Nonfiction Authors (page 4)

“We all do it. Fantasize disaster,” Kristen Radtke writes toward the end of Imagine Wanting Only This, her starred debut graphic memoir. “Perhaps that’s why we stare and get angry when we look too long. There are things we know about the lives we make. I painted this room. I bought this table. I washed these sheets and made this bed. We forget that everything will become no longer ours.”

The lines unfurl in short, concise captions that ...

“Don’t drink the Kool-Aid.” We hear the admonition all the time, are constantly treated to the spectacle of one political pundit—or would-be pundit, anyway—accusing another of downing the fruity beverage as shorthand for uncritically following some party line or another.

But where does the expression come from? Those who were around a little shy of 40 years ago should remember well: it refers to an astonishing act of mass suicide committed by followers of a revolutionary firebrand named Jim ...

Donald Trump and his cohorts are at it again, continuing with their efforts to roll back nearly every gain that the Obama administration was able to make regarding the environment and climate change. As Slate notes, Trump’s latest executive order, “much like the disastrous and cruel Muslim ban…attempts to fix a problem of Donald Trump’s invention.” Given the current administration’s head-in-the-sand stance on climate change and desire to continue down an unsustainable path, I believe it is more important ...

Over the course of a year, Dani Shapiro committed countless hours to “The Virtual Dementia Tour,” a personal essay contending with her “obsession” as a writer: memory and time.

“I had struggled with it, finally cracked it, and was feeling really good about what I’d written,” says the acclaimed memoirist and novelist, whom Kirkus reached by phone at home in Connecticut.“Then I woke up the next morning in a state of horror, with the realization that it ...

The American West has long been a place of myth and wonder, of dramatic canyons, mesas, and mountain ranges. These dramatic landscapes have wooed Americans for centuries, and The New Yorker’s David Owen isn’t immune to its siren song. Though Owen has lived in Connecticut for most of his adult life, he spent the summers of his youth in the Colorado countryside, and the draw of the West has stuck with him ever since. So when Owen decided to ...

A century ago, if you had said that evangelical Christianity would one day emerge as a leading political force in America, you might have met incredulity or even ridicule. Such belief was widely seen as a throwback to the old days of snake handling and speaking in tongues. Didn’t Clarence Darrow prove definitively, after all, in a Tennessee courtroom that Americans were ready for the science of the future in the place of the religion of the past?

But something ...

It’s a story as old as humankind: Somewhere, one of our ancestors threw a bone out into the darkness beyond the campfire, a wolf snatched it up, and its grateful descendants transformed themselves into dogs for our companionship. The process, it’s been supposed, took thousands of years, millennia in which those fierce, lethal hunters of the northern forests evolved—or devolved, perhaps—into loving lapdogs and hounds, terriers and coursers, the whole grand range of dogdom.

But what if that story were ...

Charles Manson had a sweet, clear voice, reminiscent of Chet Baker’s, that could carry a pop song, a jazz standard, or a show tune. He wrote some good songs, a couple of which became unironic hipster anthems decades later. He charmed his way into an elite circle of Los Angeles musicians, and he swayed a few of them to record his compositions.

Then people began to die at his bidding, Charlie was bundled off to prison, and those who survived ...