Nonfiction Authors (page 4)

Ijeoma Oluo recognizes that readers of So You Want to Talk About Race are taking a risk.

“We live in a country that tells you you can ignore this subject,” says Oluo, a Seattle-based writer, speaker, and editor at large of The Establishment, an intersectional media site funded and run by women.“If it gets painful, you can just stop.”

“If a reader was going to sit down and take the risk of delving through these tough emotions ...

Who would have thought I would pine for the days of George W. Bush? Given the catastrophe that has been the Trump administration, one may forgive me for looking back at a presidency that, while hardly what most historians would consider “good,” showed at least the faintest glimmer of human decency and respect for the American people. The same cannot be said for the current administration, a situation that has led to numerous book-length assessments of the president and ...

It’s January, and many of us are buried under snow and/or the general malaise of midwinter. Put down the shovel and pick up a copy of one of these engaging January books guaranteed to entertain and brighten your mood (quotes are from the Kirkus reviews).

The Most Dangerous Man in America by Bill Minutaglio and Steven L. Davis: “Minutaglio and Davis, who collaborated previously on Dallas 1963 (2014), deliver a rich and frequently hilarious chronicle of the Nixon ...

According to the extensive archival and DNA research of historian Catherine Kerrison, Thomas Jefferson had three daughters who lived into adulthood: Martha Jefferson Randolph (b. 1772), Mary “Maria” Jefferson Eppes (b. 1778), and Harriet Hemings (b. 1801).

Were we to time travel to the early 1800s and ask Jefferson directly, he almost certainly would have claimed two.

“He never in his lifetime publicly acknowledged the shadow family he had with Sally Hemings,” says Kerrison, speaking from Pennsylvania, where she ...

Longtime critic and essayist Claire Dederer has always had a slight obsession with film director Roman Polanski. So in the summer of 2011, a year after the release of Poser, her gutsy, bestselling debut memoir about yoga and motherhood, she set out to write her next book with him in mind. “I was working on that book,” Dederer recalls. “And then I realized, ‘Oh, I’m really not interested in Polanski, I’m interested in the girl that he raped.’ ...

Recipes, like people, have DNA. It may take some ferreting out, some hard kitchen testing, some documentary research, and some more tasting and adjusting, but eventually that yellowed slip of paper tucked into grandmom’s copy of Joy of Cooking will yield its ancestry, reveal its origins through the patina of the past, and show how tastes and ingredients have changed over time.

Extend that search for culinary DNA over the course of four centuries and several continents, and you have ...

Vladimir Putin, by all reports, has an enemies list a mile long. The chances are good that Moscow-born journalist Masha Gessen, author of the new book The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia, figures prominently on it as both a campaigner for LGBTQ rights in Russia and as a writer who has long chronicled the excesses of the Putin regime.

 The chances are just as good that Gessen, who has lived in the United States off and on for ...

Right after his mother died, Sherman Alexie wrote 100 poems in a frenzy. “Grief makes you obsessive in a way I’ve never been obsessive before, and I have actual OCD,” he explains about the genesis of his new memoir, You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me. He felt that after his mother’s death he could finally be honest about the complications of their relationship. But as he probed deeper into the nature of his grief, he found that ...