Must-Read Biography Books | October 2021
In the mood for a new biography or memoir? Check out these instant bestsellers by Vernon Brewer II, Richard P. Allison, Jay Caspian Kang, Farah Stockman, Albert Samaha, and Stephanie Grisham. Enjoy your new non-fiction picks!
Frenchy’s Whore
by Vernon Brewer II
Release Date: June 23, 2021
A textured semi-autobiographical look at Vietnam day-by-day with one foot in the summer of love and the other in a jungle combat boot…Brewer’s story describes the path of a young man from a Northeastern high school to combat with an elite airborne brigade in Vietnam. There are quite a few books on Vietnam, so it takes some effort to make one stand out. Brewer has succeeded because he answers a very good question with considerable descriptive talent. It’s quite clear that Brewer is just about there as a wartime novelist.
Buy on AmazonHealers or Dealers?
by Richard P. Allison
Release Date: October 26, 2021
A #1 bestselling new release by Richard P. Allison…Readers get a front-row seat to the jaw-dropping true accounts written by the retired investigator who experienced them and attempted to hold these doctors accountable. His stories show a direct correlation between doctors’ questionable conduct with illegal administrating, dispensing, and prescribing of opioids and the craze that plagues our nation today. Couple this with the addictions that unwaveringly rival those we see in the worst of America’s inner cities.
Buy on AmazonThe Loneliest Americans
by Jay Caspian Kang
Release Date: October 12, 2021
A riveting blend of family history and original reportage that explores—and reimagines—Asian American identity in a Black and white world…The unforgettable story of Kang and his family as they move from a housing project in Cambridge to an idyllic college town in the South and eventually to the West Coast. Their story unfolds against the backdrop of a rapidly expanding Asian America, as millions of more immigrants, many of them working-class or undocumented, stream into the country. At the same time, upwardly mobile urban professionals have struggled to reconcile their parents’ assimilationist goals with membership in a multicultural elite—all while trying to carve out a new kind of belonging for their own children, who are neither white nor truly “people of color.”
Buy on AmazonAmerican Made: What Happens to People When Work Disappears
by Farah Stockman
Release Date: October 12, 2021
Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Farah Stockman gives an up-close look at the profound role work plays in our sense of identity and belonging, as she follows three workers whose lives unravel when the factory they have dedicated so much to closes down…This is the story of a community struggling to reinvent itself. It is also a story about race, class, and American values, and how jobs serve as a bedrock of people’s lives and drive powerful social justice movements. This revealing book shines a light on a crucial political moment when joblessness and anxiety about the future of work have made themselves heard at a national level. Most of all, American Made is a story about people: who we consider to be one of us and how the dignity of work lies at the heart of who we are.
Buy on AmazonConcepcion
by Albert Samaha
Release Date: October 12, 2021
A journalist’s powerful and incisive account of the forces steering the fate of his sprawling Filipino American family reframes how we comprehend the immigrant experience…Tracing his family’s history through the region’s unique geopolitical roots in Spanish colonialism, American intervention, and Japanese occupation, Samaha fits their arc into the wider story of global migration as determined by chess moves among superpowers. Ambitious, intimate, and incisive, Concepcion explores what it might mean to reckon with the unjust legacy of imperialism, to live with contradiction and hope, to fight for the unrealized ideals of an inherited homeland.
Buy on AmazonI’ll Take Your Questions Now
by Stephanie Grisham
Release Date: October 5, 2021
The frankest and most intimate portrait of the Trump White House yet…Stephanie Grisham rose from being a junior press wrangler on the Trump campaign in 2016 to assuming top positions in the administration as White House press secretary and communications director, while at the same time acting as First Lady Melania Trump’s communications director and eventually chief of staff. Few members of the Trump inner circle served longer or were as close to the first family as Stephanie Grisham, and few had her unique insight into the turbulent four years of the administration, especially the personalities behind the headlines.
Buy on Amazon