As with most years, it remains a mystery how we arrived at the penultimate month of the year so quickly. The last of the leaves are falling from the branches, and the distant ringing of sleigh bells can be heard if you listen closely. In this time of transition between seasons and holidays, many readers carve out time to read more nonfiction books than they might usually reach for during the rest of the year. It’s Nonfiction November, and these are our top choices.
Must-Read Books for Nonfiction November
The Gilded Edge
by Catherine Prendergast
Nora May French and Carrie Sterling arrive at Carmel-by-the-Sea at the turn of the twentieth century with dramatically different ambitions. Nora, a stunning, brilliant, impulsive writer in her early twenties, seeks artistic recognition and bohemian refuge among the most celebrated counterculturalists of the era. Carrie, long-suffering wife of real estate developer George Sterling, wants the opposite: a semblance of the stability she thought her advantageous marriage would offer, now that her philandering husband has taken to writing poetry.
After her second abortion, Nora finds herself in a desperate situation but is rescued by an invitation to stay with the Sterlings. To Carrie’s dismay, George and the arrestingly beautiful poetess fall instantly into an affair. The ensuing love triangle, which ultimately ends with the deaths of all three, is more than just a wild love story and a fascinating forgotten chapter. It questions why Nora May–in her day a revered poet whose nationally reported suicide gruesomely inspired youths across the country to take their own lives, with her verses in their pockets no less—has been rendered obscure by literary history. It depicts America at a turning point, as the Gilded Age groans in its death throes and young people, particularly young women, look toward a bright, progressive, more egalitarian future.
In an unfortunately familiar development, this vision proves a mirage. But women’s rage at the scam redefines American progressivism forever.
The Nine
by Gwen Strauss
The Nine follows the true story of the author’s great aunt Hélène Podliasky, who led a band of nine female resistance fighters as they escaped a German forced labor camp and made a ten-day journey across the front lines of WWII from Germany back to Paris.
The nine women were all under thirty when they joined the resistance. They smuggled arms through Europe, harbored parachuting agents, coordinated communications between regional sectors, trekked escape routes to Spain and hid Jewish children in scattered apartments. They were arrested by French police, interrogated and tortured by the Gestapo. They were subjected to a series of French prisons and deported to Germany. The group formed along the way, meeting at different points, in prison, in transit, and at Ravensbrück. By the time they were enslaved at the labor camp in Leipzig, they were a close-knit group of friends. During the final days of the war, forced onto a death march, the nine chose their moment and made a daring escape.
Drawing on incredible research, this powerful, heart-stopping narrative from Gwen Strauss is a moving tribute to the power of humanity and friendship in the darkest of times.
Related: Anticipated Nonfiction Releases of Early 2021
Out of the Shadows
by Emily Midorikawa
Queen Victoria’s reign was one of breathtaking social change, yet roles for most women remained rigid and narrow. The “angel in the house” rarely expressed an opinion, and certainly not one that challenged the status quo.
But not so within the social sphere of the seance–a mysterious, lamplit world dominated by enterprising women whose apparent ability to move between the realms of the dead and the living rewarded them with otherwise unthinkable fame and power. Such talents allowed them to cross rigid boundaries of gender and class, and to summon unique political voices–voices capable of reaching some of the era’s most famous personalities, including even Victoria herself.
Out of the Shadows, which draws on original diaries, letters, and memoirs, tells the stories of six such visionary Victorians. The clairvoyance of Kate, Leah, and Maggie Fox, three sisters from upstate New York, inspired some of the era’s best-known female suffrage activists and set off an international séance craze. British performer Emma Hardinge Britten left behind a career on Broadway for the life of a “trance lecturer,” whose oration on the death of Abraham Lincoln was celebrated by tens of thousands. The meteoric rise of Victoria Woodhull, born into poverty in Ohio, took her from childhood medium to Wall Street broker to America’s first female presidential candidate. And Georgina Weldon, whose interest in spiritualism nearly saw her confined to an asylum, went on to become a favorite of the press and a successful campaigner against Britain’s archaic lunacy laws.
The Good Girls: An Ordinary Killing
by Sonia Faleiro
The girls’ names were Padma and Lalli, but they were so inseparable that people in the village called them Padma Lalli. Sixteen-year-old Padma sparked and burned. Fourteen-year-old Lalli was an incorrigible romantic.
They grew up in Katra Sadatganj, an eye-blink of a village in western Uttar Pradesh crammed into less than one square mile of land. It was out in the fields, in the middle of mango season, that the rumors started.
Then one night in the summer of 2014 the girls went missing; and hours later they were found hanging in the orchard. Who they were, and what had happened to them, was already less important than what their disappearance meant to the people left behind.
In the ensuing months, the investigation into their deaths would implode everything that their small community held to be true, and instigate a national conversation about sex and violence. Slipping deftly behind political maneuvering, caste systems and codes of honor in a village in northern India, The Good Girls returns to the scene of Padma and Lalli’s short lives and shameful deaths, and dares to ask: what is the human cost of shame?
Lawbreaking Ladies
by Erika Owen
Discover 50 fascinating tales of female pirates, fraudsters, gamblers, bootleggers, serial killers, madams, and outlaws in this illustrated book of lawbreaking and legendary women throughout the ages. Many of us are familiar with the popular slogan “Well-behaved women seldom make history.” But that adage is taken to the next level in this book, which looks at women from the past who weren’t afraid to break the law or challenge gender norms. From pirates to madams, gamblers to bootleggers, and serial killers to outlaws, women throughout the ages haven’t always decided to be sugar, spice, and everything nice. In Lawbreaking Ladies, author Erika Owen tells the stories of 50 remarkable women whose rebellious and often criminal acts ought to solidify their place in history, including:
– The swashbuckling pirate Ching Shih
– “Queen of the Bootleggers” Gloria de Casares
– The Prohibition-era gangster Stephanie Saint-Clair
– And a band of prisoners who came to be known as the Goree Girls
The perfect gift for true crime fans and lovers of little-known women’s history, Lawbreaking Ladies serves as an engaging and informative guide to gals who were daring, defiant, and sometimes downright dangerous.
Secret Wisdom
by Ruth Clydesdale
Throughout the course of our history, a secret few have sought to acquire profound occult knowledge which reveals the inner truth of our existence. From the Mystery cults of Ancient Greece to the Persian knowledge of astrology, Secret Wisdom is an exhilarating exploration of two and a half millennia of occult practices. Learn about the hidden messages in Renaissance art, the alchemy practices of Issac Newton and secret societies which passed on spiritual rites including the Freemasons, Rosicrucians, Theosophists and the Golden Dawn. New light is shone on well-known historical figures and the part they played in the global quest for divine understanding including:
– John Dee, Elizabeth I’s magician
– Aleister Crowley, the English occultist
– Poets William Blake and William Butler Yeats
– Dante, the Italian writer and philosopher
Featuring photographs and illustrations which breath life into ancient beliefs, this book is a marvelous journey to discover the most arcane of wisdom.
The Real Valkyrie
by Nancy Marie Brown
In the tradition of Stacy Schiff’s Cleopatra, Brown lays to rest the hoary myth that Viking society was ruled by men and celebrates the dramatic lives of female Viking warriors.
In 2017, DNA tests revealed to the collective shock of many scholars that a Viking warrior in a high-status grave in Birka, Sweden was actually a woman. The Real Valkyrie weaves together archaeology, history, and literature to imagine her life and times, showing that Viking women had more power and agency than historians have imagined.
Brown uses science to link the Birka warrior, whom she names Hervor, to Viking trading towns and to their great trade route east to Byzantium and beyond. She imagines her life intersecting with larger-than-life but real women, including Queen Gunnhild Mother-of-Kings, the Viking leader known as The Red Girl, and Queen Olga of Kyiv. Hervor’s short, dramatic life shows that much of what we have taken as truth about women in the Viking Age is based not on data, but on nineteenth-century Victorian biases. Rather than holding the household keys, Viking women in history, law, saga, poetry, and myth carry weapons. These women brag, “As heroes we were widely known—with keen spears we cut blood from bone.” In this compelling narrative Brown brings the world of those valkyries and shield-maids to vivid life.
Dracul: In the Name of the Father
by A.K. Brackob
Stories of Dracula have fascinated people around the world for generations. Both the fictional vampire created by the Irish author Bram Stoker at the end of the nineteenth century and the fifteenth century Prince called Vlad the Impaler, the man regarded as the historical Dracula, have become part of universal culture. Yet few realize that the Wallachian ruler dubbed “the Impaler,” is not the original Dracula. Instead, that distinction belongs to his father, a little-known prince called Vlad Dracul.
The elder Vlad, who gained the sobriquet Dracul or Dracula when Holy Roman Emperor Sigismund of Luxemburg initiated him into the Order of the Dragon in February 1431, was among the most important political personalities of his day. He far surpassed his more famous namesake in those qualities that define a great ruler. Vlad Dracul struggled to protect the independence of his land, under the most difficult of circumstances, against the threats posed by his powerful neighbors, the Ottoman Empire and the Kingdom of Hungary. In so doing, he in no small way contributed to the survival of his principality at a time when Ottoman expansion in the Balkans expunged countries such as Bulgaria and Serbia from the map of Europe.
Several books have been devoted to the study of his famous son, Vlad the Impaler, but any search for the historical Dracula must begin with the story of the father. Now, for the first time, based on extensive documentary research, the true story of the man who founded the Dracula dynasty is revealed.
When Women Ruled the World: Making the Renaissance in Europe
by Maureen Quilligan
Sixteenth-century Europe was a time of destabilization of age-old norms and the waging of religious wars—yet it also witnessed the remarkable flowering of a pacific culture cultivated by a cohort of extraordinary women rulers who sat on Europe’s thrones, most notably Mary Tudor; Elizabeth I; Mary, Queen of Scots; and Catherine de’ Medici.
Recasting the dramatic stories and complex political relationships among these four women rulers, Maureen Quilligan rewrites centuries of scholarship that sought to depict intense personal hatreds among them. Instead, showing how the queens engendered a culture of mutual respect, When Women Ruled the World focuses on the gift-giving by which they aimed to ensure female bonds of friendship and alliance. Detailing the artistic and political creativity that flourished in the pockets of peace created by these queens, Quilligan’s lavishly illustrated work offers a new perspective on the glory of the Renaissance and the women who helped to create it.
Which of these nonfiction books catches your attention? Will you be adding any to your November TBR?
