iRead Non-Fiction

A Denver jazz legend, Charlie Burrell joined the Denver Symphony in 1949 as the first person of color under contract with a major orchestra. In 1959 he moved to San Francisco to become the first person of color in the San Francisco Orchestra. In his more than 60 years as a professional musician, he played for conductors including Arthur Fiedler and Pierre Monteux, and worked with a who’s who of jazz greats – appearing on stage with the likes of Billie Holiday, Charlie Parker, and Lionel Hampton.

As an ever-more partisan, but also an ever-more diverse and accepting America continues to find its way in a changing world, A War for the Soul of America reminds us of how we got here, and what all the shouting has really been about.

Cat Warren is a university professor and former journalist with an admittedly odd hobby: She and her German shepherd have spent the last seven years searching for the dead. Solo is a cadaver dog. What started as a way to harness Solo’s unruly energy and enthusiasm soon became a calling that introduced her to the hidden and fascinating universe of working dogs, their handlers, and their trainers.

At age thirty, Kyle Boelte finds himself living in San Francisco, amidst an ever-changing sea of fog, and struggling to remember his brother Kris, who committed suicide in the family’s Denver home when Boelte was just thirteen. In this impressive debut, Boelte sets up a dual narrative: one investigates San Francisco’s climate to explain the science behind the omnipresent fog; another explores Boelte’s memory as well as letters, notes, newspaper articles, and other artifacts that tell the story of his brother’s short life and eventual suicide.