Non-Fiction reads of 2021

Vaguely broken down by category, but quite a few of these books could be in more than one.

 

Read for my "Chicago books" book club:

Chicago: City on the Make, by Nelson Algren

Campaign! the 1983 Election that Rocked Chicago, by Peter Nolan

American Warsaw: the rise, fall, and rebirth of Polish Chicago, by Dominick Pacyga

Other Chicago-related books

The Great Chicago Fire, edited by Paul M. Angle

Disposing of Modernity: the archaelogy of garbage and consumerism during Chicago's

    1893 World's Fair, by Rebecca S. Graff

The Jewel of the Gold Coast: Mrs. Potter Palmer's Chicago, by Sally Sexton Kalmbach

A Shopper's Paradise: how the ladies of Chicago claimed power and pleasure in the new

    downtown, by Emily Remus

Chicago's Great Fire: the destruction and resurrection of an iconic American city, by

    Carl Smith

 

Books on books:

 

Seven Kinds of People You find in Bookshops, by Shaun Bythell 

The Afterlife of "Little Women", by Beverly Lyon Clark

The Bookseller of Florence: the story of the manuscripts that illuminated the 

    Renaissance, by Ross King (way longer that it needed to be)

Shelf Life: Chronicles of a Cairo Bookseller, by Nadia Wassef

The Gilded Page: secret lives of medieval manuscripts, by Mary Wellesley

Britain:

These Ruins are Inhabited, by Muriel Beadle

The Very Best of British, by Nicholas Courtney

Terms & Conditions: Life in girls' boarding schools: 1939-1979, by Ysenda Maxtone

        Graham

Lions and Shadows: an education in the Twenties, by Christopher Isherwood

What Matters in Jane Austen: Twenty crucial puzzles solved, by John Mullan

C. F. A. Voysey: Architect, designer, individualist, by Anne Stewart O'Donnell

Behind Closed Doors: at home in Georgian England, by Amanda Vickery

Race:

Fire in the Hole: the Spirit Work of Fi-Yi-Yi and Mandingo Warriors, by Fi-Yi-Yi

The Color of Love: a story of a mixed-race Jewish girl, by Marra B. Gad

All that She Carried: the journey of Ashley's sack, a Black family keepsake, by Tiya Miles 

Slaves to Fashion: Black Dandyism and the Styling of Black Diasporic Identity, by

    Monica L. Miller

Caste: the origins of our discontent, by Isabel Wilkerson

Asia:

The Sakura Obsession: the incredible story of the plant hunter who saved Japan's cherry

    blossoms, by Naoko Abe

Winter Pasture: one woman's journey with China's Kazakh herders, by Li Juan

African Samurai: the true story of Yasuke, a legendary black warrior in feudal Japan, 

       by Thomas Lockley & Geoffrey Girard

The Spirit of Japanese Poetry, by Yone Noguchi 

 

Art/architecture/design/fashion: 

 

Sisters in Art: the biography of Margaret, Esther, and Helen Bruton, by Wendy Van Wyck        Good 

Marion Mahony and Millikin Place, by Paul Kruty & Paul E. Sprague

Dandies, by James Laver

Brolliology: a history of the umbrella in life and literature, by Marion Rankine 

Patch Work: a life amongst clothes, by Claire Wilcox

The Unfinished Palazzo: Life, love and art in Venice, by Judith Mackrell

Portrait of Dr. Gachet: the story of a Van Gogh masterpiece, by Cynthia Saltzman 

Memoirs/biographies/diaries

Two Memoirs of Renaissance Florence: the diaries of Buonaccorso Pitti & Gregorio Dati,         (edited by) Gene Brucker

Dante and the Early Astronomer: Science, adventure, and a Victorian woman who opened 

    the heavens, by Tracy Daugherty

'Dangerous Work': Diary of an Arctic Adventure, by Arthur Conan Doyle

Fillets of Plaice, by Gerald Durrell

Still Alive: a Holocaust girlhood remembered, by Ruth Kluger

Lear's Italy: in the footsteps of Edward Lear, by Michael Montgomery

Fred in Love, by Felice Picano

Confessions of a Cineplex Heckler, by Joe Queenan

Memories: from Moscow to the Black Sea, by Teffi

 

Jews/Judaism:

 

Plunder: a memoir of family property and Nazi treasure, by Menachem Kaiser 

Letters to Camondo, by Edmund de Waal  

Jewish Pirates of the Caribbean, by Edward Kritzler

Jews and Shoes, (edited by) Edna Nahshon

Other:

Elderhood: redefining aging, transforming medicine, reimagining life, by Louise Aronson

An Atlas of Extinct Countries, by Gideon Defoe

The Writing of the Gods: the race to decode the Rosetta Stone, by Edward Dolnick

The Ring of Truth and other myths of sex and jewelry, by Wendy Doniger 

Dante and the Early Astronomers, by M. A. Orr