Nonfiction November Wrapup

I enjoyed sharing my nonfiction reads of November with others. It was fabulous to get new books on my ever-growing TBR pile and to meet new bloggers. But the one thing I didn't get to...my reviews. So without further ado, here are my mini-reviews.

Smoke Gets in Your Eyes: And Other Lessons from the Crematory by Caitlin Doughty

I'm still processing this book...that's kind of the theme of the whole book, though. How we ignore death and dying and never process it until it's too late. Well, that's kind of what I've been doing after I read this. I've known I needed to write a reviews and I've put it off and put it off. Ha!


"Looking mortality straight in the yes is no easy feat. To avoid the exercise, we choose to stay blindfolded, in the dark as to the realities of death and dying. But ignorance is not bliss, only a deeper kind of terror."


"Death drives every creative and destructive impulse we have as human beings. The closer we come to understanding it, the closer we come to understanding ourselves."

Doughty has tried to turn the funeral industry upside down by providing a good death for those who want it. Her stories bring love and humor to death. She has started a death positive movement The Order of the Good Death. She wants everyone to accept mortality and to come at it head on.

"Whether my mortality caught me at twenty-eight or ninety-three, I made the choice to die content, slipped into the nothingness, my atoms becoming the very fog that cloaked the trees. The silence of death, of the cemetery, was no punishment, but a reward for a life well lived."

We are mortal; let's face death head on, not with a sense of dread or terror, but one of acceptance and knowledge of a full life.

We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy by Ta-Nehisi Coates

Coates offers up eight articles he wrote for The Atlantic during the eight years Barack Obama was president. He adds in new introductions for each one and a final epilogue.

I don't quite know how to quite sum it up properly. America is the great tragedy. Our country was built on the backs of slaves and genocide and we as a nation have never come to terms with that. It's a cycle that is perpetual. We can see it now with Trump in power and his cronies in the senate and congress.

"He was deliberate to a fault, saw himself as the keeper of his country sacred legacy, and if he was bothered by his country's sins, he ultimately believed it to be a force for good in the world. IN short, Obama, his family, and his administration were a walking advertisement for the ease with which black people could be fully integrated into the unthreatening mainstream of American culture, politics, and myth. And that was always the problem."

Can we ever come together and look into the eyes of our terrible past and present and move forward from that point with eyes wide open? Or is our country doomed to this tragedy until we are no more?

Coates knows how to lay it all out simply and profoundly. This book is a must-read.

The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion

I listened to this one and that means it's going to be difficult to mark passages and go over them. But I can tell you that this was a powerful book. I cried during many passages as I was driving around town.

I felt her loss. Her year of dealing not only with the sudden death of her husband but also the illness of her daughter was horrible. It was a sad reminder of how our culture wants us to grieve but not too much. Get over it and move on and don't let us know how much you are grieving because it makes us uncomfortable and we don't know how to handle that....

I want to pick up a hard copy and reread and mark it up. Beautiful and profound.