Gilbert Cruz:

I have to second Maureen’s recommendation. All the books she is talking about are great, but I really love that one.

One I will talk about is “Master Slave Husband Wife” by Ilyon Woo. This is a piece of historical narrative nonfiction. It is about a couple in 1848. They live in Georgia. They are an enslaved couple. And right before Christmas, they decide to make a run for it, to leave Georgia and try to escape to the North.

And the way that they do this is by disguising the wife, Ellen Craft, who is a light-skinned African American, as a wealthy white man. And her husband serves or play-acts her servant. And they make this four-day journey. It’s very tense. It’s amazingly researched. That’s just the first part of the story.

You get a peek into their lives after they make it to the North, the way they got involved in anti-slavery advocacy. It’s a historical drama. It’s a love story that reads like a novel. It’s quite an amazing book.

The second nonfiction book I will talk about is a book called “Fire Weather.” This one is set now. This one is set in present time. It is a climate change book, “Fire Weather” by John Vaillant. It’s ostensibly about the 2016 Fort McMurray wildfire, which took place in Canada. Fort McMurray is an oil boomtown.

It is a place that popped up and has made great wealth for people based on extraction of oil from the ground. That extraction has led to climate change, and that climate change has led to a giant wildfire that resulted in the evacuation of almost 100,000 people in 2016. And, again, it’s a book that reads like a novel.

It mixes a beat-by-beat account of a wildfire with the history of oil extraction, climate change. It’s just masterfully done.