This week’s host is She Seeks Nonfiction, and the theme is Worldview Shapers:

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 can’t answer this one with just one book, and I can think of a few books that I read before blogging that made me see things differently. However, I’ll stick mostly to ones that I have reviewed on this blog.

One was a book recommended by my brother called Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth by Reza Aslan, an acclaimed religious scholar. Aslan’s goal was to try to find as much evidence as possible about the man Jesus aside from the religious claims. In other words, the historical record. What he found was that most of what we think we know about his life is myth, created by the gospel writers years after his death to further the claim that Jesus was the Messiah.

On the subject of religion, another book that affected me profoundly before I started the blog was Jon Krakauer’s Under the Banner of Heaven, about the beliefs and behavior of some fringe apostolic Mormon groups.

A book that might be popular again now that told me something I didn’t know about from history is Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI, which profoundly shocked me when I read it four years ago. As most of you probably know, it’s about members of the wealthy Osage tribe who were murdered by their guardians (the government deeming they were not able to look after their own interests) or white family members in order to get claims to their share of the oil money. The movie that is out now by Martin Scorsese is excellent.

Thinking, Fast and Slow by Nobel Prize winning Daniel Kahneman explains the results of years of scientific experiments that show that most of our decisions are made by our unconscious rather than our conscious mind. This was an entertaining book full of intellectual surprises and little exercises that you can try yourself that show the profound implications of how we make our decisions.

I was aware that DDT was banned as a result of Rachel Carson’s ground-breaking book Silent Spring, but her book about the poisons that we still use every day in agriculture and other industries made me realize why the world seems to be dying of cancer. This book may have been written in 1962, but it still needs to be paid attention to. I think everyone should read it.

Finally, for me personally, the first book I ever reviewed on this blog was revelatory. That is The Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan, about the foods we eat and how our basis in corn and soy is not really good for us. I was even more profoundly affected by his In Defense of Food, but I read it before starting this blog.

This week’s host for Nonfiction November is Liz of Adventures in reading, running and working from home. The theme is Book Pairings, and here is its description:

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. You can be as creative as you like!

This is a toughie. I can think of some obvious pairings, like Middlemarch and My Life in Middlemarch, or the biographies of authors whose books I have read, or Elif Batuman’s The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them and one of those Russian books, but I was looking for something more creative.

Here’s what I came up with: The Hare with Amber Eyes: A Hidden Inheritance is the world-renowned ceramicist Edmund de Waal’s nonfiction account of a collection of netsuke that belong to his family and what happened to it during World War II, when the family thought it was stolen by the Nazis. In tracing the collection, de Waal traces his own family history, beginning with Charles Ephrussi, the original owner of the collection, who was the cousin of de Waal’s great-grandfather and also the inspiration for Proust’s Charles Swann.

I’m pairing this with Great House by Nicole Krauss, a collection of linked short stories about the migrations of a desk, which the character Nadia tries to find after giving it away because she cannot write without it. The desk turns out to have a sad history and comes to represent all the objects lost in the Holocaust.

Week Two of Nonfiction November is hosted by Volatile Rune. The theme is Choosing Books, and here is its description:

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. 

I am not nearly as big a nonfiction reader as I am a fiction reader, so to answer this question, I had to look back at my list of nonfiction books since I started my blog. It’s clear that I like to read books about literary subjects and biographies and memoirs, often by or about literary figures, but although I have read a few, not often celebrity biographies and memoirs. I think in general I just look for nonfiction books that pique my interest in some way, either because of who wrote them or what they are about.

Although the cover generally influences me for fiction books, I haven’t been able to discover that I read any nonfiction books because of their covers. However, I will read books by certain authors: the biographers Doris Kearns Goodwin, Claire Tomalin, and Ron Chernow, for example. I also like true crime novels, but mostly true crime of an older vintage, so I have enjoyed a couple of books by Kate Summerscale (The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher, The Wicked Boy) and have another one on my pile.

There are also periods of history I’m interested in, particularly the Wars of the Roses. I’ll read histories and biographies about that time.

I am not very scientific minded, but occasionally I hear of a book about science that sounds fascinating. I have an upcoming review of The Bathysphere Book that I found really interesting, and it has a great cover illustration.

Ten years ago, I discovered John McPhee’s Annals of the Former World, about how our continent was formed geologically, in four big, fat volumes, and I read every one. Fascinating stuff, and McPhee is a great writer.