Nonfiction November 2019: Fiction/Nonfiction Pairings

Week 2 of Nonfiction November is a real highlight for me every year. This week is hosted by the brilliant Sarah @ Sarah’s Bookshelves (seriously, have you listened to her podcast? So many great books all the time!) and is really a great way for people who don’t think they like nonfiction to get introduced to some great books. For the nonfiction/fiction book pairings:

It can be a “If you loved this book, read this!” or just two titles that you think would go well together. Maybe it’s a historical novel and you’d like to get the real history by reading a nonfiction version of the story.

Without further ado, here are mine!

Kick Kennedy

I first read about Kathleen ‘Kick’ Kennedy when I read Laurence Leamer’s The Kennedy Women. But as she died when she was 28, there wasn’t a whole lot of time devoted to her or her story. Which is bananas because her life was…well, when I finally read her biography, I was sobbing.

The Kennedy Debutante by Kerri Maher. This book looks at a very specific time in Kick’s life. We meet Kick in 1938 on the day she debuts in London Society, as the daughter of the American Ambassador to England. The book follows an incredibly popular Kick at all the parties and the estate weekends she is invited to. And then she meets Billy Hartington, the son and heir of the Protestant Duke of Devonshire. As they fall in love, they must grapple with the issues of faith that would keep them apart – Kick is very serious about her Catholic faith and would have to give that up were she to become the Duchess of Devonshire. This book doesn’t follow Kick to the end of her life and when I finished it, I immediately ordered a biography of the extraordinary women at the heart of this book.

Kick: The True Story of JFK’s Sister and the Heir of Chatsworth by Paula Byrne. This book was exactly what I hoped it would be. The author was also introduced to Kick by way of Laurence Leamer’s book and tried to find out more about a woman who had kind of been erased from the Kennedy myth because of the circumstances surrounding her death. I don’t want to say anymore really (not that you can’t google it) because I really want you to read this book. Kick seemed like the most wonderful person, everyone who knew her loved her. Her brother Jack never spoke of her after her death, it was too painful. And little brother Bobby named his first child Kathleen but on the condition that she never be called Kick. It’s not a big biography, it reads like a novel about a romantic, rebel intent on following her heart.

WWII Paris

OK so WWII can be one of those genres that people get fatigued by very easily. I’m one of those people who kind of steers clear of these books as they all start to run together after a while. But when I read these two books this year, I knew I had to include them in this post.

Mademoiselle Chanel by CW Gortner. I’ve always found Coco Chanel to be somewhat enigmatic, someone who wasn’t super keen to be well known, to want to live her life in the background. Mademoiselle Chanel was the first time I felt like I read something where I got to know the woman behind the legend. While this book doesn’t focus just on what Chanel was doing during WWII, when I finished it, that was the part that really stuck out for me. Even though it was a fictionalized account of her life, I thought Gortner did an incredible job at getting to the real person, warts and all.

Les Parisiennes: How the Women of Paris Lived, Loved, and Died Under Nazi Occupation by Anne Sebba. I mean, this title kind of says it all no? In some respects, it reminded me of A Train in Winter in that it covers the lives and deaths of a great number of women. But while that book focused on the lives of those women who had been involved in the Resistance, Les Parisiennes looks at those women plus the society women who maybe colluded with the Nazis to continue living their fairly comfortable lives. For a lot of people, Nazi occupation didn’t really change their way of life and that’s something people don’t like to think about outside of Germany.

The Lusitania

I’m not normally one for nautical reading but stories about the Lusitania have such a human element. It was one of the reasons American involvement in the Great War was justified two years later.

Seven Days in May by Kim Izzo. Sydney and Brooke Sinclair are New York heiresses set to sail for England. While Sydney is heavily involved in suffrage and women’s causes (the novel opens with her visiting a clinic that helps women who have had illegal abortions), Brooke is engaged to an impoverished English peer. They have no idea that the Lusitania has been targeted by German U-boats when they board for their crossing. Isabel Nelson does have an idea about the fate of the Lusitania. Back in London, Isabel works in a coding unit for the British Admiralty. Her work with codes and cyphers means she is privy to secrets around the true cost of the war. The novel follows all of them over the course of the seven days in May that will change the trajectory of history. Izzo does an incredible job recreating the atmosphere on board the ship and the eventual sinking, peppering the novel with real life stories of those who were on board. If memory serves, I believe she has a family connection to someone that was actually on the ship.

Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania by Erik Larson. Here is my annual plea for people to read books by Erik Larson: Guys. If you have not read anything by Erik Larson, you need to. Dead Wake covers the last crossing of the Lusitania in heart breaking detail. Larson has put together a timeline down to the minute. I read this a while ago but I remember that I read the whole thing in one day. I could not put it down. It doesn’t read like nonfiction (Larson’s work never does) and I couldn’t believe that what I was reading actually happened. I spent a long time after finishing this book googling the things he wrote about.

So those are mine. Which book recently sent you on a quest for more information?

Non-fiction Fangirl: Erik Larson’s Dead Wake

Full disclosure: I received a copy of this book from Penguin Random House of Canada in exchange for an honest review.

Ever since I read The Devil in the White City, I’ve been a huge fan of Erik Larson’s. His is a particular kind of novelistic non-fiction that I haven’t seen any other writer achieve. He is able to take something that really happened and flesh out the characters and plot as though he created them. He is thorough, precise, and you can tell that he loved every minute of the process.

When I heard about his latest book, Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania I couldn’t wait to read it.

I basically spent all day Saturday doing just that.

Let’s just take a minute to underscore that achievement: Erik Larson wrote a non-fiction book that is so compulsively readable that I finished it in a day. I mean, I love non-fiction and you know I have no problems reading it but I’m not sure that I’ve ever done this before.

I’d say the title is pretty self-descriptive in terms of what this book is about: the sinking of the Lusitania off the coast of Ireland in May 1915. But as is often the case in Larson’s books, this one event set off a chain of events that ultimately brought the United States into the First World War. The sinking of a passenger ship by a German U-boat was considered by many Americans to have crossed the line and they wanted to do something about it.

But before Larson gets to the politics that followed the sinking, he describes how the war started in the first place and the days leading up to boarding the ship. He tells us about the people on board: the Cromptons, a family with 6 children and 2 nannies booked into 3 staterooms; Alfred Vanderbilt, one of the men that almost sailed on the Titanic; Theodate Pope, a female architect and spiritualist who served as an investigator of paranormal phenomena and was a friend of Henry James; Charles Lauriet, a bookseller travelling with a set of priceless Thackeray sketches and a copy of A Christmas Carol that had been owned by Dickens’ himself and annotated by the author; Richard Preston Prichard, a second class passenger who was so popular that a number of letters and journals mention him by name; and Robert Kay, a five year old boy who was diagnosed with measles and missed all the fun, spending the voyage in quarantine below deck.

Larson also looks at the man at the helm of the U-Boat, Walther Schweiger who by all accounts was a gregarious man and a good captain. He was able to maintain order on board but earned the respect of his crew and tried to make their days on board as pleasant as possible, at one point they even had puppies on board if you can believe that. The German military was set up so that U-Boat captains were able to make all their own decisions – they were the only ones that could see what was happening and had full judgment to sink passenger liners if they so chose. Their decisions are unpopular in the annals of history but it was wartime and they did what they had to do. Larson is skilled at capturing that delicate balance without judgement.

You know that it’s not going to be a happy ending, from the title alone. Even thinking myself prepared for the end, I was caught off guard by how moved I was by it. Again, Larson handles his subject matter with compassion and care without being sentimental.

Guys, I’m a huge fan of Erik Larson and at this point I’d probably read something he wrote on a cocktail napkin, but if you haven’t read any of his work yet, get to it. He is the best and he tells some incredible (true) stories; you won’t even realize you’re reading non-fiction.