NON-FICTION REVIEWS
Looking to broaden your horizons? CAROLINE SANDERSON shares some titles that could challenge your thinking
ALL THE YOUNG MEN
Ruth Coker Burks with Kevin Carr O’Leary, Trapeze, £16.99 While visiting a friend in hospital in 1986, Coker Burks, a young single mum living in Arkansas, noticed the nurses’ reluctance to go inside a quarantined room. On impulse, she entered the room herself and was moved to care for the young male AIDS sufferer inside during his final moments of life.
With that compassionate act began a lifetime of activism and advocacy for gay men afflicted and stigmatised by the AIDS crisis.
A story of ordinary but heroic human empathy.
REAL ESTATE
Deborah Levy, Hamish Hamilton, £10.99
Home is the central theme of this final instalment in Levy’s excellent Living Autobiography trilogy, set between her crumbling London apartment building, the Paris flat where she lived and wrote for a time, and her rented Greek island house.
The house talk serves as a jumping-off point for a wise and pithy examination of personal and artistic freedom, womanhood, motherhood, love, and how to make a living as a writer just turned 60.
WHAT IT FEELS LIKE FOR A GIRL
Paris Lees, Particular, £17.99 The trailblazing journalist and broadcaster, and the first trans woman to appear on Question Time, has written a distinctive memoir in Nottinghamshire vernacular.
It hauls you into the world in which Lees grew up where she faced daily battles for acceptance, was beaten up after school for “talkin’ like a poof” and longed to escape.
A BIGGER PICTURE
Vanessa Nakate, Bluebird, £20 When it comes to speaking or writing about the climate crisis, the voices of people from the global South are seldom heard. But they often contribute the least to the problem and suffer the greatest consequences.
Nakate, 24, grew up in Uganda and, in her first book, she traces the links between the climate crisis and feminism, education, economics and more, lighting the path for others to become effective activists.
EMPIRELAND Sathnam Sanghera, Penguin, £9.99
Wolverhampton-born journalist and novelist Sanghera looks with great acuity at how the Empire wrought contemporary Britain, from the attitudes of our politicians and our response to Covid-19, to the words we use daily without appreciating their colonial origin.
How can it be, he asks, that despite the ubiquitous influence of imperialism on our daily lives, we still so often refuse to acknowledge it?
EMPIRE OF PAIN Patrick Radden Keefe, Picador, £20
Winner of the 2021 Baillie Gifford Prize For Non- Fiction, this parable of 21st-century greed reads like a novel but is all too true. It’s a masterly exposé of the Sackler family who, while making lavish donations to the fields of art and science, were also behind the manufacture of OxyContin, a blockbuster painkiller and catalyst for the opioid crisis – an epidemic of drug addiction that’s killed nearly half a million people.
BEING YOU
Anil Seth, Faber, £20
It’s a mind-blowing notion that electrical impulses in your brain are responsible for making you the unique individual you are.
Seth – a leading British researcher in the field of consciousness science – has made it his mission to discover exactly how such impulses translate into the vast range of perceptions, thoughts and emotions we feel.
His extraordinary debut shows how our “inner universe is part of, and not apart from, the rest of nature”.