Here are the nonfiction books NPR staffers have loved so far this year
MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:
We're almost halfway through 2025, and there's a lot going on. So maybe you missed out on some good books that have come out so far this year. No worries - the team at NPR Books has got you covered and rounded up some of their favorites. Today, we're going to catch up on some nonfiction reads with Andrew Limbong, host of NPR's Book of the Day podcast.
Good Morning, Andrew. Thanks for joining us.
ANDREW LIMBONG, BYLINE: Hey, Michel. No problem.
MARTIN: So NPR just put out its midyear books list, and these are staff picks. Are there any trends that you saw from the submissions?
LIMBONG: Yeah. I think the folks here at NPR were really into books that blended historical and personal narratives, you know? Books by authors who took on a subject, saying, like, this thing affected me personally, and I want to see how my story fits into the bigger narrative. Right? So an example of this is the book "Black In Blues" by Imani Perry. Perry's an academic who won a National Book Award for her book "South to America," where she used her personal life to look at the larger story of the American South. And she's using that same route to examine the color blue and what it's meant for Black history in this new book. So, like, the obvious touchpoint here is, like, the blues - right? - the musical genre. But there's also a history of indigo dyeing and what blue clothing meant to Black Americans, and the way the color blue is used in literature by Black Americans.
Another book like this is "On Muscle" by Bonnie Tsui. It's a science book about muscles. And it opens with this cute story of the author hanging out with her dad as a kid in their home gym while he's, like, working out and getting ripped and stuff.
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LIMBONG: And it's a collection of all these different stories about, you know, either bodybuilders or runners or scientists who are all poking at this thing, you know - I'm poking at my muscles - in our body that we use for everyday things. But it's also something that can communicate something aesthetically, you know, whether we like it or not.
MARTIN: Wow. That sounds really interesting. OK. What about biographies? Any good ones come out recently?
LIMBONG: Yeah. There's a book out by the writer Todd S. Purdum called "Desi Arnaz: The Man Who Invented Television." Now, people obviously will know him as the guy who played Ricky Ricardo in "I Love Lucy," and he was also Lucille Ball's husband. But he was also her business partner, right? They co-owned the production company that made "I Love Lucy" together.
And the book gets into his background - about how he was the son of Cuban aristocracy before fleeing to America, only to just run into trouble trying to get a Latino man on screen for America to see. And, you know, the marriage between him and Ball - it wasn't great. The book gets into, like, Arnaz seeing, like, sex workers and, you know, his drinking a lot. And, you know, like all good biographies, it's a complicated portrait of a complicated person.
MARTIN: Right, and he was a genius. I mean, it has to be said. He was...
LIMBONG: Yeah.
MARTIN: The title is not wrong. I mean, fascinating.
LIMBONG: Yeah.
MARTIN: OK. What about you? Did you particularly enjoy something this year?
LIMBONG: Yeah. One of the books I submitted for the midyear list was Craig Thompson's "Ginseng Roots." Listeners might know Craig Thompson as the cartoonist behind the memoir "Blankets." That was about him growing up in an extremely Christian household and finding comics as a way out. What he left out of that book was apparently, he grew up in Wisconsin, and that was the center of American ginseng production.
So a lot of his childhood was spent on ginseng farms, cultivating ginseng that'll ultimately get sold to China. And just this big story about global trade, right? Like I was talking about earlier, it's something we're all into. And, you know, I know that sounds dense, but his artwork is super spectacular. And that's what really does a lot of the heavy lifting when it comes to the historical nuts and bolts of the history.
MARTIN: All right. You've given us a lot to think about and to enjoy.
That's Andrew Limbong. He hosts NPR's Book of the Day podcast. Andrew, thank you.
LIMBONG: Thanks, Michel.
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