October’s Best Reviewed Nonfiction

Francesca Wade’s Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife, Susan Orlean’s Joyride, and Lance Richardson’s True Nature: The Pilgrimage of Peter Matthiessen 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. Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife by Francesca Wade
(Scribner)

12 Rave • 3 Positive • 3 Mixed
Read an excerpt from Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife here

“The structure…allows its readers to understand something that usually goes unmentioned in literary biographies. A writer is not merely the sum total of known events that occurred to her between birth and death, she is also the network of readers created by her work during that period and afterward … When Wade is confronted by writing she doesn’t understand, curiosity rather than resentment wins the day … The superiority of Wade’s approach can be measured by the insights into Stein’s work that she gleans from it … Thoughtful and thorough, with insightful interpretations of her work embedded in a compelling narrative of her and Toklas’s life, Wade’s biography makes a convincing case that, while her status as a cultural figure is secure, her writing remains, if anything, underrated.”

–Ryan Ruby (Bookforum)

2. 38 Londres Street: On Impunity, Pinochet in England, and a Nazi in Patagonia by Philippe Sands
(Knopf)

9 Rave • 3 Positive
Read an excerpt from 38 Londres Street here

“Remarkable … It is the relentless pursuit of this hidden and repulsive past that gives 38 Londres Street its startling originality, turning it into a tour de force that extends its reach far beyond what we typically envisage from a book about human rights.”

–Ariel Dorfman (New York Review of Books)

3. Joyride: A Memoir by Susan Orlean
(Avid Reader Press)

9 Rave • 2 Positive

“Might be the best craft book on writing you will ever read. It’s not written as a craft book, of course; it’s a memoir, and an entertaining one at that. But it is a memoir about how Orlean became a writer … Orlean is engaging and generous, explaining how she found ideas, honed and reported them, overcame obstacles … It is the good fortune of the rest of us to be invited along on this ebullient ride.”

–Laurie Hertzel (The Boston Globe)

4. True Nature: The Pilgrimage of Peter Matthiessen by Lance Richardson
(Pantheon)

7 Rave • 2 Positive • 1 Mixed
Read an interview with Lance Richardson here

“Untangles the mixed observations and complaints of Peter’s many friends and lovers over a life that led to the peaks of Zen. Richardson’s fine-toothed research establishes Peter’s importance as a writer and a singular inhabitant of his time. That is the strength of a great biography—which True Nature is, illuminating Peter as an interpreter and translator of all things human as well as a defender of the natural world and everything in it, even as he inflicted great pain on his family, especially the women he loved.”

–Terry McDonnell (Alta)

5. The Uncool: A Memoir by Cameron Crowe
(Avid Reader Press)

7 Rave • 2 Positive

“Crowe’s charming new memoir is an elegy for a lost time and place … As he does so often in this book, Crowe pulls the reader in with his keenly observant eye … Reminds us of what has been lost, the myths and mystique that fueled our rock star fantasies and gave the music an aura of magic.”