Archives de catégorie : Nonfiction

THE DARKROOM d’A.J. Hewitt

In the tradition of Unnatural Causes, When the Dogs Don’t Bark and All That Remains, this is a true crime book full of the wisdom that can be found in the darkness.

THE DARKROOM
Case Files of a Scotland Yard Forensic Photographer
by A.J. Hewitt
Orion, February 2024
(via Dystel, Goderich & Bourret)

For years, A.J. Hewitt was the first person into a crime scene. Before the detectives and the forensics team it was her alone with the body, the only sound her flashes firing as they lit up scenes of unimaginable horror. It was her job to shoot the photographs that revealed the circumstances of someone’s final moments.

Now in her debut book, THE DARKROOM, Hewitt takes us into the shadowy world of the crime scene photographer, and recounts remarkable tales, from murders to suicides, accidents to assassinations.

“An incredible insight into the work of a crime scene photographer told with sensitivity and compassion, but also with the forensic acuity of an experienced professional. The autobiographical style used to tell stories of crime scenes and crimes is compelling and incredibly readable. It becomes clear the crucial role that crime scene photography plays in not only documenting the evidence, but in aiding the solving of crimes. A must read for anyone interested in the darker side of human criminality and the work of forensic investigators.” — Professor Jane Monckton- Smith, author of In Control: Dangerous Relationships and How They End in Murder

“THE DARKROOM is an absolutely riveting read. It is a compelling book that works on so many levels. An authentic and sensitive account of the impact and aftermath of crime that will appeal to true crime readers and crime fiction authors, it also has wide appeal as a human story that charts A.J. Hewitt’s touching journey as the outsider turned insider and her struggle to prevent herself being changed by her experiences as a Police Forensic Photographer for New Scotland Yard. A unique book that offers a unique perspective. Highly recommended.” — Adam Hamdy, screenwriter and bestselling author of The Other Side of Night

“Passionate and empathetic, Hewitt speeds across London from one site of murder and mayhem to the next, always another crime scene coming, always more brutalized dead to bring to light and into focus. The great city grinds on, never seeing or knowing of these, her haunted stories selected from decades of skilled photographic investigative work for Scotland Yard.” — Judy Melinek & T.J. Mitchell, authors of Working Stiff: Two Years, 262 Bodies, and the Making of a Medical Examiner, a New York Times bestseller

A.J. Hewitt is a professionally trained photographer who spent almost a decade as a forensic photographer with New Scotland Yard. Hewitt studied photography and design at art college and subsequently graduated (with distinction) with a Bachelor of Arts (double major) degree. Insatiably curious and a lifelong learner, she is in the final stage of completing a psychology degree. She is a voracious reader, an open water scuba diver and has travelled widely, with her cameras, on four continents. She’s a storyteller at heart, whether through her camera lens or with a pencil and paper.

THE GOOD MOTHER MYTH de Nancy Reddy

Blending history of science, cultural criticism, and memoir, THE GOOD MOTHER MYTH pulls back the curtain on the flawed social science behind our contemporary understanding of what makes a good mom.

THE GOOD MOTHER MYTH
Unlearning Our Bad Ideas About How to Be a Good Mom
by Nancy Reddy
St. Martin’s Press, January 2025

When Nancy Reddy had her first child, she found herself suddenly confronted with the ideal of a perfect mother—a woman who was constantly available, endlessly patient, and immediately invested in her child to the exclusion of all else. Nancy had been raised by a single working mother, considered herself a feminist, and was well on her way to a PhD. Why did doing motherhood “right” feel so wrong?
For answers, Nancy turned to the mid-twentieth century social scientists and psychologists whose work still forms the basis of so much of what we believe about parenting. It seems ludicrous to imagine modern moms taking advice from mid-century researchers. Yet, their bad ideas about so-called “good” motherhood have seeped so pervasively into our cultural norms. In THE GOOD MOTHER MYTH, Nancy debunks the flawed lab studies, sloppy research, and straightforward misogyny of researchers from Harry Harlow, who claimed to have discovered love by observing monkeys in his lab, to the famous Dr. Spock, whose bestselling parenting guide included just one illustration of a father interacting with his child. This timely and thought-provoking book will make you laugh, cry, and want to scream (sometimes all at once).

Nancy Reddy‘s previous books include the poetry collections Pocket Universe and Double Jinx, a winner of the National Poetry Series. With Emily Pérez, she’s co-editor of The Long Devotion: Poets Writing Motherhood. Her essays have appeared in Slate, Poets & Writers, Romper, The Millions, and elsewhere. The recipient of grants from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts and the Sustainable Arts Foundation and a Walter E. Dakin Fellowship from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, she teaches writing at Stockton University and writes the newsletter Write More, Be Less Careful.

ALIEN EARTHS de Lisa Kaltenegger

With Dr. Kaltenegger as our witty and knowledgeable tour guide, we discover not merely new continents, like the explorers of old, but whole new worlds circling other stars. This riveting account will appeal to anyone who has ever gazed at the night sky in wonder.

ALIEN EARTHS
The New Science of Planet Hunting in the Cosmos
by Lisa Kaltenegger
St. Martin’s Press, April 2024

For thousands of years, humans have wondered whether we are alone in the cosmos. Now, for the first time, we have the technology to investigate. The question should have an obvious answer: yes or no. But once you try to find life elsewhere, you realize it is not so simple. What is life, actually? How do you find it over cosmic distances? And where are we the aliens? As director of the Carl Sagan Institute at Cornell University, astronomer Lisa Kaltenegger works with teams of tenacious scientists building the uniquely specialized tool kit to find life on alien worlds. In Alien Earths, she provides an insider’s view of what scientists are learning from Earth’s history and its astonishing biosphere. With an infectious enthusiasm, she takes us on an eye-opening journey to a dozen of the most unusual exoplanets that have shaken our worldview—planets covered in oceans of lava, lonely wanderers lost in space, and planets with more than one sun in the sky! And she dives into the worlds of science fiction, using these imagined other worlds to entertainingly describe how close they come to reality. With the James Webb Space Telescope, other smaller telescopes, and the pioneering work that Dr. Kaltenegger is carrying out in her labs, we live in an incredible epoch of exploration.

Lisa Kaltenegger is the Director of the Carl Sagan Institute to Search for Life in the Cosmos at Cornell and Associate Professor in Astronomy. She is a pioneer and world-leading expert in modeling potential habitable worlds and their detectable spectral fingerprint. Kaltenegger serves on the National Science Foundation’s Astronomy and Astrophysics Advisory Committee (AAAC), and on NASA senior review of operating missions. She is a Science Team Member of NASA’s TESS Mission as well as the NIRISS instrument on James Webb Space Telescope. Kaltenegger was named one of America’s Young Innovators by Smithsonian Magazine, an Innovator to Watch by TIME Magazine.

NO ONE LEFT de Paul Morland

Why we face population collapse and what to do about it.

NO ONE LEFT
Why the World Needs More Children
by Paul Morland
Forum Press, September 2024
(via Randle Editorial & Literary Consultancy)

A population calamity is unfolding before our eyes. It started in parts of the developed world and is spreading to the four corners of the globe. There are just too few babies being born for humanity to replace itself. Before the end of the current century at the latest, and probably much sooner, the world’s population will start to decline.

Leading demographer Paul Morland argues that the consequences of this promise to be calamitous. Labour shortages, pensions crisis, ballooning debt: what is currently happening to South Korea – which faces population decline of more than 85% within just two generations – threatens to engulf us all, and sooner than we think. In time a ballooning number of elderly people will simply be left to their own devices as there will not be enough people of working age to meet all needs. Whole settlements will start to be abandoned. Social collapse may ensue.

NO ONE LEFT will chart this future, explain its causes and suggest what might be done. We can and must rise to this challenge.

Paul Morland is the UK’s and one of the world’s leading demographers. He has been an Associate Research Fellow at Birkbeck, University of London and a Senior Member at St Antony’s College, University of Oxford. His previous books include The Human Tide: How Population Shaped the Modern World and Tomorrow’s People: The Future of Humanity in Ten Numbers.

THIS IS NOT A BOOK ABOUT EVEREST de Melissa Arnot Reid

A searching, uplifting memoir by the celebrated, groundbreaking climber: a journey of overcoming where the mountain’s highest peaks can only be reached by traversing the dark crevasses of the soul.

THIS IS NOT A BOOK ABOUT EVEREST
by Melissa Arnot Reid
Sugar23, April 2025

At twenty-seven, when Melissa Arnot Reid accepted a tank of oxygen just short of the summit of Mt Everest, she felt ravaged by defeat. Driven by a relentless, lifelong quest to prove to herself, her family, and the world that she was enough, she had set herself an incredible goal to be become the first American woman to summit Everest without oxygen, in the manner of history’s greatest alpinists. The failure battered her spirit and left her struggling to keep her tenuous grip on hope.

In the candid and adventurous spirit of Cheryl Strayed’s Wild, THIS IS NOT A BOOK ABOUT EVEREST is a story of a life in which the most dangerous mountain faces became a refuge until suddenly Ithey, too, no longer seemed safe. From a childhood marked by conflict, betrayal, and predation, Reid propelled herself to the top of the mountain climbing world, summiting and guiding on the world’s most challenging peaks, and establishing herself as woman unafraid to throw elbows in a milieu dominated by men. And yet for every summit she attained, her valleys of inner turmoil–over her estrangement with the family she believed she’d destroyed as a child; over relationships that cycled through deception and infidelity grew deeper and more self-destructive. Eventually, she could not keep these worlds from colliding, especially after a series of tragedies at dangerous elevations took the lives of her mentors and friends. Forced at last to face herself, Reid made her most perilous climb vet -toward the uncertain promise of forgiveness and self-acceptance

A beautiful, aching memoir of a journey with life-and-death stakes on the mountain and off, THIS IS NOT A BOOK ABOUT EVEREST bares the soul of one of the world greatest climbers, offering views on the awesome, rarified heights visible only at thin-air altitudes and the dark depths home to demons at once personal to Reid and yet familiar to anyone who has struggle to love themselves.

Melissa Arnot Reid is the first American woman to summit Everest without supplemental oxygen. It was her sixth summit of the highest ground on earth, cementing her place in mountaineering history. In doing so, she became a media star, in demand from many publications, television shows, and organizations looking for inspirational speakers.