LSA Winter Reading List: Nonfiction Edition

There’s nothing like the grounding comfort of a trustworthy nonfiction voice—a voice that conveys authority, intimacy, vulnerability, and a profound, curiosity-inspiring depth of knowledge. If you’ve been longing for the rigorous emotional precision of an essay collection, an accessible study of scientific evolution, or a lesson on baking the kind of bread that makes daily life more festive, we have just the reading list for you. 

Here are eight somewhat recent, highly acclaimed books of nonfiction, on a variety of topics, written by LSA alumni and faculty.

• Film, television, and media alum Corynn Coscia (A.B. ’06) and organizational studies alum Lindsay-Jean Hard (A.B. ’03), with Amy Emberling and Lee Vedder, have written a cookbook certain to rouse appetites—and sweet nostalgia among fellow alumni—with Zingerman’s Bakehouse Celebrate Every Day: A Year's Worth of Favorite Recipes for Festive Occasions, Big and Small (Chronicle Books, 2024). These recipes from the iconic Ann Arbor business include baked goods for special occasions like Passover, April Fool’s Day, Mother’s Day, and Juneteenth promise to make every day worth celebrating.

• Prosanta Chakrabarty, an alum of the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology (Ph.D. ’06), explores the significance of evolution to contemporary life through personal stories as well as discussions about the diversity of organisms, virus mutations, and the origins of life, in his book Explaining Life Through Evolution (MIT Press, 2023).

• Erin A. Cech, associate professor of sociology, has written a book that tackles a topic familiar to nearly all of us: work. The Trouble with Passion: How Searching For Fulfillment at Work Fosters Inequality (University of California Press, 2021) turns the idea that work will love you back on its head, and argues that class, gender, and race disparities are reinforced by a culture of “leaning in.”

• Webb Keane, the George Herbert Mead Distinguished University Professor of Anthropology, has written Animals, Robots, Gods: Adventures in the Moral Imagination (Princeton University Press, 2024), which presents research on the ethical dilemmas in relationships between humans and the world of non-humans (disease, roosters, and automatons, to name a few), a timely book for considering questions of the AI era. 

• In Bird Milk & Mosquito Bones: A Memoir (Knopf, 2024), Romance languages and literatures alum Priyanka Mattoo (A.B. ’01) reminisces about her Ann Arbor days of studying Italian, her efforts to replicate her mother’s rogan josh recipe via Zoom, and her lifelong search for home.

• Aisha Sabatini Sloan, assistant professor in the Residential College and the English department’s Helen Zell Writers’ Program, writes essays on art, playing with puppets in the wilds of Vermont, a police ride-along in Detroit, her photographer father, and discovery, in her lauded collection Dreaming of Ramadi in Detroit (Graywolf Press, 2024).

• Political science alum David S. Tatel's (A.B. 1963) book Vision: A Memoir of Blindness and Justice (Little, Brown and Company, 2024) recalls a lifetime of public service as a civil rights lawyer and federal judge while experiencing decades of progressive vision loss, an experience that offers a thoughtful meditation on justice and his love of his guide dog, Vixen. 

• Jia Tolentino (M.F.A. ’14)—New Yorker staff writer, cultural critic, and alum of English’s Helen Zell Writers’ Program—has written Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion (Random House, 2019), an essay collection that combines research, reporting, and memoir. Topics as diverse as “being very online,” scammers as millennial heroes, the mandate that everything—including our bodies—should always increase in efficiency, are examined in this investigation of our world as it is now and as it might become. 

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Illustration by Becky Sehenuk Waite