Below I will be sharing some of the new nonfiction titles that will be released in July. All the titles are available to put on hold from our catalog and will also be made available on the library’s Overdrive account on the day of publication. For a more extensive list of new nonfiction books coming out this month check our online catalog.
Top Picks
“The Answer Is…: Reflections on My Life” by Alex Trebek (Jul 21)
Since debuting as the host of Jeopardy! in 1984, Alex Trebek has been something like a family member to millions of television viewers, bringing entertainment and education into their homes five nights a week. Last year, he made the stunning announcement that he had been diagnosed with stage four pancreatic cancer. What followed was an incredible outpouring of love and kindness. Social media was flooded with messages of support, and the Jeopardy! studio received boxes of cards and letters offering guidance, encouragement, and prayers. For over three decades, Trebek had resisted countless appeals to write a book about his life. Yet he was moved so much by all the goodwill, he felt compelled to finally share his story. The book combines illuminating personal anecdotes with Trebek’s thoughts on a range of topics, including marriage, parenthood, education, success, spirituality and philanthropy. Trebek also addresses the questions he gets asked most often by Jeopardy! fans, such as what prompted him to shave his signature mustache, his insights on legendary players like Ken Jennings and James Holzhauer, and his opinion of Will Ferrell’s Saturday Night Live impersonation. The book uses a novel structure inspired by Jeopardy!, with each chapter title in the form of a question, and features dozens of never-before-seen photos that candidly capture Trebek over the years.
“Memorial Drive: A Daughter’s Memoir” by Natasha Trethewey (Jul 28)
At age nineteen, Natasha Trethewey had her world turned upside down when her stepfather shot and killed her mother. Grieving and still new to adulthood, she confronted the twin pulls of life and death in the aftermath of unimaginable trauma and now explores the way this experience lastingly shaped the artist she became. With penetrating insight and a searing voice that moves from the wrenching to the elegiac, Pulitzer Prize winning poet Trethewey explores this profound experience of pain, loss, and grief as an entry point into understanding the tragic course of her mother’s life and the way her own life has been shaped by a legacy of fierce love and resilience. Moving through her mother’s history in the deeply segregated South and through her own girlhood as a “child of miscegenation” in Mississippi, Trethewey plumbs her sense of dislocation and displacement in the lead-up to the harrowing crime that took place on Memorial Drive in Atlanta in 1985.
“The Unidentified: Mythical Monsters, Alien Encounter, and Our Obsession with the Unexplained” by Colin Dickey (Jul 21)
In a world where rational, scientific explanations are more available than ever, belief in the unprovable and irrational — in fringe — is on the rise: from Atlantis to aliens, from Flat Earth to the Loch Ness monster, the list goes on. It seems the more our maps of the known world get filled in the more we crave mysterious locations full of strange creatures. Enter Colin Dickey, Cultural Historian and Tour Guide of the Weird. With the same curiosity and insight that made Ghostland a hit with readers and critics, Colin looks at what all fringe beliefs have in common, explaining that today’s Illuminati is yesterday’s Flat Earth: the attempt to find meaning in a world stripped of wonder. Dickey visits the wacky sites of America’s wildest fringe beliefs– from the famed Mount Shasta where the ancient race (or extra-terrestrials, or possibly both depending on who you ask) called Lemurians are said to roam, to the museum containing the last remaining “evidence” of the great Kentucky Meat Shower– investigating how these theories came about, why they take hold, and why as Americans we keep inventing and re-inventing them decade after decade. “The Unidentified” is Colin Dickey at his best: curious, wry, brilliant in his analysis, yet eminently readable.
More New Releases for July
- “The Apocalypse Factory: Plutonium and the Making of the Atomic Age” by Steve Olson (Jul 28)
- “Big Friendship: How We Keep Each Other Close” by Aminatou Sow and Ann Friedman (Jul 14)
- “Hell in the Heatland: Murder, Meth, and the Case of Two Missing Girls” by Jax Miller (Jul 28)
- “Miracle Country” by Kendra Atleework (Jul 14)
