Rebecca's Thoughts

Whether you are new to non fiction books, or need some recommendations here is a list of my top 15 top favourites plus some honourable mentions!

Before if start I want to set out some rules I’ve made for myself:
1) the book must be easily obtainable
2) this is a list of ‘pop non fiction’ and therefor doesn’t have any textbooks or strictly academic books!

known as the Inklings, which met weekly in Lewis’s Oxford rooms and in nearby pubs. They discussed literature, religion, and ideas; read aloud from works in progress; took philosophical rambles in woods and fields; gave one another companionship and criticism; and, in the process, rewrote the cultural history of modern times.

In The Fellowship, Philip and Carol Zaleski offer the first complete rendering of the Inklings’ lives and works. C. S. Lewis accepts Jesus Christ while riding in the sidecar of his brother’s motorcycle, maps the medieval and Renaissance mind, becomes a world-famous evangelist and moral satirist, and creates new forms of religiously attuned fiction while wrestling with personal crises. J.R.R. Tolkien transmutes an invented mythology into gripping story in The Lord of the Rings, while conducting groundbreaking Old English scholarship and elucidating, for family and friends, the Catholic teachings at the heart of his vision. Owen Barfield, a philosopher for whom language is the key to all mysteries, becomes Lewis’s favorite sparring partner, and, for a time, Saul Bellow’s chosen guru. And Charles Williams, poet, author of “supernatural shockers,” and strange acolyte of romantic love, turns his everyday life into a mystical pageant.

Romantics who scorned rebellion, fantasists who prized reality, wartime writers who believed in hope, Christians with cosmic reach, the Inklings sought to revitalize literature and faith in the twentieth century’s darkest years–and did so in dazzling style.

Jennette McCurdy was six years old when she had her first acting audition. Her mother’s dream was for her only daughter to become a star, and Jennette would do anything to make her mother happy. So she went along with what Mom called “calorie restriction,” eating little and weighing herself five times a day. She endured extensive at-home makeovers while Mom chided, “Your eyelashes are invisible, okay? You think Dakota Fanning doesn’t tint hers?” She was even showered by Mom until age sixteen while sharing her diaries, email, and all her income.

In I’m Glad My Mom Died, Jennette recounts all this in unflinching detail—just as she chronicles what happens when the dream finally comes true. Cast in a new Nickelodeon series called iCarly, she is thrust into fame. Though Mom is ecstatic, emailing fan club moderators and getting on a first-name basis with the paparazzi (“Hi Gale!”), Jennette is riddled with anxiety, shame, and self-loathing, which manifest into eating disorders, addiction, and a series of unhealthy relationships. These issues only get worse when, soon after taking the lead in the iCarly spinoff Sam & Cat alongside Ariana Grande, her mother dies of cancer. Finally, after discovering therapy and quitting acting, Jennette embarks on recovery and decides for the first time in her life what she really wants.

Told with refreshing candor and dark humor, I’m Glad My Mom Died is an inspiring story of resilience, independence, and the joy of shampooing your own hair.

role of money in politics soared and important issues were taken out of public contestation, a system of “rights without democracy” took hold. Populists who rail against this say they want to return power to the people. But in practice they create something just as bad: a system of “democracy without rights.” The consequence, as Yascha Mounk shows in this brilliant and timely book, is that trust in politics is dwindling. Citizens are falling out of love with their political system. Democracy is wilting away. Drawing on vivid stories and original research, Mounk identifies three key drivers of voters’ discontent: stagnating living standards, fear of multiethnic democracy, and the rise of social media. To reverse the trend, politicians need to enact radical reforms that benefit the many, not the few.

The People vs. Democracy is the first book to describe both how we got here and what we need to do now. For those unwilling to give up either individual rights or the concept of the popular will, Mounk argues that urgent action is needed, as this may be our last chance to save democracy.

In 2012, Beck Dorey-Stein was just scraping by in DC when a posting on Craigslist landed her, improbably, in the Oval Office as one of Barack Obama’s stenographers. The ultimate DC outsider, she joined the elite team who accompanied the president wherever he went, recorder and mic in hand. On whirlwind trips across time zones, Beck forged friendships with a tight group of fellow travelers–young men and women who, like her, left their real lives behind to hop aboard Air Force One in service of the president. But as she learned the ropes of protocol, Beck became romantically entangled with a consummate DC insider, and suddenly, the political became all too personal. Set against the backdrop of a White House full of glamour, drama, and intrigue, this is the story of a young woman making unlikely friendships, getting her heart broken, learning what truly matters, and discovering her voice in the process.

This books got it all; drama, history, and politics!! Honestly what more could you want. If your looking for a fast read that honestly reads like fiction than this is the book for you. Its a non-fiction book that doesn’t feel like non-fiction. The writing is casual and the flow of the story makes sense and flows nicely.

This is a wild ride from beginning to end and showcases life as a White House staffer; the good, the bad, and the ugly. I find this book fascinating from an outsiders perspective and I’m honestly intrigued about what goes on behind the doors of the White House. This book is like the real life version of the West Wing and Gossip Girl combined and the drama and intrigue is top tier. I think about this book, likely more than I should, but there is something about it that I keep coming back to. If you don’t like crappy people, melodrama, and immature people than this book likely isn’t for you. But have no fear there is still 14 other books on this list.

Rachel Bloom has felt abnormal and out of place her whole life. In this exploration of what she thinks makes her “different,” she’s come to realize that a lot of people also feel this way; even people who she otherwise thought were “normal.”

In a collection of laugh-out-loud funny essays, all told in the unique voice (sometimes singing voice) that made her a star; Rachel writes about everything from her love of Disney, OCD and depression, weirdness, and female friendships to the story of how she didn’t poop in the toilet until she was four years old; Rachel’s pieces are hilarious, smart, and infinitely relatable (except for the pooping thing).

I think this book is a good comp to I’m Glad My Mom Died and I think that people who like one will like the other! I will say that I prefer this one over Jenette’s but both are really good. Also the audio book for this memoir is pronominal and truly the best way to consume this book. Before reading this book I knew very little about Rachel Bloom (I’ve never seen Crazy Ex Girlfriend…) but that didn’t really matter and I was still able to enjoy this book. It toes the line really well between being funny but also grounded and sad at times. I Want to Be Where the Normal People Are is told through essays and letters to people in Rachel’s life and I think the what she has to say is very relatable and I’m glad she wrote this book. This book is amazing and I can’t recommend it enough! Despite the number on this list, I would not consider myself a memoir lover, but I think this book changed my perception of what a memoir can be. The book is original in the way it tells stories and I think that more memoirs should be written and created like this one!

were elected, school superintendents were mismanaging districts, and police chiefs were getting mysterious payouts. This is not the much-discussed fake-news problem–it’s the separate problem of a critical shortage of real news.

America’s premier media critic, Margaret Sullivan, charts the contours of the damage, and surveys a range of new efforts to keep local news alive–from non-profit digital sites to an effort modeled on the Peace Corps. No nostalgic paean to the roar of rumbling presses, Ghosting the News instead sounds a loud alarm, alerting citizens to a growing crisis in local news that has already done serious damage.

In this propulsive investigation, two prize-winning journalists reveal the reality. McKinsey’s work includes ruthless cost-cutting in the NHS, incentivising the prescription of opioids and executing Trump’s immigration policies (the ones that put children in cages). Meanwhile its vast profits derive from a client roster that has included the coal and tobacco industries, as well as some of the world’s most unsavoury despots.

McKinsey proudly insists it is a values-led organisation. When McKinsey Comes to Town is a parable of values betrayed: a devastating portrait of a firm whose work has often made the world more unequal, more corrupt and more dangerous.

Amazon, Coca Cola, and Intel have invested billions. Esports events have sold out Los Angeles’s Staples Center, Seoul’s World Cup Stadium, and Seattle’s KeyArena. Hundreds of people have dedicated their lives to gaming, sacrificing their education, relationships, and even their bodies to compete, committing themselves with the same fervor of any professional athlete. In Good Luck Have Fun , author Roland Li talks to some of the biggest names in the business and explores the players, companies, and games that have made it to the new major leagues.

Follow Alexander Garfield as he builds Evil Geniuses, a modest gaming group, in his college dorm into a global, multimillion-dollar eSports empire. Learn how Brandon Beck and Marc Merrill made League of Legends the world’s most successful eSports league and most popular PC game, on track to make over $1 billion a year. See how Twitch pivoted from a video streaming novelty into a $1 billion startup on the back of professional gamers. And dive into eSports’ dark drug abuse, labor troubles, and for each success story, hundreds of people who failed to make it big. These are the stories of the rise of an industry and culture that challenge what we know about sports, games, and competition.

Here is my post about this book!

scene, but gradually Suki Kim, too, learns the tune and, without noticing, begins to hum it. It is 2011, and all universities in North Korea have been shut down for an entire year, the students sent to construction fields – except for the 270 students at Pyongyang University of Science and Technology (PUST), a walled compound where portraits of Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il look on impassively from the walls of every room, and where Suki has accepted a job teaching English. Over the next six months, she will eat three meals a day with her young charges and struggle to teach them to write, all under the watchful eye of the regime.

Life at PUST is lonely and claustrophobic, especially for Suki, whose letters are read by censors and who must hide her notes and photographs not only from her minders but from her colleagues – evangelical Christian missionaries who don’t know or choose to ignore that Suki doesn’t share their faith. She is mystified by how easily her students lie, unnerved by their obedience to the regime. To them, everything in North Korea is the best, the tallest, the most delicious, the envy of all nations. Still, she cannot help but love them – their boyish enthusiasm, their eagerness to please, the flashes of curiosity that have not yet been extinguished.

As the weeks pass, she begins to hint at the existence of a world beyond their own – at such exotic activities as surfing the Internet or traveling freely and, more dangerously, at electoral democracy and other ideas forbidden in a country where defectors risk torture and execution. The students in turn offer Suki tantalizing glimpses into their lives, from their thoughts on how to impress girls to their disappointment that soccer games are only televised when the North Korean team wins. Then Kim Jong-il dies, leaving the students devastated, and leading Suki to question whether the gulf between her world and theirs can ever be bridged.

Without You, There Is No Us offers a moving and incalculably rare glimpse of life in the world’s most unknowable country, and at the privileged young men she calls “soldiers and slaves.”

blockchain to the totalitarian state.

Coming of age in the 2008 financial crisis, Lou’s generation has a natural affinity with this rebel internet money, this so-called millennial gold, created in the wake of that economic storm. At once an immersive narrative of adventure and fortune, Once a Bitcoin Miner is also a work of journalistic rigor. Lou examines this domain through the lens of the human condition, delving deep into the lives of the fast-talkers, the exiles, the ambitious, and the daring, forging their paths in a new world harsh and unpredictable.

This book does a really good job explaining crypto-currency and bit coin. Its a great entry point to people who want to lean more without having to take economics and computer science classes. I think this book has a very interesting story to tell and all of the people mentioned in this book a fascinating and contribute to the world of crypto-currency in a large manner. Ethan Lou has a wild perspective and in sight into the world of bitcoin and he is definitely knowledgeable and is a great story teller. He’s a financial reporter and is able to take his personal story and still tell it in an educational and helpful way.

stewardess serving on iconic Pan Am between 1966 and 1975 also had to be between 5′3″ and 5′9″, between 105 and 140 pounds, and under 26 years of age at the time of hire. Julia Cooke’s intimate storytelling weaves together the real-life stories of a memorable cast of characters, from Lynne Totten, a science major who decided life in a lab was not for her, to Hazel Bowie, one of the relatively few black stewardesses of the era, as they embraced the liberation of their new jet-set life.

Cooke brings to life the story of Pan Am stewardesses’ role in the Vietnam War, as the airline added runs from Saigon to Hong Kong for planeloads of weary young soldiers straight from the battlefields, who were off for five days of R&R, and then flown back to war. Finally, with Operation Babylift—the dramatic evacuation of 2,000 children during the fall of Saigon—the book’s special cast of stewardesses unites to play an extraordinary role on the world stage.

Read my full review here!

I’d honestly read anything this man writes. I think he has such an interesting way of telling stories and his gonzo style of research and writing is engaging and fun. I think this book also has a lot of interesting things to say about social media and the people whose lives it effects. I think the people Jon was able to talk to and the discussions he has with them are fascinating and have such interesting takes on social media. Its a super easy book to read and is thoroughly engaging.

This book explores a lot of ideas like greed, compassion, and anger leading to conversations that are very nuanced and something not really heard about social media. I think this book brings fourth a lot of ideas that might effects peoples relationships with the internet and I think these are important conversations to have!

Other books I’d recommend from the author:
The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry
Them: Adventures with Extremists
The Debutante (Audible Original)

are one of the richest families in the world, known for their lavish donations to the arts and sciences. The source of the family fortune was vague, however, until it emerged that the Sacklers were responsible for making and marketing OxyContin, a blockbuster painkiller that was a catalyst for the opioid crisis.

Empire of Pain is a masterpiece of narrative reporting and writing, exhaustively documented and ferociously compelling.

Check out my full review here!

Honourable Mentions:
This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends: The Cyberweapons Arms Race – Nicole Perlroth

Trust Me, I’m Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator – Ryan Holiday

LIV and Let Die: The Inside Story of the War Between the PGA Tour and LIV Golf – Alan Shipnuck

American Kingpin: The Epic Hunt for the Criminal Mastermind Behind the Silk Road – Nick Bilton