NON-Fiction read in 2020

It was a year of "one thing leads to another", one book to another.

A good example:  I took an online course about Ashkenazi cooking, which led to cookbooks and memoirs, and why let it be all about Ashkenzim, so books on Sephardic cooking and Sephardic history, etc., etc.

 

Matzoh Ball Gumbo: culinary tales of the Jewish south, by Marcie Cohen Ferris

A Drizzle of Honey: the lives and recipes of Spain's secret Jews, by David M. Gitlitz and Linda     Kay Davidson 

Heretics or Daughters of Israel? the Crypto-Jewish women of Castile, by Renée Levine                Melamed 

Family Papers: a Sephardic journey through the Twentieth-century, by Sarah Abrevaya Stein

The Cooking Gene: a journey through African-American culinary history in the old South, by     Michael Twitty 

The Cooking of the Jews of Greece, by Nicholas Stavroulakis 

 

Donna Rifkind's biography of Salka Viertel, The Sun and her Stars: Salka Viertel and Hitler's Exiles in the Golden Age of Hollywood, led me to Viertel's own memoir, The Kindness of Strangers.

 

A lot of books on race in America, several for my "Chicago books" book club:

 

Ghosts in the Schoolyard: Racism and School Closings on Chicago's South Side, by Eve L.            Ewing

A Few Red Drops: the Chicago Race Riot of 1919, by Claire Hartfield

Another Way Home: the tangled roots of race in one Chicago family, by Ronne Hartfield 

    neighborhood, by Carlo Rotella

A Most Beautiful Thing: the true story of America's first all-Black high school rowing team,       by Arshay Cooper

Say I'm Dead: a family memoir of Races, secrets, and love, by E. Dolores Johnson

Fire Shut up in my Bones, by Charles M. Blow (and I am SO SO SO looking forward to the opera at Lyric in the spring!)

Italy, of course:

Dark Water: Art, Disaster, and Redemption in Florence, by Robert Clark

The Politics of Washing: real life in Venice, by Polly Coles

Rawdon Brown and the Anglo-Venetian relationship, edited by Ralph A. Griffiths and John E.     Law

Two Cities, by Cynthia Zarin

and the two works by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa mentioned in my previous post.

Some memoirs:

Confessions of a Bookseller, by Shaun Bythell

The White Road: Journey into an obsession, by Edmund De Waal

Moab is my Washpot, by Stephen Fry

Making the Mummies Dance: inside the Metropolitan Museum of Art, by Thomas Hoving

Crossing: a transgender memoir, by Derdre N. McCloskey

Talking to Myself, by Studs Terkel

Night, by Elie Wiesel

St. Trinian's Story, by Kaye Webb

Literary women in interwar England:

The Mutual Admiration Society: how Dorothy L. Sayers and her Oxford circle remade the         world for women, by Mo Moulton (a good book, but a ridiculously over-the-top subtitle)

Square Haunting: five writers in London between the wars, by Francesca Wade 

Frauds:

Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup, by John Carreyrou (though the jury is     literally, still out as I write this)

The Baker who Pretended to be King of Portugal, by Ruth MacKay

And some odds and ends:

Renaissance Invention: Stradanus' Nova Reperta, by Lia Markey (exhibition catalog)

The Ghost: a cultural history, by Susan Owens

Daemon Voices: on stories and storytelling, by Philip Pullman

Gilgamesh: the life of a poem, by Michael Schmidt

A Unified Theory of Cats on the Internet, by E. J. White