Instagram Facebook X-twitter Linkedin
NonfictionTrue Crime

Reap the Whirlwind

The piercing Reap the Whirlwind chronicles a historic 1985 homicide, and shows how perspectives on law enforcement and innocence shift depending on who you are.
The piercing Reap the Whirlwind chronicles a historic 1985 homicide, and shows how perspectives on law enforcement and innocence shift depending on who you are.
Previous
Next

All Nonfiction Coverage

Filter by genre
NonfictionScienceNature

What the Wild Sea Can Be

Review by Becky Libourel Diamond

We are inundated by media updates about global warming, from statistical warnings and satellite images to news and weather reports on the latest storms, fires and floods. These ever-present alerts often focus on what’s happening to the land, but what about threats to the unique ecosystems of our oceans?

This vast water world is the focus of marine biologist and author Helen Scales’ latest book, What the Wild Sea Can Be: The Future of the World’s Ocean. Organized into three sections covering the ocean’s history, vanishing species and habitats, and the ocean’s restoration and future, the book takes a global perspective while also highlighting how specific regions and their wildlife are affected by the changing climate. Statistics drive home the immediacy of the crisis: “Within just the past fifty years, as people have been overexploiting species, destroying habitats, and releasing pollutants, the total mass of vertebrate life in the ocean has halved.”

Scales explores key issues impacting marine life, from warming waters, to disease-causing bacteria and viruses, to plastics contamination, along with striking examples of how these trends play out. For example, whales have a particularly high risk of microplastics consumption due to the shrimp and krill they eat: During migration to the coast of California, blue whales consume more than 10 million of these plastic particles, which can accumulate in tissues and alter expressions of genes, per day. Ecosystem shifts cause invasive migrations that upset the ecological balance, such as that of lionfish; native to the Indian and Pacific Oceans, they are now found along America’s east coast and in the Mediterranean. These invasive lionfish number five times their population in their native waters, and they threaten to consume other species to extinction.

But as the title suggests, the book is not all gloom and doom. In her introduction, Scales encourages readers to take part in “mental time travel” and “keep seeing the glory and feeling wonderment in the ocean.” By offering hopeful scenarios and advice for making “conscious decisions about the future of the earth’s biodiversity,” she provides the reader with a level of positivity not often heard amid the overwhelming climate news that can often make us feel helpless. “I hope this book will offer an antidote to the rising tide of eco-anxiety and fears for the future of the planet,” Scales writes. “Turn that fear into commitment and initiative.” What the Wide Sea Can Be provides a glimmer of light in a darkening world.

Helen Scales’ inspiring What the Wild Sea Can Be addresses climate-caused threats to our oceans, while providing a glimmer of light in a darkening world.

The Quiet Damage

The Quiet Damage investigates the destructive impact of QAnon on individuals and families, exploring the delicate art of bringing those lost to conspiracy theories back to reality.
NonfictionTrue CrimeHistory

The Incorruptibles

Review by Priscilla Kipp

New York City’s East Side at the turn of the 20th century comes vibrantly alive in The Incorruptibles: A True Story of Kingpins, Crime Busters, and the Birth of the American Underworld. In the late 1800s, Eastern European Jews began fleeing Germany’s pogroms and Russia’s Pale of Settlement, the largest ghetto in history. The East Side became their American ghetto, soon in the grip of an underworld of gamblers, grifters and pimps, and an upper world of titans of manufacturing and politics. Then along came Abe Shoenfeld and his vice squad, the Incorruptibles.

Dan Slater (Love in the Time of Algorithms) stumbled upon Shoenfield’s “reams of reportage and intelligence about the Jewish underworld of pre-World-War-I New York.” Combined with reporting from newspapers of the day, as well court cases, sales receipts, government findings and memoirs of those involved, Slater provides rich context for the setting the Incorruptibles hoped to reform. In a city plagued by abominable labor conditions in factories, the political machine of Tammany Hall and corruption blocking the path to justice, Shoenfeld’s homegrown vice squad was determined, against all odds, to be incorruptible.

Slater recreates the notorious stars of this underworld—the likes of dapper Arnold Rothstein, ruthless Big Jack Zelig and comically clueless gangster Louie Rosenberg—and the women in their shadows, some of whom, like Louie’s widow, Lily Rosenberg, kept their own notes. He also weaves in the critical impact of fomenting antisemitism throughout the country. The vices plaguing the East Side were being attributed to Jewish immigrants at large, rather than the small cabal of wealthy schemers and corrupt politicians. Slater shows how this metastasizing hatred of Jews foreshadowed Nazi Germany.

While the need for reform was an easy message to sell to the public, actually prohibiting popular illegal activities like gambling and prostitution proved hard. Working with a scrupulous lawyer named Harry Newburger and detective Joseph Faurot, whose technical acumen, like bridging telephone wires to listen in to private conversations, revolutionized criminal investigations, the Incorruptibles prompted The World to print on the front page: “BIGGEST GAMBLERS QUIT; BROADWAY SECTION CLEAN.”

If this was the sole substance of Slater’s book, it would be a singularly worthy read. Yet it is so much more. The Incorruptibles is a compelling crime story, colorful history and an ominous warning about antisemitism.

Dan Slater’s vibrant The Incorruptibles chronicles the homegrown vice squad that took down New York City’s most notorious turn-of-the-century gangsters.

The Genius of Judy

More than just a fan letter to Judy Blume, The Genius of Judy shows how the groundbreaking author’s work has impacted multiple generations of women.
NonfictionWomen's HistoryHistoryAmerican History

The Bluestockings

Review by Roger Bishop

In 18th-century England, women and men had no setting where it was acceptable to converse as equals on intellectual subjects like literature, fine art, foreign affairs, history, philosophy and science. That is, until women began hosting lively gatherings that defied sexist gender norms.

When Elizabeth Montagu began hosting her salons in her house in London, she started a trend that historian Susannah Gibson calls “the centerpiece of the first women’s liberation movement.” Gibson’s meticulously researched and beautifully written The Bluestockings: A History of the First Women’s Movement tells how this groundbreaking development changed the lives of women who achieved prestige as novelists, poets, translators and advocates of education.

Gibson spotlights salon hosts Elizabeth Montagu and Hester Thrale alongside prominent intellectual figures of the period: novelists Frances Burney and Sarah Scott, poets Ann Yearsley and Hannah More, author and advocate Mary Wollstonecraft and historian Catharine Macaulay. “Whatever magic Montagu weaved within the walls of her salon,” writes Gibson, “the old spell was broken and the learned lady—so despised elsewhere—suddenly became a desirable person to know . . . even an aspirational figure.” Macaulay is of particular interest because her experience is emblematic of the existent societal tension. Her multivolume history of England was widely praised, yet she dealt with “an enormous amount of male prejudice.”

The term “bluestocking” “caught on as a way of valuing intellectual endeavors above fashion.”  While Gibson acknowledges the diversity of opinions among the Bluestockings, she writes that, on the whole, they “were advocating for the most fundamental woman’s right: the right to be acknowledged as an independent individual of inherent worth.” Laying the groundwork of a whole new worldview, the movement influenced the suffragists of the next century. Consistently enlightening and insightful, The Bluestockings should be widely read by both women and men.

Meticulously researched and beautifully written, The Bluestockings recounts the lives of 18th-century women who forged a path for feminist movements to come.
NonfictionScienceMemoirAnimals

Sharks Don’t Sink

Review by Celia Mattison

It’s clear from the jump of Jasmin Graham’s marvelous Sharks Don’t Sink: Adventures of a Rogue Shark Scientist why the author feels such a kinship with the titular fish. Sharks, who have survived five mass extinctions, are survivors. As Graham narrates her journey to becoming a marine biologist, from a childhood spent fishing with her Black family in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina; to founding Minorities in Shark Sciences, an organization that funds research opportunities for people of color; to becoming a “rogue” scientist, we see that Graham, too, is a survivor resistant to easy classification.

In conversational prose that makes marine biology both accessible and exciting to a layperson, Graham describes the slings and arrows of shark research as a Black woman who has an infectious curiosity in and reverence for the natural world and refuses to be pushed out of it by the white men who still dominate shark science. As some of these men devolve into a screaming match about affirmative action at a professional conference, Graham locks eyes with the only other person of color, thinking, “What on earth have we gotten ourselves into?” Five years later, Graham had enough. In 2022, after questioning if she should leave science entirely, Graham became a rogue scientist, without a permanent academic affiliation. Like her beloved sharks, she adapted.

Along with Graham’s abiding love of all things oceanic, the other most potent force in Sharks Don’t Sink is her persistent belief in community. Graham pays tribute to the many scientists who paved the way for her, from a professor who offered her master’s level work while she was still an undergraduate, to the field-defining work of Japanese American shark researcher Dr. Eugenie Clark. This careful tending by her community has allowed Graham to thrive as a “Black, proud, nervous, and nerdy” scientist who has become one of the most prominent voices in marine conservation.

The cartilaginous skeletons of sharks have made it nearly impossible to leave fossil records.  Likewise, the history and triumphs of too many Black women scientists have been lost. Graham’s story of charting her own course is both an important record and a delight. “You don’t need to change the world,” Graham writes, as she thinks back on the group of Black friends she made as a child at her mostly white magnet school. “You just need to change your small piece of the world.”

 

In Sharks Don’t Sink, marine biologist Jasmin Graham pushes for diversity in her field while also celebrating her deep, abiding love for the titular fish.

Reap the Whirlwind

The piercing Reap the Whirlwind chronicles a historic 1985 homicide, and shows how perspectives on law enforcement and innocence shift depending on who you are.
NonfictionLifestylesDesign

Parachute

Review by Laura Hutson Hunter

When I first saw Parachute: Subversive Design and Street Fashion, I didn’t think I was familiar with the Montreal-based brand, which was founded by American architect Harry Parnass and British designer Nicola Pelly in the late 1970s. But after spending only a few minutes with the book, I realized I was wrong. Parachute’s influence on New Wave style was so pervasive that it was almost impossible to miss. Think about exaggerated trench coats or kimono-style jumpsuits, and you’re likely thinking of Parachute-influenced designs. Though the brand’s heyday was the ’80s, the book itself feels very current, with text in both English and French and a dynamic layout that changes from section to section. Author Alexis Walker is associate curator of dress, fashion and textiles at the McCord Stewart Museum in Montreal, and she presents her subject as if in a comprehensive museum archive. It’s rare to see a brand as subversive as Parachute become so influential, and the book gracefully walks the line between commerce and art. In a chapter dedicated to Parachute’s enduring, collaborative relationship with the musician Peter Gabriel, Gabriel is quoted as saying “Parachute always seemed different—smarter and highly original.” This book is that, as well.

 

The dynamic, photo-heavy Parachute shows the titular brand’s influence on fashion and culture.

Meet the Neighbors

Brandon Keim’s awe-inspiring Meet the Neighbors exhorts us to consider that all animals, from dolphins to salamanders, are just as capable of thinking and feeling as we are.
NonfictionHistoryEuropean History

Irena’s Gift

Review by Joy Ramirez

Karen Kirsten spent afternoons as a young child at the home of her Polish grandparents in Melbourne, Australia, eating cakes from her grandmother’s favorite patisserie and listening to classical music. Adored by her maternal grandparents Alicja and Mietek, both Holocaust survivors, she could not understand why they never spoke about their past. As a young adult, she wondered why she was taught nothing about Judaism, and she struggled to explain her mother’s tales of a troubled and abusive childhood with parents she claimed did not love her.

What Kirsten didn’t know is that when her mother, Joasia, was 32, she received a letter from a stranger that blew open her world. It was from her real father—not Mietek, but another man who was living in Canada—and he wrote that her actual mother, Alicja’s sister Irena, was fatally shot by the Nazis in occupied Poland. Joasia would soon learn that as a baby, her father smuggled her out of the Warsaw ghetto in a backpack. Alicja and Mietek, her aunt and uncle, never told her the truth. And like her aunt and uncle, Joasia kept these revelations a secret from her own children for decades.

Irena’s Gift: An Epic WWII Memoir of Sisters, Secrets, and Survival chronicles Kirsten’s remarkable, decade-long quest to understand and heal the transgenerational trauma of war on her family. Using historical accounts, interviews and extensive archival research, Kirsten movingly reconstructs scenes of violence and heroism in the lives of everyday people, most notably the extraordinary women who came before her. After years of emotionally intense research reconstructing her mother’s and grandparents’ past, Kirsten takes Joasia to Poland to uncover the origins of their pain.

Pain sometimes travels through families until someone is ready to feel it. This memoir is the result of Kirsten’s journey to break open the seal of suffering and rebuild her family’s Jewish identity after decades of silence. Irena’s Gift is a beautifully written testimony to the power of memoir to heal and recreate a family’s history.

Weaving history with mystery, Karen Kirsten uncovers her family’s traumatic experiences during the Holocaust in her remarkable memoir, Irena’s Gift.

Want more BookPage?

Stay on top of new releases: Sign up for our newsletter to receive reading recommendations in your favorite genres.

Sign up now

Trending Nonfiction

All Nonfiction

Author Interviews

More Interviews

Recent Features

All Features