Nonfiction Roundup: October 2019

Welcome back to another post for our monthly nonfiction roundup! We have several exciting new titles coming out in October. Check our catalog for a more extensive list.

Top Picks

“The Body: A Guide for Occupants” by Bill Bryson
In the bestselling, prize-winning “A Short History of Nearly Everything,” Bill Bryson achieved the seemingly impossible by making the science of our world both understandable and entertaining to millions of people around the globe. Now he turns his attention inwards to explore the human body, how it functions and its remarkable ability to heal itself. Full of extraordinary facts and astonishing stories, “The Body” is a brilliant, often very funny attempt to understand the miracle of our physical and neurological make up. This book will have you marveling at the form you occupy, and celebrating the genius of your existence, time and time again.

“Before and After: The Incredible Real-Life Stories of Orphans Who Survived the Tennessee Children’s Home Society” by Judy Christie and Lisa Wingate
From the 1920s to 1950, Georgia Tann ran a black-market baby business at the Tennessee Children’s Home Society in Memphis. She offered up more than 5,000 orphans tailored to the wish lists of eager parents — hiding the fact that many weren’t orphans at all, but stolen sons and daughters of poor families, desperate single mothers, and women told in maternity wards that their babies had died. The publication of Lisa Wingate’s novel “Before We Were Yours” brought new awareness of Tann’s lucrative career in child trafficking. Adoptees who knew little about their pasts gained insight into the startling facts behind their family histories. Encouraged by their contact with Wingate and award-winning journalist Judy Christie, who documented the stories of fifteen adoptees in this book, may determined Tann survivors set out to trace their roots and fiend their birth families.

“Unfollow: A Journey from Hatred to Hope” by Megan Phelps-Roper
Megan Phelps-Roper was raised in the Westboro Baptist Church, the fire-and-brimstone religious sect at once aggressively homophobic and anti-Semitic, rejoiceful for AIDS and natural disasters, and notorious for its picketing that the funerals of American soldiers. From her first public protest, aged five, to her instrumental role in spreading the church’s invective via social media, her formative years brought their difficulties. But being reviled was not one of them. She was preaching God’s truth. She was, in her words, ‘all in’. In November 2012, at the age of twenty-six, she left the church, her family, and her life behind. “Unfollow” is a story about the rarest thing of all: a person changing their mind. It is a fascinating insight into a closed world of extreme belief, a biography of a complex family, and a hope-inspiring memoir of a young woman finding the courage to find compassion for others, as well as herself.