AMERICAN AUTHORS CHALLENGE--APRIL 2024--GENERAL NON-FICTION

April's nearly here and it is the month with a cornucopia of reading possibilities.

Your favourite subject, your favourite American, something fun, or funny. Something learned or your guilty secret. Maybe history or science. Essays, travel, music, the environment, books about books, art. Or learn about something you've always been curious about.

Here are some possibilities:



These are a few near the top of my book mountain.

I've already read:
All the Beauty in the World: A Museum Guards Adventures in Life, Loss and Art (Patrick Bringley)
Kick (Paula Byrne) A biography of Katherine Kennedy
The Art of the Wasted Day (Patricia Hampl)

I plan to read at least two of the others this month.

Here's what I plan to start with:

I'll be reading How the Other Half Lives by Jacob Riis (1890), a classic work of journalism (text and photographs) about poverty in New York City slums. I'm interested to see how it compares to the English novel I read last year A Child of the Jago by Arthur Morrison (1896), which is about the London slums of the same time period.

I'll also be listening to John Adams by David McCullough (2002), on audiobook read by Edward Herrmann. McCullough is one of my favorite American historians.

And I may dip in and out of The Light of Truth: Writings of an Anti-Lynching Crusader, a 2014 collection of the writings of Ida B. Wells. The essays and pieces in this collection date from 1885 through 1927.

I'll be reading How the Other Half Lives by Jacob Riis (1890), a classic work of journalism (text and photographs) about poverty in New York City slums. I'm interested to see how it compares to the English novel I read last year A Child of the Jago by Arthur Morrison (1896), which is about the London slums of the same time period.


I'll also be listening to John Adams by David McCullough (2002), on audiobook read by Edward Herrmann. McCullough is one of my favorite American historians.


And I may dip in and out of The Light of Truth: Writings of an Anti-Lynching Crusader, a 2014 collection of the writings of Ida B. Wells. The essays and pieces in this collection date from 1885 through 1927.

I hope to get to Our Land Before We Die, Zabar's, and possibly one or two more. I am in the mood for non-fiction at the moment, so we'll see! I just finished Henry Louis Gates, Jr.'s latest, The Black Box; Writing the Race, and I highly recommend it.

I plan to read Bill Bryson's A Walk in the Woods, which I conveniently found in my neighborhood's little free library a couple of weeks ago.

I'm in for this challenge. First, I must finish reading Radiant: The Life and Line of Keith Haring. That's non-fiction, of course. I'm pairing it with Keith Haring, a mammoth volume that shows the paintings and parties and people that are written about in the bio.

           

7 0f the 8 Books my daughter gave me for my recent 80th Birthday are non-fiction!

I completed Around The World in 80 Books with many new countries introduced and

am now reading Elizabeth Cady Stanton's remarkable autobiography, EIGHTY YEARS AND MORE.

For this month, I am going to read Karen Abbott's Liar Temptress Soldier Spy about 4 women who were spies during the Civil War.

I’m in and I’ve got a couple of books in mind…Where the Deer and the Antelope Play by Nick Offerman and Better Living Through Birding by Christian Cooper.

Karen O

Some wonderful choices here, all new to me, so will look forward to your thoughts.

I am about 3/4 through Ann Patchett's These Precious Days, a collection of essays. I started it last month, which was an awful month for me, not just in reading, but I will finish it in April. I also have 3 other NF books out from the library so with any luck I may finish one or two of them, at the very least. Those books are:

My Father's Brain
In the Form of a Question

I just noticed that the third library book is British, not American so I won't count that for this challenge.

>12 jessibud2: I loved These Precious Days Shelley.

>3 kac522: I'd love to hear your thoughts on How the Other Half Lives!

>14 Kyler_Marie: I'll be reading it later this month. I also have a biography of Jacob Riis The Other Half: The Life of Jacob Riis by Tom Buk-Swienty, which I plan to read after Riis' book, but I believe the author of this biography is Danish.

>14 Kyler_Marie: >15 kac522: Be prepared for some hard reading - hard emotionally, that is. How the Other Half Lives does not pull any punches.

>16 alcottacre: Thanks for the heads-up: I've read about the book and flipped through the photographs, so I think I have a pretty good idea.

>16 alcottacre: Yes, also thanks for the heads up! I have it on my shelf and will be reading it at some point. Good to know that I should be mentally prepared for it.

>17 kac522: >18 Kyler_Marie: No problem. I have read the book a couple of times now and it is still a hard read for me.

I just finished Ann Patchett's These Precious Days, a collection of essays. I really liked them a lot. Some were short, some longer, a few quite long. Some overlap, most stand-alone. I felt drawn in by almost every single one of them. I should probably try some of her fiction. In my little journal books where I log titles I've read over the years, I see I read Patron Saint of Liars many years ago. I have absolutely no memory of it at all but I am guessing I wasn't all that keen because I have not attempted any other title by her since. Until this one. Time to recalibrate...

I will start the memoir by Jeopardy's Amy Schneider tonight: In the Form of a Question

I finished Radiant: The Life and Line of Keith Haring yesterday. It wasn't as satisfying as I had hoped. I was very conscious of names being dropped. Haring was relentlessly active, partying when he wasn't painting. But the bio is very short on visuals, so I've been switching between Radiant and Keith Haring, a colossal (9" x 10", 522 pages) picture book. Haven't read all the text in the latter book yet. Book cover shown at >7 weird_O:.

I finished John Adams by David McCullough (2001). I felt like I really knew the personality and character of John Adams when I finished this book. McCullough used quite a bit of Adams' correspondence with his wife Abigail and others to bring him to life. Adams felt most proud of his work for independence during the early revolutionary years and his part in constructing the Massachusetts constitution, which later became a model for the U.S. Constitution. I love McCullough's narrative style and it made the book move quickly despite its 600+ pages.

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I'm going to pick something off my TBR pile: The Conquering Tide: War in the Pacific Islands, 1942-1944 by Ian W. Toll. I'd listened to another of Toll's works, Six Frigates: The Epic History of the Founding of the U.S. Navy back in 2017, and enjoyed it tremendously. I'm not a former sailor - in fact, I'm a rather timid swimmer/sailor and prefer to look at water than be in it - but in recent years I've gravitated to reading more and more things about naval history. Maybe because I've discovered the Grand Canyon-sized hole in my education about military history in general, but also because ships are fascinating, powerful machines and the people drawn to work and live on them have interesting stories to tell. So this is a good opportunity to focus some time on my favorite subject of the moment in history, with an American author ... and get back into the book challenge.

>24 PocheFamily: Both of those sound fascinating. We're WWII history buffs here, and my husband was a member of the U. S. Coast Guard, which is actually older than the Navy.

>25 laytonwoman3rd: hahaha ... love it! The competition within the services never stops! Six Frigates was a great book, so hopefully The Conquering Tide will match up. I recently met some great people, a couple who both worked their whole careers in the CG. These Coasties had the world totally figured out ... they're now retired and living in Hawai'i, spending their days hiking, biking, and swimming. Like any track/career not pursued, it's interesting to get a peek into lives, and the history of WWII in the Pacific is fascinating. As a kid we'd watch "World at War", with all the footage of dive bombers and soldiers carrying rifles through tropical jungles, but school always seemed to end just as we were about to hit WWI chronologically, so never studied it in school. And Hogan's Heroes, etc., made us feel familiar with the European front in ways I've never felt comfortable with the Pacific. Anyways, I always have to pull up Google Earth as I read these books to understand the battles.

If you have a favorite - especially a Coast Guard history favorite - I'd love to hear about it!

>26 PocheFamily: I wish I did have a good Coast Guard history to recommend to you. The only one I've read was written--wretchedly--by one Thomas Ostrom, and I would advise you to give him a wide berth. Dry enough to lower sea levels around the globe.

I can recommend Malcolm Gladwell's The Bomber Mafia; Martha Gellhorn's contemporary reporting of WWII; Martin Goldsmith's The Inextinquishable Symphony; A True Story of Music and Love in Nazi Germany; Max Hastings's Overlord, D Day and the Battle for Normandy.

As ever I'm well behind on >2 Caroline_McElwee:. Will probably finish next month. Less reading time mostly for one reason or another.

I read a book by American journalist, Deborah Scroggins, Emma's War. While the story is about Emma McCune, A British aid worker, it is about so much more. It tells a fairly complete history of Sudan and also some of the other countries such as Somalia. It won the 2003 Ron Ridenhour Award for Truth-Telling.

It covers civil war in Sudan, it mentions the war in Somalia. It covers the conflicts between the north and south of Sudan and encompasses foreign invasions and resistance, ethnic tensions, religious disputes, and disputes over resources.

I read several NF books in April, starting with Radiant: The Life and Line of Keith Haring. It is a bio of an American artist by an American writer. I wanted to follow that with Keith Haring by Jeffrey Deitch, Suzanne Geiss, and Julia Gruen, which is a 500+ page art book that I consulted repeatedly to see what a painting being described by Brad Gooch, who wrote Radiant. The art book has a lot of text, but I didn't have the discipline to sit at a table for hours and hours to read at all. (It's definitely NOT a book you lug around and read in snatches).

Then I read How to Win an Information War by Peter Pomerantsev. This book tracks the propaganda spread by Nazis and the programs mounted by the British in response. Occasional references to Russian propaganda in its present effort to take over Ukraine. Pomerantsev is a Ukraine-born journalist who's traveled throughout Eastern Europe. He's presently in a graduate program at Johns Hopkins. I'm embracing that affiliation to make him sufficiently American to qualify for this month's challenge.

Life: Classic Photographs: A Personal Interpretation by former Life photographer and editor John Loengard wasn't a heavy read, but many of the photos are familiar. Leongard is American, but the photographers represented are international.

      

>25 laytonwoman3rd: World War II History doesn't get much more exciting than MADAME FOURCADE'S SECRET WAR -

Mr. Churchill's War from the French Resistance perspective!

^^^^^

Also reading THE INCONVENIENT INDIAN by Thomas King...

Well, I completely failed at reading the Karen Abbott book I had intended to read in April, but I still managed to read several nonfiction books by Americans: Plunder: A Memoir of Family Property and Nazi Treasure by Menachem Kaiser, Ordinary Men by Christopher Browning, The Devil in the White City by Erik Larson, The Dream: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Speech That Inspired a Nation by Drew D. Hansen, The Town That Food Saved by Ben Hewitt, and The Piano Shop on the Left Bank by T. E. Carhart (although he was an American in Paris).

Do any of these count towards April's challenge?

>31 m.belljackson: That sounds fascinating...added to the wishlist! Thank you.

>32 alcottacre: Why shouldn't they count?

I've nearly finished A William Maxwell Portrait, which I'm counting for April, AND using as a basis for my intro to the MAY Challenge as well. Hope to get a thread up for William Maxwell today.

MANY MANY thanks to Caroline for hosting this month. I didn't read as many NF works as I wanted to, and read one that didn't qualify. I did read the introduction to The Light of Truth, and will continue with Ida B. Wells' writings.

>33 laytonwoman3rd: Why shouldn't they count? Because none of them are the one that I actually signed up to read?

>34 alcottacre: Pffft. That's not a rule.

I won't finish this before the end of the day/month, but I've been reading it throughout April, and it's excellent: Black AF History: The Un-Whitewashed Story of America, Michael Harriot. I love Harriot's writing style (I've seen it called irreverent, and--I guess? It feels more honest, angry, and reverent toward people *deserving* reverence to me. But in terms of just what it's like, style-wise, "irreverant" is not off the mark, I reckon.) I'm learning about Black historical figures I'd never heard of as well as more information about ones I have. If you're a liberal who's read about race at all recently, the big picture of his project probably won't blow your mind, but he sure isn't holding any white folks' hands here. (Nor should he.) Strongly recommended.

I finally finished the late 19th century classic How the Other Half Lives by Jacob Riis (1890). As mentioned earlier, this was a difficult book to read; it took me nearly the entire month, even though it is only 218 pages. I could only read a chapter or two at a time because the material overwhelmed me.

Jacob Riis (1849-1914) was a Danish immigrant who arrived in New York in 1870. Like many of the subjects in his book, his first years in New York were spent on the street or in miserable lodging houses. After a series of jobs, he finally became steadily employed in 1877 as a journalist on the New York Tribune and later at the Evening Sun. His beat was in the Lower East side slum district, and so began his concerted effort to raise awareness of the living conditions of the neighborhood.

Riis wrote many short articles about the conditions, but they seemed to have little or no effect. It was the invention of flash photography that changed everything. He employed photographers and later learned the skill himself, and went into neighborhoods, tenements and alleys to document the living conditions. When his book came out in 1890, it had an immediate impact, due largely to the photographs.

The text is dense. Riis includes loads of statistics, intense narrative and personal stories along with the photographs to document conditions. Riis felt that the first step to improving the slums was better housing, where every room had light and air and every living space had adequate plumbing, all things that were woefully inadequate in 1890s tenements. He goes block by block, neighborhood by neighborhood, ethnicity by ethnicity, to describe the inhumane living conditions of the men, women and children, nearly all immigrants.

On the downside, this text is hard to read. Riis has definite views on various ethnic groups and seems to rely on some stereotypes. But he went everywhere, no matter how horrible the living situation. As was the practice at the time, he did not ask permission to take his photographs; he just set up and shot. The photographs were taken by him and by other photographers working with him.

There is much written about his work, so I will refrain from adding any more. If you are interested here are three websites with photographs and more information:

This has a selection of some of the photographs:
https://www.americanyawp.com/text/how-the-other-half-lived-photographs-of-jacob-...

At this PBS website, there are 2 clips from a documentary about Riis:
https://illinois.pbslearningmedia.org/resource/jacob-riis-video-gallery/new-york...

This short video is from the 2016 Library of Congress exhibition about Jacob Riis. I learned quite a bit of background info:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JqpQzyK96uk

I have certainly got some fine recommendations from here, despite getting distracted from the memoir I was reading. I'll post when I do finally finish.

I forgot to post when I finished A Walk in the Woods last weekend. I enjoyed it overall, but I found some parts annoying. Some of Bryson's comments about Gatlinburg got under my skin because he got some of the details wrong. It's local for me, so I couldn't help but notice the errors. He named several tourist attractions that had mostly disappeared in the decade since he wrote The Lost Continent. Some of them didn't disappear from Gatlinburg because they were never in Gatlinburg to begin with. They were in Pigeon Forge. We've always had to drive through Pigeon Forge to get to Gatlinburg, and I usually had my eyes glued to the car window as we drove through both towns so I'm familiar with which attractions were in which location. Mistakes in one book repeated in another left me slightly wary of the accuracy of other details.