2022 in Review: Best Runner Up Non-Fiction
Part 2: My favorite non-fiction reads
Long time no see! I’m back, and this time with my favorite non-fiction of 2022. As you can probably tell if you read my monthly round-ups, this year I’ve read much more fiction than non-fiction. Maybe it’s a combination of a hard job followed by a hard 1L semester, but sometimes the mood just isn’t right for a 500 page history. But reader, you’re in luck, because this just means I was substantially more picky when it came to choosing what non-fiction to read, and as a result, I can whole-heartedly vouch for all the books below. I’ve featured a few of these books in previous posts for summer reading recommendations and my June half-year round up of favorite books, so they have stood the test of time (i.e. 6 more months). If you’re disappointed that I didn’t have enough non-fiction recommendations this year, let me know! One of my new year’s resolutions for 2023 is to read more non-fiction, it just might have to be during school breaks.
As a reminder, all of the books written about below are available on my 2022 In Review Bookshop Page, or you can click on the title of the book itself to be routed to the shop. All of the books I’ve ever recommended, sorted by post, are also available on the general shop page.
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6. Love Lockdown - Elizabeth Greenwood
Love Lockdown is an exploration of love and relationships. Greenwood mostly focuses on couples that met while one of the partners was incarcerated, whether through prison pen pal websites, news attention, or mutual friends. To highlight these experiences, Greenwood is calculated in the types of relationships that she writes about, attempting to draw attention to the different circumstances of different couples. Throughout the course of her reporting, Greenwood discovered a large support system and online community that exists for couples that met while incarcerated, including the Strong Prison Wives network, which is comprised of non-incarcerated wives across the country who have banded together to counter judgement from the outside.
I was not expecting to be as enthralled by this book as I was. Greenwood is very clear from the beginning that she is not a fully objective third party reporter and concedes that it is possible she broke journalism ethics rules when buying snacks for inmates or when she called one of the prison wives with concerns about the woman’s susceptibility to domestic violence upon the release of her husband. I do not think that this detracts from the story that Greenwood is trying to tell. If anything, it is an asset to be able to highlight such intimate details of these people’s lives, which she is only able to collect through her personal relationships with these characters.
5. Bad City - Paul Pringle
Paul Pringle is an investigative journalist for the Los Angeles Times. This book is an expansion of his Pulitzer Prize winning story series about the incredible corruption in leadership at the University of Southern California. In April 2016, Pringle received a tip about a drug overdose of a young woman in a fancy LA hotel. Dr. Carmen Puliafito, the head of the USC medical school, was present at the scene not as a doctor, but as the girl’s drug supplier and enabler. A few weeks after the overdose, Puliafito quietly stepped down, and USC moved on like nothing had ever happened. But Puliafito continued his relationship with the girl, supplying her and her friends drugs while maintaining his medical license. Pringle, intent on getting to the bottom of the story, could never have imagined just how far the cover up would go, stretching from the president’s office of USC to the city government of Pasadena and LA County. The corruption even extended into his own newsroom, where leadership in bed with USC attempted to block the publication of his story for over a year, violating every imaginable code of journalism ethics. My friends know that I’m a massive fan of heroic journalism stories, and this book is exactly that. Like many others, I’d heard about the Operation Varsity Blues scandal at USC, but was shocked to hear about the depths of corruption and malfeasance present at USC and amongst the LA elite.
4. Sandy Hook: An American Tragedy and the Battle for Truth - Elizabeth Williamson
There are a handful of moments in life in which you can remember exactly where you were when an event took place. For me, the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School is one of them. I was sitting in my ninth grade math class when a classmate interrupted the teacher to tell everyone that there had been a shooting at an elementary school. While my reaction and the reaction of those around me was grief and the persistent question of "how can we let this happen,” the first reaction for other more conspiracy-prone people across the country was denial. This denial led to outrageous claims that Sandy Hook was a false flag operation set up by the government as a ploy to take away people's guns. These people, who found each other with newfound ease on platforms such as Facebook and Twitter, believe that the children and teachers who were killed on December 14, 2012 were "crisis actors," and that the grieving parents are in on the plot. Opportunistic fear mongers like Alex Jones at Infowars capitalized on these increasingly popular conspiracy theories, broadcasting them to hundreds of thousands of people every day, and profiting off their ignorance. Adding insult to the tragedy, these conspiracy theorists exist beyond the confines of the internet, and continue to harass grieving parents to this day.
To be clear, this book does not provide a comprehensive overview of the events that transpired at Sandy Hook and the decade after, i.e. it does not discuss subsequent efforts to pass new gun control legislation, it barely mentions the NRA response and lobbying techniques, nor does it talk about a lawsuit brought by parents against Remington. Instead, Williamson narrows her focus specifically on the conspiracy theories that sprung up surrounding the shooting, the powerful people who fueled these flames, and the reactions and lawsuits instigated by parents in response. The narrowing of the focus helps centralize Williamson's thesis: with the help of unregulated social media platforms, the reaction to the Sandy Hook shooting brought conspiracy theories and their disruptive and sometimes violent consequences into the mainstream. The subject matter of this book makes it difficult to read, but it is important. In the wake of Uvalde and the countless other shootings preceding and following it, it is important to understand how hate begets hate in order to best approach preventing future tragedies.
3. White Hot Hate - Dick Lehr
In 2016, Dan Day and his son were exercising in a local park. Looking to cool off for a minute, they walked into their local library where Dan noticed a pro-Palestine poster on the bulletin board. Surprised to see this in his small hometown of Garden City, Kansas, Dan decided to bring it to a friend he hadn’t seen in a while, but had seen posting on Facebook about the threat of Muslim terrorists. The next day, Dan was invited by this friend to a barbecue, which he discovers is actually a recruitment meeting for a local branch of the Three Percenter militia, a right-wing, white nationalist militia. Following the barbecue, the FBI noticed that the poster Dan saw had been circulating online, except now members of the militia were claiming that it was a recruitment poster for ISIS calling for terrorist attacks on American soil. The FBI approached Dan to learn more and at the end of their meeting asked him to do something dangerous - join the group and become an informant. Dan, a gun-toting conservative, sees that the ideas the Three Percenters are espousing are dangerous and so, based on a pervasive feeling of patriotism, goes undercover.
Soon after joining, Dan is introduced to an even more extreme faction of people in the Kansas State Militia who see the growing population of Somali refugees and immigrants in Kansas as a plot by ISIS to destroy America. Their response, they decide, should be to blow up an apartment complex primarily housing Somali refugees. What follows is the harrowing true story of Dan’s involvement with this group and his work with the FBI to foil the plot. It is a fast-paced and fascinating book, as well as a terrifying look at white nationalism and the ever-present threat that hateful ideas pose.
What struck me the most after finishing this book was the sheer luck the FBI had in cracking this case. Had it not been for a chain of events that could have very easily gone a different way, the FBI would never have been introduced to Dan. They also got incredibly lucky that Dan was who he was - a man of immense integrity willing to put himself in danger in defense of something larger than himself. I was alarmed that this militia group was not previously on the FBI’s radar and that if not for their luck, the terrorist plot most likely would have succeeded. To me, this speaks to a critical need to devote more resources and attention to domestic extremists and white nationalists, especially groups that hide behind the facade of a free speech defense when, in reality, their words are driving violence.
2. How the Word is Passed - Clint Smith
In How the Word is Passed, Clint Smith uses eight different locations to explore how slavery and its legacy are publicly acknowledged, taught, and reckoned with within American society. The places that Smith visits are roughly representative of the different ways in which public history considers slavery, the Civil War, and its enduring impact.
Starting at Monticello, Thomas Jefferson’s ideals of liberty are contrasted with the plantation on which he enslaved nearly four hundred people. In touring the grounds, Smith discovers that the recognition of Jefferson’s slaveholder status is a fairly recent development. For many visitors who come to admire the architecture of his home, this is the first that they are learning about the slaves Jefferson owned. At a graveyard for fallen Confederate soldiers in Virginia, Smith struggles to find any recognition of slavery as the motivating factor for the Confederate cause, and instead engages in conversation with Confederate re-enactors and members of the Sons of the Confederacy who look proudly upon their heritage and believe firmly in the states’ rights, “war of northern aggression” narrative. Moving to Angola Prison in Louisiana, Smith takes a tour of the facility that was once a slaveholding plantation and then a convict leasing prison after emancipation. Still today, 150 years later, every license plate issued in Louisiana is made by prisoners at Angola who receive a wage of 2 to 25 cents an hour and live within sweltering cellblocks devoid of air conditioning. A trip to New York City reminded me of the intimate connections the Financial District and Wall Street had with the slave trade, disrupting the Northern myth that slavery was only a crime of the South. Wandering around lower Manhattan, however, Smith struggled to find recognition of these connections, an example of how if monuments do not exist, history can easily be forgotten.
Smith uses intimate and lyrical language to link each of these narratives to his central thesis: recognition of America’s sins is rooted in a system of education and memory that struggle to confront hard truths. Although historical context is weaved throughout the chapters to provide background to the locations Smith visits, Smith’s original contribution to this field of study comes from his examination of the creation of public history itself.
1. These Precious Days - Ann Patchett
These Precious Days is Patchett's most recent non-fiction essay collection, with stories centered around different elements of her life. In my opinion, Patchett is at her best in her non-fiction essays, including in her previous books This is the Story of a Happy Marriage and Truth and Beauty. In These Precious Days, Patchett looks at her life with new wisdom, writing essays full of heart and humor on topics ranging from her three fathers to her husband's love of flying to her induction into the American Academy of Arts and Letters. The title essay, "These Precious Days" about Ann's friendship with Tom Hanks' former assistant, her battle with cancer, and her accidental living arrangement with the Patchetts during COVID moved me to tears. If that is not a sign of powerful writing, I do not know what is.
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