2023 Holiday Gift Guide: Nonfiction
These reads are the perfect gift for the person who almost exclusively watches documentaries. From true crime to heartwarming memoirs, these nonfiction reads are so great, you won’t mind when your loved one recaps the whole thing for you.
Paced like a thriller and full of insider information, this book embeds readers in one of the most famous true-crime stories of our generation—the kidnapping of Polly Klaas.
On October 1, 1993, a 12-year-old girl was kidnapped at knifepoint from her bedroom in Petaluma, California, during a sleepover with two friends, while her mother slept soundly in the room next door. This rarest of all kidnappings—a stranger abduction from the home—triggered one of the largest manhunts in FBI history.New York Times bestselling author Kim Cross has written the first comprehensive account of what happened on that fateful night in October, as well as how the case forever transformed the Bureau’s approach to solving crimes. With unprecedented access to case files, crime scene photos, a videotaped murder confession, and inside sources, In Light of All Darkness follows the investigators who pieced together the evidence that led to the arrest and conviction of the kidnapper—and made the victim a household name and a girl who will never be forgotten.
An unflinching memoir about navigating social mobility as a first gen Latina, offering both a riveting personal story and an examination of the unacknowledged emotional tolls of being a trailblazer.
Alejandra Campoverdi has been a child on welfare, a White House aide to President Obama, a Harvard graduate, a gang member’s girlfriend, and a candidate for U.S. Congress. She’s ridden on Air Force One and in G-rides. She’s been featured in Maxim magazine and had a double mastectomy. Living a life of contradictory extremes often comes with the territory when you’re a “First and Only.” It also comes at a price.
With candor and heart, Alejandra retraces her trajectory as a Mexican American woman raised by an immigrant single mother in Los Angeles. Foregoing the tidy bullet points of her resume and instead shining a light on the spaces between them, what emerges is a powerful testimony that shatters the one-dimensional glossy narrative we are often sold of what it takes to achieve the American Dream. In this timely and revealing reflection, Alejandra draws from her own experiences to name and frame the challenges First and Onlys often face, illuminating a road to truth, healing, and change in the process.
Part memoir, part manifesto, First Gen is a story of generational inheritance, aspiration, and the true meaning of belonging—a gripping journey to “reclaim the parts of ourselves we sacrificed in order to survive.”
Winner of the Martin Cruz Smith Award (California Independent Bookseller’s Alliance)
Winner of the Dolores Huerta Award (International Latino Book Awards)
2024 Council for Opportunity in Education National Book Club Selection
Longlisted for the Outstanding Works of Literature (OWL) Award for First Year Experience
LONGLISTED FOR THE PEN/JEAN STEIN BOOK AWARD 2024
“A brilliant and brilliantly different” (Kiese Laymon), wrenching and redemptive coming-of-age memoir about the difficulty of growing up in a hazardous home and the glory of finding salvation in geek culture.
Stranded within an ever-shifting family’s desperate but volatile attempts to love, saddled with a mercurial mother mired in crack addiction, and demeaned daily for his perceived weakness, Joseph Earl Thomas grew up feeling he was under constant threat. Roaches fell from the ceiling, colonizing bowls of noodles and cereal boxes. Fists and palms pounded down at school and at home, leaving welts that ached long after they disappeared. An inescapable hunger gnawed at his frequently empty stomach, and requests for food were often met with indifference if not open hostility. Deemed too unlike the other boys to ever gain the acceptance he so desperately desired, he began to escape into fantasy and virtual worlds, wells of happiness in a childhood assailed on all sides.
In a series of exacting and fierce vignettes, Thomas guides readers through the unceasing cruelty that defined his circumstances, laying bare the depths of his loneliness and illuminating the vital reprieve geek culture offered him. With remarkable tenderness and devastating clarity, he explores how lessons of toxic masculinity were drilled into his body and the way the cycle of violence permeated the very fabric of his environment. Even in the depths of isolation, there were unexpected moments of joy carved out, from summers where he was freed from the injurious structures of his surroundings to the first glimpses of kinship he caught on his journey to becoming a Pokémon master. SINK follows Thomas’s coming-of-age towards an understanding of what it means to lose the desire to fit in—with his immediate peers, turbulent family, or the world—and how good it feels to build community, love, and salvation on your own terms.
In America, we teach that strength means holding back tears and shaming your own feelings. In the Black community, these pressures are especially poignant. Poor mental health outcomes—including diagnoses of depression and anxiety, reliance on prescription drugs, and suicide—have skyrocketed in the past decade. In this book, actor Courtney B. Vance seeks to change this trajectory.
Along with professional expertise from famed psychologist Dr. Robin L. Smith (popularly known as “Dr. Robin”), Courtney B. Vance explores issues of grief, relationships, identity, and race through the telling of his own most formative experiences. Together, they provide a guide for Black men navigating life’s ups and downs, reclaiming mental well-being, and examining broken pieces to find whole, full-hearted living.
Self-care is an act of revolution. It’s time to revolutionize mental health in the Black community.
“A thoughtful, wise, empathetic book that has the capacity to save lives.” —Kirkus Reviews
“… an inspiring story of what [Black men] can achieve personally and professionally when they have the tools and support necessary to examine their pain and find their joy.” —New York Journal of Books
Lab Girl meets Brain on Fire in this provocative and poignant memoir delving into a woman’s formative experiences as a veritable “lab rat” in a lifelong psychological study, and her pursuit to reclaim autonomy and her identity as a adult.
What if your parents turn you into a human lab rat when you’re a child? Will that change the story of your life? Will that change who you are?
When Susannah Breslin is a toddler, her parents enroll her in an exclusive laboratory preschool at the University of California, Berkeley, where she becomes one of over a hundred children who are research subjects in an unprecedented thirty-year study of personality development that predicts who she and her cohort will grow up to be. Decades later, trapped in what she feels is an abusive marriage and battling breast cancer, she starts to wonder how growing up under a microscope shaped her identity and life choices. Already a successful journalist, she makes her own curious history the subject of her next investigation. From experiment rooms with one-way mirrors, to children’s puzzles with no solutions, to condemned basement laboratories, her life-changing journey uncovers the long-buried secrets hidden behind the renowned study. The question at the gnarled heart of her quest: Did the study know her better than she knew herself?
At once bravely honest and sharply witty, Data Baby is a compelling and provocative account of a woman’s quest to find her true self, and an unblinking exploration of why we turn out as we do. Few people in all of history have been studied from such a young age and for as long as this author, but the message of her book is universal. In an era when so many of us are looking to technology to tell us who to be, it’s up to us to discover who we actually are.
Jonathan Conyers introduces us to the teachers, his debate coach, and a boy named Diego who changed his life.
Everybody was rooting for Jonathan Conyers after his inspiring story went viral, sparked millions in donations to the Brooklyn Debate League, and captured the heart of America. The kid who entered school struggling to read, ended up being a breakout star on his high school debate team, thanks to a life-changing friendship with his transgender debate coach. Jonathan’s story highlights the important role teachers play in opening up worlds of opportunity for the most vulnerable students.
In I Wasn’t Supposed to Be Here, Jonathan shares the full story of his incredible journey escaping the precarious circumstances he was born into, and the teachers, mentors, and guides who helped him along the way. Born into a family crippled by addiction and homelessness, Jonathan “failed” kindergarten and was told he would never succeed academically. But instead, Jonathan found ways to defy the limited expectations placed upon him by building a village to save his own life, and realize his dream to get into medical school.
Throughout this heartwarming memoir, we will meet the unique and diverse cast of characters who made up Jonathan’s village and helped him change the trajectory of his life into one that has proven to be a great inspiration to others.
Nylon’s “June 2023’s Must-Read Book Releases”
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The Skimm’s “17 of Our Favorite Books Coming Out This Summer”
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Bustle’s “Most Anticipated Books Of Spring & Summer 2023”
Harper’s Bazaar’s “23 Best Summer Beach Reads of 2023”
Zibby Mag’s “Most Anticipated Spring and Summer Books”
A New York Post Best Books of the Week selection
Three suburban girls meet at a boarding school for troubled teens.
Eight years later, they were dead.
Bustle editor Samantha Leach and her childhood best friend, Elissa, met as infants in the suburbs of Providence, Rhode Island, where they attended nursery, elementary school, and temple together. As seventh graders, they would steal drinks from bar mitzvahs and have boys over in Samantha’s basement—innocent, early acts of rebellion. But after one of their shared acts, Samantha was given a disciplinary warning by their private school while Elissa was dismissed altogether, and later sent away. Samantha did not know then, but Elissa had just become one of the fifty-thousand-plus kids per year who enter the Troubled Teen Industry: a network of unregulated programs meant to reform wealthy, wayward youth.
Less than a year after graduation from Ponca Pines Academy, Elissa died at eighteen years old. In Samantha’s grief, she fixated on Elissa’s last years at the therapeutic boarding school, eager to understand why their paths diverged. As she spoke to mutual friends and scoured social media pages, Samantha learned of Alyssa and Alissa, Elissa’s closest friends at the school who shared both her name and penchant for partying, where drugs and alcohol became their norm. The matching Save Our Souls tattoo all three girls also had further fueled Samantha’s fixation, as she watched their lives play out online. Four years after Elissa’s death, Alyssa died, then Alissa at twenty-six.
In The Elissas, Samantha endeavors to understand why they ultimately met a shared, tragic fate that she was spared, in turn, offering a chilling account of the secret lives of young suburban women.