Nonfiction Archives

My Beloved World

You would be remiss if you didn’t ask how Justice Sotomayor transcended the adversity of her childhood: dangerous neighborhoods, chronic poverty, an alcoholic father, an unhappy mother. Yet My Beloved World is a memoir suffused with gratitude, generosity, and love.

5 min

Music and the Armenian Diaspora

Big Band music saved my sanity during an especially stressful time in my life. I was working long hours, seven days a week, on a high-stakes project. I actually liked…

The Long Emancipation

As discussed by the scholar Ira Berlin in his monograph The Long Emancipation: The Demise of Slavery in the United States, the struggle for freedom is, at its core, about…

3 min

Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets

Secondhand Time gives readers a history of people's stories - their stories of what it was like to live through the fall of the Soviet Union and what has been carved in its wake.

20 min

A Singular Woman

For many, Ann Dunham is known as the mother of the 44th U.S. president who happened to be white, and that’s just about all they know about her. In A Singular Woman, Janny Scott retrieves Dunham from the bin of misrepresentation and presents an accomplished woman.

3 min

The Grind: Inside Baseball’s Endless Season

The millstone in The Grind is professional baseball. The grain it grinds are the men and women who either play the game, are players' wives, or have a specific role that makes the game possible.

18 min

3 min

Perfume Dreams

In 2005, the University of Hawaii at Manoa hosted a symposium honoring the forty-year anniversary of the Vietnam War. I went to a few events where Tim O’Brien and others…

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Nonfiction