We asked 2011 speaker Laurie Hertzel, Senior Books Editor at the Minneapolis Star Tribune, to recommend some of her favorite nonfiction books to read this summer. Here is her letter from Minneapolis with great nonfiction for Romania:<\/p>\n
First, I should mention that I agree with Jacqui\u2019s list<\/a> of last year, especially Timothy Egan and Katherine Boo. And David Finkel. And, well, the whole list. So here\u2019s a good list (in no particular order) of some who might be a little less well-known. A summer spent reading these books would be a wonderful summer indeed.<\/p>\n 1. Darcy Frey\u2019s \u201cThe Last Shot\u201d<\/a> is a great example of immersion reporting married with graceful writing: He spent a year with young black teens who believed that a professional basketball career would be their way out of poverty—even though all signs pointed to the impossibility of such a dream. He inserted himself in the book late in the reportage, and reluctantly, because his constant presence began to alter the story.<\/p>\n 2. Adrian Nicole LeBlanc\u2019s \u201cRandom Family\u201d<\/a> is also wonderful immersion reporting, ten years in the reporting, hanging out with a family in the Bronx, observing how years of poverty grind people down and affect generations.<\/p>\n 3. Anything by Erik Larson, but probably most entertaining is \u201cDevil in the White City,\u201d<\/a> about a serial killer prowling the 1893 World\u2019s Fair. Larson is a former Wall Street Journal reporter, and his five books are all deeply reported narrative nonfiction history. (His latest, \u201cDead Wake,\u201d<\/a> is about the sinking of the Lusitania.)<\/p>\n 4. \u201cMountain City,\u201d<\/a> a memoir by Gregory Martin, is a beautiful book about the quirky people in his tiny hometown, now a ghost town in the mountains of Nevada.<\/p>\n 5. Tracy Kidder won the Pulitzer Prize for his first book, \u201cSoul of a New Machine\u201d<\/a> which is about the invention of a computer. But I am most partial to \u201cHouse,\u201d<\/a> his book about something deceptively ordinary: the construction of a house, which he manages to turn into a page-turner drama. He starts with the couple, then the architect, and then moves on to the builders, whom you will grow to love. (Kidder and his longtime editor, Richard Todd, also have a book out about the collaboration between a writer and editor. It\u2019s called \u201cGood Prose: The Art of Nonfiction.\u201d<\/a> A very good read.)<\/p>\n 6. \u201cThe Empathy Exams,\u201d<\/a> by Leslie Jamison. A reminder that not all great nonfiction is narrative journalism. These are brilliant essays\u2014narrative, yes, and well-reported, definitely, but then they take a giant step beyond that into context and interpretation and speculation and meaning. (Leslie\u00a0Jamison is coming to Bucharest this October for the fifth edition of our conference. You can register here<\/a>.<\/em>)<\/p>\n 7. Anne Fadiman: \u201cThe Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down.\u201d<\/a> Fadiman has a long, great story to tell about how this book came to be (it started as a piece for the New Yorker, which was ultimately rejected after the magazine changed editors). But this is a fascinating look at the clash of two cultures: American, and Hmong, illuminated by the serious illness of a young child and the very different ways these two cultures look at illness and health care.<\/p>\n 8. I wanted to include \u201cToast,<\/a>\u201d by Nigel Slater, one of my favorite memoirs for no particular reason (it just depicts childhood so beautifully) but instead I\u2019m going to go with Emily Fox Gordon\u2019s memoir of childhood, \u201cAre You Happy?<\/a>,\u201d which is evocative and specific and both melancholy and brilliant. Gordon is a Fulbright fellow and (ahem) is one of my thesis readers for my MFA.<\/p>\n 9. \u201cCitizen,<\/a>\u201d by Claudia Rankine. A difficult book to read because of its subject matter\u2014racism in America\u2014but not because of the way it is written, which is lyrical and lovely. I\u2019m including it because it\u2019s a fascinating blend of poetry, reportage, essay and photography, a true blurring of nonfiction genres. It is such a wonderful mash-up of genre that it was a finalist in two different categories for a National Book Critics Circle Award\u2014criticism, and poetry. (It won in poetry.)<\/p>\n 10. Norman Mailer \u201cThe Armies of the Night.\u201d<\/a> Not an easy read, but a fascinating one as a model for how to include the narrator\/author as a character. It also walks the line between fiction and nonfiction in a fascinating way. An easier read, but more chilling, would be Mailer\u2019s biography of the murderer Gary Gilmore, \u201cThe Executioner\u2019s Song,\u201d <\/a>which he wrote using material largely gathered by a different reporter.<\/p>\n 11. I cannot resist one more. Read the travel writing of Eric Newby. Any of it. But especially “A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush.”<\/a> Not just a fascinating exploration of 1950s Afghanistan, but also a lesson in how to write about oneself in a modest and self-deprecating way. Oh, heck, also read his “The Last Grain Race,”<\/a> just because it’s so fun. And now I will stop, though I could go on and on.<\/p>\n Laurie Hertzel<\/a> was one of the speakers of our first edition. She is\u00a0Senior Editor for books at the Minneapolis Star Tribune and the author of\u00a0News to Me: Adventures of an Accidental Journalist<\/a>, winner of a 2011 Minnesota Book Award.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" We asked 2011 speaker Laurie Hertzel, Senior Books Editor at the Minneapolis Star Tribune, to recommend some of her favorite nonfiction books to read this summer. Here is her letter from Minneapolis with great nonfiction for Romania: First, I should mention that I agree with Jacqui\u2019s list of last year, especially Timothy Egan and Katherine … Continue reading Reading list: Laurie Hertzel<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":1011,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[24],"tags":[38,60,69,73],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thepowerofstorytelling.org\/edition-2018\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1085"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thepowerofstorytelling.org\/edition-2018\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thepowerofstorytelling.org\/edition-2018\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thepowerofstorytelling.org\/edition-2018\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thepowerofstorytelling.org\/edition-2018\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1085"}],"version-history":[{"count":18,"href":"https:\/\/www.thepowerofstorytelling.org\/edition-2018\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1085\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3019,"href":"https:\/\/www.thepowerofstorytelling.org\/edition-2018\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1085\/revisions\/3019"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thepowerofstorytelling.org\/edition-2018\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1011"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thepowerofstorytelling.org\/edition-2018\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1085"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thepowerofstorytelling.org\/edition-2018\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1085"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thepowerofstorytelling.org\/edition-2018\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1085"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nSecond, I\u2019m going to assume that you are all already deeply familiar with E.B. White\u2019s essays, and Joan Didion\u2019s graceful, intelligent reportage\/cultural criticism, and Gay Talese and Joseph Mitchell and all those other old New Yorker writers.<\/p>\n