We just scrolled past a tweet about some research saying that AI chatbots are turning all our brains and memories and capacity to think for ourselves to mush. We didn’t click on it but we did double-take on some diagrams of brains that looked quite legit. This could have been yesterday, it could have been two weeks ago, who can say...
To counteract all this, we’re keeping our grey matter going with ten of the best non-fiction releases to dig into this summer.
The Haves and Have-Yachts (Evan Osnos)
We have a new found respect for Flo Rida, having read this book of essays from The New Yorker staff writer Evan Osnos. He follows the rapper between a bar mitzvah in Chicago to a corporate gig in New York whilst reporting on the big money ‘private’ gigs that are keeping a lot of musicians going. This is in the most fun section of his book on the ultrarich - How To Spend It - which also goes into excruciating detail on gigayachts from captains, crew, designers and salesman and lays out the tactics of Silicon Valley doomsday preppers (get a motorbike, buy land in New Zealand).
Elsewhere, there’s a particularly illuminating piece on how three Getty heiresses got into a spat with their trust fund wealth manager. Plus bonkers tales about chaos machine Guo Wengui and white collar criminals, a look at what went wrong for Zuck and Facebook, as well as a short take on who gets to be ‘elite’, who ends up a ‘counter elite’ (say, a Luigi Mangione) and who gets to rail at ‘the elites’ from Trump to Tucker Carlson. These essays were written between 2016 and 2024 so each one features an update on the cast of characters. Osnos covers a lot of ground to detail this new Gilded Age from the comparisons to the Vanderbilts and Carnegies of old to the new(ish) money of sheikhs, emirs, Greenwich, Connecticut and exclusive Monaco clubs.
Tart (Slutty Cheff)
There’s a scene in this memoir from an anonymous female chef based in London where she could go home with someone or she could go get a doner kebab. She gets the kebab. After starting out telling stories about restaurants and relationships on Instagram in her mid-twenties, Slutty Cheff is now no less than a Vogue columnist and Tart is just the right mix of adrenaline-crunching shifts in fine dining kitchens, zany, drug-fuelled interludes with various shitbags and real feeling, anxieties and friendships. It’s Anthony Bourdain meets Bridget Jones meets Samantha Jones.
Slutty Cheff piles on the food and sex metaphors with glee, there’s lots of talk of thighs and cream and juices and meat and aww, artichoke hearts. And she does a great job of bringing you into both the terror of sweaty, macho, out-of-control double shifts and the bliss of sitting on the pavement with a pint and a cigarette at the end of one. The comparisons with boring office jobs are especially brutal. This’ll make you feel guilty next time you ask how long your starter’s gonna be.
Tree Hunting (Paul Wood)
An absolutely gorgeously constructed book from Penguin’s Particular Books imprint, Tree Hunting features maps from Neil Gower and sees Paul Wood (no relation) run down his top 1,000 trees in towns and cities around Britain and Ireland. This is not pocketable but it would make a fine guide to keep on the bookshelf and consult before any trips, as well as around your own neighbourhood. Each tree is named - old names, local names, recent names and Wood’s own names - with short Tree City histories, plus very accessible info on characteristics, the best times of year to see, nearby statues or buildings and stories or myths related to artists, writers, kings, queens and circus elephants.
After reading it, you really do walk down your everyday street with a new lens. Did I know that Manchester was once stuffed full of poplars and is now more of a foxglove city? I did not. Am I sure I’ve seen the Platform 1 Giant Redwood at New Cross Gate station in South East London? I am not. Most of all, Wood wants us to remember that trees are individual, they have character and we should not just protect them but celebrate them too.
The Fiery Spirits (John Rees)
If you want a chunky slice of history to chew over this summer, may I push in front of you John Rees’ brilliant The Fiery Spirits. This title from Verso Books charts the course of parliamentary opposition to the monarchy from the 1620s, through the English Civil War between the Cavaliers and Roundheads and right up to the king-killing of Charles I and revolution. Rees focuses in on a small group of radical MPs, their allies and how their speeches and actions influenced and were influenced by popular protests in London and throughout the whole ‘riotous’ country.
The Fiery Spirits is a scholarly, meticulous piece of work but it’s also genuinely thrilling to read - right down to the details of which committees the likes of Henry Marten and William Strode were on - considering we know where it’s all heading. (Oliver Cromwell). There’s accusations of treason, religious clashes, prison time in the Tower, a sticky end for an earl and angry merchants marching over to Westminster with weapons night after night. Superb.
I Love You, Byeee (Adam Buxton)
The follow up to the comedian/TV trickster/podcaster’s Ramble Book, this one also has a lot of delightful rambles, and indeed very entertaining sub-rambles. A mix of funny ha-ha and heartfelt, Buxton gets the levels right with memories of The Adam & Joe Show’s Toytanic-based competition, lovely stories of digitising his memories of his mum, glimpses of lost projects he never got to make on TV, hanging out with Radiohead and Travis, and stand-up style scorecards of fights with his wife.
This is a very honest book from an all-round good egg, now a dad in his mid-50s, who - as he admits himself in his self-deprecating advice for budding ‘creatives’ - got very lucky. Intriguingly, this comes a couple of months before the release of Buxton’s first actual album Buckle Up, produced by Metronomy’s Joe Mount. Oh, and the audiobook features a chat with Joe Cornish, some jingles and a bonus chapter on Bowie in the 90s.
A Duel of Bulls (Pete Carvill)
Subtitled Hemingway and Welles in Love and War, A Duel of Bulls is a slim, gorgeously strange book that takes as its starting point the love that both Ernest Hemingway and Orson Welles had for bullfighting and for Spain. Pete Carvill, who writes about boxing and sport for The Independent, makes it clear that this is strictly creative non-fiction. He’s read a bunch of biographies of both the famous writer and the famous director but he’s not looking for pinpoint historical accuracy. He’s more interested in their psyches and relationships, including when they encountered each other through the decades, firstly in a 1930s Manhattan recording studio, where the two men came to blows.
There are many fabulous quotes, meetings and details here - so much so, I found myself wondering 'WWOWD?' (or What Would Orson Welles Do?) after reading this. Carvill’s interested in exploring the two men’s masculinity, self-mythologising and their feelings towards fame, their families, war, money, artistry and ageing with flair in the dramatisation of key moments of crisis and clarity. We follow them to Seville, Paris, Venice and Havana as they navigate two adventurous, tumultuous lives. A beaut of a book.
Reframing Blackness (Alayo Akinkugbe)
Reframing Blackness is a short, precise intro to what writer, researcher and curator Alayo Akinkugbe calls ‘A Black History of Art’, from Stormzy’s Merky Books. That’s also the name of Akinkugbe’s excellent Instagram page that kicked off this project for her - and she has a fab podcast, A Shared Gaze, too. This is not simply a survey of important and influential black artists, though you will find plenty of those mentioned and analysed here — it’s also a discussion about black sitters and models you probably overlooked in Old Masters, the missing stories that we aren’t taught at school and university and that we don’t see in public museums, and the current work of curators to redress this balance in the UK, Europe and the US.
The book features the work of artists you’ve probably heard of - Yinka Shonibare, Sonia Boyce, Lynette Yiadom-Boakye - with 40+ reproductions of paintings, photography and installations within the pages, but for me there were also new discoveries too, including some artists who have ‘remixed’ famous works (the Titian!) to quite literally reframe our gaze. Akinkugbe also champions exhibitions and spaces that centre art by, about and for black, African and diaspora artists, from London and New York to Rotterdam and Cape Town, interspersed with her personal stories, including searching for the only painting of a black woman in the Louvre, Marie-Guillemine Benoist’s 1800 Portrait of Madeleine. My only complaint: I want more of this.
The Absence (Budgie)
Budgie - real name Peter Clarke - has written a quietly intense music memoir for White Rabbit Books. Budgie is best known as the drummer for Siouxsie and the Banshees and one half of and multi-instrumentalist for the band The Creatures (also with ex-wife Siouxsie Sioux). He drummed on The Slits’ debut record Cut, hung out during The Cure sessions, the list goes on: the post-punk and alt-pop tour and studio tales here from London to Berlin to LA to Japan are tantalising and heart-breaking in equal measure.
The melancholic throughline is not surprising for the time and the industry - Budgie reflects on love, loss, addiction, abuse, turbulence - but here it’s both very honest and trying to be generous to all concerned. The addition of sketches of Clarke’s - mostly self-portraits, drawn through the decades, brings us further into the inner workings of his mind and there’s a wealth of detail on composing, drumming, arranging and experimenting in the studio, with Budgie’s recollections of making the Banshees albums Kaleidoscope, Juju, A Kiss in the Dreamhouse and more.
Fatherhood (Augustine Sedgewick)
There have been a load of books written about motherhood - the question of it, the experience of it, the existential challenges of it - in the past five to ten years so I’m hoping Augustine Sedgewick’s book Fatherhood kicks off a similar trend. If I was being cheeky, I’d say this is a grand history of all the ingenious ways great men and great thinkers have come up with to make being a father about anything other than cooking, cleaning and caring related chores. But that would be rude to this thoughtfully written series of explorations of where ideas of fatherhood have come from and which personal and political crises have formed them, from the consequences of Socrates’ pig nose to Henry Thoreau’s complex feelings towards the cedar wood used to make pencils.
Sedgewick, who has also written a history of coffee, takes us from Babylonian kings and the Ten Commandments, through Plato’s Republic, Saint Augustine’s Original Sin, Henry VIII’s obsession with having a son, right up to the invention of the ‘dad’ in the mid to late 20th century. He looks at how figures including Thomas Jefferson, Darwin, Freud and Bob Dylan thought of their own fathers, how they treated their own children and what impact all that had on their era-defining work and lives. Sedgewick’s ultimate answer, which came from a chat with his young son, is very sweet.
L.A. Baby! (Tim Key)
It’s Tim Key Summer over here: his indie film The Ballad of Wallis Island is a sleeper hit at the cinemas and he’s back at Edinburgh Fringe this month, too. Shortlist ed-in-chief Gerald Lynch had a nice chat with Key recently and he’s also read this cracking anthology of the comedian/poet/actor’s stint in Hollywood, filming an under-wraps sitcom (possibly but possibly not a spin-off of The Office named The Paper) while staying in an AirBnb for three months.
The review: “it’s hilarious — bite-sized chunks of lunacy, self-aggrandizing and self-effacing in equal measure, as the lines between Tim’s real-world experience and the exaggerated ramblings of his comedy shadow increasingly merge.”
Key says, helpfully, that some of it is real and some of it’s not. So that clears that up, then.
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