The Warmth of Other Suns

The Warmth of Other Suns is one of those books that I’d been meaning to get around to and just never did. I knew I’d love it. I knew it won all the awards when it was published. My friends raved about it. I even name dropped the title, derived from Richard Wright’s Black Boy,

The Unwomanly Face of War: An Oral History of Women in World War II

I first stumbled upon Svetlana Alexievich’s work about ten years ago, when I visited the library and randomly picked up a copy of her brilliant Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of Nuclear Disaster. Of course, Alexievich has been around much longer than that; Voices from Chernobyl was published 20 years ago, and she’s been chronicling

The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America’s Shining Women

A century ago, radium was one of the most exciting wonders of modern times. Not only could it make things glow in the dark, it also had healing properties that could be used for medicinal purposes. Then America went to war, and the demand for radium products skyrocketed. In 1917, many young women from Newark,

Imbeciles: The Supreme Court, American Eugenics, and the Sterilization of Carrie Buck

In the 1920s, riding high on the pro-eugenics wave that had swept across the nation, key individuals in Virginia pushed hard to advocate for mass eugenic sterilization. Unlike other states that were moving their sterilization programs forward with zeal, however, Virginia took a somewhat more cautious approach. A law was passed that would give the

The Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal, and the Real Count of Monte Cristo

I spent part of the summer of 2012 reading — and falling deeply in love with — Alexandre Dumas’s The Count of Monte Cristo. Talk about perfect timing: soon after I finished reading that book, The Black Count was released to great critical acclaim and went on to win the 2013 Pulitzer in the Biography