A Merry Christmas Non-Fiction Shopping List

The Non-Fiction Shopping List 2012

It's the beginning of the holiday shopping season, and it's time to start checking peoples' Amazon wish lists and listen for hints. Book readers can be a squirrley bunch, though, and none more so than those who read non-fiction. Some people read non-fiction simply for the desire to learn about the world around them, while others look down at fiction readers as escapists. Whatever the reason, there's plenty of good true stories out there to be given. Here's a few, along with the suggest audience for each.

The Reluctant Communist: My Desertion, Court-Martial, and Forty-Year Imprisonment in North Korea

North Korea's been all over the news this year, with last winter's death of Kim Jong-Il, the rise of Kim Jong-Un and his wife Ri Sol-Ju, and the loosening of some of the restrictions there. This is a rather unique look into the most cloistered country in the world, through the eyes of an American POW.

Recommended for: the current-affairs and news junkies on your list.

A Man With No Talents

This is a rare look into one of the less shiny subcultures in Japan. Writing with the pen name Oyama Shiro, this chronicles the life of a day laborer through the bubble years and following recession in Japan. Unable to fit into the salaryman role laid out for him, the narrator take the more difficult, yet ultimately more freeing life of manual labor. Living in a bunk in a boardinghouse, not only does he blame no one for his fall in status, he thanks his society for giving him the opportunity to live as he wishes, with no responsibilities to anyone but himself.

Recommended for: people struggling with the current American recession, those who believe Japan has no underside.

The Boy who Harnessed the Wind

William Kamkwamba lived through some of the hardest times in Malawi. With his father unable to bring in a harvest, he couldn't afford to go to school. Even when he was young, though, he thought it was a shame that work and study had to end when it got dark. While trying to piece together an advanced science book in the village's library, he put together the bicycle lights he's seen around town and a picture of a windmill, and he brings a light in the darkness to his home for the first time.

Recommended for: with a strong message of self-reliance and a happy ending, this is a safe book for anyone from upper-middle-school to a grandmother.

Okimono Kimono

Almost more of an art book than a real story, one of the women of the CLAMP manga writing group puts together a beautiful collection of both original and traditional kimono. She relates her experiences in wearing kimono in regular life, as well as ways to modernize the style of dress while keeping them feminine and pretty.

Recommended for: most female manga readers would appreciate the art of this book, even if they'd never dress like this themselves.

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

Known by many aliases since her death, this is the story of the life and family of a poor black woman in Maryland. Treated at Johns Hopkins, the cancerous cells that eventually killed her opened the door to the study of human cells outside of the body. What follows is the history of her family, who never saw a dime of the money that their mother's cells made, the scientists who used her biological material without her consent, and a fascinating look at the fields of bioethics and medical patents.

Recommended for: fans of science, civil rights and biographies alike.

Good Women of China

China has one of the most controlled 'free' presses in the world. And yet, it's still much more relaxed than in decades past. In the 1980s, as radio was slowly able to show the country a more realistic view of itself, Xinran began a late-night call in show for women. Collected here are some of the most memorable stories from those years. Told in plain language, but with a journalist's ear for narrative, the lives of the women in this book will stay with the reader long after she closes the cover.

Recommended for: current events and history buffs, women's rights and civil rights activists, and anyone looking for poignant stories with a thread of hope woven within them.

So there it is. That should cover most of your shopping list. But again, as always, make sure to tuck that gift receipt into the front cover. Book readers are a wily bunch, and sometimes we read even the most obscure title without anyone knowing. 

A horrific look into North Korea, through the eyes of a man who lived the worst of it.

South Korea, like Japan, has had a renaissance in the last century or so. With a national attitude of always striving to achieve, the small nation has international auto companies, a huge online presence, and is now beginning to export its music and culture as well.

Just to the north is a country that, during the same period of time, has travelled backwards by decades. Unable to feed itself with its rocky soil and outdating farming practices, the same ethinc population is nearly three inches shorter than its well-fed southern counterparts.

But even in this strange world, there is a deeper hell to fall into. Their prison camps, scattered across the countryside, are a nightmare within a nightmare. These are the places that are used to control a population that watched as much as 10% of its population starve to death in the 1990s.

This is the hell that is Escape from Camp 14, by Blaine Harden. In the worst of North Korea's prison camps, the people living there aren't being rehabilitated by labor. People sent to these are never expected to leave again. They're completely self-sufficient, with the prisoners even growing the food for the guards who live on-base. There's plenty of labor to go around, and even schools for the children.

At least the adults who are sent here have memories of their lives before they got here to hold on to. They remember a life outside of breaking rocks in the quarry, outside of less-than-subsistence farming, of the freedom to choose one's partner, rather than being assigned a mate for good behavior.

Shin Dong-hyuk was born here. For the first 14 years of his life, he had no idea about the world outside the fences of his camp. Unbelievably, the children of Camp 14 aren't even indoctrinated into the personality cult of Kim Il-Sung and his descendants. Where the Dear Leader's portrait hangs in virtually every classroom and public space in the country, the rules of the camp are posted. 

Violation of Rule Three, Subsection 2 - Anyone who steals or hides any kind of food in the work camp will be shot immediately - was the cause of his six year old classmate being beaten to death in front of the class. In this twisted mockery of society, ideals of filial piety and the value of children are mostly unheard of. Starving children steal food from their equally starving parents and are beaten for it. They're taught that they are here because of the sins of their parents, and that the way to redeem themselves is to accept the guards as their teachers. And as Shin learned early on, any infraction against these rules could, and did, result in a swift and painful death.

Escape never really occurred to Shin. He had no real idea that life would be different anywhere else. But when he was imprisoned and tortured following the failed escape attempt of his mother and brother, his outlook changed. He was placed in a cell with a man who had lived outside of North Korea for a time. It wasn't the brutality of his captors that made him dream of freedom. It wasn't watching his mother and brother be hanged, or a teen's curiosity at the larger world outside.

It was the stories of the banquets that the Chinese throw for any reason they can come up with. It was the dream of white rice and roast pork, from a child who had grown up on a thin gruel, with the occasional bit of Chinese cabbage and salt thrown in. It was the dream of eating until he was full that motivated Shin to be not only the first person to escape Camp 14, but the first person born in a labor camp to escape North Korea, and eventually make it all the way to the West.

This is no Elie Wiesel's Night. There is no holding on to their humanity for the children born here, because they were never taught to have any in the first place. There's no message of the strength of human spirit or any other platitudes like that. This is simply one man's story of growing up in hell, and escaping to a world he's never learned how to function in.

Highs: If nothing else, the reader learns to believe in blind luck, because after Shin manages to escape the prison camp itself, a string of much-needed good luck helps him along until he makes it to the South Korean embassy.

Lows: This is possibly the most unrelentingly brutal, despairing book I've ever come across.

Verdict: Perhaps the best accounting of a North Korean prison camp, but plan to follow reading this with something more uplifting.

Further Reading: Nothing to Envy, The Reluctant Communist

Does a person have default ownership of their own genome?

Who owns the biological waste that gets left behind at hospitals and clinics every day? What, exactly, defines informed consent and when does it apply? Can an organism or a snippet of DNA be patented? How does this change when it's human DNA involved?

These topics, and many others, are tackled in Rebecca Skloot's The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. Skloot was first introduced to Henrietta as a side-note in ah High School biology class.The HeLa line of cells was the first to be successfully cultured in a lab. This created a way for scientists to study how cells work outside of a human host. The ability to work with cells in this way paved the way for vaccines for polio and influenza and helped create some of the most popular drugs to fight cancer. It helped to found the study of chromosomes and DNA itself.


But what of the woman behind the cells?


The HeLa strain was discovered long before such things as 'informed consent' and HIPAA laws. Discovered in 1951 by a researcher at Johns Hopkins, it was cultured from a young black woman living outside of Philadelphia. She later died of the cervical cancer from which HeLa sprung, which metastasized throughout her body. She left behind five children and a legacy that would change science forever, but her existence as a person would be largely forgotten, even by her own young children.


Rebecca Skloot's journey to discover Henrietta Lacks takes her on a journey that she could hardly have imagined when she started out. Skipping through time, the book ventures from Henrietta's mother's upbringing in Lacksville to her youngest daughter's home. We meet the doctors and nurses who discovered the unique traits of her cells, the ones who put the cells to use curing and preventing a myriad of diseases, and the one young doctor who finally takes the time to explain to her children exactly how important the mother they didn't get to grow up with was to the world.


There's a host of failures on the parts of the medical community, society and the Lacks family shown here. Over and over, the doctors and researchers simply never too the time to explain to the Lackses what they were doing and why. In the 1950s, the Lacks children were never tested for the hearing deficiencies that doomed them scholastically. The family as a whole didn't see anything wrong with cousins marrying, probably causing a host of problems with Henrietta's first daughter and also possibly contributing to learning disabilities with her other children as well.


Even though the story skips through the decades, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks is a quick, easy to follow read. While the story of the Lacks family is interesting, the legal and medical information is even more fascinating. The author touches on other patients who have had biological material that was considered useful by the medical field, the legal advances in protection patients' rights, and the history of the care of patients. In an age where GMO food is starting to make headlines and patents and copyrights are making it nearly impossible for scientists to do research, the issues addressed here will only become more and more important.


Highs:  Watching Henrietta's troubled youngest son finally be shown how important his mother is to the world.


Lows:  I wish there was more about the legal aspect of some of the issues raised here.


Verdict:  Simple enough for a reader without much of a science background, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks is a fascinating ride through an aspect of medicine that most never see.


Further Reading:  The Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat, The Family that Couldn't Sleep

A boy faces starvation and accusations of witchcraft to bring power to his village

People complain about not having enough opportunities to advance themselves.  Generally what they mean by that is the quality of education in the public school systems, or the perceived nepotism and racism in the corporate world.  And yes, these situations may cause people to lose hope in their ability to climb the social and economic ladders as high as they would like to.

But imagine living in a place where your neighbors explain electricity and other phenomena that they don’t understand by saying that it’s magic or demons.  Where your father has to pull you out of school before you reach your teens. because he simply doesn’t have the few dollars for tuition.  Where instead of watching your pet dog starve to death you have to put him down yourself.

This is the country of Malawi, and this is where The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind takes place.  William Kamkwambe grew up here during some of the worst draughts and famines that the country has seen.

This isn't the story of a hard-luck kid growing up in the projects who ends up lifting himself out of that situation.  It isn't that William didn’t have enough to eat because his father didn’t want to work or his mother spent it on liquor.  William didn't have more than a few mouthfuls of food a day because there literally was no food to be had in the country.  Years of devastating droughts and corruption coupled with bad management from the top down left Williams family, as well as his neighbors with no fertilizer to grow even subsistence crops.  And when their is no food, it doesn't matter how much money you have, because there’s nothing to buy.  He spent years watching people simply lay down on the side of the road, on the way to town to try to beg, and not get up again.  He watched people try to make a gruel from grounded grasses, dirt and water, and watched as the mud solidified in their stomachs killing them even faster.

But William and his family did their best.  As long as there were still birds in the skies, William and his friends did their best to snare them and try to bring something home to eat.  Any time it looked like they might get enough rain to put crops in the ground, they made sure to try, and with the first successful crop, they were finally able to eat until they were actually full again.

The very best bit of luck that William received was that his family is, if not properly educated by Western standards, then at least not so backwards as to explain away the workings of the universe as “magic.”  William always valued his schooling, and of the biggest disappointments  he faced at the beginning of the drought is when his father wasn’t able to give him the money for tuition to the school he had been going to.

For other, less determined boys this would mean the end of their education.  But he was lucky enough to live in a village with a library.  While he wasn’t really able to keep up with all his classmates on his own, he was at least able to find out about the things that interested him, and apply them to his own life.

One of those situations that he always lamented was that once it gets dark out, the day is done.  Without electricity to the house, a dozen hours is wasted each night.  William has seen bicycles with lights on the front that are powered by the person pedaling the bicycle.  He’s taken apart enough radios and basic electronics work, but the matter of how to keep the generator turning eludes him.

Until one day, reading at the library, he sees a picture of a windmill.  Suddenly, the curse of darkness might be at an end.  With enough electricity, perhaps he could even work a stronger pump at the well to bring up enough water to irrigate the family’s crops.

It’s amazing how much the technology that so many take for granted can mean so much to others.  Even after William figures out the difference between AC and DC, he still nearly burns his house down using scavenged bits of wire to bring a light into his bedroom.

That’s the determination that William continues to put forward.  And he has the ability to live in any country he wants now.  But after his schooling is over, he wants to return to Malawi to help bring his country up, and introduce technology and more schools to the country in which he was raised. And thats something great.

Highs: His trip to the TED conference, and his reaction to the Vegas casinos.

Lows: More than half the book id devoted to the hardships he faced but i’d have liked to have seen more of the turn afterwards, and how he is now

Verdict: Both an uplifting story about one indomitable human spirit and a motivation to do what one can with all that they have themselves


Further Reading:  Persepolis, The Reluctant Communist

A Japanese man chooses to live his life on his own terms

Japan has had to be a very structured society for centuries.  A relatively small country with very little in the way of natural resources (even with the abundance of fishing, over 60% of the food used by the country is produced elsewhere), the will of the self has by necessity had to take a back seat to the will of the collective.  This attitude continues today, with the stereotypical 'salaryman' position being a prime example.

But what happens when, for whatever reason, a person simply can't make himself fit into that mold?  Some people simply fall out of society altogether, and that is what happened to our narrator, who goes by Oyamo Shiro, in A Man With No Talents.


He is very careful to lay the blame for not fitting on his own shoulders, and not blaming society or his parents.  Rather, he sees himself as simply unable to cope with the stress of a normal job and life in modern Japan, so he gave up on that part of life.  Instead, he works as a day laborer on the streets.


He started this life fairly late, at around 40 years of age.  He did try his best to keep up the appearances of a normal life.  he went to university and was able to get decent jobs.  But without fail, eventually he would 'get sick' and not be able to keep going to work.  Later on he reads up a bit on psychology and decides that he might have something of a mental illness rather than being simply weak-willed, but eventually he gives up on mainstream jobs, gives up on his former life, and takes up residence at a bunkhouse in the San'ya district of Tokyo.  Here, he falls in with the day laborer crowd, and begins to take jobs with them.


Officially unemployed, he has a card that, when he works a certain number of days for the month, he can turn in to a government office for a stipend for the days that he doesn't work.  This gives him enough money to get by, living in a doya, or bunkhouse.  He shares a room with six other men, receiving a bunk bed with a curtain around it to sleep in, a TV with a headphone jack at the foot of the mattress, and a locker in which to store his belongings.  While this would seem spartan at best to most, he sees this existence as freeing, allowing him to live without the responsibilities of a normal job and apartment that had made his life so unbearable before.


The book is a really interesting look at one of the subcultures of Japan that many never see.  the outskirts of Toyko has is boxtowns and its truly homeless who sleep on the streets, but rather than rail against the uncaring government, our narrator is grateful to live in a country in which he is able to choose a path in life that he finds more suitable.


He chose a good time in Japan's recent history to become a day laborer.  At the beginning, during the housing boom, laborers like him could be choosy, only picking the types of jobs that they preferred, or even taking a day off, confident in the fact that there would be work waiting for him the next day.


After the bubble economy collapsed, however, work became more and more scarce.  Men would line up at two in the morning outside the job offices that open at six, and even this would guarantee a job for the day.  Besides this, our narrator is getting older, and even though he has always gravitated towards the easier jobs, even these get harder and harder as one ages, and not everyone is able to keep up the work until he reaches the official retirement age.


The author submitted his memoir to a writing contest on a whim, and was stunned when it won.  Shunning the spotlight, he refused to accept interviews after he won, preferring to continue the life he had chosen for himself.


Highs:  A candid look at a way of life rarely talked about


Lows:  At times frustratingly self-depreciating


Verdict:  An interesting look at a different Japanese mindset


Further Reading:  Shutting Out the Sun, North Korea Kidnapped My Daughter

A bad decision gets a young man lost to North Korea for most of his life

There are some decisions that set the course of your life forever.  Picking a major in college.  Getting married.  Quitting a job to follow your dream.



Then there are the less well thought out life changers.  Dropping out of college to gold mine in World of Warcraft.  That one-night stand.  A drunk-dial to your (now former) boss.

Charles Robert Jenkins' poorly thought out decision probably trumps all of those.  Stationed in South Korea during the end of the US' involvement with the Korean war, Jenkins hears that his unit might soon be transferred to the war now heating up in Vietnam.


Jenkins has always been the type to take the easy way out.  In fact, he enlisted in the army because his father told him that he either had to get a job or join the military, and the military seemed easier.


Not liking the stories that he was hearing coming out of Vietnam, he comes up with a plan to get out of being transferred.  He's heard that men who have defected to the USSR regularly get sent home in prisoner exchanges.  He might spend a few years in Leavenworth, but that would be easier than the hell going on in Vietnam.  So, one particularly drunken night, he walks across the DMZ and turns himself in.


Unfortunately, North Korea is a completely different animal that the USSR.  Instead of seeing Jenkins' capture as a chance to get back some of their own men, they saw a golden opportunity to get information and train their spy program.  So there Jenkins stayed.


For four decades.


So Jenkins hardly got the easy out he was hoping for.  Although, in the world that is North Korea, he probably had it easier than many others.  He never quite starved to death, for one.  While the beatings were at times plentiful, from both the North Koreans as well as other American prisoners, he always recovered from them.  He even found something of a love match with a prisoner kidnapped from Japan to work with the spy program as well.  All in all, it could have turned out much worse for him.


Along the way, we get to see some of the truly bizarre customs and beliefs that are programmed into the lives of everyday North Koreans.  The government does such a complete job of blacking out the media that the average citizen simply has no idea how different the world outside is.  And those who do know what happens to them and their families if they show the slightest signs of dissent.


Even as you shake your head at the sheer idiocy of defecting to North Korea, to which Jenkins fully admits, there are moments to cheer for him as the underdog of the story.  When he's assigned to teach English classes to future spies, he purposefully gives them the wrong words, out of a combination of amusement and spite.  You can't help but cringe along with him when he's assigned a 'housekeeper' who lays down the law about how the house is going to be run.  And you cheer at the end when he gets to teach his daughters about how the rest of the world lives.


The writing's simple, and it's a very quick read.  It gives a unique and intriguing look into one of the most insular countries in the world, which would be hard to get anywhere else.


Highs:  The writing's brutally honest in its self-reflection, which keeps the story from turning into a "look how hard my life is" mess


Lows:  Parts of the narrative could have been cleaned up better by the editor of co-writer


Verdict:  Material you won't get anywhere else, and short enough not to be boring


Further Reading:  North Korea Kidnapped My Daughter, Pyongyang

An outspoken, brazen girl grows up during the Islamic Revolution

Many memoir writers are not terribly good at really being honest with the reader. While writing a memoir should be a reflective exercise, oftentimes the writer simply justifies past actions, rather than admitting when those actions were wrong.

Marjane Satrapi is brutally honest about herself, and this is what helps make The Complete Persepolis an interesting, and important, read.

Marjane was born into a very interesting time and place. Raised in Iran during the Iran/Iraq war, even as a young girl she has had strong opinions and convictions that didn't always match up with the popular opinion. In the first story, when she is now required to wear a veil in the newly conservative school, she needs to come to a decision on her own about what is right and wrong with her relationship to God. While throughout her life how her relationship with God changes and grows, the relationship is always there.

Being an outspoken opinionated female in any Muslim country is a perilous prospect. When the country the girl is in is undergoing a fundamentalist revolution, the situation becomes more dire. In fact, as Marjane becomes older and even more rebellious, her parents arrange for her to live in France. While there, she rebels even more strenuously, even going so far as to move to Amsterdam for a short time.

One of the most painful scenes in the book shows when Marjane points out a random, innocent man on the street to divert the attention of the police off of herself. She absolutely deserves the shaming she receives from her mother when she returned home. In the way of most young adults, she really didn’t think of the consequences her actions might have on that man and his family. It would have been very easy for Satrapi to leave this event out, but putting the story in helps to show the growth and maturity Marjane gains later in the story.

It would be very easy for Marjane to justify her rebellion and bad choices on anything from the Islamic Revolution to bad parenting. However, Marjane takes full responsibility for her decisions. This changes the book from the story of a spoiled, bratty child and young adult, to the story of a woman who looks back at her life with a more experience eye, and has learned from both the good and bad choices she has made.

Persepolis also has a special place in literature as one of the first biographical graphic novel to get both critical and popular acclaim in the US. While the WW II stories Maus and Maus II came out well before Persepolis, the story of Persepolis got more mainstream media attention upon release due to its subject matter, as well as a considerable publisher push and movie tie-in. For many pop lit and book club reader Persepolis was probably the first “comic book” they have read in decades. If the surge in graphic novel memoirs as well as nonfiction graphic novels in general is any indication, Persepolis must have made a good impression.

Highs: Little Marjane's conversations with God

Lows: Watching Marjane rebel against what she still knew was wrong in France and Amsterdam

Verdict: A painfully honest look at the life of an upper-class women during the Islamic Revolution

Futher Reading: The Complete Maus, Pyongyang

A mother's loss becomes an international incident

Over here in the US, we’re very luck that we border fairly reasonable countries.  We had some issues with Cuba a generation ago, and Mexico might be having some problems, but generally we’re not doing to badly with our next-door neighbors.

Japan, on the other hand, isn’t quite so lucky.  Just to the northwest is one of the most insular and unstable countries in the world.  A country with a history of dictator-for-life leaders even though the country is nominally communist.  A country where the leaders have ludicrous riches while the citizens not only cannot support themselves, but are starving while donated food rots in storage.

That country would be North Korea.

During the late 1970s and early 1980s, at least 13 Japanese were abducted, mostly from coastal towns, with the intent of using them to train Korean spies to pass as Japanese citizens.  Although the rest were adults, Megumi Yokota was only 13 years old when she was kidnapped on her way home from school.  The police found a few of her belongings, but there is no other sign of what happened to her.

What follows in Sakie Yokota’s North Korea Kidnapped My Daughter is a decades-long quest by her parents to discover what happened to their beloved daughter.  It took North Korea until 2002 to officially admit that they had abducted Japanese citizens for their training camps.  Until then, the local police made the painful suggestions that perhaps Megumi had killed herself or simply run away.  Her parents, especially her mother, could no accept any of these theories, and never gave up their fight for justice.

As a piece of literature, however, it leaves quite a bit to be desired.  Revelations are few and far between, which is how life is.  Because of the long stretches without any new information, the book tends to drag on and seem rather dry, as the mother can only tell us about the lengths that she’s gone to find her daughter without any success.

The book also isn’t focused on the international aspect of the conflict.  There’s still a book out there to be written that focuses on all the people abducted by North Korea.  Citizens from South Korea, Japan, and even Russian and Europe have all disappeared.  This book is solely focused on the one family.

I also hesitate to criticize her directly on the quality of the writing.  Vertical is a fairly small publishing company, and is not used to publishing novels or nonfiction.  It could easily be the fault of the translator that the writing comes across as so stilted and formal to American ears.  It could also be the writing style of the people of Sakie Yokota’s generation.  In general, Japanese speech among adults is more formal than in the US, so that might be how their writing is as well.  An especially good translator would have changed the cadence of the writing to what the region’s readers are accustomed to, but that might not have been done here.

All around, the information is interesting and not found anywhere else in the US.  While the writing is a bit reminiscent of a Dateline NBC episode, it’s an in-depth look at how mothers in other countries cope with some of the hardest events in life.

Highs:  The government finally starting to pursue the case as a kidnapping

Lows:  Dealing with local police

Verdict:  Worth reading for the information, though not necessarily for pleasure reading

Further Reading:  The Reluctant Communist, Pyongyang