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By Marc Velasquez, on December 22nd, 2011 [As each year comes to a close, we ask our contributors to give us their picks of the best books that came out in the previous 12 months--and we let a few older ones slip in as honorable mentions. You can follow the entries through the rest of the year here, and check out the picks from 2009 and 2010 while you're at it.]
Best Nonfiction of 2011
 Townie, by Andre Dubus III
Because, holy shit, I wasn’t expecting this book to be what it was. Yeah, I knew it was going to be about a street-tough kid knocking heads around an old mill town, but I didn’t expect the introspection, the redemption. Townie is a disciplined, well-crafted memoir. And at it’s core, under many gut-wrenching, heavy layers, Townie is a heart-warming tale about a father and his son.
Read my full review here.
 The Convert, by Deborah Baker
This is an unconventional biography about a Jewish woman from New York who decides to convert to Islam and move to Pakistan. Weirdly, I didn’t like it as much right after I read it as I do now, months later. This book got under my skin. The book’s central figure, Maryam Jameelah, is increasingly enigmatic. Her public life and writings have become a rallying point for radical Muslims, yet Maryam herself is a complex and troubled individual who shouldn’t be put on a pedestal. This book also highlights and questions the role of a biographer. Readers will be left with plenty to ponder.
Read my full review here.
 Patriot Acts, edited by Alia Malek
This book’s subtitle—Narratives of Post-9/11 Injustice—more than aptly describes its contents. The narratives are puzzling. How did these acts go unnoticed? How is it that we accept them? How does a first responder, a Muslim-American EMT who died in one of the collapsing towers, get labeled a terrorist? Why must his mother suffer through those heinous allegations. Why must we detain a 16-year-old because of her religious head scarf? Now that Congress has decided it’s legal to indefinitely detain US Citizens, Patriot Acts is increasingly important. We were forced to make a choice between our freedom and our security. We chose security, and Patriot Acts shows us what we have ahead of us.
 Into the Forbidden Zone, by William T. Vollman
I don’t know much about William T. Vollman, but I know that he has many dedicated (cultish?) fans. After reading this, I think I could perhaps become one of them. Forbidden Zone falls somewhere between a long magazine article and a short book. For lack of a better term, it’s a nonfiction novella published by the good folks over at Byliner. The book is Vollman’s account of his trip to Japan shortly after the Earthquake. It opens with a search for a Geiger counter, a scene which is at first humorous, but throughout the course of the book it becomes eye opening, and then extremely important.
Late add from 2010
 Hellhound on His Trail, by Hampton Sides
Hellhound on His Trail is an in-depth account of the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., and the manhunt for the assassin, James Earl Ray. In the afterword, the book’s author, Hampton Sides, balks at those who have described his book as a thriller. Given the weight and historical significance of the crime detailed in the book’s pages, I can understand his hesitancy. But this book reads like a thriller; it’s a fast paced, well constructed mystery. More importantly, it is a round portrait of King during his final days, and an only slightly less round portrait of King’s assassin (Ray’s motives remain still somewhat fuzzy, but hey, so do Hitler’s—some things will always remain a mystery.) If Sides isn’t ok with “thriller,” perhaps he’s more comfortable with what I feel is a more apt description: Masterpiece.
By Marc Velasquez, on October 28th, 2011  Author: Jerry West
2011, Little, Brown and Co.
Filed Under: Memoir, Nonfiction
Get the book.
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As a player, Jerry West won an Olympic gold medal and an NBA championship.He scored more points than any Laker not named Kobe Bryant ever has, and is in the Basketball Hall of Fame. As an executive, he put together the “Showtime” Lakers of the 80s, traded for Shaq and Kobe in the 90s, and turned the lowly Memphis Grizzlies into a playoff team in the 00s. He has been immortalized as a bronze statue in both Morgantown, WV (where he played in college) and Los Angeles. His silhouette became the NBA logo.
Despite this long, illustrious, and successful career, West is so emotionally crippled by loss that his autobiography, West by West, reads as if Glass Joe wrote it. …
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By Marc Velasquez, on July 25th, 2011 [In this new series (idea copped from High Fidelity), our contributors put together a "top 5" list of books on a theme of their choosing. Read other entries in Top 5 Books here, and catch up on other fun series like this on our Special Features page.]
I was going to do a straight forward, all-time favorite top five books. Then I realized that list would have counted down to One Hundred Years of Solitude, a book that seems to come up in all of our special features. So instead of extolling Gabriel García Márquez on this site yet again, I decided to go another route. I noticed that three of the five books on my all-time list were unexpected encounters—books that I knew nothing about, books that I encountered on a shelf or was assigned for a class and absolutely loved. So I figured I’d write about five books that took me by surprise.
Top 5 Unexpected Encounters
5. Mankind: Have a Nice Day, by Mick Foley
 I know you’re not taking me seriously. I don’t blame you. When a friend told me that Mankind was one of the best books he’d ever read and forced his copy on me, I was fairly certain he was either on drugs or fucking with me. So it was unexpected that I enjoyed the book as much as I did. Foley is actually a decent writer. He’s witty and intelligent, and overall, he’s a good storyteller. This book won’t ever be considered high literature, but if you’ve ever hulked up or watched a Royal Rumble, or even if you enjoyed the movie The Wrestler, Mankind is worth picking up.
4. Men and Cartoons, by Jonathan Letham
 You know those carts in the library, the ones you are supposed to use instead of re-shelving a book? I found Men and Cartoons on one of those. The cover and the name made me think it was a graphic novel. I would have put it down after realizing my mistake, but the first sentence of the first story hooked me, and I checked it out. A few of the stories in the collection are duds, but the best (“The Vision,” “Super Goat Man”) I’ve revisited a few times.
3. Blood and Grits, by Harry Crews
 At the 2006 AWP Conference in Atlanta, I attended a talk during which one of the panelists kept referring to Harry Crews’s “memoir.” But she kept pronouncing it with a French accent that she seemingly pulled from thin air: “mem-WAH.” A few of us laughed at her pretentiousness well into the morning. When I saw Blood and Grits on a used bookstore shelf a year later, I bought it for the laugh. But Crews knocked me off of my feet. He writes about booze, and drugs, and waking up with strange tattoos. And no matter how idiotic or hopeless those he writes about actually are, Crews manages to find their humanity, and portrays them gently and lovingly.
2. Invisible Man, by Ralph Ellison
 I was assigned the prologue of this book for a Philosophy class on morality. I’m not sure how it fit into the curriculum. I do know that I went to the store and bought the book immediately after reading the assigned, photocopied prologue. I love this book for the musical quality of the prose. I also love this book because I continue to circle back to it: in countless conversations about religion, about politics, about class divisions, I’ll find myself saying, “have you read Invisible Man?”
1. In Cold Blood, by Truman Capote
 I found this book on a shelf in a prison library. This was in 2004, before the Philip Seymour Hoffman movie brought the book back to the bestseller list. The book I encountered looked old and forgotten, had yellowing pages, and I mistook it for a pulp crime novel. By the time I finished reading In Cold Blood, I realized how beautiful a nonfiction book could be, and had decided to write a book about my experience in the prison (I was teaching, not serving). I guess I have Capote to thank (blame?) for my MFA, my stack of rejections, and the last five years of my life.
By Marc Velasquez, on June 28th, 2011  Author: Deborah Baker
2011, Graywolf Press
Filed under: Biography, Nonfiction
Get this book
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Deborah Baker’s The Convert is billed as a biography of Margaret Marcus, an American Jewish woman who became an influential voice in the radicalization of Islam and fueled the modern understanding of Jihad. Baker builds Convert on extensive (but not quite exhaustive) research, primary source material, and interviews with living key players.
Even so, it’s a stretch to suggest that Convert reads like a typical biography. Excluding notes and acknowledgement, the book checks in at a relatively slim 223 pages. Those pages are packed tight with information about Marcus and her new Pakistani environment. But in the end, those pages don’t possess a firm sense of the truth. Nor does it feel like the truth is entirely unknowable. In many ways, the absence of such a conclusion could make a biography feel hasty, as if the writer had simply given up on knowing her subject. In this case, The Convert takes an interesting turn: it becomes a clever and well-written meditation on the relationship between a writer and her subject. …
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By Marc Velasquez, on May 18th, 2011  Author: Wilfred Santiago
2011, Fantagraphics Books
Filed under: Graphic Novel, Nonfiction, Biography
Get it at Powell’s
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My father loved baseball. When I was young, he told me stories of his favorite players as if they were superheroes. He held none in higher esteem than Roberto Clemente. As a result, I believed Roberto Clemente had superpowers. I believed he floated through the outfield and flew between the base paths. I believed the ball exploded off of his bat and that he had a cannon for an arm.
In the years since, I have read as much about Clemente as possible. And while each article or book reinforced my belief that Clemente was both an incredible ballplayer and incredible human being, none of them seemed to satisfy the childhood fascination I had for him. I should have known, given the superhero aspects of the image in my head, that I needed a comic book. With his graphic novel, 21: The Story of Roberto Clemente, Wilfred Santiago delivered exactly what I’ve been waiting for.
Take, for instance, one of the book’s first pages: …
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By Marc Velasquez, on May 5th, 2011  Author: Jon Krakauer
2011, Byliner
Filed Under: Nonfiction, Literary
[Only available as an ebook from Amazon]
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Jon Krakauer’s Three Cups of Deceit excites me for a couple of reasons. First, I’m a big fan of Krakauer’s work. I find his writing entertaining, enlightening and accessible despite it being so heavily founded on in-depth research. Not many writers can make fact-reporting as exciting as Krakauer continually does. But I’m also excited by Deceit because I’m a huge fan of long form Journalism. At a lean 20,000 words, Deceit is longer than a magazine article but shorter than a book; it’s sort of like a nonfiction novella, and it’s the perfect length for its subject.
What excites me most is that Byliner, the company that published Deceit, has promised 20 similar projects in the near future. Unfortunately, Deceit and Byliner’s second title—Into the Forbidden Zone, William T. Vollmann’s first hand account of the nuclear disaster in Japan—are only available from Amazon as “Kindle Singles,” and if Byliner releases future titles with that sort of exclusivity, it could be pretty annoying. However, I have to admit that the exclusive release of Into the Forbidden Zone did force me to download the “Kindle for PC” deally, so they might know what they are doing.
If you follow news about books, or news about Afghanistan, or maybe just news in general, you know that Three Cups of Deceit is Krakauer’s fact-based gut-punch to Three Cups of Tea and it’s philanthropist author, Greg Mortenson. …
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By Marc Velasquez, on April 15th, 2011  Author: Andre Dubus III
2011, Norton
Filed Under: Literary, Memoir, Nonfiction
Get a copy of Townie at Powell’s
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I had well-defined expectations about Townie before I’d ever actually opened it. I’d read too much about it going in, about the violence and the street fighting, the one-punch knockouts that sent men to the hospital choking down their own teeth. Even the cover and the flap copy will lead you to believe that this book is about a street-tough kid punching his way through the world.
But Andre Dubus III’s memoir is much more than a fighter’s tale. It’s about filling the voids in one’s life, voids left primarily by absent parents. It’s about the wounds violence creates; about the emotion, or lack of emotion required to be violent towards another human being. It’s about the difference between creativity and destruction. And ultimately, it’s about redemption, not only for the memoirist, but for his father as well.
In other words, it wasn’t at all what I expected, but it turned out to be a whole lot more. …
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By Marc Velasquez, on March 25th, 2011 [This column highlights the best pieces of journalism in magazines each month, all available free online unless noted. Follow it here.]
 Since when is there crying in politics? The other day, my girlfriend got a haircut. This happens about once a year, and since we were having such a pleasant Saturday afternoon together, when her appointment time rolled around, I decided to go with her to the salon. It was the first time I had ever been in one (weird, I know, but my mom had a beautician’s license and cut my hair at home. I cut my own hair now. I’ve been to a barbershop only a few times). I was pleasantly surprised with the free coffee, and also with the magazine selection. I picked up the copy of Rolling Stone with Jimmy Fallon on the cover and thought to myself, “hmm, I wonder why I didn’t get this yet.” I looked at the date.
It was at that moment I realized my subscription to Rolling Stone had ended three months ago, and I was sad (how someone can go three months without realizing a magazine subscription has ended is a story for another column). I’ve grown fond of Rolling Stone in recent years. They’ve gone beyond their well-rounded music/pop culture coverage to put together some serious pieces of journalism. Ten-years-ago-me would probably punch me in the neck for writing this, but I’m going to write it anyway: In a world where journalism is becoming more and more biased, it’s refreshing to know that places like the Rolling Stone take reporting seriously. Maybe that is just a said sign of our times. While they have gone the way of the NY Times and started charging online readers, a few of their articles are available online. Here is a taste of some of what I missed, along with a few extras:
Crybaby
Ok, maybe I shouldn’t champion Rolling Stone’s journalistic integrity and then highlight an article that begins “John Boehner is the ultimate Beltway hack, a man whose unmatched and self-serving skill at political survival has made him, after two decades in Washington, the hairy blue mold on the American congressional sandwich.” But if you’ve read this column before, you know that I am a fan of Matt Taibbi’s political and economic coverage (and, as I pointed out, because RS is now charging for archive access, I didn’t have much to choose from). Yes, it’s highly biased, and yes, Taibbi sometimes comes across as a pompous dick, but if you tend to agree with his viewpoint, he’s an entertaining writer. Plus, c’mon, is there really anybody out there who doesn’t think Boehner looks ridiculous when he breaks into tears? …
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By Marc Velasquez, on March 7th, 2011 [Deserted Isle Books is our new series in which our contributors discuss the one book they would choose if they were, well, stranded alone on a deserted isle forever. Read other installments of the series here, get your own copies at Powell's, and explore other series like this on our Special Features page.]
Okay With Myself
I hate being alone. I find it hard to contemplate being by myself for more than a few hours. The only thing I hate more that being alone is sand—nasty, gritty, dirty, hard to wash away sand. Being on a deserted island would suck.
So, if for some reason I were condemned to such an inconceivable hell with only one book to keep me company, I’d want as my companion Antonio Marez, the protagonist of Rudolpho Anaya’s Bless Me, Ultima.
Anaya’s book isn’t my favorite book (In Cold Blood), or the one that moved me most (One Hundred Years of Solitude), or the one that made me work the hardest (The Brothers Karamazov), but it holds distinction as the only book I’ve read more than once [1]. In fact, I’ve read it three times, and each time the book and its characters found relevant footing in my life as I struggled to make sense of my own dualities.
Inescapable duality is the Center of Anaya’s book, and Antonio—who is sometimes “Tony”—is just beginning to discover how his dualities will determine his place in the world. He’s torn between the contradictory ways of his parents. His father is a man of the llano, a vaquero, with blood wild like the sea from which the family takes their surname. A vaquero’s heart desires adventure, and Antonio’s father is restless in one spot. Antonio’s mother is a polar opposite to his father; her people come from and live their life on the fertile soil of the riverbed. Her brothers are farmers. Antonio’s five siblings, all older, have been pulled in either the direction of their father or mother. His three brothers have inherited the restless blood of their father, and a need to venture towards the more exotic parts of the world. His three sisters are like their mother, settled and predictable. But it is Antonio’s destiny, with the help of the Curandera, Ultima, to emulsify these conflicting ways of life. …
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By Marc Velasquez, on February 10th, 2011 [This column highlights the best pieces of journalism in magazines each month, all available free online unless noted. Follow it here.]
I’m embarrassed. It’s been a slow reading month for me. Perhaps you’ve noticed—the title of the column doesn’t exactly match the calendar—I’ve been slacking lately. When I realized that this column was long overdue, I tried to fabricate a suitable excuse. Holiday lethargy? Boston snow has cut off both my internet and mail service? Lingering brain trauma from an old football injury? Well, I couldn’t come up with a good one, and now I have to admit that I just haven’t been reading. That’s some serious Babytown Frolics on my part.
 nap time at Yale Just look at these articles. In the internet age, two of them are so old, they’re practically Prohibition-era. And the others are about football (maybe that’s it: football; I’ve been so obsessed with football, that I’ve had no time to read. It was the playoffs, and then the [underrated] Kraft Fight Hunger Bowl, and then the national championship game, and then more playoffs, and then the Senior Bowl, and finally the Super Bowl. I clearly had no time to read during all that… Nope, still a lame excuse.)
Oh well. Anyway, here are a few, much-delayed links. I’ll do better next time.
The One Handed Dude Who Looks Like James Franco
You see the latest Franco flick? I didn’t. I did want to, but something got in the way. Probably the same thing that got in the way of my reading time. But I did find time to read Aron Ralston’s article In Outside. You know who he is; he cut off his own hand. The article is about Ralston’s reactions as he’s watching his life turn into a film, and if you don’t have respect for the cat before reading it, I’ll bet good money that you will after.
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Townie, by Andre Dubus III
The Convert, by Deborah Baker
Patriot Acts, edited by Alia Malek
Into the Forbidden Zone, by William T. Vollman
Hellhound on His Trail, by Hampton Sides
