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Fun fact: Non-fiction November was first celebrated in the U.K. in 2010. It hasn’t exactly spread like wildfire, but it is catching on.
A few worthy titles to pick up this month.
Book and Dagger: How Scholars and Librarians Became the Unlikely Spies of World War II
Elyse Graham
HarperCollins
Learning about the role librarians and university professors played in winning the Second World War shouldn’t be this entertaining, but historian Elyse Graham has an eye for fascinating detail, along with a gift for storytelling.
Graham profiles a handful of intrepid American academics who were the first Office of Strategic Services (OSS), spies when war broke out. Gathering intelligence involved everything from procuring and reading maps and local German newspapers to recruiting double agents and deciphering codes.
Spies had to learn to make and use invisible ink, invent a workable cover story and withstand interrogation and torture for 48 hours — not because they might be rescued, but to give their accomplices time to escape. Recruits, women in particular, were told to make small mistakes in conversations with potential sources to trigger mansplaining. Oh, and they had to learn how to kill a man quickly and quietly, maybe with an artfully folded newspaper.
These pioneers laid the foundation for modern intelligence services. Their work helped defeat Nazis and other Fascists, and Graham writes that their skills are just as vital to democracy today. She makes an excellent argument for investing in libraries and encouraging students to explore the humanities and social sciences.
And Sometimes They Kill You: Confronting the Epidemic of Intimate Partner Violence
Pamela Cross
Between the Lines
Most Canadians were shocked when a man murdered three women — Carol Culleton, Nathalie Warmerdam and Anastasia Kuzyk — in three different locations in Renfrew County, Ontario on the same day in September 2015. But the victims, and others who knew the killer, saw so many red flags before the murders. In 2013 and 2014, he had been convicted of assaulting and strangling Kuzyk — while on probation for threatening Warmerdam. He was a serial abuser, a stalker and a scofflaw and the courts should have taken his earlier crimes much more seriously.
Sadly, Renfrew County’s tragedy was an all-too familiar story to feminist lawyer and educator Pamela Cross, who provided a report on intimate-partner violence to a public inquest into the case.
She also held consultations with local residents and presented a report about the impact of the murders on the community, with their suggestions for systemic change — some of which have been made repeatedly over the past three decades.
Cross, who sits on Ontario’s Domestic Violence Death Review Committee, has spent more than 30 years working with survivors and advocating for solutions.
Along with improving responses from the justice system, and calling out misogyny in all its forms, she writes that everyone should learn about intimate-partner violence, and education needs to be mandatory for new judges and justices of the peace.
We know what we need to do, she writes. “We just haven’t found the social and political will to do it.”
Her book’s publication date is Nov. 26, to align with Canada’s 16 Days of Activism against Gender-Based Violence, Nov. 25-Dec. 10.
Revenge of the Tipping Point: Overstories, Superspreaders and the rise of Social Engineering
Malcolm Gladwell
Little, Brown and Company
It’s been almost 25 years since big thinker Malcolm Gladwell’s first bestseller, The Tipping Point, landed in bookstores. Since then, he’s given us plenty of food for thought. We’ve devoured half a dozen more must-reads — Blink, Outliers, What the Dog Saw, David and Goliath, The Bomber Mafia, Talking to Strangers — and can’t wait to sink our teeth into his latest.
Revenge of the Tipping Point revisits the concept of social epidemics, including an idea Gladwell says he “got wrong” in the original book. It promises to be another gripping read, with astute observations inspired by stories about bank robberies in Los Angeles, a 1970s TV miniseries, an executive retreat that goes horribly wrong, and a handful of other intriguing events.