Alicia Zheng/NPR hide caption We see you, hard-core NPR readers — just because it's summer doesn't mean it's all fiction, all the time. So we asked around the newsroom to find our staffers' favorite nonfiction from the first half of 2024. We've got biography and memoir, health and science, history, sports and more.
(And, sure, if you only want to take fiction to the beach, we've got you: Click here. ) Simon & Schuster hide caption Burn Book: A Tech Love Story by Kara Swisher Kara Swisher pulls off a magic trick here, delivering several sharply written books in one. There’s her story of becoming media’s most influential tech analyst, chronicling the rise of Facebook, Amazon, Google and, of course, X/Twitter — psychoanalyzing all the driven, flawed (mostly) dudebros who turned them into world-shaking platforms.
There’s also an affecting personal memoir, charting her journey as a gay woman, spouse, mother, entrepreneurial journalist and advocate. And there’s a passionate critique of toxic technology, slamming self-centered tech CEOs who pursue engagement through enragement, unleashing social division. It’s all knit together with nimble-yet-effective prose, outlining how Silicon Valley works, how journalism works and how society works in one neat package .
— Eric Deggans, TV critic Your purchase helps support NPR programming. How? St. Martin's Press hide caption Cloistered: My Years as a Nun by Catherine Coldstream Nuns have captured our imaginations as characters.
