LEILA FADEL, HOST:
Springtime is officially here, and a new season means a new crop of books we're looking forward to. Here to shout out some nonfiction books is Andrew Limbong. He hosts NPR's Book Of The Day podcast. Hey, Andrew.
ANDREW LIMBONG, BYLINE: Hey, Leila.
FADEL: OK. So I'm excited to hear what I should read for the spring. So between now and June, we've got some memoirs, some reportage. Where do you want to start?
LIMBONG: Let's start with the biggest book of the bunch. And I mean that quite literally (laughter). The Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer Ron Chernow has got a new book coming out in May. This is the guy that wrote definitive biographies of George Washington, Ulysses S. Grant and, of course, Alexander Hamilton. That last book inspired a musical you might have heard of. Chernow's got a new book coming out and it's called "Mark Twain." And this bad boy is, like, 1,200 pages long.
FADEL: Ugh.
LIMBONG: So, you know, it's one of those books you really got to settle into. But I think Chernow's resume proves that it'll be time well spent.
FADEL: So let's stay in the biography lane for a bit. You flagged another book that's a deep look at a polarizing figure.
LIMBONG: Yeah. This one comes from another Pulitzer winner, Robin Givhan. She's the fashion critic at The Washington Post. And she's coming out with a book called "Make It Ours," which is a biography of the fashion designer Virgil Abloh, who died in 2021 when he was 41 years old. Now, he was the first Black American to become an artistic director at the luxury fashion brand Louis Vuitton. And even before that, his brand Off-White was all about making people think about what counts as, quote-unquote, "high fashion," right? So his whole career was this mishmash of streetwear, hip-hop culture, postmodernism, corporate branding. You know, all of that is to say, even if you don't care about what's going on on the runway - right?...
FADEL: Yeah.
LIMBONG: ...I think learning about Abloh is a unique way to understand popular culture at large.
FADEL: And speaking of popular culture. Any celebrity memoirs you're looking forward to?
LIMBONG: All right, Leila. So I'm a 35-year-old man who still thinks fart jokes are funny, right?
FADEL: OK.
LIMBONG: And so...
FADEL: Thank you for the context.
LIMBONG: ...It's no surprise - yeah, the band Blink-182 played a very important part in my life.
(LAUGHTER)
LIMBONG: And so I was stoked to hear Mark Hoppus, the bassist, has a new memoir coming out this week. It's titled "Fahrenheit-182." And he goes through the band's come-up, the highs of the MTV era and then the cancer he was diagnosed with a few years ago. But I got to take an early look at it, and it's really this touching look at his friendship with Tom DeLonge, the other guitarist and other vocalist in the band. You know, they go through their ups and downs, like you do in any long-term relationship. And I think fans of the band will appreciate how open Hoppus is about stuff like, oh, you know, when this happened, that hurt my feelings, or when that happened, I was the one being a jerk.
FADEL: I mean, I love a good memoir. I also - a bad memoir is pretty tough (laughter). So what about memoirs, though, from noncelebs?
LIMBONG: I don't know if you remember that book "Blankets" that came out in 2003.
FADEL: Yeah.
LIMBONG: That was the graphic memoir by cartoonist Craig Thompson, and it still comes up in the news from time to time for being pulled from library shelves for its sexual content. Thompson's got a new graphic memoir out titled "Ginseng Roots," and it's about how he grew up in rural Wisconsin, working on ginseng farms. I didn't know this until reading the book, but apparently, Wisconsin is, like, a top producer of cultivated ginseng, and this book is all about taking this, like, big global story about trade and agriculture and telling it through the eyes of Thompson as a kid.
FADEL: OK. I think we've got time for one more book.
LIMBONG: OK, real quick. This is for, like, hardcore literature fans. It's titled "Toni At Random" by Dana A. Williams. And it's a look at Toni Morrison's editing career.
FADEL: Oh.
LIMBONG: You know, people generally know her as an author of, like...
FADEL: Right.
LIMBONG: ..."The Bluest Eye" and "Beloved." But this book is all about Morrison's time at Random House and how she was picking projects and working behind the scenes, editing writers like Muhammad Ali and Angela Davis.
FADEL: Andrew Limbong, host of NPR's Book Of The Day podcast. Thanks, Andrew.
LIMBONG: Thanks, Leila.
(SOUNDBITE OF BLINK-182 SONG, "ALL THE SMALL THINGS") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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