BookLife Recommendations by Carol O’Day: Non-Fiction Books to Gift for the Holidays
Non-fiction holiday book gifting recommendations, historical, financial, memoir, how-to and life milestones
As you approach the holidays, BookLife offers non-fiction recommendations for holiday gifting for a wide range of readers on your gift list. Whether you are looking for a historical dive, a memoir, humor or a how-to style book, these selections may fill the bill. Most have been reviewed in prior issues on BookLife: Reviews for Readers and can be found in the BookLife Archive there. The December 2nd post on BookLife: Reviews for Readers featured fiction selections for holiday gifting.
Historical Non-Fiction/Literary Non-Fiction
For the lover of adventure, history, ships and boats, naval stories, and Robinson Crusoe survivor stories. This is a surprisingly rich and riveting read. As the ship, The Wager, heads on a mission to intercept enemy ships that have pirated treasure from Great Britain, we are taken on a bold and daring ship’s journey around the horn of South America where storms, scurvy, shipwrecks, mutiny and death awaits. Grann includes entries from diaries and ships journals to pump up the detail and authenticity.
The author of The Devil in the White City and The Splendid and the Vile delivers another exhaustively researched history zeroing in on the attack on Fort Sumter and South Carolina’s decision to secede from the Union. The book relies on diaries, journals, White House records, and news clippings to dive deep into another, eerily familiar period of extreme philosophical division in the United States that resulted in our Civil War.
Presidential history, finance bros, and wealth managers alike will enjoy this book by a seasoned financial advisor into the characteristics and qualities that promoted or inhibited a selection of U.S. Presidents in their efforts to build wealth, before and after holding the office.
Isabel Wilkerson’s master work will turn your thinking of race relations on its head, or at least add a significant new wrinkle to it. Wilkerson presents a theory of race relations in the United States through the lens of socio-economic hierarchy and the Indian caste system. The parallels are stunning and thought-provoking.
Memoir/Biography
As our government contemplates new roles for our enlisted service men and women in the coming years, this read can educate us all on the experience of military families deployed alongside service members. It is the story of a young woman, then a young wife, who never expected to be an military spouse and yet finds herself living in a new area of the country, near the military base where her young husband is pursuing a long-held desire to serve in a special operations unit. Her struggle to manage her fear and loneliness, her efforts to find community in a place where she believes she has little in common with military families and the massive adjustment and sacrifice she makes in the process are the subject of this book.
Established comedian and late night show host, Trevor Noah, delivers an intimate portrait of growing up poor in South Africa, as the child of a black mother and a white father, a combination that rendered his very birth a crime. Noah’s writing is peppered with humor, as we might expect, but it is also a heart-rendingly candid lesson and expose about apartheid in South Africa and the very real day-to-day and multi-generational impacts of the racial discrimination and poverty the system relied upon.
For anyone who is facing or has faced or experienced a terminal diagnosis of a loved one, this book will make you gasp, cry and soar with the relief of being seen and understood. Written by a physician upon and during his cancer diagnosis, the book is a candid record of his journey, his marriage and his fatherhood along the way. Because he is a physician, his understanding is deeper than most but the book is accessible and extraordinarily powerful.
A horrifying, timely and much-needed memoir by a young mother who unwittingly finds herself dependent on anti-anxiety sleep-aid medications. Prescribed them for insomnia associated with new motherhood, the author encounters the very real struggle to wean herself off the drugs after an extended period of use, a feat significantly more difficult than virtually anyone understands. A cautionary tale for those who may use sleep aids or anti-anxiety drugs periodically believing them to be safe.
A beautiful reflection on grief arises from the pages of Didion’s masterpiece. Upon the sudden death of her husband of decades, Didion is thrust into grief, depression, isolation and despair. The experience is not unique, but Didion’s ability to articulate the ranging, variable, disruptive and reflective nature of the experience gives all of us access to a universal balm.
In the era of the grand debate over immigration, we all too often lose sight of the human experience of the grueling flight from their homes or from vioent crime for a better life or to unite with family who went before them. Zamora writes from the perspective of an immigrant in his twenties recounting his experience as a ten year-old boy traveling on foot, with a small cadre of strangers, through inhumane conditions to reach La USA. The reader follows the boy and his group through uncertainty, fear, setbacks, hunger, thirst, cold, exhaustion on a remarkable journey.
Take a walk in the shoes of a young boy through the perils of the foster care system. A single mother and her children find themselves homeless, cold, hungry, wandering in Manhattan. The mother struggles with mental illness and must surrender her children into the foster care system where countless abuses and extensive neglect prevail. The boy grows into a man determined to impact the system.
Not a new book, but an enlightening one. Michelle Obama is widely admired but her personal story was held close during her time as First Lady. Not originally an advocate of political office for her husband, Michelle Obama’s own journey is remarkable. Two-thirds of the book relays the details of her personal story before the White House; the last third is an enjoyable peek behind the curtains on Pennsylvania Avenue.
Short Stories/Poetry/How-To
Looking for something different, a new voice, an underrepresented perspective? Grab this collection of short stories by Haitian-born author Edwidge Danticat and prepare to be awed by the sweep and beauty and flow of her prose.
Milestones
Pregnancy or new baby in the family? Gift these two books–classic standbys for every parent-to-be and new parent.
Holiday engagement announcement? Wedding in 2025? Gift this book to any bride, groom, mother of the bride or mother of the groom and they will thank you forever.
Retirement looming? Check out this pair of books to reframe thinking of your last third of your career and to approach framing retirement to best suit your interests.
Purchase your holiday gift selections on the BookLife Bookshop online store here.
For more book reviews and writing by Carol O’Day visit BookLife: Reviews for Reviews for Readers on Substack