Books like Drag Queens and Beauty Queens — picked by fans

Starting from the premise that beauty pageants are often dismissed as “frivolous, meaningless, or carnivalesque and therefore unworthy of serious sustained intellectual scrutiny,” (4) Banet-Weiser shows how class and race, patriotism, and community values are embodied on the pageant stage. Crucially, she proves that the Miss America pageant doesn’t mean “one thing to one audience” and explains how what may seem like an expression of individual ambition is more frequently a reflection of national ideals—and biases.  

Miss America memoirs tend to be a frothy, humble-braggy business, but Kate Shindle’s well-researched, searingly honest exposé Being Miss America: Behind the Rhinestone Curtain is complex and entertaining. It includes a lively narrative history of the pageant, a warts-and-all account of her own (successful) bid for the 1998 title, a damning analysis of its hypocrisies and shady business practices, and the revelation that competing gave her eating and exercise disorders. She courageously calls herself a hypocrite for publicly pretending Miss America “was all about the big picture while privately striving for an impossible aesthetic.” Still, because of the power it gave her to change the world through her AIDS awareness platform, Shindle, now an actress and president of the Actors Equity Association, says “I wouldn’t trade that year for anything.” 

This anthology spans a remarkable and surprising range of topics including first-hand accounts by pageant winners—and losers—along with rich historical context. Historian Kimberly Hamlin documents the first Miss America Pageant (launched a year after women won the vote), showing how it both appropriated the format of suffrage pageants and defined itself in opposition to them. Feminist scholar Donelle Ruwe explains why becoming Miss Meridian [Miss.] in 1985 had an unexpectedly positive impact on her life, even though she considers beauty pageants to be “oppressive” and “degrading.” And the African-American scholar Gerald Early’s riveting “Waiting for Miss America” weighs the racial implications of Vanessa Williams’ 1983 crowning as the first Black Miss America. “[S]he was the most loved and most suspect woman in America,” he writes. Suspect, because “some blacks don’t trust her motives and some whites don’t trust her abilities.”  

A history of campus pageants going back to the 1920s, Queens of Academe considers not only their “calibrations of class and femininity,” but also their racial and (overwhelmingly Christian) religious underpinnings. Tice chronicles how campus competitions (many of which are feeder pageants for Miss America) allayed fears that educated women would renounce home and hearth, and traces the ways they’ve evolved to reflect social progress. Two chapters—“We are Here: Pageants as Racial ‘Homeplaces’ and Ethnic Combat Zones” and “Flesh and Spirit: Bibles, Beauty and Bikinis”—examine neglected aspects of pageant scholarship, showing how Black swimsuit contestants faced a unique challenge in deflecting the pernicious Jezebel trope by proving their worth through demonstrations of etiquette, grooming, and racial progress. Even male contestants swagger through these pages—including a Mr. Harvard hopeful who competed in see-through tape and rose-petal pasties. 

Most people were drawn to this work because of the HBO television series of the same name. While there was, to be kind, a great deal of exaggeration in the series, Johnson’s thorough research for the book provides an accurate and fascinating account of the history of Atlantic City and its legendary political boss Enoch “Nucky” Johnson.

Janet has a penchant for coming up with the craziest and most outrageous scenes with her characters who go around investigating strange cases as bounty hunters. This is a short and sweet holiday version based on the original Stephanie Plum series. Every book features explosions, mishaps, romantic hookups, and epic failures. She makes me laugh every time, and I don’t feel as bad about having an old car, small apartment, empty fridge, or lack of romance. Totally worth it.

The Jersey Devil, is a horrifying creature said to lurk in the rugged New Jersey pine barrens.

It’s been the subject of (fruitless) searches and scary legends for well over a century. But it’s not an intrepid cryptozoologist or weekend monster hunter who finally cornered the beast, but instead two historians, Brian Regal and Frank Esposito.

Just as Jay Smith tackled the beast of Gévaudan as a historial mystery, the pair trace the origins of the Jersey Devil from an eighteenth-century settler named Daniel Leeds to the present day.

Along the way we find a smattering of compelling –yet evidence-free—eyewitness reports, much folklore, some professional feuds, and several outright hoaxes (including a painted kangaroo exhibited as the Devil!)

As with the chupacabra and other monsters, the true story is in many ways more interesting than the fictional one. 

Baseball is for girls too!

A simple but lyrical picture book biography of Effa Manley, an African American baseball-loving girl who became the owner of a pro baseball team—and the only woman inducted into Baseball Hall of Fame, to date! Don Tate’s detailed, vibrant illustrations will cause readers to pause before every page turn.

The premise is simple but ingenious. Winik catalogs the lives and deaths of people she’s known throughout her life, some well, others hardly at all. Each entry is no longer than a page or two, and her writing is stark and unruffled, creating moments of dark humor. She never glorifies the departed, yet her emotion buzzes below the surface. And you immediately wonder how your own page or two might go.

I grew up in Los Angeles in the 1970s and 1980s, when toxic pollution hung in the air and tainted the drinking water, ocean, and soil in ways much more plainly evident than today. Because of this, I am drawn to investigative journalism that holds industrial polluters to account. 

This is a towering work of narrative journalism that explains the causes of a mysterious cancer cluster in a bucolic town on the New Jersey shore. Fagin unspools the knotty science of epidemiology with the on-the-ground reality of a small town coming to grips with a rising, mysterious cancer epidemic. 

It’s an easy read for such a weighty topic, showing how science and the hard work of regulators and journalists can change the world by exposing the truth.