Non-Fiction books you might pass up, but……..
The following three books could easily fly under your radar UNLESS you pay close attention to this post!
Ancestor Trouble: A Reckoning and a Reconciliation, by Maud Newton
How many of you have sent your DNA to ancestry.com? For those of us who are very curious and do not have a genealogist in the family, we may have done so. I know that I did. But this post is not about me. It’s about Maud Newton, a writer and a critic who has been struggling for years to come to terms with her crazy family. Many of us think we had a ‘disfuntional’ family growing up, but Newton really did! The book toggles between specific stories about individuals in Newton’s family and generalized research into topics such as epigenetics, generational trauma and for-profit outfits like 23andMe.
Inspired: Understanding Creativity by Matt Richtel.
Did you ever hear that “Everyone can sing. Some people just need a little coaching.” ? Well, in Inspired, Matt Richtel tells us that everyone has creative juices that just need to be activated. Fluency, originality and flexibility are all qualities of creative people. Peer pressure, bad parenting and perfectionism are enemies of creativity. Richtel won a Pulitzer Prize in 2010 in the category of National Reporting for a series on distracted driving. He is an ardent researcher, and his new book bears the proof of that. The book combines interesting storytelling with scientific concepts and stresses the need for curiosity in order to be creative. Of course, just as in all of life, a little luck comes in handy!!
Freezing Order by Bill Browder
Freezing Order could possibly be a bit anti-climactic now that the American public has heard so much about Vladimir Putin. Nothing could surprise us about him, right? Browder’s new book follows on the heals of Red Notice, his best-seller about his highly successful business ventures in Russia following the break up of the Soviet Union. Fans of Red Notice will definitely want to read Freezing Order because it follows what happened after Browder’s lawyer Sergei Magnitsky was killed in a Russian jail and Browder barely escaped. It also theorizes on why Russia tried to interfer in the 2016 presidential election in the United States AND why Putin still wants Browder dead! The Washington Post calls the book, ” An essential work by someone who understood long before the rest of the world did just how far corrupt Russian officials and businesspeople will go to defend their ill-gotten wealth, and how foreign lawyers, lobbyists and public relations firms enable them….”