Bad Nuns and Good Science: Jenny's Nonfiction Rec List

[helloladies]

We're super happy to welcome regular Lady Business contributor Jenny back to discuss some awesome nonfiction recommendations. \o/

My middle sister, one of the most voracious readers I’ve ever met, told me recently that she’s completely stopped reading fiction. "I just don’t enjoy it anymore," she said to me super-casually even though this is, like, my nightmare. I read more nonfiction than I used to, and I’m worried that I’ll wake up one morning and find that I, like my cleverest sister, have just stopped enjoying fiction.

But that’s…not likely, right? And also kind of a dark, Christoper-Nolan-y way to open a nonfiction rec list. Let me put it to you this way: I only entertain the possibility of this fiction-free future because I am aware of how phenomenally great nonfiction can be. As we head into fall and embrace that back-to-school vibe, here’s a list of some excellent nonfiction to entertain, educate, and astound you.



The Bright Continent, Dayo Olopade
Because nature (and also human civilization) is red in tooth and claw, some of the books on this list are, yes, a trifle depressing. I’m starting us out with an antidote to that: Dayo Olopade’s wonderful The Bright Continent, which will make you feel better about the world at large. It’s about innovation and technology in sub-Saharan Africa—more specifically, it’s about the ways residents and entrepreneurs in sub-Saharan Africa make use of available technologies in ways that make their lives (and/or the world) better.

Given that US news outlets report regularly on African conflict and disaster, but only rarely on African successes, The Bright Continent is a wonderful corrective to what Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie calls “the power of a single story.”




The Nuns of Sant’Ambrogio, Hubert Wolf, translated by Ruth Martin
THIS BOOK RIGHT HERE. It’s going to be a real test of my self-control to see if I can manage to describe it without turning into book-five Harry Potter. A German princess/nun wrote to her cousin claiming that the novice mistress was committing heresy, sleeping with a priest, forcing the novices to perform sexual acts on her, and poisoning the princess/nun for speaking out against it. The Vatican opened up an investigation, and all of it (PLUS SO MUCH MORE) turned out to be true.

The Nuns of Sant’Ambrogio is so balls-to-the-wall outrageous that you will need to take a breather every chapter or two to digest the insanity of the behavior of this novice mistress. I won’t go into any more detail because you deserve to experience that for yourselves, but please trust me when I say that this book is a true gift to outrageous bullshit enthusiasts.




The Other Slavery, Andrés Reséndez
Okay, this is the only book on this list that I’ve included because I think people should read it—or at least be aware of its contents—as a matter of moral duty. The Other Slavery is about the enslavement of American Indian people by European colonizing powers and, later, American settlers and the American government. Andrés Reséndez has done some impressive digging into the historical record to uncover the ways white colonizers concealed, justified, and perpetuated their enslavement of indigenous populations. It’s history that I didn’t learn in school, and it’s so important to know.




Congo, David van Reybrouck
Yes, yes, I understand that you are not necessarily in the market for a 700-page history of a failed African state. But van Reybrouck’s Congo is so phenomenally good that it’s worth trying out if you enjoy history books even a little. He corrals the stories of a massive country and its people in a way that’s fascinating and accessible even if you don’t know much about Africa.

Many histories of colonized countries end up presenting primarily the stories and voices of the colonizers—often by necessity, because we have such extensive archival records from colonizing nations. Van Reybrouck makes it a point to include excerpts from interviews he conducted with Congolese people over many years of visits, soliciting their individual and collective memories of the many upheavals the Democratic Republic of Congo has faced over its long history.



Delusions of Gender, Cordelia Fine
You will never trust brain science journalism again once you’ve read Cordelia Fine’s Delusions of Gender—but in a good way! Fine critiques the scientific research dealing with gender, much of which purports to find fundamental differences between the sexes, but which often rests on shaky premises, faulty methodology, and stereotypical assumptions. Fine casts a critical eye on the notion that the genders are inherently different in ways that can be defined by biology, free of the gender socialization process that begins long before the babies are even born. This book is so good that I want to distribute copies to every health teacher, and also human, in America.

Phew. That was a lot of nonfiction. I believe I’ll go read a book about aliens having space adventures now, as a palate-cleanser.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

First, all of these sound fantastic and I must look them up. Second, if it makes you feel any better, I've gone full circle from reading fiction to mostly only enjoying non-fiction and now I'm back to fiction (plus still some non-fiction obviously though!). So there is still hope ;)

--AMCKIEREADS