Below I’m highlighting some nonfiction books coming out in June. All of the mentioned titles are available to put on hold in our catalog and will also be made available via the library’s Overdrive website on the day of publication in eBook and downloadable audiobook format (as available). For a more extensive list of new nonfiction books coming out this month, check our online catalog.
Top Picks
“The Sisterhood of Ravensbrück: How an Intrepid Band of Frenchwomen Resisted the Nazis in Hitler’s All-Female Concentration Camp” by Lynne Olson (Jun 3)
Decades after the end of World War II, the name Ravensbrück still evokes horror for those with knowledge of this infamous all-women’s concentration camp, better known since it became the setting of Martha Hall Kelly’s bestselling novel, “Lilac Girls.” Particularly shocking were the medical experiments performed on some of the inmates. Ravensbrück was atypical in other ways as well, not just as the only all-female German concentration camp, but because 80 percent of its inmates were political prisoners, among them a tight-knit group of women who had been active in the French Resistance. Already well-practiced in sabotaging the Nazis in occupied France, these women joined forces to defy their German captors and keep one another alive. The sisterhood’s members, amid unimaginable terror and brutality, subverted Germany’s war effort by refusing to do assigned work. They risked death for any infraction, but that did not stop them from defying their SS tormentors at every turn — even staging a satirical musical revue about the horrors of the camp. After the war, when many in France wanted to focus only on the future, the women from Ravensbrück refused to allow their achievements, needs, and sacrifices to be erased. They banded together once more, first to support one another in healing their bodies and minds and then to continue their crusade for freedom and justice — an effort that would have repercussions for their country and the world into the 21st century.
“The Mind Electric: A Neurologist on the Strangeness and Wonder of Our Brains” by Pria Anand (Jun 10)
A girl believes she has been struck blind for stealing a kiss. A mother watches helplessly as each of her children is replaced by a changeling. A woman is haunted each month by the same four chords of a single song. In neurology, illness is inextricably linked with narrative, the clues to unraveling these mysteries hidden in both the details of a patient’s story and the tells of their body. Stories are etched into the very structure of our brains, coded so deeply that the impulse for storytelling survives and even surges after the most devastating injuries. But our brains are also porous — the stories they concoct shaped by cultural narratives about bodies and illness that permeate the minds of doctors and patients alike. In the history of medicine, some stories are heard, while others — the narratives of women, of Black and brown people, of displaced people, of disempowered people—are too often dismissed. In “The Mind Electric,” neurologist Pria Anand reveals — through case study, history, fable, and memoir — all that the medical establishment has overlooked: the complexity and wonder of brains in health and in extremis, and the vast gray area between sanity and insanity, doctor and patient, and illness and wellness, each separated from the next by the thin veneer of a different story. Moving from the Boston hospital where she treats her patients, to her childhood years in India, to Isla Providencia in the Caribbean and to the Republic of Guinea in West Africa, she demonstrates again and again the compelling paradox at the heart of neurology: that even the most peculiar symptoms can show us something universal about ourselves as humans.
“Belle Starr: The Truth Behind the Wild West Legend” by Michael Wallis (Jun 24)
In the annals of legendary Wild West desperadoes, Belle Starr is remembered to this day as the Bandit Queen. Shortly after her murder in 1889, a highly romanticized, sensational book titled “Bella Starr… The Bandit Queen, or the Female Jesse James” was published — the first in a series of high-profile portraits to brand Starr as a villain. Now, celebrated author Michael Wallis parses over a century of mythmaking to reveal the woman behind the renegade legend. Wielding compelling research, including correspondence, official records, and contemporary newspaper accounts, Wallis traces Starr’s beginnings to Carthage, Missouri, where she was born Myra Maibelle Shirley in 1848 and was classically educated to be a Southern belle. Myra’s early years were characterized by the chaotic violence of the Civil War — she was traumatized by the death of her brother, who was killed riding with “bushwhackers,” one of the many insurgent guerilla groups supporting the Confederate Army. From then on, she swore revenge against all Yankees and became a willing “friend to any brave and gallant outlaw.” The crimes committed by Starr’s innermost circle―stagecoach stickups, bank robbery, horse theft — would take her from war-torn Carthage to rollicking Scyene, Texas, until she finally settled in Indian Territory (present Oklahoma). And although Starr indeed ran in the same circles as notorious outlaws Jesse James and the Younger brothers, the crimes ascribed to her were greatly embellished — including the fact that the allegedly bloodthirsty Starr more than likely never killed a single person. Turning a redemptive eye to Belle Starr’s tarnished legacy, Wallis crafts an illuminating portrait of a woman demonized for refusing to accept the genteel Victorian ideals expected of her, a woman who chose instead to live her life outside the law, riding sidesaddle with a pearl-handled Colt .45 strapped to her hip.
More Notable Releases for June
- “The Gunfighter: How Texas Made the Wild West” by Bryan Burrough (Jun 3)
- “How to Lose Your Mother: A Daughter’s Memoir” by Molly Jong-Fast (Jun 3)
- “Murderland: Crime and Bloodlust in the Time of Serial Killers” by Caroline Fraser (Jun 10)
- “Threads of Empire: A History of the World in Twelve Carpets” by Dorothy Armstrong (Jun 17)
