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matter of fact
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Now in Nonfiction
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As a horror fan, I am anything but mad at the growing popularity of Halloween. Every year, the lawn decorations get bigger and the fandom more voracious. But what’s behind the strange impulse to scare ourselves, anyway? Are we like the extreme chiliheads who crave more heat with each increasingly demonic bite? Is the obsession with spooky season, timed so close to a polarizing presidential election, just a distraction from what really frightens us? Or does our innate attraction to spine-tingling stories seduce us into blowing our fears out of proportion?
The tales in this newsletter are true accounts of real anxieties. But with insightful storytellers and an investigative lens, they should leave you feeling informed and engaged—which is more than you can say for the candy corn.
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If you see more aliens out trick-or-treating this year, blame Luis Elizondo (and Taylor Swift in that flying saucer dress at the VMAs). The former Pentagon official, who ran a program investigating unidentified aerial phenomena (UAPs), is knocking listeners’ socks off with his memoir, Imminent. Whether you take his account as gospel—and there are plenty of folks on all sides!—it’s undeniably a ripping account. From Area 51 and Skinwalker Ranch to the notorious “Tic Tac” objects spotted in the USS Nimitz encounter, it’s all here. Elizondo resigned from his post to protest government secrecy about UAPs; it seems he’s found a new calling as an author, disclosure proponent, and a damn good narrator.
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Jonathan Haidt’s book The Anxious Generation is everywhere, and while its premise is extremely relatable to anyone parenting in the age of social media—and it has possibly the best nonfiction narrator in the biz with the great Sean Pratt—I confess I’m actually a bit anxious to listen to it myself. I loved Johann Hari’s Stolen Focus, which makes a related argument about devices, but for all of us, not just kids. When children are involved, the debate gets heated, and understandably so. Nowhere do you see that better than in Backfired: Attention Deficit, which traces the changing discourse around ADHD as the focus shifted from “hyperactive” young boys to college kids cramming for exams to the diagnosis du jour among adults.
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“Every wrongful conviction deserves its own book,” states John Grisham at the opening of Framed, the novelist and former defense lawyer’s first work of nonfiction in nearly a decade, co-written with Jim McCloskey of Centurion Ministries. But wrongful convictions—far more common than many assume—are not the only thing rotten in American criminal justice. Author Ben Austen, who wrote and narrated the astonishing new Audible Original The Parole Room, put together a list of the essential audiobooks—including memoirs, investigations, and novels—to inspire necessary rethinking, activism, and change in our current system of crime and punishment.
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Get outside your genre zone
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