All this month we’re featuring a selection of fantastic summer reading selected by the experts at O: The Oprah Magazine. See more topics here.
What is America made of? Is it the landscape? The people? An idea? What we revolt against? What we produce? These nonfiction titles tackle those questions from exhilaratingly different angles—culture, crime, the natural and the bureaucratic—each enriching our understanding of our roots, our appreciation of home.
The Hour of Land , by Terry Tempest Williams (FSG)
Our national parks are memory palaces where our personal histories reside,” muses naturalist and activist Williams in her ode to the sacred spaces —millions of acres from Alaska to Maine—that are the legacy of Abraham Lincoln’s 1864 Yosemite Grant Act. Whether contemplating the spiritual life she finds “inside the heart of the wild” or marveling at the peaks and monuments that comprise “our best idea”—the National Parks system—Williams movingly urges us to remember that “heaven is here.” Start Reading Now on B&N Readouts.
Never A Dull Moment: 1971 – The Year That Rock Exploded, by David Hepworth (Holt)
A revelatory account of the bombshell 365 days that gave birth to what the author dubs “the rock era”—12 months when Marvin Gaye, Joni Mitchell, Sly Stone, and a host of others broke with convention to give us the music that made us. Start Reading Now on B&N Readouts.
The Lynching, by Laurence Leamer (Morrow)
Morris Dees, a civil rights attorney who cofounded the Southern Poverty Center and his landmark 1983 lawsuit on behalf of a slain black man’s family, are at the heart of this stirring true story of racial politics and the legal takedown of the KKK. Start Reading Now on B&N Readouts.
Witness to the Revolution by Clara Bingham (Random House)
A gripping oral history of the centrifugal social forces tearing America apart at the end of the ’60s—Nixonian corruption, the war in Indochina, the Black Panthers, psychedelic drugs, Cointelpro, youthquake, domestic terrorism—with recollections by Bill Ayers, Jane Fonda, and Carl Bernstein, among others. This is rousing reportage from the front lines of U.S. history. Start Reading Now on B&N Readouts.
Under the Stars by Dan White (Henry Holt)
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hether sharing the backstory of everyone’s favorite fireside dessert (s’mores, of course), roughing it in the buff, or braving the wilderness amenities in tow, the disaster-prone White revels in a cherished national pastime—camping—with curiosity and humor. Start Reading Now on B&N Readouts.
How the Post Office Created America, by Winnifred Gallahger (Penguin Press)
Without a postal service linking far-flung territories together like “a central nervous system,” our country’s story would have been radically different. Including American originals like Ben Franklin (the first postmaster general) and the young riders of the Pony Express, this invigorating book tells the unlikely story of snail mail—not at all dull, though perhaps soon to be extinct. Start Reading Now on B&N Readouts.
Looking for more inspirations for your summer reading? Explore more of The Best Books of Summer from the editors of O: The Oprah Magazine, in the B&N Review or in the pages of this month’s issue of O: The Oprah Magazine.
The Barnes & Noble Review http://ift.tt/29lBAy4
Sig Nordal 