...and the year’s best nonfiction
in NPR.org. Her book “powerfully maps a complicated mother-daughter relationship” and sugarcoats nothing about her mother’s harrowing final days and bearing witness to the suffering. Currently the leader of the band Japanese Breakfast, Zauner has previously written many songs about her grief yet she still felt an emptiness. What Crying in H Mart reveals is that in turning to cooking to keep her mother’s memory alive, “Zauner became herself.”
All That She Carried
by Tiya Miles (Random House, $28)
“If you want a window into what it has meant to be Black in America, read this,” said Rana Foroohar in the Financial Times. In All That She Carried, which won a National Book Award, Harvard historian Tiya Miles “brings a remarkable kind of scholarship to a rip-your-heart-out tale of a simple cotton sack.” Purchased at a flea market in 2007, the sack bears embroidered words that indicate it was given to a 9-year-old girl by her enslaved mother in the 1850s just before the girl was sold away and the pair separated forever. Miles dug up as much detail as she could about both women and their descendants as well, said Marjoleine Kars in The Washington Post. Where the record falls short, she sketches the possibilities by drawing on what is known about the women’s contemporaries and about the significance of the three objects that the sack once held. “While it may not be traditional history, it is certainly great history”—“a bold reflection on the human capacity for love in the face of soul-crushing madness.”
A Little Devil in America
by Hanif Abdurraqib (Random House, $27)
“There are few things more rewarding than watching Hanif Abdurraqib take a deep dive into good music,” said Patrick Rapa in The Philadelphia Inquirer. In his latest book, the poet and cultural critic does that many times, as he celebrates famous and nonfamous Black performers alike, all in service of an inquiry about what he describes as the performance of Blackness and how it has reverberated throughout American history. He reconsiders the stories of vaudeville dancer Master
Juba, actress-singer Josephine Baker, and comedian Dave Chappelle, among many others, and yet it’s Abdurraqib’s personal recollections “that set
Little Devil soaring.” Abdurraqib, a MacArthur fellow, is prone to leap from assessing the rise of Whitney Houston to analyzing a schoolyard fight, and “the connections that he makes between these stories point to the enduring influence of Black art,” said Annabel Gutterman in Time. In a book that’s “as bold as it is essential,” he “covers broad ground with ease and wit.”
All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days
by Rebecca Donner (Little, Brown, $32)
A“Here is a historical biography that reads like a literary thriller,” said Moira Hodgson in The Wall Street Journal. The author’s greatgreat aunt, Mildred Harnack, was an American-born professor working in Berlin who from 1932 until her execution by order of Adolf Hitler led a clandestine resistance movement against the Nazi rise. While posing as a Nazi loyalist, she even learned of Germany’s planned 1941 invasion of the Soviet Union and managed to put a detailed warning in the hands of Joseph Stalin. Rebecca Donner, a novelist, tells the story in the present tense, an approach that “conveys what it felt like in real time to experience the tightening vise of the Nazi regime,” said Jennifer Szalai in The New York Times. Once Harnack is arrested, the sudden cutoff of known information about her feels wrenching to the reader. But Donner discovered the record of a chaplain who visited Mildred the day of her 1943 beheading. He found her ailing from tuberculosis but focused in her last hours on translating poems by Goethe. One of the verses she translated that day provides the title of this “astonishing” book.