August’s Best Reviewed Nonfiction

Evan Friss’ The Bookshop, Katherine Bucknell’s Christopher Isherwood Inside Out, and Alexis Pauline Gumbs’ Survival Is a Promise: The Eternal Life of Audre Lorde all feature among the best reviewed books of the month.

Brought to you by Book Marks, Lit Hub’s home for book reviews.

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1. The Bookshop: A History of the American Bookstore by Evan Friss
(Viking)

11 Rave • 1 Positive 

“A spirited defense … Friss’s book is organized like the best of such literary emporiums: a little higgledy-piggledy, with surprise diversions here and there … Considers how little overhead is required to nourish the fundamental human hunger for knowledge.”

–Alexandra Jacobs (The New York Times)

2. Christopher Isherwood Inside Out by Katherine Bucknell
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

7 Rave • 2 Positive • 2 Mixed
Read an excerpt from Christopher Isherwood: Inside Out here

“Bucknell goes beyond the diaries, gathering up the many strands of the writer’s personal and public lives to create a nuanced, masterful portrait of a brilliant, insecure, charismatic seeker of artistic truth and personal freedom … As Bucknell’s definitive wide-screen biography shows us, Isherwood’s struggles were transmuted into lyrical fiction that never stopped questioning what it meant to be a man in the 20th century, and thus his art became our gift.”

–Marc Weingarten (The Boston Globe)

3. A Wilder Shore: The Romantic Odyssey of Fanny and Robert Louis Stevenson by Camille Peri
(Viking)

6 Rave • 3 Positive
Read an excerpt from A Wilder Shore here

“Engrossing … Her richly researched and vivid double portrait makes a convincing case that Fanny pulled off a rare feat, enabling Louis’s genius to mature while releasing his boyish energies … Peri does not often venture into extended discussion of Louis’s literary work, but when she does, it can be fascinating … I am grateful to Peri for telling the story of their marriage, in all its complexity, with sympathy and spirit.”

–Phyllis Rose (The Atlantic)

4. Survival Is a Promise: The Eternal Life of Audre Lorde by Alexis Pauline Gumbs
(Farrar, Straus, and Giroux)

5 Rave • 3 Positive
Read an excerpt from Survival Is a Promise here

“An unabashed celebration of Lorde … There is no room for Lorde’s flaws in this book; she is a goddess, an avatar, an icon. As an entry point into Lorde’s poetry, though, Gumbs’s persuasive close readings create a virtuous circle, shining a light on how the life generated the poems, which now elucidate that life … Gumbs honors Lorde’s desire for an expansive legacy.”

–Ayten Tartici (The New York Times Book Review)

5. Earth to Moon: A Memoir by Moon Unit Zappa
(Dey Street Books)

3 Rave • 4 Positive • 1 Mixed

“For such a thoroughly dispiriting saga, Earth to Moon is somehow an unconscionably entertaining read. This is in no small part thanks to the prose … She emerges to claim her own narrative at last. And what a narrative it is.”

–Nick Duerden (The Guardian)