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Recent non-fiction reads
Aug. 26th, 2025 01:39 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
marinarusalkaBy which I mean "recently read by me", not "recently published."
1. The Lost Flock by Jane Cooper. One of my favorite genres of nonfiction is "expert on obscure topic rambles enthusiastically about their passion." Much of the time, the expert is a scientist, but not always. Jane Cooper for example, is just a super-enthusiastic knitter who became interested in wool sourced from rare British breeds of sheep, and fell into a research rabbit hole that led to her moving to Orkney to become a sheep farmer tending a flock of Boreray sheep -- a super rare breed that has survived mostly unchanged since the Stone Age. It's a fascinating story, and Cooper tells it well, conveying her love for the sheep and for Orkney itself. Definitely worth picking up, even if you're not a knitter.
2. Owls of the Eastern Ice: the Quest to Find and Save the World's Largest Owl by Jonathan C. Slaght. Slaght, on the other hand, is a scientist, a wildlife biologist who spent five years tramping about in the wildest regions of north-eastern Russia tracking and studying the Blakiston's Fish Owl, which I'd never even heard about before I picked up this book, but which I now love even though I'll probably never see one. Slaght writes vividly not just about the birds, but also about the challenges of doing science in a hostile wilderness, and the motley crew of eccentric and frequently drunk Russians who helped him deal with those challenges. He apparently has a new book coming out in a few months, about Amur Tiger conservation, and I'm totally adding it to my TBR list.
3. The United States Governed by Six Hundred Thousand Despots: A True Story of Slavery by John Swanson Jacobs. So, years ago I read Harriet Jacobs' Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl as background research for a fanfic. Then recently, I came across a Tumblr post informing me that Harriet's brother, mentioned a few times in Incidents, had also written a book, which was published in installments in an Australian newspaper and lost for a long time before being recently rediscovered and published in full. And as luck would have it, my library had a copy on Libby! Who says fandom can't be educational? Jacobs' book is short, more of a pamphlet really, but powerfully written. The editor fills out the volume with a foreword, a lengthy biographical section of Jacobs' life before and after the book, a collection of his letters, and tons of copious end notes. Unfortunately, the editorial sections, while informative and thoroughly researched, weren't nearly as well written as the book itself. There were a lot of places where I felt like the editor was trying hard for pathos -- something that Jacobs himself angrily rejected. Still, I appreciated getting a fuller picture of his life, from slavery to escape to his career as a firebrand anti-slavery lecturer, a gold miner and a sailor. Powerful stuff, and well worth seeking out.
1. The Lost Flock by Jane Cooper. One of my favorite genres of nonfiction is "expert on obscure topic rambles enthusiastically about their passion." Much of the time, the expert is a scientist, but not always. Jane Cooper for example, is just a super-enthusiastic knitter who became interested in wool sourced from rare British breeds of sheep, and fell into a research rabbit hole that led to her moving to Orkney to become a sheep farmer tending a flock of Boreray sheep -- a super rare breed that has survived mostly unchanged since the Stone Age. It's a fascinating story, and Cooper tells it well, conveying her love for the sheep and for Orkney itself. Definitely worth picking up, even if you're not a knitter.
2. Owls of the Eastern Ice: the Quest to Find and Save the World's Largest Owl by Jonathan C. Slaght. Slaght, on the other hand, is a scientist, a wildlife biologist who spent five years tramping about in the wildest regions of north-eastern Russia tracking and studying the Blakiston's Fish Owl, which I'd never even heard about before I picked up this book, but which I now love even though I'll probably never see one. Slaght writes vividly not just about the birds, but also about the challenges of doing science in a hostile wilderness, and the motley crew of eccentric and frequently drunk Russians who helped him deal with those challenges. He apparently has a new book coming out in a few months, about Amur Tiger conservation, and I'm totally adding it to my TBR list.
3. The United States Governed by Six Hundred Thousand Despots: A True Story of Slavery by John Swanson Jacobs. So, years ago I read Harriet Jacobs' Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl as background research for a fanfic. Then recently, I came across a Tumblr post informing me that Harriet's brother, mentioned a few times in Incidents, had also written a book, which was published in installments in an Australian newspaper and lost for a long time before being recently rediscovered and published in full. And as luck would have it, my library had a copy on Libby! Who says fandom can't be educational? Jacobs' book is short, more of a pamphlet really, but powerfully written. The editor fills out the volume with a foreword, a lengthy biographical section of Jacobs' life before and after the book, a collection of his letters, and tons of copious end notes. Unfortunately, the editorial sections, while informative and thoroughly researched, weren't nearly as well written as the book itself. There were a lot of places where I felt like the editor was trying hard for pathos -- something that Jacobs himself angrily rejected. Still, I appreciated getting a fuller picture of his life, from slavery to escape to his career as a firebrand anti-slavery lecturer, a gold miner and a sailor. Powerful stuff, and well worth seeking out.
