfiction reads. Seriously. Every book on this list is more than 400 pages long. So much reading!
