This reading list features the five nonfiction nominees for the National Book Awards. The winner be announced on November 18, 2015.
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Posted inNonfiction, Story
Rebel Virgins and Desert Mothers
The radical women of early Christianity.
Posted inBooks, Nonfiction, Story
The Politics of Poetry
The New York Times’s poetry columnist on the intersection between poetry and politics.
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
Olive Oil Trouble
Olive-oil fraud was already common in antiquity. Galen tells of unscrupulous oil merchants who mixed high-quality olive oil with cheaper substances like lard, and Apicius provides a recipe for turning cheap Spanish oil into prized oil from Istria using minced herbs and roots. The Greeks and the Romans used olive oil as food, soap, lotion, […]
Posted inNonfiction
By the Reflection of What Is
On the aesthetics, performance, and “majestic wrath” of Frederick Douglass, the most-photographed American of the nineteenth century.
Posted inBooks, Nonfiction
The Politics of Poetry
The New York Times’s poetry columnist on the intersection between poetry and politics.
Posted inNonfiction, Story
The Broken Pop of James Bond Songs
What can the endurance of the messy, campy canon of James Bond theme songs tell us about contemporary popular music?
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
Generational Shift for Kenya's Maasai Tribe
Once the lords of East Africa, the Maasai have been close to peerless in the modern age for maintaining the continuity of their traditions—traditions now imperiled by the tentacles of the market and by technology, as cell phones and cheap Chinese motorcycles, like the one we rode, upend the very possibility of isolation. Compulsory and […]
Posted inBooks, Nonfiction, Story
Franklin, Reconsidered: An Essay by Jill Lepore
Jill Lepore revisits the legacy of Benjamin Franklin, who in his time was “the most accomplished and famous American who had ever lived.”
Posted inBooks, Nonfiction
Franklin, Reconsidered: An Essay by Jill Lepore
Jill Lepore revisits the legacy of Benjamin Franklin, who in his time was “the most accomplished and famous American who had ever lived.”
