March’s Best Reviewed Nonfiction

Helen Garner’s How to End a Story, Graydon Carter’s When the Going Was Good, and David Sheff’s Yoko 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. Raising Hare: A Memoir by Chloe Dalton
(Pantheon)

9 Rave • 1 Positive

“There is something both wonderfully archaic and utterly contemporary about Chloe Dalton’s memoir of finding and raising a baby hare … One of the great glories of the book, beautifully illustrated by Denise Nestor, is the way in which Ms. Dalton records the appearance, movement and behavior of the growing leveret … Dalton has given us a portrait, both ephemeral and real.”

–Karin Altenberg (The Wall Street Journal)

2. How to End a Story: Collected Diaries, 1978-1998 by Helen Garner
(Pantheon)

 6 Rave • 1 Positive

“It gets off to a tentative and makeshift start … By a quarter of the way in, I was utterly in her hands … Garner has an ideal voice to express late-night pangs of precariousness and distress, some more comic than others. Her prose is clear, honest and economical.”

–Dwight Garner (The New York Times)

3. Yoko: A Biography by David Sheff
(Simon & Schuster)

1 Rave • 7 Positive • 2 Mixed

“Sheff’s most important accomplishment may be taking this reframing a step further. By explaining Ono’s personal history and artistic path, he builds the case that she, not Lennon, was more damaged career-wise by their union … The first significant biography … The strength of Sheff’s book is simple journalism, connecting the dots that existed only vaguely before Yoko.”

–Geoff Edgars (The Washington Post)

4. Firstborn by Lauren Christensen
(Penguin Press)

4 Rave • 2 Positive

“Radiant, rigorous, heart-rending … It is a testament to Christensen’s storytelling talent that the book’s sense of suspense is nonetheless acute … I will never forget Simone or the lodestar that is Firstborn.”

–Priscilla Gilman (The Boston Globe)

5. When the Going Was Good: An Editor’s Adventures During the Last Golden Age of Magazines by Graydon Carter
(Penguin)

2 Rave • 5 Positive

“At its best when Carter is the underdog biting at ankles, or a Don Quixote who learns to tilt at the right windmills … Catnip for those of us still addicted to magazines, who still harbor the delusion that we’ll get to that pile on the table as soon as we can. Carter seems to know how fortunate he was to ride the wave and thrive as a shot-caller back when that meant something more than it does today. The going was indeed good.”

–Chris Vognar (The Los Angeles Times)