Our Best Books coverage continues with Professor Nell Irvin Painter and editor John McMurtrie.
It’s time for our annual best books coverage! Each year Kirkus’ editors choose from thousands of industry-first reviews to determine the top 100 titles in fiction, nonfiction, picture books, middle grade, and YA. In celebration, we’re launching a series of five special episodes, each featuring one best books author, followed by a conversation with the respective section editor.
On this special 400th episode of Fully Booked, Nell Irvin Painter—award-winning author, artist, and emerita professor of American history at Princeton University—joins us to discuss I Just Keep Talking: A Life in Essays (Doubleday, April 23), one of Kirkus’ best nonfiction books of 2024. “Painter, author of Old in Art Schooland The History of White People, gathers more than 40 previously published essays, framed by a new introduction and coda, reflecting her shrewd analyses of issues including race, class, and gender; history and historiography; police brutality and poverty; art, education, and politics,” Kirkus writes in a starred review of this “vibrant, insightful collection from an indispensable voice.”
Painter and I begin by discussing exceptional beauty of the book itself—from the bold cover, featuring her colorful original artwork, to its thick glossy paper—and its reception since publication in April. We talk about how an essay collection presents the life of a specific mind over time and experience, the specificity of Sojourner Truth, and an exhibit at the National Museum of African American History and Culture that allows museumgoers to record their reactions. We talk about structuring an essay collection and how she chose to group selected essays, how the meaning of Whiteness has changed over time, whether she’s optimistic about the future of our democracy, and much more.
Then nonfiction editor John McMurtrie joins us to discuss the making of this year’s best nonfiction books list.
EDITORS’ PICKS:
The Achilles Trap: Saddam Hussein, the CIA, and the Origins of America’s Invasion of Iraq by Steve Coll (Penguin Press)
Challenger: A True Story of Heroism and Disaster on the Edge of Space by Adam Higginbotham (Avid Reader Press)
Feeding Ghosts: A Graphic Memoir by Tessa Hulls(MCD/Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
The Garden Against Time: In Search of a Common Paradise by Olivia Laing (Norton)
Undue Burden: Life and Death Decisions in Post-Roe America by Shefali Luthra (Doubleday)
Another Word for Love: A Memoir by Carvell Wallace (MCD/ Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
The Apothecary’s Wife: The Hidden History of Medicine and How It Became a Commodity by Karen Bloom Gervirtz (Univ. of California)
Malcolm Before X by Patrick Parr (Univ. of Massachusetts)
John Lewis: A Life by David Greenberg (Simon & Schuster)
THANKS TO OUR SPONSORS:
Zibby Books, publisher of Here After by Amy Lin
In the Trackless Wild by Sean Gates
The Long Journey Out by Ronald Okuaki Lieber
Russian Nonsensical by Edward D. Webster
Purpose-Driven Innovation: Lessons From Managing Change in the United Nations by Jens P. Flanding and Genevieve M. Grabman
Fully Booked is produced by Cabel Adkins Audio and Megan Labrise.
