Six Feet of Books (continued)–Some great non-fiction reads

I am excited to share with you three wonderful works of non-fiction I have read recently. Check them if you have not done so already.  

Solitary, by Albert Woodfox.  You must read this book.  It is the devastating story of a life trapped in solitary confinement—four decades of solitary confinement—for a crime he did not commit.  Woodfox, who wrote the book with Leslie George, was only a young man when he was first jailed.  After a number of years in and out of trouble he landed at the infamous Angola prison in Louisiana.  At some point, he became a member of the Black Panther Party, and he spent much of the rest of his life in prison trying to live and lead in accordance with the Party’s tenets. The book documents his struggle to maintain some semblance of dignity and humanity while attempting to prove his innocence or at least to gain his release. It seems certain that the crime for which he was ultimately held was likely committed by others—there was little or no credible evidence of his involvement.  This is not only a powerful story but a damning indictment of the criminal justice system and the officials—elected and otherwise—who were complicit in the injustices Woodfox so compellingly describes.

The Boys in the Boat, by Daniel James Brown.  A few years old and a best seller, but an extraordinary book, a total page-turner.  The story of the American crew (eights) who won gold at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin, is narrative non-fiction at its best.  Building his story primarily around one of the crew, Joe Rantz, and his challenging life, Brown skillfully weaves the stories of George Yeoman Pocock, an Englishman who was a brilliant rowing mind and also the preeminent builder of racing boasts of his day, Rantz’s teammates, his coaches, his opponents, with the historical and other events that shaped the decade leading up to the Olympics. And unlike other books, he manages to intersperse the necessary story of the rise of the Nazi party in Germany, particularly around Goebbels and Leni Riefenstahl, without taking the reader so far out of the primary story that it becomes difficult to get back.  And the complicity, or at least willful ignorance, of long-time Olympic official Avery Brundage and others with the horrors that Hitler was intent on keeping hidden from the world before he was ready for the full-scale attacks that were to come. 

Ninth Street Womenby Mary Gabriel.  The long and exhaustively researched story of the women who formed a core of the Abstract Expressionist movement—or rather, of American painting from the 1940s on.  The “first generation”, including Lee Krasner and Elaine de Kooning, and the next wave, including Helen Frankenthaler, Joan Mitchell and Grace Hartigan.  It describes the women’s varying approaches to their art, to the obstacles they faced as artists and women in a man’s world, as partners to their sometimes more celebrated life partners, who they promoted often at their own expense.  All the while telling the story of the men as well, the artists, gallerists, collectors, curators and critics, who finally promoted an American art, as opposed to Americans doing art that had its creative heart in Europe. Gabriel manages to capture the creative urge, the need to make art, that drove all of them, men and women alike.  After years of looking at art, many art history classes, lectures, reading, this book captured for me the essence of abstraction, the creative expression coming from within the artist, with no obvious references to figures or objects in reality. Brilliant, detailed, exciting.