Tag: nonfiction
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Great short memoir-style creative nonfiction
Striking creative nonfiction from Barlow Adams, Jake Maynard, and Andrew Bertaina
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Best of 2023: Nonfiction
These are some of the nonfiction books I read this year that I liked most. Many of them were published prior to 2023, but they affected me this year, which is what counts. There’s no ranking, and no fixed number of books. These are just the books that hit me hardest this year. Artificial: A Love…
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How Not to Kill Yourself by Clancy Martin
Of course the expected content warnings apply: Martin has a history of substance abuse issues as well as suicidal thoughts and actions. This book is him trying to understand himself and what drives these issues. It’s deeply researched and also deeply personal, digging into Buddhist teachings, ancient and modern philosophers, and contemporary figures like David…
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Uncle Pete gives a Zoom lecture
I liked this but I’m very biased: my uncle (and Godfather) Peter Carter was invited to present to the Ottawa Independent Writers Association. This is so genuinely Pete — he’s personal and honest, funny, distracted, scattered and it somehow always comes home.
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A good review
From Patrick McKenzie, in Bits About Money: a review of Number Go Up by Zeke Faux. I like the concept of ‘the anti-book’.
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Wonder Drug: The Secret History of Thalidomide in America and Its Hidden Victims by Jennifer Vanderbes
It’s no surprise that Patrick Radden Keefe endorsed this book. Stop me if you’ve heard this: Dangerous medicine promoted dishonestly by a greedy pharmaceutical company, leading to deaths and heartbreak. Government fails at every step of the way, despite efforts to raise alarm from regulators and members of the public. The people responsible largely get away with…
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Number Go Up by Zeke Faux
This might be Zeke Faux’s Liar’s Poker. It has the same combination of elements that made Lewis a star — engaging writing, a fun subject and wild characters that exemplify a moment in time, and a writer who not only is waist-deep in the culture he’s writing about, but incredibly lucky. That’s not to diminish the…
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The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America by Margaret O’Mara
Even if you’ve read all the similar books like The Innovators: , Hackers, Don’t Be Evil, and The Contrarian, this is great. O’Mara details not just the people and brains, but the politics and culture of Silicon Valley and the broader U.S. tech industry from the 1960s to late 2010s. She isn’t a sycophant or part of the culture,…
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The Coming Wave: Technology, Power, and the Twenty-first Century’s Greatest Dilemma by Mustafa Suleyman
This is a pretty good substack post padded with 250 pages of filler. What a frustrating disappointment. If the subject interests you, save yourself a lot of time and start on chapter 14. The first 200-plus pages of this book are table-setting, long essays with scares like, “What if the Unabomber, but with AI”? It reads…
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Strangers to Ourselves: Unsettled Minds and the Stories That Make Us by Rachel Aviv
It’s rare to find a book about mental illness that doesn’t have an angle or an agenda. Aviv is fascinated by the stories of the people she profiles, and by the backgrounds and differences in their (and her) cases, and comes at them with empathy, understanding and some really great writing. It took a while…