* Though my participation in Nonfiction November this year wasn’t as consistent as I would have liked, I have made the effort to visit every blogger who has taken part and, as usual, come away with a long list of titles added to my TBR.
As a bonus I’ve also come away with titles to recommend for the various categories of the 2024 Nonfiction Reader Challenge (details of which will be available this weekend). Join the challenge as motivation to read your new nonfiction TBR additions over the next year!
Please click on the cover to visit the source of the recommendation, and visit this week’s host Hopewell’s Library of Life to peruse what others have added.
Joanne Anderson draws on her experience as a newspaper journalist and editor to explain the vagaries of the English language in Writely or Wrongly: An unstuffy guide to language stuff. Dipping in to the history of the hyphen, the danger of the dangling participle, and the controversy of the comma, among other things, this practical style guide is written with humour and clarity.
Writely and Wrongly is enhanced by whimsical illustrations from Melbourne-based cartoonist Matt Golding.
This would be the perfect gift for a writer or wordsmith of any age
One of the greatest things about reading nonfiction is learning all kinds of things about our world which you never would have known without it. There’s the intriguing, the beautiful, the appalling, and the profound. What nonfiction book or books have impacted the way you see the world in a powerful way? Is there one book that made you rethink everything? Do you think there is a book that should be required reading for everyone?
I very rarely read a book, nonfiction or fiction, without learning something new. Such knowledge may not always be profound but nonetheless it all contributes something to my world view. As I browsed the list of nonfiction books I’ve read in the past few years considering this week’s question, I cam across one I think deserves to be recognised.
Though I gave Fixed It: Violence and the Representation of Women in the Media by Jane Gilmore five stars, I never wrote a review for it, I’m not sure why except it likely had something to do with the time of year, however this book has had a lasting influence on me, especially in the way in which I engage in my daily perusal of news sites.
Jane Gilmore is an Australian author, journalist, feminist, and consent educator. In 2014 she started the FixedIt campaign, pushing for change in the way media reports on men’s violence against women. It was born of her frustration with the then constant victim-blaming and erasure of perpetrators from media headlines about men’s violence against women. Media headlines were full of “scorned lovers” who raped women they claimed to love, “good fathers” who killed their children, and adults who had “sexual relationships” with children they were abusing. You may have seen her posts on Twitter/X, or Instagram, with news media headlines edited with red pen, correcting the misleading impressions they give.
After reading Fixed It, I immediately became very aware of the way in which news headlines, not only in Australia but across the world, report on violence against women. Somehow I just hadn’t noticed how often headlines minimised, offered excuses, or completely erased, the role of men in violent incidents, or how inappropriately the word sex was used referred to cases involving sexual assault and rape, especially against children, but once it was pointed out, I couldn’t unsee it. In Fixed It, Gilmore discusses how this affects our perception of crimes against women, as well as about violence in general, supported with statistics and examples.
While Jane’s campaign, and events like #MeToo, have since resulted in some changes to reporting from many reputable news outlets, four years on from the publication of Fixed It, headlines and reportage still has a tendency to be problematic, but now I notice it every time, and join the voices demanding the media do better.
For this week’s prompt, I’m going to focus on Flowers of Fire: The Inside Story of South Korea’s Feminist Movement and What It Means for Women’s Rights Worldwide by Hawon Jung.
In it, Hawon Jung touches on the the fight for compensation for the ‘comfort women’, those who were forced into the system of camps during World War II to supply sexual services to soldiers, which piqued my interest. As such I searched out books that examine their plight in order to learn more. While I’ve yet to read any of them this is what I’ve added to my TBR.
Drawing on historical research and interviews with survivors, Soh tells the stories of these women from girlhood through their subjugation and beyond to their efforts to overcome the traumas of their past.
Focusing on the “Comfort Women” of his native Korea as well as from other countries, author and artist Han Seong-won tells the stories of women who were coerced, sometimes through abduction, into sexual slavery wherever the Japanese army put down stakes. This offering in graphic novel format is both a moving tribute and a call to awareness that, though addressing young adults, speaks to all of us.
Can’t I Go Instead follows the lives of the daughter of a Korean nobleman and her maidservant in the early 20th century. When the daughter’s suitor is arrested as a Korean Independence activist, and she is implicated during the investigation, she is quickly forced into marriage to one of her father’s Japanese employees and shipped off to the United States. At the same time, her maidservant is sent in her mistress’s place to be a comfort woman to the Japanese Imperial army.
Korea, 1943. Hana has lived her entire life under Japanese occupation. As a haenyeo, a female diver of the sea, she enjoys an independence that few other Koreans can still claim. Until the day Hana saves her younger sister from a Japanese soldier and is herself captured and transported to Manchuria. There she is forced to become a “comfort woman” in a Japanese military brothel. The heartbreaking history of Korea is brought to life in this deeply moving and redemptive debut that follows two sisters separated by World War II.
Week 1 (30th Oct to 3rd Nov) Your Year in Nonfiction Celebrate your year of nonfiction. What books have you read? What were your favorites? Have you had a favorite topic? Is there a topic you want to read about more? What are you hoping to get out of participating in Nonfiction November?
I’ve read 20 nonfiction books since December 2022. Click the cover to learn more.
There are two books I’d particularly recommend from this list.
I have several nonfiction titles I hope to read before the end of this month. Everything to Play For will finish off the Nonfiction Reader Challenge for me.
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As always I look forward to visiting all of the Nonfiction November participants.
*Just a note: I had this post almost completed in my draft folder for the launch of Nonfiction November but well that was before my schedule went to hell. Apologies for the very late posting.
Reading memoirs offer many benefits. They can teach us empathy and compassion, and offer inspiration and empowerment. I’m appalled by the level of vitriol currently directed at transgender people globally, and to that end my recommendation for this prompt from the books I’ve read this year is The All Of It: A Bogan Rhapsody by Cadance Bell.
Sharing her journey as a transgender woman who began life as Benjamin in Mudgee in 1984, The All of It: A Bogan Rhapsody is an authentic, moving and often funny memoir from Australian author, director, producer and writer, Cadance Bell. Bell is an excellent storyteller as she leads us through her childhood into adulthood, sharing important moments of discovery, achievement, realisation and loss. Her experiences are familiar, full of the ordinary sorrows and joys of life, yet also unique. Hiding her truth came at great cost, confused and ashamed by their gender dysphoria, terrified someone would discover her secret stashes of magazines and women’s clothes, Bell succumbed to food and drug addictions, fell victim to an abuser, and hid himself away. Until Bell realised something had to change.
The author is Australian, but I think much of their experience is likely universal. I want to recommend it to everyone, especially anyone who may be grappling with their gender identity, or trying to understand someone who is.
Here are three other memoirs by transgender people that have been recommended to me.
“Before you judge my life, my past or my character, walk in my shoes, walk the path I have travelled, live my sorrow, my doubts, my fear, my pain and my laughter. Remember, everyone has a story of their own. When you’ve lived my life, then you can judge me…” -anonymous
In The Unexpected Truth About Animals: Stoned Sloths, Lovelorn Hippos and Other Wild Tales, New York Times best-selling author, award-winning documentary filmmaker and broadcaster, and National Geographic explorer Lucy Cooke counters the ‘biggest misconceptions, mistakes and myths we’ve concocted about the animal kingdom’.
Written with an irreverence tempered by passion, Cooke exposes the secrets of thirteen well known animals, drawing from historical sources, current research, and her own knowledge and experience.
Here are just a few of the unexpected truths I learned:
Despite billions of dollars and the best of modern technology, we still are not certain how or where the Anguilla anguilla (Eel) reproduce.
The sloth’s neck has more vertebrae than any other mammal’s, even the giraffe’s.
Vultures have been used to detect gas leaks in pipelines
To determine how bats are able to fly in the dark, Italian Catholic priest Lazzaro Spallanzani experimented by systematically removing their eyeballs, plugging their ears and noses, cutting off their tongues, and coating them in varnish.
From the 1940s through to the 1960s the world’s first reliable pregnancy test came courtesy of a small, bug-eyed frog. When injected with a pregnant woman’s urine, the amphibian squirted out eggs eight to twelve hours later to confirm a positive result.
Storks were exterminated in Britain because the church was offended by the ‘pagan’ belief that they played a part in bringing a couple a baby.
Hippopotamuses secrete a substance that is acts as sunscreen, fly repellent and antiseptic.
Pandas might look cute and harmless but the powerful muscles in the panda’s cheeks deliver a bite force almost equal to a lion’s.
Adélie penguins exchange sex for pebbles from single males to shore up their nests.
And so much more! I’ve shared some of the tamer revelations here because, among other things, the sex lives of desperate male penguins are a little disturbing. This is definitely not a book for prudes, or anyone who prefers the Disney version of animals.
Witty, informative and utterly fascinating, The Unexpected Truths About Animals is an engrossing read.
The book that best fit this topic for me that I’ve read this year is Unmask Alice: LSD, Satanic Panic, and the Imposter Behind the World’s Most Notorious Diaries by Rick Emerson.
If you ever read Go Ask Alice or Jay’s Diary as a teen, particularly in the 1970’s/80’s then this exposé is a must read. The blurb says it all…
Two teens. Two diaries. Two social panics. One incredible fraud.
In 1971, Go Ask Alice reinvented the young adult genre with a blistering portrayal of sex, psychosis, and teenage self-destruction. The supposed diary of a middle-class addict, Go Ask Alice terrified adults and cemented LSD’s fearsome reputation, fueling support for the War on Drugs. Five million copies later, Go Ask Alice remains a divisive bestseller, outraging censors and earning new fans, all of them drawn by the book’s mythic premise: A Real Diary, by Anonymous.
But Alice was only the beginning.
In 1979, another diary rattled the culture, setting the stage for a national meltdown. The posthumous memoir of an alleged teenage Satanist, Jay’s Journal merged with a frightening new crisis—adolescent suicide—to create a literal witch hunt, shattering countless lives and poisoning whole communities.
In reality, Go Ask Alice and Jay’s Journal came from the same dark place: Beatrice Sparks, a serial con artist who betrayed a grieving family, stole a dead boy’s memory, and lied her way to the National Book Awards.
Unmask Alice: LSD, Satanic Panic, and the Imposter Behind the World’s Most Notorious Diaries is a true story of contagious deception. It stretches from Hollywood to Quantico, and passes through a tiny patch of Utah nicknamed “the fraud capital of America.” It’s the story of a doomed romance and a vengeful celebrity. Of a lazy press and a public mob. Of two suicidal teenagers, and their exploitation by a literary vampire.
Unmask Alice . . . where truth is stranger than nonfiction.
I don’t remember The Great Depression ever being a topic of discussion among my family. My maternal and paternal grandparents were born in the mid to late 1920’s so they would have been young children at the time, and my great great grandparents had all passed away by the time I was six. All I really know of its impact comes from American novels set during the period that I studied in high school like Of Mice and Men and The Grapes of Wrath. Though I don’t care much for economics as a subject I am increasingly interested in learning more about Australian history.
Australia’s Great Depression by Jean Beaumont is a comprehensive examination of the global crisis’s impact on the nation, particularly between the years of 1929 and 1932. Australia was amongst the hardest hit nations, with the economic crash triggered by a combination of wartime and repatriation spending, the collapse of export markets like wheat and wool, the rising price of imports, and high overseas debts.
I have to admit that I found some of the economic and political detail to be tedious, but I do feel it was explained clearly.
Of more interest to me was the impact on the population. Unemployment in Australia ranged between 25 and 30 per cent, and was at its highest in 1932. Beaumont shows that not all sectors of the economy equally affected, and hence the impact of the Great Depression varied according to location, age, marital status, gender, ethnicity, class and former military service. I found the specifics of the variables to be intriguing , though none were too surprising.
I also found the brief discussion of the parallels between the behaviour of political parties and politicians around the Depression and the current economic downturn post-CoVid to be of interest. It was also interesting to note, given current woefully low unemployment payments, that the ‘susso’ payment introduced during the Great Depression, was similarly set at a meagre rate, and for almost the same reasons that the government uses to justify it today.
There is a collection of photographs and other images included at the end of the book. So too are Beaumont’s extensive lists of References and Notes for anyone interested in further reading.
At nearly 600 pages I wouldn’t recommend Australia’s Great Depression.to a casual reader unless the topic is of specific interest, but I feel I learnt a lot about the nation’s socioeconomic history and the complexity of the Great Depression experience by reading it.
Book’d Out 