February’s Best Reviewed Nonfiction

Geraldine Brooks’s Memorial Days, Hanif Kureishi’s Shattered, and Susan Morrison’s Lorne all feature among the best reviewed nonfiction titles of the month.

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

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1. Memorial Days by Geraldine Brooks
(Viking)

13 Rave • 2 Positive

“Intensely intimate and candid … Brooks frames her book in two separate narratives; each amplifies the potency of the other … Brooks captures the striking coincidences that marked his death with a poignancy tempered by her keen ability as a storyteller … Unlike others, this memoir, delicately written but without any precious patter, frames itself as a book of days. Overwrought metaphors aside, grief is less of an ocean and more of a series of days … A book that is meant to be read slowly.”

–Lauren LeBlanc (The Los Angeles Times)

2. Shattered by Hanif Kureishi
(Ecco)

6 Rave • 5 Positive

“His memoir is good but modestly so. It contains a great deal of black comedy but its most impressive emotion is regret—for things undone and unsaid earlier in his life … Remorse runs through this memoir’s veins like tracer dye. Kureishi stares hard at himself … We confront the bare wood beneath the bark of Kureishi’s best earlier writing. But he is good and bracing company on the page. His book is never boring. He offers frank lessons in resilience, about blowing the sparks that are still visible, about ringing the bells that still can ring.”

–Dwight Garner (The New York Times)

3. Lorne: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live by Susan Morrison
(Random House)

6 Rave • 3 Positive

“Morrison…has built Michaels the kind of biographical monument usually consecrated to founding fathers, canonical authors and world-historical scientific geniuses. A fair question might be whether the progenitor and supervisor of a long-running sketch-comedy show…merits such treatment … That the answer turns out to be yes is largely a tribute to Morrison’s journalistic chops. Briskly written and solidly sourced, Lorne is in essence a nearly 650-page magazine profile—something I mean almost entirely as praise.”

–A.O. Scott (The New York Times Book Review)

4. One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This by Omar El Akkad
(Knopf)

5 Rave • 2 Positive

“Powerful, angry, but always compelling in its moral logic, and damn hard to put down. I devoured it in two quick sittings, and by the end my heart was drumming … Passionate, poetic and sickening. It is full of well-earned rage, frustration with those who need this morality to be spelled out. For me it was cathartic, almost spiritual, to have these ugly truths articulated. It stoked and tempered the fires of my own rage. It is an important book, a must-read.”

–Dina Nayeri (The Guardian)

5. No Fault: A Memoir of Romance and Divorce by Haley Mlotek
(Viking)

5 Rave • 1 Positive

“Thoughtful and elegantly equivocal … Devoid of both dogmatism…and heroine-ism…in a way not always true of its predecessors … Reading her book can feel like sitting cross-legged on the floor, surrounded by an unmarshaled welter of artifacts. There is richness here, and exhilaration, if not quite a thesis about what divorce means either in general or to her … Disinclined to give either a firm narrative of Mlotek’s own divorce or a theory of the meaning of contemporary marriage. Firm narratives are precisely what people love to confect and clutch at the end of a marriage, or indeed any relationship … [A] highly intelligent writer.”

–Hermione Hoby (Bookforum)