Thank you to the mentioned publishers for these books.
I am deciding to lean into #NonfictionNovember pretty heavily this year. I have quite a list of nonfiction titles on my TBR. Some that are newer and some that have been on my list for quite a while. Using this month as motivation to get some of these books read.
Which of these should I read first?!
Hooked
How Crafting Saved My Life
by Sutton Foster
Thanks to Grand Central Publishing
From the 2-time Tony Award-winner and the star of TV's Younger, funny and intimate stories and reflections about how crafting has kept her sane while navigating the highs and lows of family, love, and show business (and how it can help you, too).
Whether she's playing an "age-defying" book editor on television or dazzling audiences on the Broadway stage, Sutton Foster manages to make it all look easy. How? Crafting. From the moment she picked up a cross stitch needle to escape the bullying chorus girls in her early performing days, she was hooked. Cross stitching led to crocheting, crocheting led to collages, which led to drawing, and so much more. Channeling her emotions into her creations centered Sutton as she navigated the significant moments in her life and gave her tangible reminders of her experiences. Now, in this charming and poignant collection, Sutton shares those moments, including her fraught relationship with her agoraphobic mother; a painful divorce splashed on the pages of the tabloids; her struggles with fertility; the thrills she found on the stage during hit plays like Thoroughly Modern Millie, Anything Goes, and Violet; her breakout TV role in Younger; and the joy of adopting her daughter, Emily. Accompanying the stories, Sutton has included crochet patterns, recipes, and so much more!
Witty and poignant, Hooked will leave readers entertained as well as inspire them to pick up their own cross stitch needles and paintbrushes.
Saving My Assassin
by Virginia Prodan
Recommended by a friend
"I should be dead. Buried in an unmarked grave in Romania. Obviously, I am not. God had other plans."
At just under five feet tall, Virginia Prodan was no match for the towering 6' 10 gun-wielding assassin the Romanian government sent to her office to take her life. It was not the first time her life had been threatened--nor would it be the last.
As a young attorney under Nicolae Ceausescu's brutal communist regime, Virginia had spent her entire life searching for the truth. When she finally found it in the pages of the most forbidden book in all of Romania, Virginia accepted the divine call to defend fellow followers of Christ against unjust persecution in an otherwise ungodly land.
For this act of treason, she was kidnapped, beaten, tortured, placed under house arrest, and came within seconds of being executed under the orders of Ceausescu himself. How Virginia not only managed to elude her enemies time and again, but how she also helped expose the appalling secret that would ultimately lead to the demise of Ceausescu's evil empire is one of the most extraordinary stories ever told.
A must-read for all generations, Saving My Assassin is the unforgettable account of one woman's search for truth, her defiance in the face of evil, and a surprise encounter that proves without a shadow of a doubt that nothing is impossible with God.
Race of Aces
WWII's Elite Airmen and the Epic Battle to Become the Master of the Sky
by John R. Bruning
Thanks to Netgalley and Hachette
The astonishing untold story of the WWII airmen who risked it all in the deadly race to become the greatest American fighter pilot.
In 1942, America's deadliest fighter pilot, or ace of aces -- the legendary Eddie Rickenbacker -- offered a bottle of bourbon to the first U.S. fighter pilot to break his record of twenty-six enemy planes shot down. Seizing on the challenge to motivate his men, General George Kenney promoted what they would come to call the race of aces as a way of boosting the spirits of his war-weary command.
What developed was a wild three-year sprint for fame and glory, and the chance to be called America's greatest fighter pilot. The story has never been told until now.
Based on new research and full of revelations, John Bruning's brilliant, original book tells the story of how five American pilots contended for personal glory in the Pacific while leading Kenney's resurgent air force against the most formidable enemy America ever faced.
The pilots -- Richard Bong, Tommy McGuire, Neel Kearby, Charles MacDonald and Gerald Johnson -- riveted the nation as they contended for Rickenbacker's crown. As their scores mounted, they transformed themselves from farm boys and aspiring dentists into artists of the modern dogfight.
But as the race reached its climax, some of the pilots began to see how the spotlight warped their sense of duty. They emerged as leaders, beloved by their men as they chose selfless devotion over national accolades.
Teeming with action all across the vast Pacific theater, Race of Aces is a fascinating exploration of the boundary between honorable duty, personal glory, and the complex landscape of the human heart.
Nice
Why We Love to Be Liked and How God Calls Us to More
by Sharon Hodde Miller
Thanks to Netgalley and Baker Books
God never called us to be nice.
What happens when we replace courage with compromise?
What happens when we replace honesty with likability?
What happens when we replace conviction with clichés?
What happens when we replace discipleship to Christ with a devotion to nice?
We live in a culture that prizes niceness as one of its highest virtues. Niceness keeps the peace, wins friends, gains influence, and serves our reputations well, but it also takes the teeth out of our witness and the power out of our faith. When we choose to be nice instead of faithful, we bear fruits that are bland, bitter, empty, and rotten to the core.
In this life-changing book, Sharon Hodde Miller explores the seemingly innocent idol that has crept into our faith and quietly corrupted it, producing the bad fruits of cowardice, inauthenticity, shallowness, and more. Then she challenges readers to cultivate a better tree, providing practical steps to reclaim our credibility as followers of Christ, and bear better, richer, more life-giving fruits.
Trove
A Woman's Search for Truth and Buried Treasure
by: Sandra A. Miller
Thanks to Netgalley and Brown Paper Press
The true story of a woman whose life is up-ended when she begins an armchair treasure hunt--a search for $10,000 worth of gold coins buried in New York City, of all places--with a man who, as she points out, is not her husband. In this eloquent, hilarious, sharply realized memoir, Sandra A. Miller grapples with the death of her difficult mother and the regret and confusion that so often accompanies middle age. In a very real way, Miller has spent her life hunting for buried treasure. As a child, she trained herself to find things: dropped hair clips, shiny bits of broken glass, discarded lighters. Looking to escape from her volatile parents and often-unhappy childhood, Miller found deeper meaning, and a good deal of hope, in each of these objects. Now an adult and facing the loss of her last living parent--her mother who is at once cold, difficult, and wildly funny--Miller finds herself, as she so often did as a little girl, pressed against a wall of her own longing. Her search for gold, which soon becomes an obsession, forces her to dredge up painful pieces of her past, confront the true source of her sorrow, and finally discover what it is she has been looking for all these years.
Good Apple
Tales of a Southern Evangelical in New York
by Elizabeth Passarella
Thanks to Netgalley and Thomas Nelson
"For a woman who thinks of herself as a New Yorker at this point, I buy a lot of clothes from companies named things like Shrimp & Grits. Why? Because identity is complicated."
Elizabeth Passarella is content with being complicated. She grew up in Memphis in a conservative, Republican family with a Christian mom and a Jewish dad. Then she moved to New York, fell in love with the city--and, eventually, her husband--and changed. Sort of. While her politics have tilted to the left, she still puts her faith first--and argues that the two can go hand in hand, for what it's worth. In this sharp and slyly profound memoir, Elizabeth shares stories about everything from conceiving a baby in an unair-conditioned garage in Florida to finding a rat in her bedroom. She upends stereotypes about Southerners, New Yorkers, and Christians, making a case that we are all flawed humans simply doing our best. Good Apple is a hilarious, welcome celebration of the absurdity, chaos, and strange sacredness of life that brings us all together, whether we have city lights or starry skies in our eyes. More importantly, it's about the God who pursues each of us, no matter our own inconsistencies or failures, and shows us the way back home.
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