Reader's Choice: Nonfiction My-Z

Julia Child singlehandedly created a new approach to American cuisine with her cookbook Mastering the Art of French Cooking and her television show The French Chef , but as she reveals in this bestselling memoir, she was not always a master chef.

Our sharpest and most original social critic goes "undercover" as an unskilled worker to reveal the dark side of American prosperity.

The Radium Girls fully illuminates the inspiring young women exposed to the "wonder" substance of radium, and their awe-inspiring strength in the face of almost impossible circumstances.

Amid the violence and censorship of their Iranian homeland, seven young women immerse themselves in the worlds of Jane Austen, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Henry James and Vladimir Nabokov.

Teenaged Wolff moves with his divorced mother from Florida to Utah to Washington State to escape her violent boyfriend. When she remarries, Wolff finds himself in a bitter battle of wills with his abusive stepfather, a contest in which the two prove to be more evenly matched than might have been supposed.

Nashville, August 1920. Thirty-five states have ratified the Nineteenth Amendment, twelve have rejected or refused to vote, and one last state is needed. It all comes down to Tennessee, the moment of truth for the suffragists, after a seven-decade crusade.

More than a quarter of a million Americans crossed the continental United States between 1840 and 1870, going west in one of the greatest migrations of modern times. The frontiersmen have become an integral part of our history and folklore, but the Westering experiences of American women are equally central to an accurate picture of what life was like on the frontier.

A beguiling exploration of the joys of reading across boundaries, inspired by the author’s year-long journey through a book from every country.

In 1961, Sarah M. Broom’s mother Ivory Mae bought a shotgun house in New Orleans. It was the height of the Space Race and the neighborhood was home to a major NASA plant—the postwar optimism seemed assured. Widowed, Ivory Mae remarried Sarah’s father Simon Broom; their combined family would eventually number twelve children. But after Simon died, the Yellow House would become Ivory Mae’s thirteenth and most unruly child.

When Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans, Abdulrahman Zeitoun, a prosperous Syrian-American and father of four, chose to stay through the storm to protect his house and contracting business. In the days after the storm, he traveled the flooded streets in a secondhand canoe, passing on supplies and helping those he could. A week later, on September 6, 2005, Zeitoun abruptly disappeared.