July’s Best Reviewed Nonfiction

Rachel Aviv’s You Won’t Get Free of It, David Thompson’s A Sudden Flicker of Light, and Pamela Colloff’s Catch the Devil 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. You Won’t Get Free of It: Stories of Mothers and Daughters by Rachel Aviv
(Knopf)

7 Rave • 3 Positive
Read an interview with Rachel Aviv here

“Aviv’s writing also defies a fixed point of view. She moves effortlessly between reporting on events in one moment and entering the inner lives of her subjects the next, as though you were reading a short story told in the third person … No one who reads Aviv’s book will ever read Alice Munro in the same way again, but they may read her, as I did, with a strange new curiosity.”

–Thomas Beller (4Columns)

2. A Sudden Flicker of Light: A Revisionist History of Movies by David Thompson
(Simon & Schuster)

5 Rave • 5 Positive • 1 Mixed • 1 Pan

“So much film criticism is clichéd or unadventurous—he tackles it with a bullwhip, a magnifying glass and a sardonic grin … Is this really his last book? There’s certainly an air of finality and futility in the way he ties things up at the end, or rather unravels them … He still cares and after reading this you will you will too.”

–Ed Potton (The Times)

3. Catch the Devil: A True Story of Murder, Deception, and Injustice on the Gulf Coast by Pamela Colloff
(Knopf)

5 Rave • 2 Positive

“One of the fascinations here is Skalnik’s psychic makeup … Lacking actual cooperation, Colloff instead deploys her prodigious investigative reporting skills … Its unusual villain makes Catch the Devil an engrossing read; the public policy implications make it important.”

–Ted Conover (The New York Times Book Review)

4. They Stole a City: Wilmington’s White Supremacist Coup and the Families Who Live with Its Legacy by Lauren Collins
(Penguin Press)

6 Rave

“Remarkably successful in its scope and depth, They Stole a City is an urgent argument for reckoning with history in order to understand the present backlash and rising white nationalism.”

–Laura Chanoux (Booklist)

5. Exit Stalin: The Soviet Union as a Civilization, 1953-1991 by Mark B. Smith
(W. W. Norton and Company)

5 Rave • 1 Positive • 1 Mixed

“Mark B Smith, a Cambridge historian, has written a fascinating chronicle of the Soviet Union … No single volume can adequately explain the Soviet state’s collapse, but Exit Stalin is a valiant attempt. Smith provides a teeming, collage-like picture of how ordinary Soviet citizens withstood repression and food scarcities yet clung hopefully to the 1917 revolution’s promise of a better life … Smoothly readable … Though marred at times by a surfeit of information, Exit Stalin offers a superb history of the rise and fall of a utopian state and its dangerously deluded ideology.”

–Ian Thompson (The Observer)