Tag: nonfiction

Review 2561: Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism

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In February, I decided to take a break from trying to finish A Century of Books and revisit my intention to read more nonfiction books that I formed during Nonfiction November. I realized I hadn’t read any nonfiction at all in 2025, so I picked Cultish, which I read about last November.

Montell is a writer and language scholar, although, taking a note from her own approach, I wonder what “language scholar” means. This book is written for the general public and takes an entertaining rather than scholarly approach.

Although I noticed at the time I was reading that I was unable to summarize the topic of any chapter (each of which is unhelpfully named with something like “Repeat after me”), Montell makes clear what she means by a cult, broadens that definition to explore whether some organizations are cults or not (hence, “cultish”), and shows how true cults use language to attract and hold followers. She starts with some of the usual suspects, moves to the death cults, and then examines the cultish qualities of marketing companies like Amway and the niche health businesses like Peleton.

This is an interesting book, but it felt a little muddled to me, probably because I didn’t feel I could single out, except by the type of business or group, the central ideas of each section of the book.

Also, I saw some evidence of sloppiness. The first was simply a syntax issue. It says on page 28, “If you subscribe to an astrology app or have ever attended a music festival, odds are that in the 1970s, you’d have brushed up against a cult.” Now, what does that mean, given that there were no astrology apps in the 1970s? or any apps for that matter. I think she meant, “If you . . . app or attended a music festival in the 1970s, odds are . . . .” To make that sentence crystal clear, you’d start the pairing with the music festival.

That’s fairly minor (except that she’s a language scholar), but she twice brings up the Branch Davidian incident and both times slightly misrepresents what happened. I lived in Texas then and remember what happened, but just in case my memories were false, I looked it up. On pages 38 and 39, she says that the FBI showed up in response to concerns expressed by families of the members. I thought, what? The FBI would never show up en masse for a reason like that, and I remembered that it was actually the ATF who came first. They came based on reports from neighbors and a gun sales business that the Branch Davidians were stockpiling weapons. Of course, everyone was shocked by the incident, especially its outcome, but it is interesting that Montell left that out, because it minimizes the role of the Branch Davidians in how the incident started. And that is also an interesting use of language.

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Review 2540: Elizabeth and Essex

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Years ago, I read Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians and found it both informative and entertaining—full of scandalous information about some of the Victorian age’s most prominent citizens. I was hoping for something similar from this book, but it is a little more serious, although Strachey gets some zingers in.

The book is the 1928 version of history written for the general public. There are a very few footnotes and a couple of pages of bibliography at the end. It is written in Lytton’s liquid, sometimes sardonic style.

This book is about Queen Elizabeth and her last favorite, Robert Devereaux, Earl of Essex. He was more than 30 years younger than she and the stepson of her earlier favorite, Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester. Elizabeth’s relationships with her favorites, at least with this one, seemed more like volatile love affairs than anything else, with fulsome compliments expected and fiery spats, which usually resulted in Essex stomping out and being forgiven after an apology. In fact, considering her own temper, I’m surprised that Elizabeth put up with him, because he certainly treated her less respectfully than he would if his sovereign was a man.

You have to get used to Strachey, because he starts out right away by making assertions about Elizabeth’s character without giving examples or showing how he is right, as a modern historian would do. And his depiction seems pretty sexist. Over time, he demonstrates some of these characteristics, though. Still, Elizabeth’s main problem with Essex seemed to be that he didn’t behave as if she was his sovereign. I think he had an inherent assumption that he was superior because he was a man, not surprising in that time.

Without going into all the details of the story, which Strachey labels “tragic,” I’ll say that it boils down to temperaments. Essex was proud and fiery, and he valued his family name. He had poor judgement about who to take advice from and was actually incapable of taking any that involved caution and circumspection. He was brave in battle and pictured himself as a great war commander, but he was not. In fact, he seemed to me like a charismatic, well-liked bear of little brain. But he wrote wonderful letters.

Strachey clearly didn’t like Sir Walter Raleigh, but I don’t know why. He just hinted around about him. According to Strachey, no one liked him.

Essex was a loyal friend to many, among them Francis Bacon. It was Bacon’s Machievellian advice that Essex was unable to follow. Despite Essex having supported him for several positions, Bacon did his best to put the nail in Essex’s coffin when he was tried for treason.

This is an interesting book and even though Essex seemed to me like a spoiled baby most of the time, I saw by the end that indeed it was a tragic story.

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Review 2537: Levels of the Game

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Although John McPhee is best known for his work in the 1960s through 1990s, he is still going at 93. He is known for being a pioneer in a style of writing called “creative nonfiction” or “literary journalism.” Years ago, I read his four-volume work Annals of the Former World, about the geology of the United States, basically the formation through time of various areas of the country, which was absolutely fascinating. Later I picked up a copy of his Coming into the Country, about homesteaders in the wilds of Alaska in the 1970s. So, when I saw he had written a book that could fill a hole in my A Century of Books project, I got it.

Levels of the Game is not really my subject matter. It cleverly combines a play-by-play description of a tennis game at Forest Hills in 1968 with profiles of the players. This is an amateur game between Arthur Ashe and Clark Graebner. Although I used to watch tennis a bit when Ashe was further along in his career, I couldn’t really follow the subtleties of the play-by-play that well. I’m sure for tennis lovers it might have been climactic.

Ashe at the time was the only Black player of the U. S. circuit, and there were no others following behind. A lot of what McPhee says in his profile is interesting and a lot is dated. Coming up, Ashe ran into situations where he was barred from clubs. Yes, it was still like that.

If you’re a sports fan, particularly of tennis, you’ll probably get more out of this book than I did. Still, I didn’t really understand the important place Ashe holds in the game until I read this book.

P. S. The description of Ashe, who at the time was a lieutenant at West Point, putting on love beads to go on a date, cracked me up.

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Review 2526: The Inconvenient Indian

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For some reason when I bought this book, I thought it was fiction. It’s not, nor is it a history of the relationship between native peoples and the various entities that have ruled Canada and the United States. (King repeatedly calls these two countries North America. He doesn’t deal with the inequities and atrocities of Mexico, which of course is also in North America and probably has committed plenty.) It is a series of chapters on such topics as residential schools, government attempts at assimilation and allotment, treaties that have been ignored, and inequities under law.

Thomas King is a writer, speaker, and activist who is part Cherokee. Born in California, he is now a citizen of Canada and has won, among other awards, the Order of Canada.

His writing style is acerbically funny and more personal than you’d expect. He reminds me of Bill Bryson with more sarcasm.

This book is an eye opener for anyone who thinks that our native populations are no longer oppressed. It didn’t make me cry like Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee did when I read it years ago, but it gave me a lot to think about. King’s main message is that all government programs for our natives amount to land grabs.

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Review 2520: Hunting the Falcon

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I have read quite a bit about the Tudors, fiction and nonfiction. This book deals especially with the relationship between Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn, although it starts earlier in their lives.

A strong theme in the book is Anne’s formative time spent at the court of France. There she witnessed a different kind of court than that in England, one in which powerful women discussed politics and were forces behind the throne and in which court was gay and flirtatious. As queen and as a woman who had worked in tandem with Henry on their cause for six years before marriage, she tried to create that sort of court.

In addition, her leanings toward France helped incline Henry toward an alliance with Francis of France, despite a long history of enmity between the two countries, rather than one with Charles, the Holy Roman Emperor and his first wife Katherine’s nephew. Francis had his own agenda, though, that did not always match Henry’s.

All-in-all, the book paints Anne in a more positive light than I’ve seen, emphasizing her true piety and her generosity to the poor. However, she also clearly got caught up in her own power and was sometimes rapacious and unforgiving.

Recent programs about the Tudors are notoriously inaccurate, but we are sometimes affected nonetheless. Used to thinking of Jane Parker, wife of Anne’s brother George, as someone who betrayed her, I now find she was one of the people who had the nerve to speak up for her.

Biographers and historians can err by including too much information on a subject. Although this book was written for a general audience in an entertaining style, it occasionally has that fault, for example, describing every detail of Anne’s coronation, including her outfits and the themes of the spectacles presented. However, in general, I found it interesting and illuminating.

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Review 2512: Dean Street December! The Dancing Bear

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The rate I’m knocking out books for my A Century of Books project has been slow lately because first I was reading books for Novellas in November (some of which also qualified for ACoB), and I also wanted to read at least a few books for Dean Street December. And I don’t know what I was thinking, but I also put several books for my other projects on my library reserve list, and they have arrived. I must be crazy! Anyway, I read The Dancing Bear for Dean Street.

Although The Dancing Bear is set in time after Faviell’s A Chelsea Concerto, it is actually her first memoir. It covers her time in post-World War II Berlin, where her husband was part of the Occupation. The people in the city are freezing and starving, and even their occupiers are on strict rations of many commodities.

Much of the book is about Faviell’s relationship with the Altmann family. She is being driven in her car when she spots Frau Altmann, an older lady of fragile build, trying to move a heavy cart of furnishings through the streets. Faviell’s German driver thinks it’s hilarious when she falls, but Faviell stops to help her and shames him into helping, too. Despite the dictum not to give rides to Germans, she takes Frau Altmann home in her car.

There, she gets to know Herr and Frau Altmann, two gentle and dignified older people, their daughters Ursula and Lilli, and their sulky son Fritz, a former member of a Nazi youth group against his parents’ wishes. Ursula is the only bread-winner, making money by fraternizing with the British and American soldiers. Lilli, extremely frail, is a ballet dancer.

Aside from descriptions of the living conditions and the changing situation between the Soviet and the other occupiers, much of the story is about Faviell’s relationship with the Altmann’s and with her regular driver, Stampie, who trades on the black market to keep some German families alive.

This is a fascinating account of how some people meet and overcome difficult situations and some don’t. I also wasn’t aware of the conditions in Berlin (although I had heard of the Berlin Flyover) and all the manipulation the Soviets did to try to claim the entire city from their other allies.

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Nonfiction November: Week Five

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Here we are at the last week of Nonfiction November. The prompt for this week is

Week 5 (11/25-11/29) New To My TBR:  It’s been a month full of amazing nonfiction books! Which ones have made it onto your TBR? Be sure to link back to the original blogger who posted about that book! (Deb)

I have added a bunch of books to my TBR this week! Some of them were ones that I intended to put on it but forgot until reminded by a thoughtful blogger! Others are brand new to me. So, let’s go! I thought I’d divide these into books I already knew about and books I learned about this week.

Books I already knew about but forgot

Actually, a friend of mine recommended this book to me quite some time ago, and I forgot about it. So, when I saw it on Readerbuzz this month, I immediately put it on my list. Thanks Deb! It’s Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari.

I’ve had my eye on A Fever in the Heartland by Timothy Egan since it came out. Okay, I am interested in the history of fringe organizations. I’ll never forget reading Under the Banner of Heaven by Jon Krakauer. Also, I found Egan’s book about the dust bowl to be interesting. Notice how I made no attempt to use this book’s really long and bulky subtitle. C’mon you guys! Some subtitle on a nonfiction book is expected, but you don’t have to tell everything on the cover! The blog that reminded me of this book was Joy’s Book Blog.

I didn’t write down which blog reminded me of Caste: The Origins of our Discontent, because it was mentioned on several. I have been meaning to read this book, especially because I thought Wilkerson’s book about the Great Migration was excellent.

One morning as I was driving to my art class, I heard an interview with Amy Tan. I didn’t know that she had been more or less restricted to her house because of a condition that causes her to faint with no warning. She told how she got interested in looking at the birds in her backyard and how she eventually trained some of them to eat from her hand. The book is also illustrated by herself! I made a resolution to get that book right away, but I forgot all about it until Shoe’s Seeds and Stories wrote about it this week.

Those are the books I knew about before, but look what I picked up this week!

Books that piqued my interest this month

These books appear in the order that I wrote them down.

What could be more exciting than the story of women in 1938 tackling the Colorado River to see what botanical specimens they can collect? They were expected to die! I found out about Brave the Wild River by Melissa L. Sevigny on The Book Stop blog! Another unnecessarily long subtitle, guys.

I can thank Unsolicited Feedback for listing two books that I put on my TBR this year. One of them is Our Moon (long subtitle) by Rebecca Boyle. I’ve always liked the moon, and Boyle hooks it into effects on our intellectual development, science, and other topics.

The other book is Around the World in 80 Birds by Mike Unwin, illustrated by Ryuto Miyake. OK, I like birds. In this beautiful book, Unwin picks 80 birds from around the world and tells us all about them.

Thanks so much, Unsolicited Feedback!

This one looks like a page-turner, Spy Princess: The Life of Noor Inayat Khan by Shrabani Basu. It’s about the first woman wireless transmitter in occupied France during World War II. She assumed a dangerous resistance post, was betrayed, and ended up dying in Dachau. I put it on my TBR thanks to Literary Potpourri!

And stepping back to World War I, Margot at War by Anne de Courcy is a biography of Margot Asquith, the wife of Britain’s Prime Minister during World War I and how she affected the office. This is a staid description, but this book with its examinations of the couple’s private lives sounds quite juicy! Thanks to Hopewell’s Library of Life for this suggestion!

Finally, thanks to Helen of She Reads Novels for just yesterday reviewing another true crime novel by Kate Summerscale, The Peepshow: The Murders at 10 Rillington Place. I have found Summerscale to be reliably good and interesting but didn’t know she had another book out. I like me a good true crime.

Last year, I listed six or seven nonfiction books in my TBR, but only managed to read three of them (along with nine others). This year, I’ll try to make a point of doing better.

Nonfiction November: Week Four

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Here we are already coming up on week four of Nonfiction November. It’s gone by really fast. This week, the prompt is as follows:

Week 4 (11/18-11/22) Mind Openers: One of the greatest things about reading nonfiction is the way it can open your eyes to the world around you–no plane ticket required. 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? Is there a book where, if everyone read it, you think the world would be a better place? (Rebekah)

I don’t think any of my nonfiction choices this year impacted me as strongly as expressed in the prompt. Rather, some reaffirmed my interest in topics that I have neglected. I like reading books that tell me something I didn’t know about, and this year, the only one that fits in that category is David Grann’s The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny, and Murder. It is about an ill-conceived venture of 1740 to capture rich Spanish ships in the Pacific Ocean. It was part of the War of Jenkin’s Ear, a conflict I also know nothing about (something to look up!). The expedition left too late for good conditions and had misestimated when the best weather for rounding Cape Horn would be. The Wager was the smallest ship in the fleet. It underwent some problems before getting to the Horn, and when it did, it was shipwrecked. What was most interesting was what happened among the crew once it was wrecked.

Another book that restressed some reading I had already done was The Inconvenient Indian: A Curious Account of Native People in North America by Thomas King, which I have not yet reviewed. It merely reconfirmed and built upon my reading from way back, when I read Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee by Dee Brown. Our history with dealing with native peoples is shameful, and our double-dealing hasn’t stopped. I need to get more informed on this issue and see what is going on today.

As I mentioned before, I really didn’t read much nonfiction this year despite my resolve to read more. It just didn’t happen that way, but I’ll try harder next year.

Nonfiction November: Week Three

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I had to think a lot about what I could do for this week, because the most self-evident answer to the prompt was too obvious. Here’s the prompt for this week:

Cover for Wolf Hall

Week 3 (11/11-11/15) Book Pairings: This week, pair up a nonfiction book with a fiction title. Maybe it’s a historical novel and the real history in a nonfiction version, or a memoir and a novel, or a fiction book you’ve read and you would like recommendations for background reading. Or (because I’m doing this myself) two books on two different areas have chimed and have a link. You can be as creative as you like! (Liz)

Cover for Bring Up the Bodies

Maybe this pairing is obvious, too, but it didn’t immediately come to mind. Here it is, though. I recently finished the history/biography Hunting the Falcon: Henry VII, Anne Boleyn and the Marriage That Shook Europe by John Guy and Julia Fox. This account begins when both figures are younger, with Henry becoming king and Anne first going to the French court. But it concentrates on the years of their relationship and marriage, including the fallout from Henry’s divorce of Katherine.

I’m actually pairing this nonfiction book with three fiction books that concentrate on the same subject matter, and they, of course, are well known. I meant Hilary Mantel’s outstanding trilogy about Thomas Cromwell. The trilogy begins with Wolf Hall, in which Cromwell helps Henry with his divorce from Katherine so he can marry Anne. It continues with Bring Up the Bodies, in which Cromwell eventually helps ruin Anne after she fails to produce a son and Henry sets his eyes on Jane Seymour. Finally, it ends in The Mirror and the Light, which begins with the beheading of Anne.

Whether you’re interested in the nonfiction or the fiction books, you’ll be entertained, but the trilogy happens in my opinion to be a set of top historical fiction books.

Nonfiction November: Week Two

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Here’s the prompt for Week Two of Nonfiction November:

Week 2 (11/4-11/8) Choosing Nonfiction: What are you looking for when you pick up a nonfiction book? Do you have a particular topic you’re attracted to? Do you have a particular writing style that works best? When you look at a nonfiction book, does the title or cover influence you? If so, share a title or cover which you find striking. (Frances)

What are you looking for when you pick up a nonfiction book? Do you have a particular topic you’re attracted to?

As far as the overall categories are concerned, I tend to gravitate toward history and biography, with a distinct slant toward reading about literary figures. However, there are certain periods of history that appeal to me (the Wars of the Roses and the Tudors, for example), and there are certain authors that I trend toward, usually buying any books that I come across. Here are some of those authors:

  • Bill Bryson
  • Doris Kearns Goodwin
  • David Grann
  • Erik Larson
  • Kate Summerscale
  • Claire Tomalin
  • Lucy Worsley

As you can see, several of these names are historians and biographers. I also like reading about art and true crime.

Do you have a particular writing style that works best?

Where writing style is concerned, I obviously want the book to be well written. In nonfiction, writing can get pretty academic and stuffy. If I’m not reading a book for a particular research goal, then I prefer the style to be more informal, maybe even with a touch of humor. However, Goodwin uses a more formal style, but it is eminently readable and not stodgy.

When you look at a nonfiction book, does the title or cover influence you? If so, share a title or cover which you find striking.

Yes, of course, the covers influence me to buy books. I’m not going to pretend otherwise. However, I’m more influenced by the author than the cover, usually. Titles not so much in nonfiction, because they are often stodgy or ruined by those stupid subtitles they all seem to have now. I think the cover that I liked best from my reading of the last year was the one for The Salt Path (note no subtitle).