A thoughtful, thorough survey of the best nonfiction found in today’s libraries.
A retired Virginia librarian compiles an annotated bibliography of high-quality nonfiction.
With decades of experience in public and school libraries, Maxie has a lifetime of experience helping patrons locate the next book to add to their reading list. In her debut, written under the pen name of Library Lin, Maxie distills a century of nonfiction into a digestible best-of compilation. Following the organizational structure of the Dewey Decimal System, the book’s 10 chapters parallel the classification system’s 10 hierarchal divisions of knowledge, from General Knowledge and Computer Science (000-099) and Religion (200-299) to Languages (400-499) and Geography, Biography, and History (900-999). Drawing on 65 lists, including those of National Book Award winners and the Kirkus Best Nonfiction Books of the Year, Maxie’s entries include a brief synopsis paragraph that describes each book’s thesis. Books that make Maxie’s cut must meet three additional criteria: They “must teach me something new,” “must change the way I look at life in some small way,” and must “keep the pages turning with a clear, engaging writing style.” Adhering to the American Library Association’s Library Bill of Rights, the book does not discriminate based on the ideology or background of the author and thus includes books that span a full range of sometimes competing perspectives on controversial topics like religion and politics. For a reference book of such enormous scope that has barely 400 pages, Maxie acknowledges her lists are “a tiny sampling,” part of a larger network of Library Lin book lists featured on her Further Reading blog. Dedicated “to all those who love to read and learn,” this is a useful reference tool for bibliophiles on the never-ending journey to find their next favorite book, and it’s accompanied by practical appendix material such as an author and title index. And while the book’s introductory chapter makes a too-cursory attempt to deal with topics like theoretical debates over blurred lines between “Fiction vs. Nonfiction,” its lists nevertheless make for a delightful guidebook.
A thoughtful, thorough survey of the best nonfiction found in today’s libraries.Pub Date: May 5, 2022
ISBN: 979-8-98592-340-7
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Spoon Creek Press
Review Posted Online: July 25, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
As bleak as winter fog at dusk, suggesting that one goes on after tragedy only because there’s nothing else one can do.
A memoir of living with the unbearable grief that followed the suicides of the author’s two teenage sons.
“I am in an abyss. I did not stray into the abyss. I did not fall into the abyss. I was not bullied or persecuted by others and thrown into the abyss. Rather, inexplicably and stunningly, I simply am in an abyss.” So writes Li, novelist and memoirist, whose two sons, full of promise, took their own lives—one, she ventures, for reasons of emotion, the other for reasons of thought, both concluding that a “livable life” was not possible. Li recounts her own struggles with depression, struggles not lightened by the delight of a Chinese media that considered her, having left her homeland and taken up writing in English, richly deserving of such punishment. Li lives through words and books, and here, even in the most harrowing moments, she reaches for them to explain herself to herself: here Ludwig Wittgenstein and Euripides, there Shakespeare and Philip Larkin, often Albert Camus. Always her habitat is that abyss, “which is my life,” marked by exhaustion, frustration, endless sorrow, and occasional bemusement, as when she notes that her older son died on the very day she put down a deposit for her new house in Princeton, the kind of coincidence that would seem unbelievable in fiction, on which she concludes, “Life…does not follow a novelist’s discipline. Fiction, one suspects, is tamer than life.” Though elegantly written and deeply thought through, Li’s book makes for emotionally difficult reading, offering little comfort for those who may be experiencing similar travails. “Both my children chose a hard thing,” she writes, encapsulating the narrative as a whole. “We are left with the hardest: to live after their deaths.”
As bleak as winter fog at dusk, suggesting that one goes on after tragedy only because there’s nothing else one can do.Pub Date: May 20, 2025
ISBN: 9780374617318
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Feb. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2025
Sedaris at his darkest—and his best.
In which the veteran humorist enters middle age with fine snark but some trepidation as well.
Mortality is weighing on Sedaris (Theft by Finding: Diaries 1977-2002, 2017, etc.), much of it his own, professional narcissist that he is. Watching an elderly man have a bowel accident on a plane, he dreaded the day when he would be the target of teenagers’ jokes “as they raise their phones to take my picture from behind.” A skin tumor troubled him, but so did the doctor who told him he couldn’t keep it once it was removed. “But it’s my tumor,” he insisted. “I made it.” (Eventually, he found a semitrained doctor to remove and give him the lipoma, which he proceeded to feed to a turtle.) The deaths of others are much on the author’s mind as well: He contemplates the suicide of his sister Tiffany, his alcoholic mother’s death, and his cantankerous father’s erratic behavior. His contemplation of his mother’s drinking—and his family’s denial of it—makes for some of the most poignant writing in the book: The sound of her putting ice in a rocks glass increasingly sounded “like a trigger being cocked.” Despite the gloom, however, frivolity still abides in the Sedaris clan. His summer home on the Carolina coast, which he dubbed the Sea Section, overspills with irreverent bantering between him and his siblings as his long-suffering partner, Hugh, looks on. Sedaris hasn’t lost his capacity for bemused observations of the people he encounters. For example, cashiers who say “have a blessed day” make him feel “like you’ve been sprayed against your will with God cologne.” But bad news has sharpened the author’s humor, and this book is defined by a persistent, engaging bafflement over how seriously or unseriously to take life when it’s increasingly filled with Trump and funerals.
Sedaris at his darkest—and his best.Pub Date: May 29, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-39238-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2018
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