Check out what the Non-Fiction Adult Book Group has been reading this past year. The Non-Fiction Book Group welcomes readers interested in a variety of contemporary non-fiction and meets on the 4th Wednesday of the month September through May in the PWPL Conference Room at 2 p.m.

Book descriptions in this article are adapted from publishers’ summaries and library catalog records.


“Everything is Tuberculosis” by John Green (616.995 GR) –In 2019, author John Green met Henry Reider, a young tuberculosis patient at Lakka Government Hospital in Sierra Leone. In the years since that first visit to Lakka, Green has become a vocal advocate for increased access to treatment and wider awareness of the healthcare inequities that allow this curable, preventable infectious disease to also be the deadliest, killing over a million people every year. In “Everything Is Tuberculosis”, John tells Henry’s story, woven through with the scientific and social histories of how tuberculosis has shaped our world–and how our choices will shape the future of tuberculosis.

“Everything I Learned, I Learned in a Chinese Restaurant” by Curtis Chin (921 CHIN) is the Great Michigan Read for 2025-26! Nineteen eighties Detroit was a volatile place to live, but above the fray stood a safe haven: Chung’s Cantonese Cuisine, where anyone–from the city’s first Black mayor to the local drag queens, could sit down for a warm, home-cooked meal. Here was where, beneath a bright-red awning and surrounded by his multigenerational family, filmmaker and activist Curtis Chin came of age. Along the way he learned to embrace his identity as a gay ABC, or American-born Chinese and how to navigate the divided city’s spiraling misfortunes.

“Four Mothers” by Abigail Leonard (306.8743 LE) is an intimate narrative of four women’s experience with motherhood- Anna from Finland, Tsukasa from Japan, Sarah from the U.S., and Chelsea from Kenya. Each are navigating the best and worst moments of their child’s first year on this earth. As nations around the world debate programs like paid leave, universal daycare, reproductive healthcare, and family tax incentives, “Four Mothers” offers a uniquely intimate, moving portrait of what those policies mean for parents on the ground–and considers what modern families really want.

“A Walk in the Park” by Kevin Fedarko (917.9132 FE) — A few years after quitting his job to pursue an ill-advised dream of becoming a whitewater guide on the Colorado River, Kevin Fedarko was approached by his best friend, National Geographic photographer Pete McBride, with a vision as bold as it was harebrained. Together, they would embark on an end-to-end traverse of the Grand Canyon–a journey that, McBride promised, would be “a walk in the park.” They struggled to make their way through the all-but impenetrable reaches of the canyon’s truest wilderness; and where, even today, there is still no trail spanning the length of the country’s best-known and most iconic landmark. Along the way, members of the canyon’s eleven Native American tribes brought them face-to-face with layers of history that forced them to reconsider myths at the very center of our national parks–and exposed them to the threats of commercial tourism. Even Fedarko’s dying father, who had first pointed him toward the chasm more than forty years earlier but had never set foot there himself, opened him to a new way of seeing the landscape.

Amy Salminen is the Adult Services Department Head at the Peter White Public Library in Marquette.