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The 50 Best Nonfiction Books of the Past 25 Years

Slate’s books team selects the definitive works of reporting, memoir, and argument of the past quarter-century..

“As a writer, I prefer to get bossed around by my notebook and the facts therein,” David Carr wrote in his reported memoir The Night of the Gun , one of Slate’s 50 best nonfiction books of the past 25 years. Carr was mulling over the difference between fiction and nonfiction, the novelist’s art and the reporter’s craft. “They may not lead to a perfect, seamless arc, but they lead to a story that coheres in another way, because it is mostly true.”

In the work of canon-building , nonfiction tends to get short shrift . While memoir has gained a foothold in the literary conversation, narrative and reported nonfiction tend to be ignored. It can be easy to dismiss these forms as the worthwhile but fundamentally unliterary assemblage of facts into paragraphs. Yet what reader hasn’t had her mind expanded, her heart plucked, her conscience stirred by a nonfiction book? The responsibility the writers of such books take on, to arrange the facts of the world into a form that makes sense of its tumult, can produce in the reader a kind of clarity of thought that no other genre can match.

Slate’s list of the definitive nonfiction books written in English in the past quarter-century includes beautifully written memoirs but also books of reportage, collections of essays, travelogues, works of cultural criticism, passionate arguments, even a compendium of household tips. What they all share is a commitment to “mostly truth” and the belief that digging deep to find a real story—whether it’s located in your memory, on dusty archive shelves, in Russian literature, in a slum in Mumbai—is a task worth undertaking.

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Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder: Pronged Ants, Horned Humans, Mice on Toast, and Other Marvels of Jurassic Technology  by Lawrence Weschler (Pantheon, 1995)

“What kind of place  is  this exactly?” Lawrence Weschler asks the proprietor of the oddball Los Angeles storefront museum he stumbles into one day, where the exhibits are surprising, whimsical, and in fact often (but not always!) entirely made up. In Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder, Weschler spins the story of the Museum of Jurassic Technology’s unlikely creation into an entirely winning meditation on human ingenuity and creativity, a thought experiment about how the mind responds to being  amazed . The result is   a deceptively simple book that—like the 16 th -century “wonder cabinets” that, Weschler explains, served as the very first museums—opens to reveal astonishments untold.

Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder

By Lawrence Weschler

Into the Wild  by Jon Krakauer (Villard, 1996)

In April 1992, Christopher McCandless, a young man in search of wild, untrammeled experience, hiked into the Alaskan wilderness. Four months later, his body was found by a moose hunter. Krakauer sets out to unravel the mystery of how this adventure ended in tragedy, and the tiny mistakes that cost McCandless his life, by reading McCandless’ journals, talking to his friends, and traveling to the abandoned bus where McCandless spent his last months. Through his reporting of McCandless’ passionate and foolhardy journey into transcendence—and writing about his own, similar youthful experiences—Krakauer explores our modern relationship to the wilderness and the deep desire many young people feel to seek out unthinkable danger.

Into the Wild

By Jon Krakauer

Madeleine’s World: A Biography of a Three-Year-Old  by Brian Hall (Houghton Mifflin, 1997)

Hall’s quixotic premise—to write a detailed biography of his own daughter, Madeleine, from infancy through toddlerhood to small-kidness—works only because Hall is such a curious observer and imaginative interpreter of his subject. That subject is, of course, Madeleine but also childhood , the period of almost incomprehensible development between zero and 3, the simultaneous flowerings of action, reason, and self-awareness. Even nonparents will be fascinated by  Madeleine’s World  for the ways it delves deep into the thought patterns and imaginative leaps readers half-remember from their own childhoods; for parents, the book—in its insistence that to  pay attention  is to love—can be almost unbearably moving.

Madeleine’s World

By Brian Hall

The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures by Anne Fadiman (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1997)

This deeply researched, profoundly empathetic story of cultural miscommunication in medicine focuses on the case of Lia Lee, the doted-on youngest daughter in a family of Hmong refugees in rural Northern California. Lia had an unusual and severe form of epilepsy. Doctors at the American hospital where her family sought treatment prescribed an elaborate drug regimen to control her seizures. Her family, on the other hand, believed the doctors’ recommendations made the child sicker and failed to address what they saw as the cause of her illness: spirits that had kidnapped her soul and needed to be placated with animal sacrifices. Fadiman shows great respect for the Hmongs and their culture, devoting alternate chapters to their beliefs and history, without ever pretending that their folk cures did Lia any good. It’s Fadiman’s commitment to sympathetically depicting both sides without ceding all judgment entirely that makes this case study so impressive. Both sides were united in their devotion to the little girl’s welfare, and Fadiman ultimately argues that if the physicians had been more willing to better understand the Hmong people and engage with Lia’s parents and their beliefs, they might have saved Lia from her sad fate.

The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down

By Anne Fadiman

A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments by David Foster Wallace (Little, Brown, 1997)

Although he’s now best known for his 1996 novel, Infinite Jest, Wallace made his reputation, particularly among younger readers in the late ’90s, as an essayist and a very particular sort of journalist. His editors at Harper’s sent him to a state fair and on a holiday cruise, pastimes whose reputations for carefree, middle American fun seemed hopelessly alien to Wallace himself, a hyperactive observational machine desperate to shed his own self-consciousness but incapable of doing so. The results, included in this collection of essays, were hilarious and revelatory; who knew it was even possible to write that way, to acknowledge how difficult it is for a certain kind of media-soaked mind to stop making associations and references, to forget itself? In these pieces, Wallace makes himself—and his doomed attempts to fit in and have a kind of fun he doesn’t really believe in—the butt of the joke, and a very funny joke it is (although less so in light of his suicide in 2008). This collection also includes some top-notch writing on tennis, and Wallace’s still-relevant essay on television and fiction, “E Unibus Pluram,” but the cruise ship and state fair pieces still shine the brightest.

A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again

By David Foster Wallace

Out of Sheer Rage: Wrestling With D.H. Lawrence by Geoff Dyer (North Point Press, 1998)

Surely the funniest book ever written about writer’s block, this “study” of D.H. Lawrence, a favorite author of Dyer’s, is more travelogue and memoir than the “sober, academic” work the author originally set out to pen. Pinging from Paris to Rome to Greece to Taos, New Mexico, Dyer makes literary pilgrimages that result in no epiphanies. One place is too hot to get anything done; another is too beautiful. One is too cacophonous; another is too tranquil. He comically works on a novel to avoid his Lawrence book when he’s not working on the Lawrence book to avoid his novel. (“At first I’d had an overwhelming urge to write both books but these two desires had worn each other down to the point where I had no urge to write either.”) His ennui is operatic and ridiculous. And yet, through the cracks between Dyer’s torpor and his dissatisfaction, a tribute to Lawrence—that great proponent of passionate living—finally emerges. Lawrence knew well the paradox at the center of a writer’s life, which is that life is the subject of writing and yet writing is not living; the two cancel each other out. The only sensible response to this absurd dilemma is laughter, and Dyer’s readers will enjoy plenty of that.

Out of Sheer Rage

By Geoff Dyer

The Tennis Partner: A Doctor’s Story of Friendship and Loss  by Abraham Verghese (HarperCollins, 1998)

Abraham Verghese was a doctor at a teaching hospital in El Paso, Texas, when he met medical student David Smith, a burned-out ex–tennis pro from Australia.  The Tennis Partner  is, in part, the story of the friendship that grew between the two men as they interact at work and on the tennis court, with Verghese encouraging Smith to rekindle his love of the game and Smith counseling Verghese through the difficult end of his marriage. If it were only a closely observed, intimate portrait of a close and meaningful friendship, the book would already be an enormous success. But Smith, an addict in recovery, falls back into drug use, and the final third of the book is both a suspenseful portrait of a doctor trying to save a life and a moving meditation on the limits of what friends can do when facing the monster of addiction. Carrying us through it all is Verghese’s voice: empathetic, rueful, honest to a fault, and always kind.

The Tennis Partner

By Abraham Verghese

We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families: Stories From Rwanda by Philip Gourevitch (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998)

Media reports during the genocidal 1994 massacres in Rwanda were spotty and confusing. Gourevitch, a journalist, was determined to understand how a country united by a single language and religion could become so divided that one part of its population would suddenly turn on the other, killing a million of their fellow citizens, including their own neighbors. He traveled in the African nation for nine months, visiting sites of slaughter, interviewing war criminals in prison camps, gathering the stories of those who escaped by the skin of their teeth. But We Wish to Inform You is more than a masterpiece of war reportage. Gourevitch digs down to the roots of the genocide, locating them in the leftover resentments fostered by colonialism and a civil war. Above all, he blames the schemes of the ruling Hutu elite, who deliberately engineered the massacre by using radio, Rwanda’s primary means of mass communication, to foment murderous hatred among Hutus toward the Tutsi minority. This plan went unhampered by international intervention, even after Western leaders became aware of the atrocities being perpetrated. Although beautifully written, this book is not easy to read, but the insights Gourevitch arrives at are more essential than ever.

We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families

By Philip Gourevitch

Home Comforts: The Art and Science of Keeping House  by Cheryl Mendelson (Scribner, 1999)

Beautifully written and nearly deranged in its comprehensiveness,  Home Comforts  holds what seems an entire culture’s collected wisdom on fabric selection, lighting design, clothes folding, waste disposal, dishwashing, food storage, table setting, closet organization, and piano tuning. Mendelson’s irreplaceable guide to stain removal spans four pages, from  adhesive tape to crayon to mustard all the way to  urine . But this isn’t just a handbook; above all,  Home Comforts  is animated by Mendelson’s respect and affection for the duties and pleasures of housekeeping. Every one of its 884 pages is an absolute joy to read, and no book is more deeply comforting to neat freaks—or inspirational to slobs.

Home Comforts

By Cheryl Mendelson

The Battle for God by Karen Armstrong (Knopf, 2000)

After 9/11, Armstrong, a former nun turned popular historian of religion, seemed like some kind of prophet: She had published her history of fundamentalism, The Battle for God, the preceding year. Readers turned to her in droves, trying to understand what felt like a sudden, unanticipated, overwhelming menace. As a result, Armstrong’s take on fundamentalism has shaped our understanding of the phenomenon more than perhaps any other thinker’s. Fortunately, hers is an insightful analysis, identifying the similarities among fundamentalists of all three major monotheistic religions: Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. Most importantly, she recognizes that all forms of fundamentalism are reactions to the dislocation and confusion of modernity even as fundamentalists embrace modern tools like mass and social media. Lucid, wide-ranging, and persuasive, The Battle for God provides a framework for understanding more than the three religions it focuses on. It only becomes more relevant with every year.

The Battle for God

By Karen Armstrong

A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers (Simon & Schuster, 2000)

If you were a semifeckless, amply flawed but eminently clever twentysomething Gen Xer at the turn of the 21 st century, and you were writing a memoir about how your parents died within five months of each other when you were a senior in college, leaving you to care for your 8-year-old brother, you faced a choice. You could present your story with purported sincerity (as pretty much anyone in their late 20s would do today). Or, if you were painfully aware that so much of what fronts as sincere is in fact ungenuine or calculating sentimentality and otherwise bogus, you could come up with a new style. It would need to be a style that insisted on scrutinizing and mocking and apologizing for itself, that veered vertiginously between the playful and the stark. Eggers, of course, chose the latter, producing a book that was hugely influential—that still is hugely influential, to judge by, among other things, the prevalence of a certain exclamation mark–bedazzled school of journalism. Eggers himself was inspired by David Foster Wallace, but unlike Wallace, Eggers was able to hack his way out of the thickets of self-consciousness, or maybe it was even further into them, and arrive at a rock, a kernel of reality, which was his love for, and commitment to, his brother Toph. He left a pretty good path behind him, too.

A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius

By Dave Eggers

Borrowed Finery : A Memoir by Paula Fox (Henry Holt, 2001)

It’s true that Fox’s memoir of the first 20 or so years of her life was published during a boom in autobiographies about awful childhoods, and Fox’s Jazz Age–style bohemian parents were …  difficult. They abandoned her to assorted relatives, friends, and strangers for years at a time, bouncing her from an elderly minister’s house in upstate New York to a Floridian resort, a Los Angeles apartment, a Cuban sugar plantation, and a fancy Montréal boarding school. Her charming, mercurial father drank too much and broke promises, while her mother simply rejected her. But Fox clearly has no interest in crafting a tale of woe. Instead,  Borrowed Finery  is a kind of transcription of memory in its strange spottiness. It comes in pieces, a recording of those incidents, big and small, that are for whatever reason lit up as if by spotlights when we cast our minds back over the great, dark stretches of the past. This memoir is less a narrative than a collage of mysteriously potent moments: a favorite teacher’s kitchen, a dead puppy, a new dress. Best of all is Fox’s prose style—unostentatiously simple, lucid, distilled down to quintessential detail—as close to perfection as the English language gets.

Borrowed Finery

By Paula Fox

American Ground: Unbuilding the World Trade Center  by William Langewiesche (North Point Press, 2002)

“The buildings were not buildings anymore, and the place where they fell had become a blank slate,” William Langewiesche writes of ground zero, the site of the World Trade Center towers’ destruction on Sept. 11. “Among the ruins now, an unscripted experiment in American life had gotten underway.” Langewiesche had nine months of unfettered access to every meeting, decision, and subterranean hellhole at ground zero, which resulted in this astonishingly detailed and deeply emotional look at the labor of thousands of city employees, engineers, and construction workers as they cleaned up the burning, toxic, dangerous wreckage of Lower Manhattan. American Ground is an inspiring portrait of American ingenuity when faced with an impossible task and a gripping exploration of the American psyche in the aftermath of a great shift in the world order.

American Ground

By William Langewiesche

Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble, and Coming of Age in the Bronx  by Adrian Nicole LeBlanc (Scribner, 2003)

Adrian Nicole LeBlanc spent 10 years reporting on a group of young men and women in the west Bronx as they paired off, grew up, escaped, returned, and tried to raise children of their own. Written with a moment-to-moment emotional intensity that drops the reader into the hearts of Jessica, Coco, Lourdes, Mercedes, and Foxy,  Random Family  crackles with immediacy. Brilliantly observant of the social codes and structures that rule the communities it portrays, the book reads like a Jane Austen novel, its heroines constricted by circumstance as well as their own personalities. The most moving moments of this work of deep reportage come when its women find brief moments of peace in good relationships, in family, in jobs they enjoy; but always trouble waits around the corner, to “break open like a burst of billiard balls.”

Random Family

By Adrian Nicole LeBlanc

Can’t Stop Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation  by Jeff Chang (St. Martin’s Press, 2005)

A sweeping cultural history of the dominant American art form of the past 50 years,  Can’t Stop Won’t Stop  traces hip-hop back to its birth in the South Bronx and then back even further, to the Jamaican toasters whose style inspired New York’s first rappers. Chang fills his book with the names and stories of the kind of small-time heroes whose creativity and inspiration get overlooked in so many cultural narratives: the party promoters whose DIY bashes in dingy apartments drew crowds and DJs, the dance crews who drove the community’s passion for this new music, the graffiti artists who brought street style downtown. But he also highlights the stars, from Kool Herc to Rakim to Ice Cube, who innovated and popularized the form for an audience beyond those DIY parties. And in his propulsive, idiosyncratic style, Chang situates the revolution in the political and social context of 20 th -century New York (and America): deeply racist, economically cruel, and ready to explode.

Can’t Stop Won’t Stop

By Jeff Chang

Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic   by Alison Bechdel ( Houghton Mifflin, 2006)

In this moving memoir-as-investigation of her own father’s hidden life, Alison Bechdel combines the skills of an experienced cartoonist—expressive drawing, concise storytelling, mordant humor—with the ingenuity and curiosity of a reporter. Starting with her own journals, Bechdel uncovers dark treasures of her childhood and adolescence as the daughter of a closeted funeral home director in small town Pennsylvania; her clever narrative structure returns to crucial moments again and again, polishing them and holding them up to the light to reveal new facets of meaning. Young Alison and her dandyish father were inversions of each other: “While I was trying to compensate for something unmanly in him,” she writes, “he was attempting to express something feminine through me.” This understated yet beautiful book, an attempt to puzzle out his life and death, thrillingly animates and embodies their relationship.

By Alison Bechdel

The World Without Us by Alan Weisman (Thomas Dunne Books, 2007)

We are a culture intoxicated by apocalypse and ruin, forever telling one another stories about what we’d do to survive should civilization as we know it collapse. But what if humanity itself went poof and left behind the entire apparatus of our existence without a single soul remaining to start over? That is the irresistible premise of Weisman’s book, a thought experiment substantiated by deep research into what it takes to keep the built world functioning and what has happened in the few places (Chernobyl, the Korean Demilitarized Zone) where there has been no one around to prop it up. Weisman, a science journalist, projects a week-by-week progression of flooding subway tunnels, farms reclaimed by grassland, toppling skyscrapers, domestic animals reverting to their feral state, and, less romantically, nuclear reactors melting down, chemical plants exploding into poisonous bonfires, and a vast mass of discarded plastics drifting around the world’s oceans for ages to come. The planet would eventually recover, he assures his readers—if “assure” is even the right word: The air would clear, the waters sweeten, and the animals, birds, and insects would take up residence in our old haunts. It’s a scenario both beautiful and terrifying, the original definition of the sublime, and executed with a methodical bravado that’s breathtaking.

The World Without Us

By Alan Weisman

The Night of the Gun: A Reporter Investigates the Darkest Story of His Life. His Own.  by David Carr (Simon & Schuster, 2008)

In 2008, David Carr had been a respected New York Timesman for years, the paper’s media reporter and a beloved mentor of countless young journalists. But two decades before that, Carr was a junkie—a crack addict who washed out of journalism jobs, who was rung up by the Minneapolis cops nine times, and whose twin daughters were born 2½ months premature to a mother who’d smoked crack the night before their delivery. For  The Night of the Gun , Carr applied his reporter’s eye to his own story, digging into those lost years and uncovering painful and frightening truths about the man he was while in the throes of addiction. Released into a post–James Frey, post–JT LeRoy era when skeptics found memoir increasingly unreliable, Carr’s live-wire combination of autobiography and journalism explores not only the secrets of his own life but also the ways in which the stories we all tell ourselves evolve into the versions we can live with.  The Night of the Gun  makes plain how hard, and how necessary, it is to face the past with diligence and humility.

The Night of the Gun

By David Carr

The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science by Richard Holmes (Pantheon, 2009)

Holmes is our greatest living biographer. Whether he’s recounting Percy Shelley’s rebelliousness, Samuel Coleridge’s descent into opium addiction (Holmes specializes in the Romantic poets), or his own penchant for walking along the paths and roads his subjects once tread, everything he writes is a positive delight to read—charming, unostentatiously erudite, moving. In this unusual work, he considers several British scientists and explorers as the 18 th century gave way to the 19 th . Far from soberly rational, these thinkers were as galvanized by the exhilarating spirit of their times as the poets Holmes usually writes about. William Herschel, who identified the first new planet in centuries; Humphry Davy, who invented electrochemistry and experimented with nitrous oxide; Mungo Park, who searched for Timbuktu; and others were as much adventurers of the imagination as any artist, Holmes insists. Coleridge (the subject of a two-volume Holmes biography and a friend of Davy’s) declared science to be driven by “the passion of Hope” and a vision of transforming the world for the better. Holmes urges his readers to understand that at one time poetry and science stood with linked arms upon the peak of discovery and looked at each other with “a wild surmise” like Cortez and his men in Keats’ sonnet . Here is a book capable of flooding a reader with the same sense of astonishment.

The Age of Wonder

By Richard Holmes

Columbine by Dave Cullen (Twelve, 2009)

The 1999 slaying of 13 people at Columbine High School in Colorado was, as Cullen notes in this definitive account of the tragedy, “the first major hostage standoff of the cellphone age.” As Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, heavily armed, still roamed the hallways of the building, the media, desperate for any information, began to spin a tale of the Trenchcoat Mafia and disaffected goths lashing out at the jocks who’d bullied them. Students hiding from the shooters saw these reports on classroom TVs and echoed them back via their mobile phones. A mythos grew up around the school shooting, the deadliest up to that point, almost entirely fictional, and much of it difficult to dispel. Harris, Cullen concludes, was merely an angry psychopath, and Klebold, his suicidal apostle, but in the aftermath, everyone from onetime adolescent misfits to evangelicals with martyr complexes twisted this bald reality into a story that confirmed their views of the world. Cullen, who was on the scene himself within 15 hours of the crime, spent 10 years teasing out the legends from the truth. The result is an extraordinary work of reportage, a revelation, not just of the shootings themselves but of the myriad misbegotten attempts to find meaning in them.

By Dave Cullen

The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon  by David Grann (Doubleday, 2009)

Percy Fawcett was the last of the great white explorers, a dashing Brit who, in the first decades of the 20 th  century, became obsessed with a fabled ancient civilization deep within the Amazon jungle. For years, Fawcett hunted for his “lost city of Z,” even as he was betrayed by collaborators, weakened by hunger, and attacked by poisonous ants and carnivorous fish. Z finally cost Fawcett his life, along with that of his son, when they both disappeared on a 1925 search. Grann—“nearly 40 years old, with a blossoming waistline”—resolves to tell Fawcett’s story and soon finds himself stuck in the jungle himself, captured, absurdly, by the same lust for discovery that killed his subject. A signal work of narrative nonfiction that both celebrates and satirizes the time-honored tale of the adventurer attacking the wilderness with “little more than a machete, a compass and an almost divine sense of purpose.”

The Lost City of Z

By David Grann

Finishing the Hat: Collected Lyrics (1954–1981)  and  Look, I Made a Hat: Collected Lyrics (1981–2011)  by Stephen Sondheim (Knopf, 2010–11)

Plenty of writers have collected their life’s work into two volumes and assessed it, but no one has done so with as much wit, ruthless honesty, and good humor as Stephen Sondheim, which makes sense, because few writers’ work matches Sondheim’s in those exact qualities. Crucially, these collected lyrics aren’t an exercise in self-gratification; Sondheim is insightful and unsparing about his own mistakes, even the ones that only he is smart enough to see. Take, for example, his notes on the perfectly lovely  Company  song “The Little Things You Do Together”: He bemoans the song’s glibness, calls its tight rhyme schemes “as tiresome as they are elaborate,” and mourns a quatrain he replaced with one he now sees as worse. The result is a pocket history of the past half-century of musical theater, a crash course in the collaborative creative process, and a bottomless craft lecture for anyone who aspires to make something beautiful.

Finishing the Hat

By Stephen Sondheim

Look, I Made a Hat

The immortal life of henrietta lacks  by rebecca skloot (crown, 2010).

In 1951, a 30-year-old black woman was diagnosed with cervical cancer at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore. The cells biopsied from Henrietta Lacks’ tumor, dubbed HeLa cells, soon became the basis for decades of crucial medical research: The polio vaccine, IVF techniques, and advancements in gene mapping all owe their success to the HeLa cells taken from Lacks’ body. Skloot’s impeccably reported book tells a remarkable story of scientific development but also makes an impassioned argument about the way medicine has always used black and poor bodies. In the process of reporting the book, Skloot befriended Lacks’ descendants. Rather than harming the author’s “objectivity,” these friendships transform what was already a very good science book into a deeply humane and crucial interrogation of how technological progress churns along, indifferent to the lives fueling its course.

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

By Rebecca Skloot

The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires by Tim Wu (Knopf, 2010)

It seems obvious today that the internet would trend toward the consolidation of power in the hands of a few major players, but nearly 10 years ago, Wu raised hackles when he argued that all information industries move from openness to concentration unless outside forces intervene. In this book, he follows the histories of telephony, radio, movies, and television, observing that early periods of innovation and access for small, nimble players (such as local telephone companies) always yielded to centralized control. Hollywood tycoons in particular sought to bring every aspect of moviemaking, from the talent to the theaters, under their sway, and only government action succeeded in breaking their stranglehold. The fantasy that the internet’s distributed structure (it has no “master switch”) would keep it forever free of monopolies was a point of faith among the medium’s early adopters, and the intervening years have only underlined how prophetic Wu was in identifying their mistake. He did get some things wrong—social media was a fledgling force at the time, and Google then seemed an admirably open gateway to content compared with Apple—but the stories of those other industries remain a potent warning about the fate of any crucial communications medium in a society that fails to protect itself.

The Master Switch

The new jim crow: mass incarceration in the age of colorblindness by michelle alexander (the new press, 2010).

Alexander was an academic specializing in civil rights when, in the early 2000s, she walked past a protest sign condemning the War on Drugs as the “new Jim Crow.” Her first impulse was to shrug off this claim as conspiracy theory and to go back to what most of her middle-class black friends and colleagues considered their top priority: protecting affirmative action. But over the years, Alexander’s work as a lawyer for the ACLU ultimately led her to agree with the sign’s author. Far from being “just another institution infected with racial bias,” she argues, the criminal justice system, and particularly its drug laws, has replicated the effect of Jim Crow laws, reinforcing a racial caste system in which large numbers of poor black men have been barred from anything better than the most menial employment and from equal participation in civic life. Riveting to read, The New Jim Crow became a surprise bestseller, and it transformed forever the way thinkers and activists view the phenomenon of mass incarceration.

The New Jim Crow

By Michelle Alexander

The Possessed: Adventures With Russian Books and the People Who Read Them by Elif Batuman (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010)

What Batuman, a staff writer for the New Yorker , loves most about Russian literature, and about Russianness itself, are what she calls its “mystifications,” specifically, “the feeling of only half understanding.” In this delectable collection of essays, she describes her travels to such perplexing locales as Tolstoy’s former estate, Uzbekistan, a monastery on an Adriatic island, and graduate school. Hers is a lifelong quest for the grandiose, the melancholic, and—crucially—the absurd. Batuman seems to attract Borgesian peculiarity like a magnet. She journeys to Samarkand to study a language of dubious authenticity, in which one of the few remaining written texts takes the form of love letters between the colors red and green. When Aeroflot loses her luggage, the clerk asks her, “Are you familiar with our Russian phrase, resignation of the soul?” She gets talked into judging a boys’ “leg contest” at a Hungarian summer camp. And while most academic conferences are pretty dull, she attends one in which an old lady turned to another guest and demanded, “I would like to know if it is TRUE THAT YOU DESPISE ME.” When it comes to eccentricity, Batuman holds up her end—her Ph.D. dissertation compared novels to double-entry bookkeeping, and she talked her way into a Tolstoy conference by proposing a paper arguing that the novelist was murdered. While The Possessed is unlikely to enhance readers’ understanding of Dostoevsky, by the end they’ll be having so much fun they won’t care.

The Possessed

By Elif Batuman

Travels in Siberia   by Ian Frazier (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010)

A kind of capstone to a career spent visiting seemingly empty landscapes and finding the warm hearts that beat inside them,  Travels in Siberia  exhibits all of Ian Frazier’s remarkable travel-writing talents. He is deeply curious about everything and everyone he meets. He is patient and observant. He is a well-read, brilliant contextualizer. He effortlessly brings the past to the present and makes connections between person and place, history and destiny. And he’s funny as hell, one of the funniest writers alive. ’Til the day that you die you will remember with squirming laughter Frazier’s descriptions of the nightmarish mosquitoes of Western Siberia, which “came at us as if shot from a fire hose”: “There are the majority, of course, who just bite you anywhere. Those are your general practitioner mosquitoes, or GPs. Then you have your specialists—your eye, ear, nose, and throat mosquitoes.”

Travels in Siberia

By Ian Frazier

The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration by Isabel Wilkerson (Random House, 2010)

At once intimate and sweeping, Wilkerson’s history offers a landmark account of one of the epochal changes in American society: The movement, over six decades, of approximately 6 million black citizens from the South to the Midwest, West, and Northeast. Many of these transplants behaved, as Wilkerson notes, more like refugees than anything else, fleeing Jim Crow laws to form enclaves united by their ties to the towns they’d left behind. (Detaching from the South, one of her sources told her, was like “getting unstuck from a magnet.”) Wilkerson pulls in the book’s focus by following the lives of three individuals: a sharecropper’s wife, a labor organizer, and a doctor who would go on to count Ray Charles among his patients. Although each migrated at a different time for different reasons, their stories share the common thread of flight from Southern society’s pervasive, cruel, and dehumanizing racism. What these hopeful travelers found once they left was often exploitative, but the slight advantages they discovered under those other suns became the springboards for that most American of dreams: a better life.

The Warmth of Other Suns

By Isabel Wilkerson

Harlem Is Nowhere: A Journey to the Mecca of Black America  by Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts (Little, Brown, 2011)

Dreamy, meandering, and ravishing, Rhodes-Pitts’ ode to Harlem summons up the ghosts of the “Mecca of Black America.” As a Texas-born pilgrim to this vexed promised land, she found herself drawn not to the obvious inspirational sites, such as Langston Hughes’ house, but to the remnants of Harlemites past who have been overlooked or half-forgotten: a literary scrapbooker named Alexander Gumby, a photographer specializing in portraits of the dead, the operator of a wax museum. A neighborhood is defined by its eccentrics, and Rhodes-Pitts seeks them out, chatting with old ladies, searching for the author of inspirational messages chalked on the sidewalks, subjecting herself to the lectures of one of the last members of a nearly extinct black nationalist movement. She matches up archival photos of vacant lots and storefronts with the new, gentrifying constructions erupting in their place. Harlem Is Nowhere is a work less of history than of mood, a delicate phantasm, evocative of the aspirations and losses of a remarkable place and all the people who have made it their sanctuary and their home.

Harlem Is Nowhere 

By Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts

The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood by James Gleick (Pantheon, 2011)

To say Gleick’s history of information and communication is wide-ranging is a bit of an understatement. According to Gleick, we are all “creatures of the information,” from the words that make up most of our interactions with one another to the code embedded in our DNA. This book constellates around Claude Shannon, a Bell Labs mathematician and cryptographer who founded information theory with a 1948 paper considering how to measure what it takes to transmit a message from a sender to a recipient—even if that recipient is just a subatomic particle on the other side of the universe wondering which way to spin. Human beings are some of the universe’s most energetic signal transmitters, and when Gleick isn’t explaining information’s relevance to Brownian motion and Gödel’s incompleteness theorem , he’s deep in the more engaging stories of African talking drums, Ada Lovelace’s nascent computer programs , and how the telegram changed the world. Information is not the same thing as knowledge, however, and it is knowledge that this book imparts in great, glorious fistfuls, as it loops through time and space, shedding brilliant light on first one corner of experience, then another. Its breadth and grasp are dazzling.

The Information

By James Gleick

Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity  by Katherine Boo (Random House, 2012)

The product of more than three years of in-depth reporting in a slum near Mumbai airport called Annawadi, Katherine Boo’s masterpiece is a Kafka story for our times, the tale of determined strivers so hemmed in by circumstance, official disregard, and rampant corruption that even those who succeed are punished for their accomplishments. In its portrait of the garbage-sorter Abdul, who winds up in court after a false accusation from a neighbor,  Behind the Beautiful Forevers  depicts a young man who loses everything he’s earned and comes out on the other side declaring that “something had happened to his heart.” His painful moral decision-making reflects a book in which Boo is always careful to portray the ways her subjects exert agency within their own lives, even at the cost of their health and safety. A propulsive, dramatic, heartbreaking book.

Behind the Beautiful Forevers

By Katherine Boo

Far From the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity by Andrew Solomon (Scribner, 2012)

Having interviewed more than 300 people over the course of 10 years, Solomon explores the experience of parenting a child fundamentally different from oneself. The children of these parents are, as Solomon recounts, “deaf or dwarfs; they have Down syndrome, autism, schizophrenia or multiple severe disabilities; they are prodigies; they are people conceived in rape or who commit crimes; they are transgender.” Far From the Tree is mammoth, but its oceanic scope is essential to convey the infinite variety in humanity’s ability to cope with the differences among us. As the collator of all this material, Solomon makes his own emotional and intellectual growth one of the book’s themes, as he describes how his subjects helped him shed the blinders he once wore. At the heart of this extraordinary project is the mystery of what makes a group of people a family. Blood, it turns out, is not always enough, but neither are many other commonalities in identity. Building true kinship starts as a choice and then often comes to seem inevitable, an act of will in the face of daunting odds that ends up feeling like a miracle.

Far From the Tree

By Andrew Solomon

The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot by Robert Macfarlane (Viking, 2012)

Macfarlane cares passionately about two things: landscape and language. This vividly sensuous account of several walking tours, plus a respectable bout of sailing, describes his experiences with ancient routes, most created by peoples whose names have been lost to time, but whose imprint on Earth lives on thanks to the countless feet that have followed them. He argues that similar age-old paths crisscross the sea, remembered by sailors even if they leave no visual trace. Macfarlane’s desire to more fully experience the places he visits—mostly in Britain but also in Spain and Tibet—is so keen he takes off his shoes to feel the rock, grass, heather, and (in one painful incident) gorse under his feet. His travels aren’t without human interest, either; they always seem to include meetings with fascinating poets and artists, like a man who plans to suspend a life-size figure made of human bones and calf skin inside a boulder whose location only a handful of people will ever know. Like all of Macfarlane’s work, this book is a charm against the streamlined, the global, the generically virtual. It is a paean to the irreducible reality of stone and leaf and wave.

The Old Ways

By Robert Macfarlane

People Who Eat Darkness: The True Story of a Young Woman Who Vanished From the Streets of Tokyo—and the Evil That Swallowed Her Up by Richard Lloyd Parry (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012)

The secret of a great true crime book is not how the author writes about the crime, but how skillfully he articulates the effect it has on the survivors and the secrets it betrays about the society that let it happen. Parry, Tokyo bureau chief for the Times of London, covered the story of the murder of Lucie Blackman, a 21-year-old former flight attendant who disappeared while working as a hostess in the city’s Roppongi district. Her body was found in a cave seven months later. Parry offers a devastating portrait of the inadequacies of Japan’s criminal justice system, as it struggled to comprehend that a serial killer was responsible. Eventually, the son of a Korean-Japanese businessman was convicted, absurdly, of abducting and dismembering Blackman but not of killing her. Blackman’s warring divorced parents play major roles in Parry’s account, from the father who kept the search for Lucie going to the embittered mother, who could not resist the opportunity to strike back at her ex. The killer himself is an impenetrable cipher, but Parry portrays the people whose lives he devastated in all their complexity: heroic, flawed, stricken, and ultimately sympathetic.

People Who Eat Darkness

By Richard Lloyd Parry

Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief by Lawrence Wright (Knopf, 2013)

This book might just be the perfect exposé: a consummate journalist writing about an outrageously malfeasant subject and raising urgent themes. Wright fell down this particular rabbit hole after writing for the New Yorker about the Church of Scientology’s wooing of celebrities, and he came in for some tweaking over the extremely measured tone he employs while recounting the shenanigans of the religion’s founder, science-fiction author L. Ron Hubbard, and the even-worse behavior of his successor, David Miscavige. But Wright’s refusal to rant and rave—even when presented with countless examples of church skullduggery, mendacity, and brutality, not to mention the sheer, flagrant kookiness—turns out to be his secret weapon. Making every effort to be fair, allowing for the bad press and outright repression that often greets new religions, Wright assembles a wall of proof, brick by damning, implacable brick. It doesn’t hurt that Scientology’s story is both utterly bizarre—including a prison camp in Southern California, a seagoing headquarters designed to evade the IRS and other authorities, and campaigns to induce mental illness in church critics—and a case study in American self-help hucksterism.

Going Clear

By Lawrence Wright

Lost Girls: An Unsolved American Mystery by Robert Kolker (Harper, 2013)

At least four and possibly as many as 14 murders have been attributed to a still-unknown individual who dumped his victims’ remains along a desolate beachside highway on Long Island. For most true-crime writers, the lack of an identified killer would make this book a nonstarter, but Kolker, who has covered the investigation for New York magazine for several years, turns that liability into a strength. As Kolker tells the story of how more than a dozen young women drifted to the margins of society and became vulnerable to one or more predators, he does justice to the painful complexity of these women’s family lives, their talents and dreams, their battles with substance abuse and sexual violence, and their fraught relationships with their mothers, as well as the friends and relatives who fought to keep their memories alive and the search for their killer going. The unifying features of all their stories are class, poverty, and the economic temptations of sex work. Another is that the authorities did not take their disappearances seriously until four of them were found buried in the same place. Kolker, who has an uncanny ability to play fly on the wall, catches members of the police and the media dismissing the victims; it was only the possibility of a serial killer that made them count. Kolker refuses to let their murderer define them.

By Robert Kolker

The Trip to Echo Spring: On Writers and Drinking by Olivia Laing ( Picador, 2013)

Not all great American writers have been big drinkers, but there are enough souses among them for Laing, a British woman intoxicated by the wide-open promises of our national literature, to engineer a road trip around their boozy misadventures. Although not an alcoholic herself, Laing grew up in a family warped by her mother’s partner’s drinking, and that story weaves through her account of her travels to the places where six men—John Cheever, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Tennessee Williams, Raymond Carver, and John Berryman—wrote, got hammered, and dried out. Laing’s readings of their work are extraordinarily sharp and sensitive, and her description of the places she visited and what happened to her there may be even better. (A bald eagle in flight looks like “a coat thrown into the air, ragged and enormous.”) But the true subject of this gorgeously sorrowful book is the drive toward self-destruction, and what it means to live close to a person who can’t resist its siren call.

The Trip to Echo Spring

By Olivia Laing

The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America by George Packer (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013)

This choral account of American life over the past 35 years is told from the points of view of famous individuals (Newt Gingrich, Elizabeth Warren, Colin Powell, Alice Waters) and unknowns (a black labor organizer, a would-be entrepreneur high on self-help nostrums, an Ohio woman who lost her retirement savings to a Ponzi scheme, and in one bravura chapter, the city of Tampa as it underwent a cascade of mortgage foreclosures following the 2008 recession). Packer strives to transmit each subject’s narrative without editorializing or moralizing, an approach that feels radical a mere six years after the book’s publication, since today the imperative to opine never seems to let up. As a result, The Unwinding is almost disorienting, like coming inside after a day spent walking into a stiff wind. But once you get used to it, Packer’s approach opens up the space to contemplate how these different people experience and respond to their sense that America is coming apart. The few exceptions practically glow with significance, from the tightknit family of poor Floridians who struggled with one setback after another but always had one another’s backs to the owner of a handful of empty motels, who chose to fight the automated foreclosure system with the help of her community and clan. “Usha Patel was not a native-born American,” Packer writes in a typically astute (if atypically subjective) sentence, “which is to say, she wasn’t alone.”

The Unwinding

By George Packer

Wave by Sonali Deraniyagala (Knopf, 2013)

Deraniyagala, an economist at the University of London and Columbia University, was vacationing with her family in Sri Lanka in 2004, when she looked out the window and saw the ocean rise up and rush toward the balcony of their holiday rental. By the end of the day, Deraniyagala had lost her parents, her husband, and their two young sons to the Boxing Day Tsunami. It is the kind of devastation that might seem beyond words, and yet Deraniyagala finds them; she is, it turns out, a very gifted writer. Most of Wave describes the aftermath of the tragedy. It is an account of grief that refuses to turn away from ugliness or wallow in sentiment, and yet it is acutely beautiful because of Deraniyagala’s devotion to the truth. There are weeks of sleeping, then drinking, then a demented campaign to eject the couple that moved into her parents’ old house. Finally, two years after the tsunami, Deraniyagala returned to the London home she once shared with her husband and sons, a place where a dirty old baby bowl repurposed as a garden toy becomes a precious talisman of the lost. Slowly, her pain clears enough for her to fill in portraits of those boys, that man, vivid enough to pierce the reader with a sliver of her own mourning. Deraniyagala’s story alone would have made this book unusual, but it is her artistry that makes it indelible.

By Sonali Deraniyagala

Citizen: An American Lyric  by Claudia Rankine (Graywolf Press, 2014)

Part poetry collection, part memoir, part book-length critical essay,  Citizen  takes risks other books wouldn’t dare, and it reads like no other title on this list. A dazzling meditation on invisibility, blackness, and America,  Citizen  grapples with the double-take moments in daily life: “Hold up, did you just hear, did you just say, did you just see, did you just do that?” And it asks other, more pointed questions: What was rising up in Serena Williams’ throat her entire career? What did the water in New Orleans want? Whose arm is that, flailing from the sea behind J.M.W. Turner’s slave ship? Midway through this wrenching and mordantly funny book, written entirely to an unnamed “you,” Rankine addresses the  first  person, the point of view of the traditional memoir. The first person, she writes, is “a symbol for something”: “The pronoun barely holding the person together.”

By Claudia Rankine

The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History  by Elizabeth Kolbert (Henry Holt, 2014)

The Sixth Extinction  is a moving elegy to the species lost over the centuries to catastrophes both natural and man-made. But it’s also a warning about what awaits the animals of Earth in the Anthropocene, the climate-changed and human-shaped era in which we now find ourselves. The result is a chilling, fascinating history of mass extinction, those once-every-hundred-million-years-or-so events in which the Earth’s population of species crashes. “During mass extinction events,” Kolbert writes, “the usual rules of survival are suspended.” Once-dominant species are wiped out in the geologic snap of a finger. No book has made the reality of how humans are endangering the future not only of their planet but of their species more clear to readers than this beautifully written, perfectly reported, passionately argued model of explanatory science journalism.

The Sixth Extinction

By Elizabeth Kolbert

Stuff Matters: Exploring the Marvelous Materials That Shape Our Man-Made World by Mark Miodownik ( Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014)

Talk about low concept: Stuff Matters is about, among other things, concrete, glass, porcelain, paper, graphite, stainless steel, and plastic. This is the man-made stuff all around us and so mundane we barely give it a second thought. Miodownik, a materials scientist with the soul of a poet, sings of the magic hidden within these ordinary substances. Stuff Matters describes how our stuff (bricks, coffee mugs) gets made and what it may someday be able to do for us (invisibility cloaks, bionic human limbs, exploding billiard balls, an elevator to outer space, concrete that can be rolled up like fabric or purify air). He also celebrates the remarkable properties of everyday stuff we take for granted, like paper, the stuff of love letters and old photographs, and glass—a substance once so rare that a lump of desert sand that had been struck and melted by lightning was one of the most valuable “gems” in King Tut’s tomb at the time of his burial. To read Stuff Matters is to see the humble objects around us afresh and to grasp the wonders they represent for the first time.

Stuff Matters

By Mark Miodownik

Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life  by William Finnegan (Penguin Press, 2015)

You may think you don’t care about a life spent chasing waves all over the world, but William Finnegan’s memoir so precisely distills the “brief, sharp glimpse of eternity” the surfer gets from riding a board through a crystal-blue tube on a perfect run that a hundred pages into  Barbarian Days  you, too, will have stepped through the looking glass. It’s clear from Finnegan’s rueful retelling of his younger days all that he endured due to the life he chose: He experiences terror and pain on the waves; he punishes his body with scrapes, a broken nose, torn ankle cartilage, sun-caused cataracts; relationships with friends and family pale next to the life of a “latter-day barbarian” who rejects the values of duty. But years of hunting surf also create unlikely friendships, from the Hawaiian kids of Finnegan’s Oahu childhood to the “goofyfoot dancer” who helps Finnegan find waves in the cold waters off Long Island, a quick subway ride from the longtime New Yorker journalist’s apartment.  Barbarian Days  is a masterpiece of sports writing, focusing its lens on the smallest unit of both athletic and artistic achievement: the single human body, attempting to do something difficult and beautiful.

Barbarian Days

By William Finnegan

Dreamland: The True Tale of America’s Opiate Epidemic by Sam Quinones ( Bloomsbury Press, 2015)

The opioid epidemic snuck up on a lot of urban middle-class Americans, but not Quinones, who quit his job at the Los Angeles Times to write Dreamland, the first and still the best book-length examination of the crisis. He approached the story from two widely disparate perspectives: from the small towns and cities where doctors’ belief in Big Pharma’s lies about the nonaddictive properties of new drugs like OxyContin led to overprescription and pill mills, and from the obscure Mexican state of Nayarit, where local clans mounted a fully vertically integrated heroin trade, controlling every aspect from growing the poppies to delivering dope to customers’ doors. He reports fully and deeply on both. Quinones’ depiction of the contrast between the strangely healthy and robust communities in Nayarit and the economically and socially disintegrating American towns where the dealers preferred to operate (avoiding clashes with the established drug dealers in metropolitan centers) is both surprising and enlightening.

By Sam Quinones

H Is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald (Grove Press, 2015)

Everyone mourns in her own way, and for Macdonald, after her beloved father’s death, that way was by taming a goshawk, a process described in this scratched, muddy, glorious memoir. A practiced falconer, Macdonald understands how ill-advised her project is; the species is famously hard to train, stubborn in its wildness. But she falls in love with the bird, “a reptile. A fallen angel. A griffon from the pages of an illuminated bestiary. Something bright and distant, like gold falling through water.” Macdonald’s writing is similarly gilded and faintly antiquarian as she pursues the medieval task of training the hawk, named Mabel, to fly to her leather-gloved hand on command. Mabel can’t be cuddled and won’t look up at her with liquid, adoring eyes—this isn’t that kind of sappy, an-animal-saved-me memoir. But the reader gradually realizes that Mabel, with all her difficulty and alien, nonmammalian ways, is exactly what Macdonald needs. The writer is reconciling herself not to loss but to life, a thing as beautiful and terrible, as merciless and vital, as the goshawk.

H Is for Hawk

By Helen Macdonald

Negroland: A Memoir by Margo Jefferson (Pantheon, 2015)

Born just after the end of World War II to a Chicago pediatrician and his “socialite” wife, Margo Jefferson grew up in “Negroland,” the name she gives to the black American elite—a class defined by profession, affluence, pedigree, and to her dismay, skin color and comportment. The appeal of her memoir lies in Jefferson’s beautifully articulated ambivalence about most everything—including memoir itself, a form that, she observes, offers the perpetual temptation to “bask in your own innocence” and “revere your grief.” Jefferson refuses to do either, or to discard the problematic word in her title. “I still find ‘Negro’ a word of wonder, glorious and terrible,” she writes. “A word for runaway slave posters and civil rights proclamations.” Jefferson’s social class fostered her exquisite sense of taste (she became a Pulitzer Prize–winning critic for the New York Times), but its members, as she would grow to understand during the upheaval of the 1960s, also “settled for a desiccated white facsimile, and abandoned a vital black culture.” Jefferson’s memoir of growing up in this milieu, with its strenuous gentility and complex relationship to the American racial caste system, is both loving and darkly ironic, as rich and seasoned as the life it recounts.

By Margo Jefferson

The Odd Woman and the City: A Memoir by Vivian Gornick (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015)

One of her generation’s greatest memoirists ( Fierce Attachments )   and essayists, Gornick devotes this book to puzzling out how she became an “odd woman,” a single and childless urbanite, intoxicated by the street life of Manhattan. A red diaper baby, she fantasized during her Bronx childhood about leading the revolution and finding true love, but as she looks back, she decides that she, like her mother and several of her literary heroines, “was born to find the wrong man,” to seek “the unholy dissatisfaction that will keep life permanently at bay.” In exchange, she got New York, which (almost) never fails to satisfy her with its parade of characters and “the variety and inventiveness of survival technique.” In supple, searching prose, Gornick meditates on the riches of friendship—particularly her bond with Leonard, a gay man who shares her saturnine take on just about everything—and the life of the mind, as well as the self-knowledge that comes with age. For a woman who claims to have “a penchant for the negative,” she has produced a remarkably inspiring book.

The Odd Woman and the City

By Vivian Gornick

How to Survive a Plague: The Inside Story of How Citizens and Science Tamed AIDS  by David France (Knopf, 2016)

For decades, the story of the fight against AIDS seemed one of nothing but frustration, shame, and a body count in the hundreds of thousands. Except that it wasn’t: Even at the height of the epidemic, scientists worked feverishly to understand the virus and its effects—and just as importantly, activists battled to increase those scientists’ funding, to focus and target their research, and to erase the stigma of those who suffered from it. In his monumental history of that battle, from the first cases in the 1970s to the mid-’90s advent of the “triple cocktail” that made AIDS a manageable condition for many economically advantaged Americans, David France notes that many of those activists’ work was extensively documented, because the activists themselves feared they’d never live to see the results of their work. Many of them didn’t. France tells their stories with clear-eyed compassion, leaning not only on his dogged research skills but also on his history as both activist and reporter for the New York Native. This is the crucial book for understanding how one of the great social transformations of our era was not the result of the arc of history bending naturally toward justice but the arc of history bending thanks to the tireless, agonizing work of those who put their lives on the line.

How to Survive a Plague

By David France

Lab Girl by Hope Jahren (Knopf, 2016)

Jahren’s memoir is a paean to her life in science, specifically the kind of science that involves getting your hands dirty and reaching for a specimen vial. She is a professor of geobiology specializing in the life cycle of plants, and while this involves a certain amount of travel and mucking about, she feels most at home in her lab, “a place where I move. I stand, walk, sit, fetch, carry, climb, and crawl. My lab is a place where it’s just as well that I can’t sleep, because there are so many things to do in the world besides that.” As inspiring as it is to read someone writing so well about a line of work whose pleasures often go unsung, the greatest treat in Lab Girl is Jahren’s account of her friendship with Bill, her scientific partner of more than 20 years. A deep and entirely platonic bond between the kind of people who celebrate receiving their advanced degrees by blowing glass tubes full of carbon dioxide into the wee hours is really not the sort of thing you often get to read about. This friendship, as fiercely committed and abiding as any blood tie, is built on junk food, scavenged equipment, wisecracks, and a shared hunger for both knowledge and the task of getting it. When the normally taciturn Bill confesses to feeling alone after his father’s death, Jahren thinks, “no matter what our future held, my first task would always be to kick a hole in the world and make a space for him where he could safely be his eccentric self.” She doesn’t know how to tell him this, so she shows him, and us, instead.

By Hope Jahren

One Day: The Extraordinary Story of an Ordinary 24 Hours in America  by Gene Weingarten (Blue Rider Press, 2019)

Weingarten, a longtime, Pulitzer Prize–winning Washington Post writer, begins his book with a gimmick: He and his editor choose a random day—Sunday, Dec. 28, 1986—and Weingarten sets out to report every single interesting thing that happened. The result is funny, heart-wrenching, chilling, and absurd, as Weingarten chronicles a serial killer, a heart transplant, a tragic fire, an  unlikely romance , a political miscalculation, a Grateful Dead concert—all of them expert portraits of American life in miniature. The book is a stunt, a dare, but it’s also proof of the belief that animates all the books on this list: There are stories everywhere. The nonfiction writer’s job is to look long and hard enough to find them, and to tell them with enough empathy and care to bring them to life.

By Gene Weingarten

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The best nonfiction books: the 2021 baillie gifford prize shortlist, recommended by kathryn hughes.

Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty by Patrick Radden Keefe

Every year the judges of the Baillie Gifford Prize pick out the very best nonfiction books, the shortlist they come up with a brilliant way to find gripping books to immerse yourself in. Here cultural historian Kathryn Hughes , one of this year's judges, talks us through the six books they chose for the 2021 shortlist, books that will draw you in, whatever the subject.

Interview by Sophie Roell , Editor

Aftermath: Life in the Fallout of the Third Reich, 1945-1955 by Harald Jähner & Shaun Whiteside (translator)

Islands of Abandonment: Life in the Post-Human Landscape by Cal Flyn

Things I Have Withheld by Kei Miller

Fall: The Mysterious Life and Death of Robert Maxwell, Britain's Most Notorious Media Baron by John Preston

Free: Coming of Age at the End of History by Lea Ypi

1 Aftermath: Life in the Fallout of the Third Reich, 1945-1955 by Harald Jähner & Shaun Whiteside (translator)

2 empire of pain: the secret history of the sackler dynasty by patrick radden keefe, 3 islands of abandonment: life in the post-human landscape by cal flyn, 4 things i have withheld by kei miller, 5 fall: the mysterious life and death of robert maxwell, britain's most notorious media baron by john preston, 6 free: coming of age at the end of history by lea ypi.

A s a judge, what were you were looking for in the nonfiction books you chose for your 2021 shortlist?

I’m always really interested in what a book’s aftereffects are on me as well. I think that’s quite a good reference point. Am I still thinking about it, even if it’s, ‘what did she mean by this?’ or ‘I wasn’t sure when he said that.’ Something that means that it’s taken up residence in your internal life, that you want to know more about it. For me—and I think I can speak for the other judges—that’s what we’re looking for: something that just sticks with us and makes itself part of our lives.

It’s called the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction , so the books have to be nonfiction. Other than that, could they be about anything?

Nonfiction is a hugely broad church so it can be about anything—as long as it’s not made up. Within nonfiction, you’ve got all these other genres that we often think of as genres on their own—like biography , autobiography , narrative history, essays .

Let’s turn to the books on the shortlist of the 2021 Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction individually. Why don’t we start with the history book, Aftermath: Life in the Fallout of the Third Reich, 1945-55 by the German journalist Harald Jähner? This was translated from German and I noticed that in German the title was Wolfszeit or ‘the time of wolves’.

It’s so interesting. I imagine it was called that not because there was a sudden influx of wolves into formerly occupied spaces—although there may well have been—but because of the sense of lawlessness. We think of Germany as a place of order and discipline, what Jähner reveals here is ten years of anarchy and very naked individualism. It’s about a period that tends not to get written about. The historiography usually goes to the end of the war, the suicide of Hitler , and then forward to about 1960 and the economic miracle. It’s just very exciting to be told about this period in between where it’s awful, just out of control. It gets to the point where a cardinal says that the seventh commandment, ‘Thou shalt not steal’, no longer applies.

Jähner paints this amazing picture of postwar Germany. I was always brought up to believe that it was a place of enormous collective guilt and soul-searching. What Jähner suggests is that, yes, there’s enormous unhappiness and pain and pity, but it’s the most extraordinary kind of self-pity. The Germans that he talks to and about—he amalgamates a lot of individual stories—think they’ve been badly done by. At one point an editor says, ‘I just get the feeling that the rest of Europe, the rest of the world, hates us. Why would that be?’ There’s an absolute lack of comprehension and it moves very quickly into being resentful about those Jews who survived because they appear to be getting better rations and preferential treatment. People say, ‘It was tough for them, but it was tough for us too!’ Just shocking statements. The Nuremberg Trials were just a bit of victory grandstanding, nothing to do with us. There’s a kind of Teflon coating to this, of just not taking responsibility at all.

“What we were looking for as judges is the sizzle, the excitement, the moment where you pick up a book…and there’s something about it that just hooks you in”

It’s a country completely in ruins, covered in rubble. All the cities have been laid waste and you have people crawling over the ruins. Women are employed as rubble collectors, going over these huge mounds, trying to sort something out, to put something together that looks like Germany.

Jähner also talks about the fact that the men coming back from the front are absolutely shattered, not just physically, there’s also a psychological weariness. A lot of them are impotent and their wives are not that thrilled to see them because it’s not very sexy to have a man coming back who has been on the losing side. There’s a sense of the women, who’ve been on the home front during the war, not wanting these emaciated, puling, weaklings back—they quite like the American soldiers, who look much healthier and have nice teeth, cigarettes, chocolate.

I just found this book such a revelation. It’s a beautiful work of history. Jähner is 68 now and was born in that postwar era. It must have been an incredibly difficult book to write.

It’s a history book: is it very long?

Let’s go on to Empire of Pain, The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty . This is by an American journalist, Patrick Radden Keefe. Why did you choose this book for the shortlist of the 2021 Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction?

It’s an extraordinary book. He’s writing of extraordinary things, but that alone won’t make it a good book. There’s incredible artistry in putting this story together. And because he has a very transparent style—he’s a New Yorker staff writer—and it’s not fancy, it’s very easy to say, ‘Well, he just had to research it and write it down.’ But no, it’s incredibly beautifully done.

It’s about the Sackler scandal, this family that’s made a fortune out of Oxycontin, this very, very addictive opioid that’s killed more Americans than have died in all the wars the country has fought since the Second World War . What he does is go back and look at the origins of the company, Purdue Pharma.

It’s a fascinating story. It’s an immigrant family, Russian Jewish. The father has a grocer’s shop. They work incredibly hard. Against all the odds the three boys, the first generation, all become doctors. It is the American dream. They’re doing something extraordinary and it’s admirable at the start.

They set up a company and are selling very unsexy products. It’s laxatives most of the time. But they have the idea that pharmaceuticals is about marketing. It’s about creating desire and demand, not just fulfilling it. They have a very successful 1970s because they do a lot of work with valium. Then along comes Oxycontin. It’s a story that reads like Succession —that drama series that’s very popular at the moment on HBO. It never becomes a public company, so there are boardroom squabbles, but it’s always family, which is what makes it so thrilling. It’s cousins and brothers not getting on, but getting on enough to decide that they’re going to produce this opioid they’ve stumbled across and they’re going to market the hell out of it.

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There’s also this very, very cozy culture whereby the FDA lets them market this highly, highly addictive and damaging opioid. Doctors become so entranced with it, that they set up pill mills on out-of-city-center car parks, where they sell the stuff off. It’s just the most extraordinary story of moral and physical corruption.

The book also raises the really interesting point that’s often made about gun control. People say, ‘guns don’t kill people, people kill people.’ Can you say that about Oxycontin? Can you say, ‘Look, it’s a choice: you don’t have to put that thing in your mouth’. He deals with that very nicely.

So it’s a perfect blending of family history, dynastic shenanigans on a par with the Borgias, combined with a story that has just ruined so many people’s lives.

The point being, of course, that the Sacklers are known around the world for their philanthropic gestures. There’s barely a Western city (and some in China too) that doesn’t have a Sackler wing or museum or department or a Sackler this or a Sackler that. There are Sackler medical wings, art galleries, Sackler is everywhere.

Yes, I’ve seen their name on buildings for decades, they were major philanthropists well before the opioid crisis. I didn’t realize they’d made their money by marketing drugs, I just presumed it was inherited wealth/old money.

Let’s move on to Islands of Abandonment , which has been shortlisted for a number of prizes this year and is really making waves. This is actually by our deputy editor, Cal Flyn, an Orkney-based journalist and writer. Tell me about it and why you consider it one of the best nonfiction books of 2021. 

I have to admit that because I work as a reviewer and a critic, I’m a little bit sick of nature writing . It’s just been so huge. I wasn’t thinking ‘Oh good, some nature writing!’ when I opened this book. Which just tells you how extraordinarily good the book is—because I was just blown away by it.

What makes it different is that while it’s certainly not a pollyannaish book—it’s not ‘don’t worry about the environment, it’s all going to be fine’—she does find a counter-narrative. She takes us to these desolate places where man has retreated, having apparently spoiled the place for good: Chernobyl , a World War One arsenic factory in France, Bikini Atoll. She goes to these eerie places, these unattractive places, these broken places, places that you wouldn’t wish on your worst enemy, and finds that nature has seeded itself there and is doing interesting things.

She starts off with ‘bings’, which are these mountains of oil shale residue in Scotland. She tells the story of how some of these bings were saved by environmental people, who tried to make them look nice, planting them with special grasses. They haven’t done very well compared with the bings that were just left alone, which are now much, much more diverse and doing much better than the ones that were slightly landscaped to make them look pretty. The book is full of these counterintuitive moments that I just found fascinating. The takeaway message is that when we try and get involved—even when we try and make things better—we make things worse. There’s a sense in which nature is wiser.

Let’s go on to Things I Have Withheld . This is a collection of essays by the Jamaican-born poet Kei Miller. Tell me about this essay collection and why it’s one of the books that made the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction 2021 shortlist.

The essay form is having a moment right now, which is all to the good. I can imagine a few years ago, this book probably wouldn’t have been on the shortlist because somebody would have said, ‘It’s a book of essays, it doesn’t count.’ It’s interesting that the essay form has got this legitimacy now.

Kei Miller is a poet and a novelist. Here, for the first time, he’s writing in a nonfiction voice. He’s of Jamaican origin, he’s Black and queer . He is writing about his own experience, about speaking and not speaking. He’s constantly making the point that he often doesn’t have to speak in certain contexts because his body does it for him. He talks about going to a party or a shop in London and people automatically being slightly afraid because he’s big and he’s Black. It’s how people read him. His body says all sorts of things that he doesn’t authorize, they just happen.

He’s trying to talk about the difficult things. It’s a very knowing collection and he starts off with a letter to James Baldwin , the late African American gay writer. He’s measuring how much has changed between his time and ours, and the answer is not a great deal.

“I’m always really interested in what a book’s aftereffects are on me…I think that’s quite a good reference point”

Most of it is set in Jamaica. There’s one wonderful essay which is about a dinner party. There’s a Black person, a person of Indian heritage and a white woman. He goes into what they’re thinking, their interior lives, all things that can’t be said out loud. On the surface it’s this wonderfully liberal get-together of people, it’s all absolutely fine, but the internal voices are not okay. They’re the things that we daren’t say; that we don’t want to say. He’s interested in the subtext, what is not said and the things that can’t be said but are always being said.

Sometimes he does say things that I understand have got him into trouble. There’s one essay which is about white Jamaican women speaking for the Jamaican experience. He asks, ‘Can you do that? Who speaks for Jamaica?’

Let’s move on to Fall: The Mystery of Robert Maxwell by John Preston. I found this one fascinating because I picked up the book thinking, ‘I really do not feel like reading anything about Robert Maxwell.’ But I couldn’t stop reading, I was just sucked in.

That was completely my experience as well. I thought, ‘Robert Maxwell: why? It’s sad, it’s unpleasant, it was a long time ago.’ And I think I can say all of us judges were just gripped. It was the absolute readability of the book. I think there’s been around a dozen Maxwell biographies—someone counted them all up—and it shows you can still get new things out of an old subject. It’s all about the skill of the writing. John Preston is an immensely experienced journalist, an immensely experienced nonfiction writer. He wrote the Jeremy Thorpe book, A Very English Scandal . He’s also a novelist. All those disciplines, I think, give him something. As a novelist, he knows a good character when he sees one—this amazing, larger-than-life, awful person. As a journalist, he knows you don’t make things up, you go to the sources. Amazingly, he’s managed to speak to three of the Maxwell children, as well as Maxwell’s surviving sister. I don’t think anyone has managed that before. He also gets an interview with Rupert Murdoch, which hasn’t been done before on the subject of Maxwell. Then, as a nonfiction writer, he has the ability to tell this extraordinary story about a man who is just making things up as he goes along, a man who makes himself to the moment, this self-created monster.

Maxwell was born into an impoverished Czechoslovakian Jewish family on the eve of Nazism. It was very traumatic; he lost his family in the Holocaust . Preston never skates over that, not at all, but looks at what Maxwell did with that. For a long time, for instance, he denied that he was Jewish. And yet, he ended up being buried on the Mount of Olives because he put so much money into Israel.

The book is a bit like the Sackler family book in that you wonder, ‘How did we let this happen?’ When Maxwell fell off his boat and died, Margaret Thatcher and George Bush Sr telephoned with condolences. Then, within 10 months, we realize that he’s a billion pounds in debt and has stolen £350 million from the Daily Mirror pensioners. What is the nature of charisma? How is he so charismatic and so awful? We all said, ‘Oh, yes, he’s a bit of buffoon, but you’ve got to love him really’. He’s in that great tradition of old English eccentrics, all the more interesting because he came from Czechoslovakia.

Also, because he fell off his boat, there’s always been a mystery about whether he jumped or fell or was pushed or assassinated. His boat was called the Lady Ghislaine, after his daughter. Now, of course, we’ve got the Ghislaine Maxwell trial coming up at the end of November. There’s a sense in which this story rumbles on and on because it’s clear that she had the most shocking upbringing. He was violent, he was disgusting. We have this extraordinary coda of his youngest and most adored daughter being involved in these very unsavoury things.

The book is also a bit of a trip down memory lane. As a journalist, I enjoyed reading about the newspaper industry in the Maxwell years, because it’s so different now.

Yes, it was extraordinary, the power of the unions to make a difference. The book does have wonderful nostalgia. There are great stories in it. I remember the Mirror used to have a ‘spot the ball’ competition. If you got it right, you got you could win a million pounds. But Maxwell rigged it all to make sure that nobody ever got more than £25!

Preston does a very good job of recalling that time, after Maxwell comes out of World War II. He’s got an eye for that postwar, the 60s, 70s, 80s milieu. We don’t yet have social media and there’s still an enormous space in which you can make yourself into whoever you want to be.

There’s a Carry On element to it as well. At that point, we still liked scoundrels and rotters and Maxwell stepped forward and took up that space. He called his house Maxwell House, which is so funny. Then, standing on top of it, he peed on passers-by walking down below. It’s shockingly uninhibited.

Let’s turn to the last book on this year’s shortlist. This is Free: Coming of Age at the End of History by Lea Ypi. She’s a political theorist at LSE now, but she grew up in Albania and this is her memoir. Tell me about it and why it’s one of the best nonfiction books of 2021.  

I’m probably just speaking for myself here, but I’ve had it with memoir . We’ve had so many of them that the retreat to first person experience feels a bit old and tired to me. It served a purpose; it was very important, but I wasn’t queuing up to love this book. And I was just totally blown away by it. It’s extraordinary.

Again, it’s partly because it is such a fantastic story. Albania was one of the last redoubts of Stalinist communism. China had made modifications, even Russia had given up on it, and Albania just carried on. It was such a secret place. From the island of Corfu, you could look across to Albania. I remember seeing lorries and thinking, ‘Who’s driving that lorry? What are their lives like?’ It was an extraordinary place—slap bang in the middle of Europe.

Lea Ypi writes about being a very precocious, talented little girl who is determined to be the best Stalinist pioneer that you could possibly have: she does more cleaning, she collects more rubbish. She’s the perfect little communist. She thinks that her parents are a huge embarrassment. They’re backsliders, they’ve not got with the program, something has gone wrong. There’s also this other embarrassment, which is that the prime minister who handed over Albania to the Italian fascist government during the war happens to have the same surname as her. She has to keep on telling her classmates, ‘No, it’s nothing to do with us, it’s another Ypi’.

Her grandmother speaks to her in French. She always thinks, ‘That’s funny, why does Granny speak in French? Everybody else speaks Albanian.’ It’s her grandmother’s aristocratic heritage; she was educated all around the world.

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Gradually Lea Ypi learns that she has grown up in a family that is very out of favour. She’s very good at doing a child’s gradual dawning of what’s happening. By 1990, when things in Albania are becoming more liberal, her parents start to talk a bit more. And she suddenly realizes the whole story, the awfulness of what’s been going on. She comes from a family of dissidents and her parents have been highly critical of the regime. They are enemies of the regime and that is why they’ve been stuck doing dead-end jobs and why, despite their obvious intelligence and education, they’ve led a very difficult life. And that prime minister who shares her surname was, of course, her great grandfather.

What happens after December 1990 is that liberal capitalism turns out to be as awful as communism. There are Ponzi schemes, there is drug dealing and sex trafficking. Everybody’s telling them that they’re free, but it’s a very strange, horrible kind of freedom. Her father is put in charge of an Adriatic port and is tasked with sacking lots of Roma workers. Whereas before, under communism, they did have a job. Then there’s a period of civil war. When they go to their high school dance, their graduation ceremony, they have to have a military presence, men with machine guns, because the possibility of being shot up, for some reason that you don’t even understand, is so high.

What makes it so good is that not only is it a fantastic subject, but she tells it beautifully. It’s very funny. There are these wonderful stories. Her parents fall out with the neighbours over an empty Coke can. An empty Coke can is so sophisticated, they put it in pride of place on the mantelpiece. Then the neighbours accuse her parents of having stolen it. The children also trade bubble gum wrappers. They’ve never seen bubble gum, but somehow wrappers have been left behind. They smell them and trade them.

I was very excited to see this book on the shortlist because I went on holiday to Albania in 2019 and found it fascinating. While I was there, I read an eye-opening novel by Ismail Kadare (and visited his house), but nonfiction about this recent period was thin on the ground. This book does fill that gap, quite apart from her reflections on communism versus capitalism .

She’s very funny about how after 1990, you start to get left-wing people coming to Albania—Scandinavians in particular—and lecturing the Albanians. ‘You had the wrong sort of socialism. You should do it our way’. It’s the absolute colonizing arrogance of the European hard left coming in and telling Albanians that they’d been doing communism all wrong.

As part of being shortlisted for the 2021 Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction, both Cal Flyn and Lea Ypi did short videos, explaining what their books are about. Lea says, “It’s a book about freedom”. Is this what you were referring to earlier, comparing freedom under communism to supposedly greater freedom under capitalism?

Yes. The point she makes is that something was hugely lost when they switched to a market economy and liberal democracy. Before, there was enormous solidarity. There were informal financial dealings between neighbours: you lent your neighbour half a pound of sugar or all your life savings because you knew you would get it back. There was absolute trust. Things were bad, but you were all in it together. There was a sense of comradeship, a touching belief that it really mattered that everybody should have a chance to flourish, that this is what they were doing, and a real belief that that was possible, no matter how naive that seems.

Once liberal democracy comes in, something is lost. There are Ponzi schemes, there’s aggressive individualism. She’s very, very critical of capitalism, she really is. She ends by saying that she thinks that socialism is still a vibrant possibility.

Part of our  best books of 2021  series.

November 14, 2021

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Kathryn Hughes

Kathryn Hughes is Professor of Life Writing at the University of East Anglia. She is the author of four books on 19th century cultural history, the most recent of which is Victorians Undone . She is also literary nonfiction critic for the Guardian. 

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The 10 Best Nonfiction Books of 2022

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A good nonfiction book doesn’t just tell you something new about the world, it pulls you out of your place in it and dares you to reconsider what you thought you knew, maybe even who you are. The best nonfiction books that arrived this year vary in scope—some are highly specific, some broad and searching—but they all ask giant questions about loss, strength, and survival. In The Escape Artist , Jonathan Freedland underlines the power of the truth through the journey of one of the first Jews to escape Auschwitz . In How Far the Light Reaches , Sabrina Imbler reveals the ways marine biology can teach us about the deepest, most human parts of ourselves. From Stacy Schiff’s brilliant chronicle of Samuel Adams’ role in the American Revolution to Imani Perry’s illuminating tour of the American South, here are the 10 best nonfiction books of 2022.

10. The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams, Stacy Schiff

Pulitzer Prize winner Stacy Schiff revisits the American Revolution in her engrossing biography of founding father Samuel Adams. The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams centers on the years leading up to 1776 when Adams helped fan the earliest flames of the independence movement. Though he drove the anti-British rebellion in Massachusetts and had an outsized role in the Revolution, Adams’ story has been told far less than those of other founders like George Washington and Alexander Hamilton . Schiff details his clandestine work and his growing radicalization to show how vital he was to American independence, crafting an intricate portrait of a man long overshadowed by his contemporaries.

Buy Now : The Revolutionary on Bookshop | Amazon

9. The Invisible Kingdom, Meghan O’Rourke

Beginning in the late 1990s, Meghan O’Rourke was tormented by mysterious symptoms that would consume her life for years to follow. She describes her wrenching experience searching for a diagnosis in The Invisible Kingdom: Reimagining Chronic Illness , a 2022 National Book Award finalist. O’Rourke’s reported memoir is an indictment of the U.S. health care system and its approach—or lack thereof—to identifying and treating chronic illnesses, which take a grave toll on millions of Americans. Moving between her own medical journey, the history of illness in the U.S., and the crisis faced by millions currently suffering from long COVID , O’Rourke writes with an empathetic hand to argue why and how we need to change our systems to better support patients. The book is a bold and brave exploration into a much-overlooked topic, one that she punctuates with candor and urgency.

Buy Now : The Invisible Kingdom on Bookshop | Amazon

8. How Far the Light Reaches, Sabrina Imbler

Sabrina Imbler thoughtfully examines connections between science and humanity, tying together what should be very loose threads in 10 dazzling essays, each a study of a different sea creature. In one piece from their debut collection, Imbler explores their mother’s tumultuous relationship with eating while simultaneously looking at how female octopi starve themselves to death to protect their young. In another, they relate the morphing nature of cuttlefish with their own experiences navigating their gender identity. Throughout, Imbler reveals the surprising ways that sea creatures can teach us about family, sexuality, and survival.

Buy Now : How Far the Light Reaches on Bookshop | Amazon

7. His Name Is George Floyd, Robert Samuels and Toluse Olorunnipa

In their engaging book, Washington Post journalists Robert Samuels and Toluse Olorunnpia expand on their reporting of the 2020 murder of George Floyd by police officer Derek Chauvin. His Name Is George Floyd: One Man’s Life and the Struggle for Racial Justice centers on the life Floyd led before he was killed, captured through hundreds of interviews and richly textured research. The biography explores how Floyd’s experiences were shaped by systemic racism, from the over-policed communities where he was raised to the segregated schools he attended. Samuels and Olorunnipa illustrate, in compassionate terms, the father and friend who wanted more for his life, and how his death became a global symbol for change .

Buy Now : His Name Is George Floyd on Bookshop | Amazon

6. Constructing a Nervous System, Margo Jefferson

In her second memoir, Pulitzer Prize winner Margo Jefferson brilliantly interrogates and expands the form. Constructing a Nervous System finds the author reflecting on her life, the lives of her family, and those of her literary and artistic heroes. Jefferson oscillates between criticism and personal narrative, engaging with ideas about performance, artistry, and the act of writing through a plethora of lively threads. She considers everything: her parents, Bing Crosby and Ike Turner, the way a ballerina moves on stage. What emerges is a carefully woven tapestry of American life, brought together by Jefferson’s lyrical and electric prose.

Buy Now : Constructing a Nervous System on Bookshop | Amazon

5. An Immense World, Ed Yong

Journalist Ed Yong reminds readers that the world is very large and full of incredible things. An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us is a celebration of sights and sounds, smells and tastes, and the unique ways different animals exist on the planet we all share. Yong’s absorbing book is a joyful blend of scientific study and elegant prose that transforms textbook fodder into something much more exciting and accessible. From dissecting why dogs love to sniff around so much to detailing how fish move in rivers, Yong underlines why it’s so important to take the time to stop and appreciate the perspectives of all the living things that surround us.

Buy Now : An Immense World on Bookshop | Amazon

4. The Escape Artist, Jonathan Freedland

When he was just 19 years old, Rudolf Vrba became one of the first Jews to break out of Auschwitz. It was April 1944, and Vrba had spent the last two years enduring horror after horror at the concentration camp, determined to make it out alive. As Jonathan Freedland captures in his harrowing biography, Vrba was fixated on remembering every atrocity because he knew that one day his story could save lives. The Escape Artist: The Man Who Broke Out of Auschwitz to Warn the World is heavy reading that spares no detail of the brutalities perpetrated by the Nazis during the Holocaust . It’s also a crucial, skillfully rendered look inside the journey of a teenager who risked his life to warn Jews, and the rest of the world, about what was happening in Auschwitz.

Buy Now : The Escape Artist on Bookshop | Amazon

3. Ducks, Kate Beaton

In 2005, Kate Beaton had just graduated from college and was yearning to start her career as an artist. But she had student loans to pay off and the oil boom meant that it was easy to get a job out in the sands, so she did. In her first full-length graphic memoir, Beaton reflects on her time working with a primarily male labor force in harsh conditions where trauma lingered and loneliness prevailed. Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands is a bruising and intimate account of survival and exploitation—of both the land and the people who worked on it—and is brought to life by Beaton’s immersive illustrations. In unveiling her plight, Beaton makes stunning observations about the intersections of class, gender, and capitalism.

Buy Now : Ducks on Bookshop | Amazon

2. South to America, Imani Perry

For her striking work of nonfiction, Imani Perry takes a tour of the American South , visiting more than 10 states, including her native Alabama. Perry argues that the associations and assumptions made about the South—with racism at their core—are essential to understanding the United States as a whole. While there is plenty of history embedded throughout South to America: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation , the winner of the 2022 National Book Award for nonfiction, it is no history book. Instead, it’s an impressive mix of deftly compiled research and memoir, with Perry making poignant reflections on the lives of her own ancestors. The result is a revelatory account of the South’s ugly past—the Civil War, slavery, and Jim Crow Laws—and how that history still reverberates today.

Buy Now : South to America on Bookshop | Amazon

1. In Love, Amy Bloom

After Amy Bloom’s husband Brian was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease, she supported him through the impossibly difficult decision to end his life, on his terms, with the aid of an organization based in Switzerland. Bloom’s memoir begins with their last flight together—on the way to Zurich—as she reflects on the reality that she will be flying home alone. But in these moments of despair, and the enormous grief that follows their trip, she finds tenderness and hope in remembering all that came before it. In writing about their marriage, Bloom unveils a powerful truth about the slippery nature of time. The book is a beautiful, heartfelt tribute to her husband, and a crucial reminder that what drives grief is often the most profound kind of love.

Buy Now : In Love on Bookshop | Amazon

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Write to Annabel Gutterman at [email protected]

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BOOKS FALL PREVIEW: Nonfiction

11 New Works of Nonfiction to Read This Season

A deeply reported look at the woman behind Roe vs. Wade, an investigation of lawbreaking animals, another hilarious essay collection from Phoebe Robinson — and more.

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By Miguel Salazar and Joumana Khatib

‘ Brothers on Three: A True Story of Family, Resistance, and Hope on a Reservation in Montana ,’ by Abe Streep

In 2018, the Arlee Warriors, a boy’s high school basketball team on Montana’s Flathead Indian reservation, was in the midst of a buzzing championship run as its town reeled from a cluster of suicides. Streep, who previously profiled the team for The New York Times Magazine , delves into the lives of the players, the town’s collective trauma and the therapeutic power of basketball in Arlee, where the sport “occupies emotional terrain somewhere between escape and religion.”

Celadon Books, Sept. 7 | Read our review

‘ The Family Roe: An American Story ,’ by Joshua Prager

In his third book, Prager sets out to tell the stories of the overlooked women behind the 1973 Supreme Court decision. Using interviews, letters and previously unseen personal papers, Prager tells the story of Roe through the life of Norma McCorvey, whose unwanted pregnancy gave way to the Supreme Court case, and three other protagonists: Linda Coffee, the lawyer who filed the original lawsuit; Curtis Boyd, a fundamentalist Christian turned abortion provider; and Mildred Jefferson, the first Black woman to graduate from Harvard Medical School.

Norton, Sept. 14 | Read our review

‘ Fuzz: When Nature Breaks the Law ,’ by Mary Roach

In 1659, an Italian court heard a case against caterpillars after locals complained of them trespassing and pilfering local gardens. In the years since, humans have come up with innovative ways to deal with jaywalking moose, killer elephants, thieving crows and murderous geriatric trees. After a two-year trip across the world, Roach chronicles these methods in her latest book, covering crow blasting in Oklahoma and human-elephant conflict specialists in West Bengal. The result is a rich work of research and reportage revealing the lengths that humanity will go to keep the natural world at bay.

‘ The Right to Sex: Feminism in the Twenty-First Century ,’ by Amia Srinivasan

Srinivasan, an Oxford professor, has developed an enthusiastic following for her shrewd writing in The London Review of Books, with topics ranging from campus culture wars to the intellect of octopuses. Her 2018 meditation on the politics of sex served as a launchpad for this highly anticipated book, which draws on — and complicates — longstanding feminist theory in six essays on pornography, desire, capitalism and more.

Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Sept. 21 | Read our review

Tell us: What new nonfiction are you most eager to read ?

‘ please don’t sit on my bed in your outside clothes: essays ,’ by phoebe robinson.

Robinson, an actress, comedian and co-creator of the podcast 2 Dope Queens, wrote her latest book of essays during the pandemic, taking up everything from Black Lives Matter to dating under lockdown to commercialized self care. Of course, there’s plenty of levity — her way of coping. “If I can make you laugh and forget your problems for a moment, then I did something,” she writes.

Tiny Reparations Books, Sept. 28 | Listen to Robinson on the Book Review podcast

‘ Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters ,’ by Steven Pinker

How can a species capable of calculating the age of the universe be so vulnerable to conspiracy theories, folk wisdom and groupthink? Rationality is in critically short supply at a time when humanity faces its greatest challenges yet, argues Pinker, a Harvard cognitive psychologist. Through mental exercises and geeky but accessible writing on topics ranging from cartoons to climate change to Andrew Yang’s presidential campaign, Pinker hopes to save reason — and, by extension, society — from extinction.

Viking, Sept. 28 | Read our review

‘ Invisible Child: Poverty, Survival and Hope in an American City ,’ by Andrea Elliott

Dasani was a precocious and spunky 11-year-old with limitless potential when Elliott, a Times investigative journalist, first met her at a Fort Greene homeless shelter in 2012. That encounter led to a five-part series shadowing Dasani as she navigated child poverty in New York City. For this book, Elliott immersed herself in the lives of Dasani and her family for eight years, at times slipping past security guards at the shelter. She also traces the family’s ancestry back to a North Carolina slave plantation, telling a vivid and devastating story of American inequality.

Random House, Oct. 5 | Read our review | Listen to Elliott on the Book Review podcast

‘ All of the Marvels: A Journey to the Ends of the Biggest Story Ever Told ,’ by Douglas Wolk

This book is an ambitious attempt to wrestle with the Marvel Comics universe, a web so expansive that almost no one has bothered to read all of its half-million pages (and counting). No one, that is, besides Wolk, who has pored over yellowing originals from at garage sales, abandoned copies at his local Starbucks and even collections on show at Burning Man. The result is 400 pages of insights — for Marvel fans and casual readers alike — and what they reveal about American dreams and fears over the past 60 years.

Penguin Press, Oct. 12 | Read our review

‘ The Loneliest Americans ,’ by Jay Caspian Kang

In his essays and commentaries , Kang, a contributor to the Magazine who also writes a newsletter for The Times’s Opinion section, has been interrogating the ideas underpinning Asian American identity for years. His nonfiction debut is a culmination of these efforts, blending memoir, historical writing and reportage as he questions the usefulness of this identity in describing people who live profoundly different realities conditioned by class, language and ethnicity.

Crown, Oct. 12

‘ The Genome Defense: Inside the Epic Legal Battle to Determine Who Owns Your DNA ,’ by Jorge L. Contreras

The ACLU had never before filed a patent case when a policy analyst and civil rights lawyer teamed up in 2005 to challenge a decades-long practice allowing private companies to patent naturally occurring human genes. Jorge L. Contreras, a law professor at the University of Utah, interviewed nearly 100 lawyers, patients, scientists and policymakers in this behind-the-scenes history of Molecular Pathology vs. Myriad Genetics, a long-shot lawsuit that culminated in a landmark 2013 Supreme Court decision that opened the human genome to the benefit of researchers, cancer patients and everyday Americans.

Algonquin, Oct. 26

‘ The Least of Us: True Tales of America and Hope in the Time of Fentanyl and Meth ,’ by Sam Quinones

Our understanding of the opioid epidemic is indebted in part to Quinones and his eye-opening first book, “ Dreamland ,” which connected the dots between OxyContin’s popularity and a booming heroin market. In this follow-up, Quinones explores the neuroscience of addiction, lays out how the crisis has morphed and deepened with the spread of synthetic drugs, and celebrates the slow efforts at rebuilding community in hard-hit counties across America.

Bloomsbury, Nov. 2 | Read our review

Explore More in Books

Want to know about the best books to read and the latest news start here..

100 Best Books of the 21st Century:  As voted on by 503 novelists, nonfiction writers, poets, critics  and other book lovers — with a little help from the staff of The New York Times Book Review.

Examining Joan Didion:  Since her death, Didion has become a literary subject  as popular for her image and writing as for the fascination she inspired for almost half a century.

A Dutch Love Story in a Time of Silence:  In Yael van der Wouden’s debut novel, “The Safekeep,” the writer spins an erotic thriller  out of the Netherlands’ failure to face up to the horrors of the Holocaust.

Aleksei Navalny’s Prison Diaries:  In the Russian opposition leader’s posthumous memoir, compiled with help from his widow, Yulia Navalnaya, Navalny faced the fact that Vladimir Putin might succeed in silencing him .

The Book Review Podcast:  Each week, top authors and critics talk about the latest news in the literary world. Listen here .

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Blog – Posted on Monday, Jun 01

The 60 best nonfiction books of all time.

The twenty-first century is still young — yet it has already produced an incredible array of nonfiction books probing all facets of human life. From uncovering invisible histories, to reflecting lyrically on medical conditions, to calling readers to political action, nonfiction writers can take us anywhere. They show us who we are, where we came from, and where we might be going.

We asked our community of 200,000 readers to vote for the most revelatory nonfiction books of all time. Without further ado, here are 60 of the best nonfiction books to peruse. These must-reads will keep you informed, inspired , entertained, and exhilarated as you journey through the most contentious and compelling topics in history and the contemporary world.

If you're feeling overwhelmed by the number of great nonfiction books to read, you can also take our 30-second quiz below to narrow it down quickly and get a personalized nonfiction book recommendation  😉

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1.  Between the World and Me  by Ta-Nehisi Coates

Between the World and Me  by Ta-Nehisi Coates offers a powerful history of racial violence in the United States — and what it means to be black in this country today. Presented in the form of a letter to the author’s teenage son, this nonfiction book weaves the personal and the political together in a series of searing essays.

2.  The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer  by Siddhartha Mukherjee

A disarming “biography” of disease,  The Emperor of All Maladies  chronicles thousands of years of people grappling with the terrifying specter of cancer. From the patients who have fought it, to the doctors who have treated it and the researchers who have sought to eradicate it, this riveting account captures the ongoing battle against a deadly condition.

3.  The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History  by Elizabeth Kolbert

When the next major mass extinction hits the planet, as scientists foretell it soon might, humanity will be the victim — and the perpetrator.  The Sixth Extinction  charts the transformative, and potentially catastrophic, impact of human activity on the planet, forcing us to consider what change we must enact now to ensure the continued survival of our species — and all species.

4.  How to Survive a Plague  by David France

David France has been one of the key chroniclers of the AIDS epidemic in the United States since its beginnings.  How to Survive a Plague  follows his acclaimed documentary of the same name, compiling a definitive work on AIDS activism. France draws from firsthand accounts and meticulous historical research to cement the legacy of all those who have battled the disease and fought the government and pharmaceutical companies for the rights to treatment. This nonfiction book ensures that their memories are not forgotten.

5.  The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning  by Maggie Nelson

Cultural critic Maggie Nelson’s  The Art of Cruelty  contends with the history of violence across media and the arts, scrutinizing the moral implications of our obsession with acts of brutality enacted against living bodies. This is an essential text for anyone interested in how ethics and aesthetics intersect.

6.  How to Do Nothing  by Jenny Odell

When was the last time that you can say you really, truly did nothing at all? In a capitalist society that encourages constant action and productivity, it seems nearly impossible to not be doing  something,  but  How to Do Nothing  shows that there is another way to live. So go ahead, do nothing… after, of course, you’ve read this book.

7.  100 Essays I Don’t Have Time to Write  by Sarah Ruhl

Sarah Ruhl has plenty to keep her busy: she is a prolific playwright as well as a mother, and routinely formulates more creative ideas than she has the time to fully realize.  100 Essays I Don’t Have Time   to Write  recounts all of those loose ends and sparks of inspiration that drive her as an artist. This collection of not-quite-essays bursts with wit and insight along its journey through the musings of a curious mind.

8.  An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States  by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States  is the first comprehensive account of the nation told from an indigenous perspective. It is a damning indictment of white violence, and the centuries of genocide and erasure of native history that have accompanied colonial expansion. It is a story of the United States that has never been told before...but should have been told long ago.

9.  The New Jim Crow  by Michelle Alexander

Legal scholar Michelle Alexander argues that justice is neither truly blind nor colorblind — in fact, the criminal justice system in the United States systematically targets people of color and enacts racial oppression.  The New Jim Crow  is both a call to awareness and a call to action, making clear the deep harm embedded in systems ostensibly designed to protect us all.

10.  The Year of Magical Thinking  by Joan Didion

In  The Year of Magical Thinking , an account of the year following the death of her husband John Gregory Dunne, literary icon Joan Didion offers an unguarded and revealing self-portrait of grief and anguish. Confronting bereavement occasionally leaves even one of America’s most lyrical writers at a loss for words. The stunningly vulnerable confessions that result are moving expressions of raw emotion.

11.  Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind  by Yuval Noah Harari

Where did we humans come from? Where are we going? And what does it even mean to be “human” in the first place? These are some of the massive questions that historian Yuval Noah Harari attempts to unpack in  Sapiens . While perhaps “brief” in its coverage on a scale of universal time,  Sapiens  still spans thousands of years of human life — showing us who we are as a species, as well as what we might become.

12.  Thinking, Fast and Slow  by Daniel Kahneman

Daniel Kahneman won the Nobel Prize in Economics for his groundbreaking research on cognitive biases and behavioral science. His book  Thinking, Fast and Slow  takes us through decades of his most essential research about how we think and why we make decisions the way we do — through the “fast” system of intuition and the “slow” system of logic. Kahneman’s conversational style makes even the most complex of psychological topics accessible to readers. After absorbing his insights, they’ll never think the same way again.

13.  A Short History of Nearly Everything  by Bill Bryson

Bill Bryson has garnered acclaim for his entertaining travelogues. Now he takes us along for the ride on the trip of a lifetime (and many previous lifetimes).  A Short History of Nearly Everything  is exactly what its title promises: a briskly paced adventure through the known universe, filled with plenty of wit and wondrous facts to fuel the journey.

14.  When Breath Becomes Air  by Paul Kalanithi

Doctor Paul Kalanithi confronted the possibility of death nearly every day in his work as a neurosurgeon… until one day the life at stake was his own.  When Breath Becomes Air  is his heart-wrenching memoir of coming to terms with his own mortality after a diagnosis of stage IV lung cancer. Though Kalanithi passed away from in 2015, his devastatingly beautiful reflection affirms the impact of his life on countless patients and readers.

15.  Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game  by Michael Lewis

In  Moneyball , Michael Lewis follows the story of the Oakland A’s and their unconventional strategy of scouting players, allowing them to choose the best talent for a fraction of the budget of other teams. On the surface, this is a story about baseball. But it is also a story about thinking differently and taking risks. Most importantly, it shows that when the game of life seems stacked against you, you don’t have to play along: you can reinvent the rules entirely.

16.  Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City  by Michael Desmond

Evicted  is a gripping exploration of life on the margins for the untold numbers of people in America living in poverty. Desmond weaves his narrative from the stories of eight families in Milwaukee, showing the dearth of resources and affordable housing options available to them.  Evicted  is unafraid to say what is often left out of the conversation about poverty, as it forces readers to look at the dire state of American housing and homeownership.

17.  Alexander Hamilton  by Ron Chernow

The definitive portrait of a founding father — and of the foundations of America’s history —  Alexander Hamilton  is a brilliant  biography , as audacious and awe-inspiring as its subject. It vividly portrays Hamilton’s intimate life as well as the grand scale of his impact, immortalizing the monumental figure who shaped the political spirit of a nation… and inspired a few Broadway musicals.

18.  This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate  by Naomi Klein

The climate is not the only thing that is changing — in  This Changes Everything , Naomi Klein shows us that life as we know it is changing, too. The entire future of the planet is now at stake. Addressing the climate crisis requires a radical transformation of our environmental and economic systems, and Klein’s wake-up call demands decisive action to ensure the continued liveability of the planet. 

19.  Dreamland  by Sam Quinones

Drawing from intense investigative reporting and heartbreaking personal stories of addiction,  Dreamland  reveals how and why the opiate industry has wrought destruction on communities in the United States and Mexico. From prescription painkillers to black tar heroin, these drugs have devastating consequences, as Quinones reminds us. His book makes clear that real people are being harmed by corrosive capitalism.

20.  The Warmth of Other Suns  by Isabel Wilkerson

The Warmth of Other Suns  is one of the greatest tales of American history you’ve never heard. Wilkerson chronicles the years between 1915 and 1970, when millions of black Americans embarked northward or westward in search of opportunity, hoping to leave behind the racial prejudice and economic oppression of the South. What unfolds is a profoundly sympathetic and richly rendered story of countless families, seeking acceptance and better lives in the nation they call home.

21.  Nothing to Envy by Barbara Demick

Though the citizens of North Korea consistently confront poverty and famine under the censorship of a repressive regime, little details about their lives sometimes escape the country’s impenetrable borders.  Nothing to Envy  ventures inside the world’s most closed-off society, giving voice to everyday people as they try to live their lives amidst totalitarianism. It is a haunting look at their despair and disillusionment — and the dreams they continue to nurture in spite of it all.

22.  These Truths: A History of the United States  by Jill Lepore

From acclaimed historian and  New Yorker  staff writer Jill Lepore,  These Truths  traces the birth of a country “forged in contradiction,” from its mythos as a land of opportunity to its history of extermination and oppression. Examining contemporary identity and politics through the lens of history,  These Truths  calls for a comprehensive reassessment of America’s past as well as its future.

23.  Behind the Beautiful Forevers  by Katherine Boo

For the people of Annawadi, an impoverished community not far from the Mumbai airport, lives of luxury and economic prosperity are constantly within sight — but always out of reach. Though the building of upscale hotels and growth of the Indian economy initially gave residents hope of upward mobility, personal and political tragedy quickly dismantled their dreams.  Behind the Beautiful Forevers  is a shocking examination of pervasive inequality in contemporary India and the people left behind by the powerful elite.

24.  Nickel and Dimed  by Barbara Ehrenreich

For the millions of Americans who perform low-paying jobs, “unskilled” labor, the living wage they supposedly earn is by no means actually liveable. In  Nickel and Dimed , journalist Barbara Ehrenreich goes undercover, journeying from Florida to Maine to Minnesota working a series of minimum-wage jobs. She quickly gains firsthand experience of the nearly insurmountable hardships the working poor encounter when they attempt to secure jobs or homes and put food on the table. Her eye-opening narrative reveals the dire situation of low-wage workers and the failures of employers and governments to provide anything near adequate support.

25.  Blurred Lines  by Vanessa Grigoriadis

In the wake of the #MeToo movement that has had transformative effects around the world, college campuses have become intensely scrutinized battlegrounds for debates about sexual politics. Vanessa Grigoriadis travels to universities across the United States to examine how the movement has prompted students to think differently about their sexuality, as well as the sexism or sexual violence they confront on campus. Unafraid to tackle controversial topics and contentious debates,  Blurred Lines  is a complex account of radical changes to contemporary culture.

26.  Underland  by Robert Macfarlane

Underland  literally takes us beneath the surface of our world — venturing into underground caves, graves, and geological features. Yet Macfarlane also goes on a deep-time exploration and digs into the intertwined history of humans and nature, scrutinizing the traces we leave behind for generations to come. This riveting journey through time traverses the rich expanse of humankind’s past and future.

27.  All the Single Ladies  by Rebecca Traister

Journalist Rebecca Traister’s book  All the Single Ladies  underscores the collective power of single women, creating a vivid and diverse portrait of unmarried women in the United States. Composed of interviews and explorations of the history of women in intellectual and public life, this feminist book is a richly researched triumph.

28.  The Invention of Nature  by Andrea Wulf

You may not recognize the name Alexander von Humboldt. In  The Invention of Nature , however, Andrea Wulf argues that he has undoubtedly shaped our understanding of the environment and our role in protecting it. Von Humboldt was a German naturalist and explorer, and his then-radical ideas — that nature existed for more than human consumption — paved the path for contemporary conservation movements. Wulf’s luminous look at his life, full of ecological exploration and scientific advocacy, shows the lasting impact of his ideas.

29.  The Other Slavery  by Andrés Reséndez

While countries in the Americas continue to grapple with the enduring horrors of slavery, there is a side to this devastating history that has never been fully confronted: the enslavement of indigenous peoples.  The Other Slavery  is a revelatory examination of the native populations enslaved throughout the western hemisphere, exposing how deeply entrenched oppression was in the creation of the “new world.” Reséndez’s fierce prose delivers on its promise to be “myth-shattering” and enlightening.

30.  Devil in the Grove  by Gilbert King

Thurgood Marshall, the Supreme Court’s first black justice, is perhaps the most significant legal figure of the twentieth century, arguing landmark civil rights cases.  Devil in the Grove  looks at the toughest cases he confronted before he was on the Supreme Court: fighting for “The Groveland Boys,” black workers in Florida’s orange industry who were subjected to horrific violence and lynchings in the Jim Crow South. This account of  true crime  and the fight for justice delves into Marshall’s origins as a fearless crusader — something not to be missed.

31.  Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race  by Reni Eddo-Lodge

After watching intense debates about racism unfold in the United States, British journalist Reni Eddo-Lodge recognized that the same conversations were just as urgently necessary in Britain. This led her to write  Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race,  one of the most accessible and best nonfiction books about the difficulties of, well, talking about race. Eddo-Lodge analyzes modern Britain’s race relations, reminding British and international readers alike of imperialism’s complicated history.

32.  The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference  by Malcolm Gladwell

This massively successful book by Malcolm Gladwell investigates the process of things  going viral,  dissecting how and why certain ideas can take off.  The Tipping Point  explores phenomena ranging from the sharp decrease in street crime in 1990s New York to children’s television shows suddenly becoming all the rage among all age groups. This is a sharp book that cannot fail to capture its readers with its masterfully recounted sociological and psychological case studies.

33.  Quiet  by Susan Cain

Susan Cain’s  Quiet  argues that Western society (and especially American society) is structured in a way that valorizes extroverted personality traits, to the detriment of introverts. In this nonfiction book, she defines the concept of introversion, traces its history, and proceeds with a mind-blowing analysis of our everyday lives and the biases inherent in the way people are assessed in a social atmosphere.

34.  The Age of Surveillance Capitalism  by Shoshanna Zuboff

Shoshanna Zuboff’s  The Age of Surveillance Capitalism  takes as its subject our current technological state, where corporations have access to a  lot  of personal information. Zuboff investigates the power and peril of digital surveillance, arguing that we have now entered a new age of capitalism where information and personal data are tools in the hands of corporations. A fascinating and thorough book,  The Age of Surveillance Capitalism  is guaranteed to provoke deep thinking about our relationship to tech.

35. On Writing  by Stephen King

In  On Writing,  bestselling author Stephen King discusses his early-career struggles, offering advice to up-and-coming writers. Intimate, honest, and approachable, this book is one every aspiring author should read. This encouraging memoir thematizes the power of memory and the importance of perseverance. If you needed the inspiration to keep writing, this is one of the best nonfiction books for you.

36. Persepolis  by Marjane Satrapi

Marjane Satrapi’s  Persepolis  is an immersive  graphic memoir  based on the author’s childhood in the Iranian capital of Tehran during the Islamic Revolution. As she grows up during a tumultuous chapter of the country’s history, her story is both a coming-of-age tale and a historical chronicle. Satrapi’s stark, black-and-white artwork supplements her text to create a thoroughly memorable reading experience.

37.  Freakonomics  by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner

Freakonomics , the famous nonfiction book by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner, reveals “the hidden side of everything,” as its subtitle makes clear. It’s a bold claim, but not one that it fails to live up to. The authors make the case for constantly asking questions, challenging accepted truths, and looking at facts and data in a novel way.  Freakonomics  is a witty, eye-opening interpretation of the economy, suitable to any reader with an interest in why things work the way they do.

38.  SPQR  by Mary Beard

Mary Beard’s  SPQR  is a sweeping and epic history of the Roman Empire, covering over 1000 years of the classical civilization’s story. In this cinematic account, Beard explores the growth of the empire and reflects on its multilayered legacy. Intelligent and informative,  SPQR  is an excellent choice for both devoted historians and casual nonfiction readers.

39.  The Uninhabitable Earth  by David Wallace-Wells

More urgent than ever,  The Uninhabitable Earth  by David Wallace-Wells draws attention to the pressing need to address the growing problem of climate change. This unsettling book warns about the potential devastation that awaits us in the near future — unless we can enact a revolution in how we tackle global warming.

40.  The Silk Roads  by Peter Frankopan

Another fascinating historical read,  The Silk Roads  by Peter Frankopan closes in on the relationship between the East and West. Examining and dismantling Eurocentric narratives, Frankopan’s illuminating work focuses on the history of countries lying on the “Silk Road,” the trade route connecting East and West, and attempts to re-balance history. In Frankopan’s version of world history, the center point of Western civilization is the Persian Empire.

41.  Why We Sleep  by Matthew Walker

Neuroscientist Matthew Walker’s  Why We Sleep  achieved sensational status due to its hyperfocus on a universal experience: sleep. Walker delves into the scientific specifics of why sleep is so important, and reminds his readers that sleep deprivation, though common in modern society, is a worrying phenomenon. This is one of the best nonfiction books to make a convincing case for being generous with our down-time and getting some rest.

42.  Playing to the Gallery  by Grayson Perry

Grayson Perry’s cheerful, informative, and inspiring  Playing to the Gallery  is a crash-course in art appreciation. According to Perry, no one is too ignorant to pursue an interest in art. This joyful and down-to-earth book is an excellent resource for anyone who’s interested in modern art but daunted by the sometimes-elitist institutions that represent it.

43.  How Language Works  by David Crystal

David Crystal’s  How Language Works  is a detailed, all-encompassing nonfiction book addressing the many questions that arise when you start to really think about the processes of using language. In learning more about language, you’ll also learn more about yourself, your idiolect, and your unconscious linguistic influences.

44.  Political Order and Political Decay  by Francis Fukuyama

In  Political Order and Political Decay , political scientist Francis Fukuyama (famous for his 1992 book  The End of History and the Last Man ) explores the historical development of political institutions in various countries. In this insightful book, Fukuyama asks important questions about corruption and its eradication — and what it might take to run a well-functioning state in the present day.

45.  Prisoners of Geography  by Tim Marshall

For cartography fans and or anyone with even a casual interest in geography, Tim Marshall’s  Prisoners of Geography  is a brilliant interpretation of ten modern maps. Marshall analyzes the geopolitical complexities of each region, showing the many layers and dimensions of our political reality as captured by cartographers. This book is guaranteed to change the way you view maps forever.

46.  This is Not Propaganda  by Peter Pomerantsev

Peter Pomerantsev’s  This is Not Propaganda  focuses on the complication and confusion of the current “disinformation” age. This book explores how surfaces can be deceiving, delving underneath them to examine (among other things) how Twitter, Reddit, and Facebook seep into our political thinking. This disturbing book provides fascinating insights important to everyone, but especially to readers troubled by the current involvement of digital technologies in the political realm.

47.  The Corporation  by Joel Bakan

Joel Bakan’s  The Corporation  draws an intriguing parallel between the psychopathic mindset and the way corporations grow. In this thought-provoking book, legal theorist Bakan uses his training in law to break down the potential of power to corrupt both individuals and corporations.He supplements this analysis with several informative interviews investigating the psychology of pursuing success. 

48.  Humans of New York: Stories  by Brandon Stanton

Brandon Stanton’s photo interview series “Humans of New York” initially became famous on Facebook for capturing everyday lives. This utterly heartwarming (and heart-wrenching) volume compiles multiple stories into a book you can hold. In  Humans of New York,  interviewees bare their souls to Brandon as they pose for his camera, creating a meaningful reminder of our shared and enduring humanity. 

49.  The Element  by Ken Robinson with Lou Aronica

Champion of creativity Ken Robinson urges artistic minds to follow their heart and identify their “element” in his inspirational nonfiction book  The Element . Your element, he explains, is where passion intersects with talent: that’s where you can harness your own power the most. Robinson argues for educational reform that will make helping students find their element a priority, as it is the key to unlocking creativity and innovation for the future.

50.  Eating Animals  by Jonathan Safran Foer

Written by successful novelist Jonathan Safran Foer,  Eating Animals  is a passionate testament to vegetarianism and a philosophical, ethical, and moral assessment of our eating habits, with a special focus on our consumption of animal products. It’s a provocative reading experience, and it’s sure to stay with you for a long time.

51.  Is That a Fish in Your Ear? by David Bellos

David Bellos’s  Is That a Fish in Your Ear?  is a witty, informative ode to the practice of literary translation. Bellos, himself a translator, details the individual aspects of style that complicate translation — like humor. As a result, he opens reader’s eyes to the countless artistic microdecisions obscured behind the curtain of translation. This exciting book will inspire you to seek translated books from other languages and open yourself up to new worlds.

52.  Late Bloomers  by Rich Karlgaard

In  Late Bloomers , Rich Karlgaard dispels the assumption that all genius must emerge in days of youth. He argues that our culture’s obsession with early achievement discourages older members of society from pursuing their passion and talents, pleading for the world to consider “a kinder clock for human development” instead. His book presents an alternative outlook that would empower more people among us to follow their dreams, because it’s never too late!

53.  How to Write an Autobiographical Novel  by Alexander Chee

Alexander Chee’s collection of essays,  How to Write an Autobiographical Novel,  muses on the subjects of art and identity, as well as the craft of writing itself. This thoughtful and reflective book is an impactful invitation into the interior world of one of America’s most acclaimed essayists.

54.  The God Delusion  by Richard Dawkins

A brutal and honest nonfiction book,  The God Delusion  is an unapologetic defense of atheism by Richard Dawkins. The author is entirely unconvinced by religion, and explains his reasoning in this detailed and expansive work. His provocative challenge to readers’ views is sure to prompt spiritual soul-searching for fellow atheists and religious readers alike.

55.  Afropean  by Johny Pitts

“European” doesn’t automatically mean “White.”  Afropean,  a captivating documentation of the history and experience of black Europeans, seeks to challenge this common assumption, turning the spotlight onto black communities in several European countries. This Jhalak Prize-winning work is exciting and invigorating, ready to take you along on a journey across Europe.

56.  A Secret Gift  by Ted Gup

One day, journalist Ted Gup discovered letters addressed to his grandfather from suffering families in Canton, Ohio, from the time of the Great Depression. Following that epistolary trail seventy-five years later, Gup uncovered the story of how his immigrant grandfather secretly helped fellow Cantonians, discovering more about his own grandfather as well as the history of America in the process.  A Secret Gift  is a masterful and moving tale about the past, and a reminder of the importance of kindness and generosity.

57.  The Glass Castle  by Jeanette Walls

Jeanette Walls’s  The Glass Castle  is a tender, humorous account of the author’s nomadic childhood, which has been adapted into an acclaimed movie. This astonishing memoir especially focuses on the author’s relationship with her bohemian-minded parents, whose flaws and eccentricities are described with deep affection, no matter how difficult they are to live with. Simply written and honestly told, this memoir is a true accomplishment.

58.  Know My Name: A Memoir  by Chanel Miller

Have you heard of Chanel Miller? Maybe not — but it’s likely you’ve heard of the man who sexually assaulted her on Stanford University’s campus: Brock Turner. In  Know My Name,  a searing memoir of trauma and recovery, Chanel writes herself back into the narrative, claiming the right to tell her own story. Brave and enlightening, this is a difficult but important read.

59.  1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus  by Charles C. Mann

The way most history textbooks tell it, Europeans brought civilization to the Americas with the arrival of Columbus in 1492. Not so fast, says Charles C. Mann’s  1491 , a book that’s here to challenge the accepted version of history. Mann offers an utterly transformative historical account of the Americas, reversing the general assumption that its inhabitants were simple villagers before the arrival of European colonizers.

60.  Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience and Redemption  by Laura Hillenbrand

Laura Hillenbrand’s  Unbroken  tells the unbelievable story of Louis Zamperini, the rebellious American son of Italian immigrants who found himself a lieutenant in World War II. This breathtaking  tale about the Second World War  is sobering, informative, and brilliantly told — an essential read for anyone interested in the War’s effect on individual lives.

Eager for more of the best contemporary reads? Check out our list of the 21 best novels of the 21st century !

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One only has to think of the romance genre for Danielle Steel’s name to immediately spring to mind. With an arsenal of silk-stocking protagonists and life-changing crises up her sleeve, Steel has mastered the formula for the perfect love story, with all the twists and turns yo...

100+ Best Sci-Fi Books to Take You to Infinity and Beyond

Fans of science fiction are drawn to the genre for a variety of reasons. If you were to look at some of the best sci-fi books through literary history, you'd see such a range of titles and authors that you'd barely believe that they could be shelved in the same p...

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The best essay collections to read now

From advice on friendship and understanding modern life to getting a grasp on coronavirus, these books offer insight on life. 

What better way to get into the work of a writer than through a collection of their essays? 

These seven collections, from novelists and critics alike, address a myriad of subjects from friendship to how colleges are dealing with sexual assaults on campus to race and racism. 

Trick Mirror by Jia Tolentino (2019)

As a staff writer at The New Yorker , Jia Tolentino has explored everything from a rise in youth vaping to the ongoing cultural reckoning about sexual assault. Her first book Trick Mirror takes some of those pieces for The New Yorker as well as new work to form what is one of the sharpest collections of cultural criticism today.

Using herself and her own coming of age as a lens for many of the essays, Tolentino turns her pen and her eye to everything from her generation’s obsession with extravagant weddings to how college campuses deal with sexual assault.

If you’re looking for an insight into millennial life, then Trick Mirror should be on your to-read list.

In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens by Alice Walker (1983)

Sometimes essays collected from a sprawling period of a successful writer’s life can feel like a hasty addition to a bibliography; a smash-and-grab of notebook flotsam. Not so In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens , from which one can truly understand the sheer range of the Pulitzer Prize winner’s range of study and activism. From Walker’s first published piece of non-fiction (for which she won a prize, and spent her winnings on cut peonies) to more elegiac pieces about her heritage, Walker’s thoughts on feminism (which she terms “womanism”) and the Civil Rights Movement remain grippingly pertinent 50 years on.

Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris (2000)

That David Sedaris’s ascent to literary stardom happened later in his life – his breakthrough collection of humour essays was released when he was 44 – suited the author’s writing style perfectly. Me Talk Pretty One Day is both a painfully funny account of his childhood and an enduring snapshot of mid-forties malaise. First story ‘Go Carolina’, about his attempt to transcend a childhood lisp, is told from a perfect distance and with all the worldliness necessary to milk every drop of tragic, cringeworthy humour from his childhood. It never falters from there: by the book’s second half, in which Sedaris is living in France, he’s firmly established his niche, writing about the ways that even snobs experience utter humiliation ­– and Me Talk Pretty One Day is all the more human for it. 

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The best non-fiction books to read in 2024

From candid memoirs to provocative essay collections, 2024’s forthcoming non-fiction is enticing. jessie thompson shares our guide to what you need on your reading pile.

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S orry, but we’re about to make your reading pile for 2024 very big. From candid memoirs to provocative essays, little-told histories to behind-the-scenes accounts of sensational trials, the new year is full of must-reads to suit every taste. Here’s our guide to the unmissable non-fiction books of the year.

Charles III: New King. New Court. The Inside Story by Robert Hardman

Boris Johnson gave a copy of Robert Hardman’s last book,  Queen of Our Times: The Life of Elizabeth II , to Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky as a gift – so you know this probably won’t be an Omid Scobie -style takedown. Instead, with impressive access to the royal family, Robert Hardman offers an insider account of the first year of King Charles III’s reign, including the royal’s plans for reform and his relationships with his sons.  18 Jan, Macmillan

Buy the book now:

• Amazon: £15, Amazon.co.uk

Only Say Good Things by Crystal Hefner

Crystal Hefner married Playboy tycoon Hugh when he was 86 and she was 26. In her memoir, she lifts the lid on life inside the Playboy mansion, which – in a surprise to no one – was apparently rife with misogyny and objectification. Hefner’s story has the potential to be as provocative as Ariel Levy’s cult feminist classic,  Female Chauvinist Pigs . 25 Jan, Ebury

• Amazon: £16, Amazon.co.uk

Empireworld by Sathnam Sanghera

With  Empireland , Sathnam Sanghera wrote the British history book that should be on every school reading list, laying bare how imperialism formed modern Britain. In  Empireworld  he takes it further, looking at the legacy of the British empire around the globe.  25 Jan, Viking

• Amazon: £14, Amazon.co.uk

Hardy Women by Paula Byrne

Women in Thomas Hardy’s novels tend to have an absolutely terrible time – but what about the women he knew in his own life? Paula Byrne, who has written biographies of Jane Austen and Barbara Pym, turns her eye to the female figures that formed him, shedding light not just on his mother, sisters, girlfriends and wives, but creating a refined portrait of the author himself.  1 Feb, William Collins

• Amazon: £21.79, Amazon.co.uk

Keir Starmer by Tom Baldwin

He’s described by many as the PM-in-waiting , but he’s also regularly accused of being dry and boring. So who is Keir Starmer, really? This new biography of the Labour leader attempts to shed light on the man who may lead our next government.  29 Feb, William Collins

Pre-order the book now:

• Amazon: £20.99, Amazon.co.uk

A Bookshop of One’s Own by Jane Cholmeley

In the 1980s, feminist bookshop Silver Moon opened its doors on Charing Cross Road and became home to a generation of creative women. Jane Cholmeley, one of the owners, is putting it back in the history books with her new memoir of that time. The perfect read for anyone who dreams of running away and opening a bookshop with all their friends (I know it isn’t just me).  29 Feb, Harper NonFiction

• Amazon: £15.63, Amazon.co.uk

The House of Hidden Meanings by RuPaul

Drag Race  addicts get ready: RuPaul has written the story of his life. The drag superstar describes his journey from growing up Black, queer and poor in a broken home to becoming a celebrated and successful champion of self-acceptance.  5 March, Fourth Estate

• Amazon: £19.99, Amazon.co.uk

The Summer We Crossed Europe in the Rain by Kazuo Ishiguro

Fans of the  Never Let Me Go  author know that Kazuo Ishiguro originally dreamed of becoming a songwriter, inspired by Bob Dylan. And he did fulfil that dream, in fact – this publication collects the lyrics he wrote for American singer Stacey Kent, with illustrations by Italian artist Bianca Bagnarelli.  7 March, Faber

• Amazon: £16.55, Amazon.co.uk

The Chain by Chimene Suleyman

Chimene Suleyman’s memoir begins with her trip to an abortion clinic in 2017. She’s accompanied by her boyfriend, but she soon finds out he isn’t who she thinks he is. Soon a community of women, all affected by him, begins to form, exposing a pattern of harm and manipulation.  28 March, W&N

• Amazon: £17.47, Amazon.co.uk

No Judgement by Lauren Oyler

Apparently, Lauren Oyler ’s literary hot takes (including a skewering of media darling Jia Tolentino’s essay collection  Trick Mirror ) have caused the London Review of Books website to crash – twice. It’s quite fun to read someone who really doesn’t care about winding people up, and Oyler’s first essay collection has one piece on Goodreads and critical timidity that’s really worth paying attention to.  7 March, Virago

• Amazon: £18.40, Amazon.co.uk

Travelling: On the Path of Joni Mitchell by Ann Powers

In her 80th year, the  Blue  singer continues to provide inspiration. After Amy Key’s gorgeous meditation on a life alone,  Arrangements in Blue , which riffed on Joni Mitchell’s seminal album, music writer Ann Powers now goes looking for the story of one of the most beguiling and enigmatic stars in music.  14 March, Harper NonFiction

• Amazon: £23, Amazon.co.uk

Easy Wins by Anna Jones

If you don’t have an Anna Jones cookbook on your shelf, all I can ask is: why? Over the last decade, she’s made a name for herself as the vegetarian answer to Nigella, offering recipes for meals that are the holy trinity of easy, healthy and delicious. Her latest is based around 12 “hero ingredients”, from garlic to lemons to olive oil.  14 March, Fourth Estate

• Amazon: £25.76, Amazon.co.uk

A Very Private School by Charles Spencer

He has written a number of history books, but this time, Charles Spencer – Princess Diana’s younger brother – is writing something more personal.  A Very Private School  is his account of being sent to Maidwell Hall, a boarding school in Northampton, when he was eight years old. It’s been described as “a clear-eyed account of a culture of cruelty” and Spencer’s “candid reckoning with his past” by the publisher – who is also the publisher behind Britney Spears’  The Woman in Me  in the UK. There could be marmalade-droppers.  24 March, Gallery Books

The Lasting Harm by Lucia Osborne-Crowley

Lucia Osborne-Crowley’s 2019 book  I Choose Elena  was a moving account of how literature helped her to overcome the trauma of an assault she experienced as a teenager. So she has a first-hand understanding of the legacy of abuse – or, to steal a phrase from the prosecutors of Ghislaine Maxwell in the trial that saw the wealthy socialite sentenced to 20 years for sex trafficking , the “lasting harm”. Her latest book is the behind-the-scenes story of that trial, and Osborne-Crowley its apt storyteller. 14 March, Fourth Estate

• Amazon: £20.24, Amazon.co.uk

Barbara Comyns: A Savage Innocence by Avril Horner

Barbara Comyns was a poodle breeder, antique dealer, painter, and the wife of a spy, and is also the best novelist you’ve never heard of. That may be about to change, though, with the publication of the first Comyns biography, featuring a number of unpublished letters.  19 March, Manchester University Press

• Amazon: £30, Amazon.co.uk

Who’s Afraid of Gender? by Judith Butler

Judith Butler’s unreadably long academic-speak sentences didn’t stop her ideas about gender from becoming some of the most influential in modern culture.  Gender Trouble  popularised the notion that gender is largely performative and something that can be subverted. In what could be one of the most divisive books of the year, Butler – who now identifies as they/them – has written about how gender is now being weaponised by the far right.  19 March, Allen Lane

Rebel Rising by Rebel Wilson

The Australian actor Rebel Wilson is apparently revealing her “deepest, darkest secrets” in a new memoir. The  Bridesmaids  star is set to discuss everything from weight loss to sexuality to fertility. She also teased that there would be “at least one story about Brad Pitt”.  2 April, Harper NonFiction

By the River: Essays from the Water’s Edge

Essay collections from Daunt Books have previously brought together wonderful writers to talk about the joy of gardens or the pleasures of the kitchen, in beautifully packaged editions with gorgeously illustrated covers. This time round, writers from Jo Hamya to Amy Key to Caleb Azumah Nelson reflect on rivers. 11 April, Daunt Books Originals

• Amazon: £9.99, Amazon.co.uk

It’s Not Banter, It’s Racism by Azeem Rafiq

Azeem Rafiq’s testimony of the racism he said he endured at Yorkshire County Cricket Club was one of the most shocking reckonings in the recent history of British sport. He has now written about his experiences, which resulted in a £400k fine for the club , as well as the dangers that come with denying racism.  25 April, Trapeze

• Amazon: £12.99, Amazon.co.uk

Knife by Salman Rushdie

The world watched in horror when Salman Rushdie was violently attacked on stage at an event in New York. He now writes his account of the incident, which left him without sight in one eye or the use of one hand, 30 years after he was first placed under the threat of a fatwa.  16 April, Jonathan Cape

• Amazon: £17.99, Amazon.co.uk

Reading Lessons by Carol Atherton

Not another year of  Of Mice and Men , surely? It’s the same book but different, argues English teacher Carol Atherton. She writes about how the books we study at school may not change that much, but their meanings do, from her first-hand experience of teaching everything from Jane Eyre to Jeanette Winterson.  4 April, Fig Tree

The Garden Against Time by Olivia Laing

Olivia Laing has walked Suffolk’s River Ouse in search of its stories, journeyed around America trying to understand alcoholic writers, and wandered through New York looking for an antidote to loneliness. In her latest book, she picks up her hand trowel and heads into her own garden, planting bulbs as she looks at gardens’ historic associations with paradise and utopia.  2 May, Picador

Rebel Girl: My Life as a Feminist Punk by Kathleen Hanna

She’s the first lady of riot grrl-dom, and now Bikini Kill and Le Tigre frontwoman Kathleen Hanna has written her memoir. Hanna will discuss life with Lyme disease, the affliction that stopped her from performing for several years, as well as her friendship with Kurt Cobain and her marriage to Beastie Boys member Adam Horovitz.  14 May, William Collins

On Green Pitches by David Kitson

After the shocking 2017 Grenfell Tower fire, in which 72 people died, a community of survivors began to look for ways to come together and help one another with the raw grief. Within weeks, Grenfell Athletic Football Club had been formed. This book, by former professional footballer David Kitson – who would go on to coach the team – tells their story. 23 May, Harper NonFiction

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Eight Nonfiction Books That Will Frighten You

These eight titles are some of the best the true-crime genre has to offer.

A decade ago, the inaugural season of Serial debuted. The podcast, about the 1999 murder of Hae Min Lee and questions surrounding the arrest and conviction of her former boyfriend, Adnan Syed, drew upon the alchemy of suspenseful storytelling and a taste for the lurid that has enticed Americans for centuries. Serial ’s massive popularity, and its week-by-week format, overhauled how the genre was received: Audiences were no longer content with merely consuming the story. They wanted to be active participants, to post theories, drive by suspects’ houses, and call attention to errors.

As a result, the true-crime landscape was transformed. Its popularity has soared, making room for work that not only shocks but also asks deeper questions. There has been a welcome uptick in stories that focus on the victims of violence and the social structures that perpetuate it. But a perennial desire for the macabre doesn’t just dissipate under the umbrella of good intentions. The level of dreck in the genre— particularly cheap, poorly researched media that substitutes flippancy for compassion—continues to rise.

This glut makes it hard to identify the best true crime, which harnesses the instinct for titillation in the service of empathy, justice, and maybe even systemic change. These eight books are some of the most accomplished the genre has to offer. They broaden the definition of true crime itself—and most important, they interrogate their own telling of the story, reflecting an essential self-awareness about mining real people’s grief.

The Phantom Prince , by Elizabeth Kendall

So much has been written about Ted Bundy, who murdered dozens of women and girls in the 1970s, most of it wondering, from the outside, how Bundy got away with so much for so long. Kendall, however, had a more intimate perspective: She was his long-term girlfriend (though she uses a pseudonym here). She thought she knew Bundy well, but as the murders of women in the Pacific Northwest began to spread, and police sketches of a man named Ted circulated, she had to confront her level of denial—and then catalog the collateral damage of being a serial killer’s partner. This book is dedicated to figuring out what she actually knew and was kept from knowing, and Kendall does so in plain (if occasionally awkward) prose that doesn’t shy away from her own blind spots. True-crime memoirs were fairly rare in the early ’80s, when hers was released—and it remains an important one.

Read: The gross spectacle of murder fandom

Under the Bridge , by Rebecca Godfrey

The horrific 1997 murder of 14-year-old Reena Virk by several other teenagers prompted a reckoning in Victoria, British Columbia. Godfrey, the author of The Torn Skirt , a novel about the effects of a self-destructive girlhood, felt compelled to report on what happened, and why. The fine Hulu series of the same name, released in April and starring Riley Keough and Archie Panjabi, was more about Godfrey’s investigative quest than Virk’s murder. But the original work, which I’ve read multiple times, better depicts the toxic dynamic of teenage girls egging one another on from bullying to more violent acts, while also humanizing the victim and perpetrators.

The Red Parts , by Maggie Nelson

In 2005, Nelson published the poetry collection Jane: A Murder , which focuses on the then-unsolved murder of her aunt Jane Mixer 36 years before, and the pain of a case in limbo. This nonfiction companion, published two years later, deals with the fallout of the unexpected discovery and arrest of a suspect thanks to a new DNA match. Nelson’s exemplary prose style mixes pathos with absurdity (“Where I imagined I might find the ‘face of evil,’” she writes of Mixer’s killer, “I am finding the face of Elmer Fudd”), and conveys how this break upends everything she believed about Mixer, the case, and the legal system. Nelson probes still-open questions instead of arriving at anything remotely like “closure,” and the way she continues to ask them makes The Red Parts stand out.

Read: The con man who became a true-crime writer

Hannah Mary Tabbs and the Disembodied Torso , by Kali Nicole Gross

Four years ago, my friend and fellow crime writer Elon Green investigated the alarming lack of true crime written by Black authors ; today, white authors still tell most of these stories, most of which are about white victims. This is in part, I’ve come to believe, because so many crime narratives—particularly historical ones—depend on a written record of some kind, which tends to exclude people of color. This book by Gross, a historian based at Emory University, was a revelation to me for uncovering the fascinating, messy story of Tabbs, a formerly enslaved woman, probable fraudster, and murderer in 1880s Philadelphia. Tabbs does not fit into any easy box, and Gross’s careful research places the desperate acts of this particular woman against the backdrop of post-Reconstruction America, a time when the gap between what was promised at the end of slavery and what was actually possible widened sharply.

We Keep the Dead Close , by Becky Cooper

Cooper, a onetime New Yorker staffer, had for years been haunted by a story she’d heard while attending Harvard in the late 2000s: A girl had been murdered, and she had been having an affair with her professor, which the school covered up. The story turned out to be more myth than truth, but Cooper felt compelled to investigate, and she discovered that there had, in fact, been a long-unsolved murder. Some of the details eerily parallel those of The Red Parts— both victims are college students named Jane, both murdered in 1969—but Cooper’s book veers away from Nelson’s. The book, which conjures the vivid, all-too-brief life of the anthropology student Jane Britton, is a furious examination of a culture of complicity at Harvard, where, Cooper points out, sexual-misconduct allegations were (and still are) dismissed or ignored. And like Nelson, Cooper demolishes the concept of closure.

Read: When Truman Capote’s lies caught up with him

The Third Rainbow Girl , by Emma Copley Eisenberg

Before Eisenberg put out her wonderful novel, Housemates , she worked primarily in the nonfiction space, publishing a 2017 feature story for Splinter about the missing Black trans teen Sage Smith, which was reprinted in my true-crime anthology Unspeakable Acts. She also published this book, a standout hybrid of reportage, memoir, and cultural criticism. Her subject was the 1980 murders of Vicki Durian and Nancy Santomero in Pocahontas County, West Virginia (and the subsequent wrongful conviction of a suspect)—but also the author’s own queer coming of age in the same area of Appalachia. Eisenberg is a warm, compassionate guide through a thicket of violence, abrupt endings, and youthful longings, and her book is an intelligent corrective to common true-crime tropes. “Telling a story is often about obligation and sympathy, identification, and empathy,” she writes. “With whom is your lot cast? To whom are you bound?”

Seventy Times Seven , by Alex Mar

I had been waiting many years for a book about Paula Cooper, the Black teenage girl who was sentenced to death for the robbery and murder of Ruth Pelke, an elderly white woman, in the mid-’80s. Though she committed the crime with three other girls, only 15-year-old Cooper was given the death penalty. She became the youngest person on death row in the country at the time, leading to international outrage, a clemency campaign, and an unlikely friendship with the victim’s grandson, Bill. The points this story makes about the human capacity for empathy, who merits collective forgiveness, and the stubborn persistence of the death penalty are discomfiting. Mar (another Unspeakable Acts contributor) has made a long career of probing deeper questions, and in this book she eschews tidy narratives. Forgiveness does not, in fact, overcome the ramifications of violence, as will become clear in Bill’s home and work life—and in Paula’s, after she is eventually released from prison. Mar masterfully explores who is entitled to mercy, and how we continue to fail prisoners during and after their incarceration.

By the Fire We Carry , by Rebecca Nagle

Finally, this terrific new book, published just last month, looks at the larger picture of Indigenous autonomy and forced removal through the lens of one case—the murder of the Muscogee Nation member George Jacobs by another tribal member, Patrick Murphy—asking whether the state of Oklahoma actually had the jurisdiction to prosecute and execute Murphy. In 2020, the Supreme Court would eventually rule that much of eastern Oklahoma did remain an American Indian reservation; its decision set a far-reaching precedent that, in practice, would prove more complicated to enforce. Nagle, a member of the Cherokee Nation and a resident of Oklahoma, writes with sensitivity and empathy for the Native American communities she grew up in and around. Her work is similar in scope and feel to (and clearly in conversation with) Missing and Murdered and Stolen , the excellent podcasts by the Indigenous Canadian journalist Connie Walker.

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The Best Reviewed Nonfiction of 2022

Featuring bob dylan, elena ferrante, kate beaton, jhumpa lahiri, kate beaton, and more.

We’ve come to the end of another bountiful literary year, and for all of us review rabbits here at Book Marks, that can mean only one thing: basic math, and lots of it.

Yes, using reviews drawn from more than 150 publications, over the next two weeks we’ll be calculating and revealing the most critically-acclaimed books of 2022, in the categories of (deep breath): Fiction; Nonfiction; Memoir and Biography; Sci-Fi, Fantasy, and Horror; Short Story Collections; Essay Collections; Poetry; Mystery and Crime; Graphic Literature; and Literature in Translation.

Today’s installment: Nonfiction .

Brought to you by Book Marks , Lit Hub’s “Rotten Tomatoes for books.”

1. In the Margins: On the Pleasures of Reading and Writing  by Elena Ferrante, trans. by Ann Goldstein (Europa)

12 Rave • 12 Positive • 4 Mixed

“The lucid, well-formed essays that make up In the Margins  are written in an equally captivating voice … Although a slim collection, there is more than enough meat here to nourish both the common reader and the Ferrante aficionado … Every essay here is a blend of deep thought, rigorous analysis and graceful prose. We occasionally get the odd glimpse of the author…but mainly the focus is on the nuts and bolts of writing and Ferrante’s practice of her craft. The essays are at their most rewarding when Ferrante discusses the origins of her books, in particular the celebrated Neapolitan Novels, and the multifaceted heroines that power them … These essays might not bring us any closer to finding out who Ferrante really is. Instead, though, they provide valuable insight into how she developed as a writer and how she works her magic.”

–Malcolm Forbes ( The Star Tribune )

2. Index, A History of the: A Bookish Adventure from Medieval Manuscripts to the Digital Age by Dennis Duncan (W. W. Norton)

14 Rave • 8 Positive • 1 Mixed Read an excerpt from Index here

“The cleverly punctuated title of Dennis Duncan’s book, Index, A History of the, should signal that this isn’t a dry account of a small cogwheel in the publishing machine. Instead, it is an engaging tale of the long search for the quickest way to find what you need in those big, information-rich things called books. It is indeed an adventure, and ‘bookish’ in the most appealing sense … Duncan goes into fascinating detail about all this—page numbers get an entire chapter of their own—with digressions into curious byways of booklore and literature … From ancient Egypt to Silicon Valley, Duncan is an ideal tour guide: witty, engaging, knowledgeable and a fount of diverting anecdotes. The book skews toward the literary, but anyone interested in the 2,200-year journey to quickly find what one needs in a book will be enlightened, and will never again take an index for granted. The well-designed book also includes nearly 40 illustrations. As might be expected, the index—created not by the author but by Paula Clarke Bain—is magnificent.”

–Steven Moore ( The Washington Post )

3. We Don’t Know Ourselves by Fintan O’Toole (Liveright) 17 Rave • 4 Positive • 1 Mixed • 1 Pan

“One of the many triumphs of Fintan O’Toole’s We Don’t Know Ourselves is that he manages to find a form that accommodates the spectacular changes that have occurred in Ireland over the past six decades, which happens to be his life span … it is not a memoir, nor is it an absolute history, nor is it entirely a personal reflection or a crepuscular credo. It is, in fact, all of these things helixed together: his life, his country, his thoughts, his misgivings, his anger, his pride, his doubt, all of them belonging, eventually, to us … O’Toole, an agile cultural commentator, considers himself to be a representative of the blank slate on which the experiment of change was undertaken, but it’s a tribute to him that he maintains his humility, his sharpness and his enlightened distrust …

O’Toole writes brilliantly and compellingly of the dark times, but he is graceful enough to know that there is humor and light in the cracks. There is a touch of Eduardo Galeano in the way he can settle on a telling phrase … But the real accomplishment of this book is that it achieves a conscious form of history-telling, a personal hybrid that feels distinctly honest and humble at the same time. O’Toole has not invented the form, but he comes close to perfecting it. He embraces the contradictions and the confusion. In the process, he weaves the flag rather than waving it.”

–Colum McCann ( The New York Times Book Review )

4. Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne by Katherine Rundell (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

14 Rave • 4 Positive • 1 Mixed Read an excerpt from Super-Infinite here

“Rundell is right that Donne…must never be forgotten, and she is the ideal person to evangelise him for our age. She shares his linguistic dexterity, his pleasure in what TS Eliot called ‘felt thought’, his ability to bestow physicality on the abstract … It’s a biography filled with gaps and Rundell brings a zest for imaginative speculation to these. We know so little about Donne’s wife, but Rundell brings her alive as never before … Rundell confronts the difficult issue of Donne’s misogyny head-on … This is a determinedly deft book, and I would have liked it to billow a little more, making room for more extensive readings of the poems and larger arguments about the Renaissance. But if there is an overarching argument, then it’s about Donne as an ‘infinity merchant’ … To read Donne is to grapple with a vision of the eternal that is startlingly reinvented in the here and now, and Rundell captures this vision alive in all its power, eloquence and strangeness”

–Laura Feigel ( The Guardian )

5. Thin Places by Kerri ní Dochartaigh (Milkweed) 12 Rave • 7 Positive • 2 Mixed

“Can the Irish border be described as a ‘thin place’? Never have I read such an eloquent description for the omnipresent border in our psyche … Readers will draw their own meaning from Ní Dochartaigh’s words, and she allows space for them to ponder … This debut is not a memoir in the traditional sense; nor is it simply a polemic about the sectarian violence that tore through the author’s childhood in Derry; instead, it combines both of these elements under the insistent gaze of the poet-writer who is always keen to draw our attention to nature … Readers may be surprised at the depths that  Thin Places explores. Do not mistake its appreciation of the natural world for anything twee or solely comforting … This is not for the faint-hearted …

Ní Dochartaigh’s writing is generous and she leaves little for the reader to surmise in those dark days she describes in startling detail … The darkness in her subject matter lends itself to the light, however. The natural world at large is a balm for her … It might sound incongruous to write about the beauty of the whooper swan and the enduring effect of Troubles in the same paragraph, but Ní Dochartaigh’s manages it … This is a book full of hope found in dark places and it confronts some of the realities of the Irish border and the enduring effect it has on our lives.”

–Mia Colleran ( The Irish Independent )

6. Translating Myself and Others by Jhumpa Lahiri (Princeton University Press)

8 Rave • 14 Positive • 1 Mixed

“Lahiri mixes detailed explorations of craft with broader reflections on her own artistic life, as well as the ‘essential aesthetic and political mission’ of translation. She is excellent in all three modes—so excellent, in fact, that I, a translator myself, could barely read this book. I kept putting it aside, compelled by Lahiri’s writing to go sit at my desk and translate … One of Lahiri’s great gifts as an essayist is her ability to braid multiple ways of thinking together, often in startling ways … a reminder, no matter your relationship to translation, of how alive language itself can be. In her essays as in her fiction, Lahiri is a writer of great, quiet elegance; her sentences seem simple even when they’re complex. Their beauty and clarity alone would be enough to wake readers up. ‘Look,’ her essays seem to say: Look how much there is for us to wake up to.”

–Lily Meyer ( NPR )

7. Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands by Kate Beaton (Drawn & Quarterly)

14 Rave • 4 Positive Watch an interview with Kate Beaton here

“It could hardly be more different in tone from [Beaton’s] popular larky strip Hark! A Vagrant … Yes, it’s funny at moments; Beaton’s low-key wryness is present and correct, and her drawings of people are as charming and as expressive as ever. But its mood overall is deeply melancholic. Her story, which runs to more than 400 pages, encompasses not only such thorny matters as social class and environmental destruction; it may be the best book I have ever read about sexual harassment … There are some gorgeous drawings in Ducks of the snow and the starry sky at night. But the human terrain, in her hands, is never only black and white … And it’s this that gives her story not only its richness and depth, but also its astonishing grace. Life is complex, she tell us, quietly, and we are all in it together; each one of us is only trying to survive. What a difficult, gorgeous and abidingly humane book. It really does deserve to win all the prizes.”

–Rachel Cooke ( The Guardian )

8. The Philosophy of Modern Song by Bob Dylan (Simon & Schuster)

10 Rave • 15 Positive • 7 Mixed • 4 Pan

“It is filled with songs and hyperbole and views on love and lust even darker than Blood on the Tracks … There are 66 songs discussed here … Only four are by women, which is ridiculous, but he never asked us … Nothing is proved, but everything is experienced—one really weird and brilliant person’s experience, someone who changed the world many times … Part of the pleasure of the book, even exceeding the delectable Chronicles: Volume One , is that you feel liberated from Being Bob Dylan. He’s not telling you what you got wrong about him. The prose is so vivid and fecund, it was useless to underline, because I just would have underlined the whole book. Dylan’s pulpy, noir imagination is not always for the squeamish. If your idea of art is affirmation of acceptable values, Bob Dylan doesn’t need you … The writing here is at turns vivid, hilarious, and will awaken you to songs you thought you knew … The prose brims everywhere you turn. It is almost disturbing. Bob Dylan got his Nobel and all the other accolades, and now he’s doing my job, and he’s so damn good at it.”

–David Yaffe ( AirMail )

9. Stay True by Hua Hsu (Doubleday)

14 Rave • 3 Positive Listen to Hua Hsu read an excerpt from Stay True here

“… quietly wrenching … To say that this book is about grief or coming-of-age doesn’t quite do it justice; nor is it mainly about being Asian American, even though there are glimmers of that too. Hsu captures the past by conveying both its mood and specificity … This is a memoir that gathers power through accretion—all those moments and gestures that constitute experience, the bits and pieces that coalesce into a life … Hsu is a subtle writer, not a showy one; the joy of Stay True sneaks up on you, and the wry jokes are threaded seamlessly throughout.”

–Jennifer Szalai ( The New York Times )

10. Body Work: The Radical Power of Personal Narrative by Melissa Febos (Catapult)

13 Rave • 2 Positive • 2 Mixed Read an excerpt from Body Work here

“In her new book, Body Work: The Radical Power of Personal Narrative , memoirist Melissa Febos handily recuperates the art of writing the self from some of the most common biases against it: that the memoir is a lesser form than the novel. That trauma narratives should somehow be over—we’ve had our fill … Febos rejects these belittlements with eloquence … In its hybridity, this book formalizes one of Febos’s central tenets within it: that there is no disentangling craft from the personal, just as there is no disentangling the personal from the political. It’s a memoir of a life indelibly changed by literary practice and the rigorous integrity demanded of it … Febos is an essayist of grace and terrific precision, her sentences meticulously sculpted, her paragraphs shapely and compressed … what’s fresh, of course, is Febos herself, remapping this terrain through her context, her life and writing, her unusual combinations of sources (William H. Gass meets Elissa Washuta, for example), her painstaking exactitude and unflappable sureness—and the new readers she will reach with all of this.”

–Megan Milks ( 4Columns )

Our System:

RAVE = 5 points • POSITIVE = 3 points • MIXED = 1 point • PAN = -5 points

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Best Books for Native American Heritage Month: Great Fiction, Nonfiction and Kids Books By Native and Indigenous Authors

These memoirs, thrillers, romance, literary fiction, nonfiction and short stories focus on Native and Indigenous stories

There's a chill in the air, the leaves are crunchy underfoot and the Halloween decorations are beginning to give way to sparkly lights and flying reindeer. But before the winter holiday festivities overtake the calendar, we can't forget Thanksgiving and the month that's often overrun by preparations for what comes after it.

November marks Native American Heritage Month, also known as National American Indian Heritage Month . Since it was federally recognized for the first time in 1990, we've spent the month recognizing the history, culture and contributions of Indigenous people to our culture and communities.

One of those ways is reading books by Native and Indigenous authors that feature characters, storylines and experiences that reflect the incredible diversity of Indigenous communities. Below, we've rounded up some old favorites and newcomers in fiction, nonfiction — and all of the genres thereof — as well as a few children's books to read with your kids this month or add to your classroom collection.

'Fire Exit' by Morgan Talty

Charles has watched Elizabeth's life unfold in glimpses since she was a baby and now that she's disappeared, he has to contend with the secret he's been carrying all that time: she's his daughter. Following Charles as he grapples with whether to reveal that truth and all the complications that come with it, not to mention his struggles with his home and family, this is a gripping tale of legacy and community, inheritance and shared values and what we owe one another.

'Heart Berries' by Terese Marie Mailhot

In this gorgeous elegy for the author's lost parents, Mailhot explores her trauma, a deeply dysfunctional family and the unreliability of memory as she writes her way toward her version of the truth.

'White Magic' by Elissa Washuta

What do Twin Peaks , the Oregon Trail video game and Stevie Nicks have in common? In this braided essay collection, the author traces her legacy of cultural inheritance, colonization and her journey toward becoming a witch, including those cultural touch points that have shaped her. It's a powerful look at the legacy and where some of the now-trendy spiritual practices find their origins.

'Wandering Stars' by Tommy Orange

This soaring exploration of generational trauma starts with Star, a survivor of the 1864 Sand Creek Massacre, who’s forced to speak English and practice Christianity by the man who goes on to found the notoriously cruel Carlisle Indian Industrial School. A generation later, his son Charles is sent to that same school, where the man who abused his father does the same to him. But Charles finds hope with fellow student Opal Viola, clinging to dreams of a better, freer future.

'The Only Good Indians' by Stephen Graham Jones

One of the best horror writers working today takes a Jordan Peele-esque story of four American Indian men who are plagued by a deadly event in their past that comes back to wreak havoc on their present. It's a spine-tingling story of revenge, cultural history and tradition that's not for the faint of heart.

'Never Whistle at Night' edited by by Shane Hawk and Theodore C. Van Alst Jr.

Speaking of scary, this unsettling short story collection by Native and Indigenous authors has something for every phobia. Ghosts, spirits and miscellaneous horrors abound in a series of stories that will get under your skin and stay there.

'The Berry Pickers' by Amanda Peters

Tragedy strikes a Mi’kmaq family when their four-year-old daughter Ruthie mysteriously disappears from one of the Maine fields where they work as seasonal blueberry pickers. That tragedy impacts the family deeply, especially her brother Joe, who last saw her. Meanwhile, a young girl named Norma, who's grown up as the only child of affluent parents, has been plagued by strange dreams that feel "more like memories" in this original, heart-wrenching novel.

'The Mighty Red' by Louise Erdrich

A wedding between terrified North Dakota farmer Gary and former goth Kismet —notwithstanding aspiring home-wrecker Hugo— forms the crux of this powerful and deeply relatable story. It's about the costs of things on a mundane and cosmic scale, how time moves in planetary and human terms, not to mention hope, despair and the life we carve out in between.

'A Council of Dolls' by Mona Susan Power

This poignant, moving novel with elements of magical realism follows three generations of Native women and their treasured playthings: Cora, shipped off to a brutal boarding school with only her doll for comfort; Lillian, who endures unspeakable horrors at the hands of punishing nuns; and Sissy, whose mother's unpredictable anger keeps her on the edge of danger.

'White Horse' by Erika T. Wurth

Turn the Metallica up to 11, crack open a cold one and pull on a well-loved band T-shirt for this gritty, supernatural novel about the importance of family and what it means to be haunted. It's spooky, scary and a great introduction to the author's prowess before her next one arrives in March 2025.

'The Plot Against Native America' by Bill Vaughn

While a number of the fiction favorites on this list explore the horrors of the Native American boarding schools that abused generations of Native and Indigenous children and decimated their communities, this gripping nonfiction breaks down what really happened. In exacting, incisive prose, it details the development, operation and harmful legacy of these institutions from their first formation in the 1800s to the reparations that are being sought today.

'The Truth According to Ember' by Danica Nava

Ember Lee Cardinal hides her Chickasaw identity to land a job and once there, she even gets a crush on the Native IT guy, Danuwoa Colson. But when they get caught violating the no-dating-coworkers policy and a colleague starts blackmailing Ember, she has to decide: should she come clean and risk losing it all?

'Braiding Sweetgrass' by Robin Wall Kimmerer

Botanist, scientist and enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, Robin Wall Kimmerer, draws on her deep knowledge of the natural world and the lessons it has to teach us in this seminal and beloved book. This 40th-anniversary edition features a new introduction by the author that Elizabeth Gilbert calls “a journey that is every bit as mythic as it is scientific, as sacred as it is historical, as clever as it is wise.”

'Sisters of the Lost Nation' by Nick Medina

Darkness descends on the Native American reservation where Anna was raised, and her ability to see a nameless entity suddenly takes on even more horrifying meaning. As women begin disappearing, including Anna's sister, she must face the forces encroaching upon her community in this unforgettable, chilling debut.

'And Then She Fell' by Alicia Elliott

This searing, darkly funny take on mental health and motherhood follows Alice, a young Native woman who's just given birth to a beautiful baby girl not long after losing her own mother. While she's the only Indigenous woman in their fancy new neighborhood, her supportive husband is a white academic who studies Mohawk culture, so it's not like she's totally alone — right? But as she starts hearing voices and unexplained occurrences mar her days, she can't tell if she's just paranoid or there's something more sinister afoot.

'Woman of Light' by Kali Fajardo-Anstine

After her brother is run out of town by a violent white mob, Luz has to figure out how to survive in 1930s Denver by herself. But when she starts having visions of her ancestors and their lives in the nearby Lost Territory, she decides she can't let their struggle, perseverance and powerful stories die with her. An epic, cinematic generation-spanning force.

'Buffalo Dreamer' by Violet Duncan

In this gorgeous National Book Award finalist , a young girl named Summer starts having vivid dreams about the reservation where her mom's family lives, her grandfather's heartbreaking history and how learning about a painful past can hold hope for a better future. A beautiful way to teach middle school-aged readers about Native, Indigenous and American Indian history.

'This Land' by Ashley Fairbanks, illustrated by Bridget George

An adorable primer on the history of land and who lived where we do before we got here, this engaging book is a great way to introduce kids to the idea that everyone comes from somewhere — and that even Disney World was something else once, too.

'Fry Bread: A Native American Family Story' by Kevin Noble Maillard, illustrated by Juana Martinez-Neal

This 2020 Robert F. Sibert Informational Book Medal honoree and 2020 American Indian Youth Literature Picture Book Honor Winner (among many other accolades) teaches kids about the traditions of a Native American family through lyrical verse and beautiful illustrations. Grab a snack — it might just make you hungry!

'Remember' by Joy Harjo

U.S. Poet Laureate Joy Harjo’s iconic poem "Remember," illustrated by Caldecott Medalist Michaela Goade, encourages young readers to reflect on their family, nature and heritage in this multiple award-winning book. It's an inspiring addition to any child's collection.

Related Articles

10 New Nonfiction Book Releases of November 2024

In celebration of true stories, I’ve collected ten of some of the most exciting nonfiction titles hitting shelves in November.

Kendra Winchester

Kendra Winchester is a Contributing Editor for Book Riot where she writes about audiobooks and disability literature. She is also the Founder of Read Appalachia , which celebrates Appalachian literature and writing. Previously, Kendra co-founded and served as Executive Director for Reading Women , a podcast that gained an international following over its six-season run. In her off hours, you can find her writing on her Substack, Winchester Ave , and posting photos of her Corgis on Instagram and Twitter @kdwinchester.

View All posts by Kendra Winchester

Of course, as a fan of true stories, nonfiction is always at the top of my to-be-read pile. With new books, there are so many options—where do you even start? I could read a new book on nature writing by Robin Wall Kimmerer, a favorite of mine. Or I could learn more about seahorses and ring-tailed lemurs. Or maybe I’ll learn more about how to bake the perfect loaf of bread. Or what about a biography of one of the most influential hip-hop groups of all time?

In celebration of true stories, I’ve collected ten of some of the most exciting nonfiction titles hitting shelves in November. You might be new to nonfiction or a true stories pro, but whatever the case, there’s sure to be something on this list that catches your eye.

All publication dates are subject to change.

Lonely Planet Hidden Libraries: The World’s Most Unusual Book Depositories by DC Helmuth (November 5)

DC Helmuth gives readers a tour of 50 libraries secreted away across the globe. Helmuth includes photos of libraries included in a prison, a monastery, and a phone booth. With its celebration of libraries of all sizes, Lonely Planet Hidden Libraries is a must-read for any book lover.

Turkuaz Kitchen: Traditional and Modern Dough Recipes for Sweet and Savory Bakes: A Baking Book by Betül Tunç (November 5)

Social media star Betül Tunç first fell in love with baking in northeastern Turkey when she was just eight years old. Now she’s known around the world for her love of all things bread and other tasty baked goods. Her new cookbook includes over 85 recipes perfect for both beginner and experienced bakers alike.

Life’s Short, Talk Fast: Fifteen Writers on Why We Can’t Stop Watching Gilmore Girls by Ann Hood (November 12)

For over two decades, Gilmore Girls has captured the imaginations of fans from around the world. Now 15 of those fans share why they love this popular television show. Some writers love a particular character while others are fascinated by a particular episode. Whatever the case, they all love this modern classic.

Vanishing Treasures: A Bestiary of Extraordinary Endangered Creatures by Katherine Rundell (November 12)

The American wood frog freezes solid every winter, and the male seahorse carries its young. These are just two of the 23 endangered animals highlighted in Vanishing Treasures , which is a must-read for any animal lover. And with its beautiful illustrations, this book also makes for a lovely gift.

High And Rising: A Book About De La Soul by Marcus J. Moore (November 19)

De La Soul arrived on the hip-hop scene in 1989, eventually becoming one of the most influential groups in the genre. High and Rising follows their debut and eventual fame, giving readers the first book published about this deeply influential hip-hop group.

Master of Me: The Secret to Controlling Your Narrative by Keke Palmer (November 19)

As a TV, film, and game show host, Keke Palmer seems to have done it all. Now for the first time, Palmer gives readers a behind-the-scenes look at her career and the moments that solidified her success. Plus, she shares intimate details about her experience becoming a single mother and learning to balance both her personal life and her career.

Resist: How a Century of Young Black Activists Shaped America by Rita Omokha (November 19)

In her new book, Rita Omokha details how, for over a hundred years, young Black activists have made vital contributions to social justice movements across America. From the Black Panther party to the protests after the murder of George Floyd, young Black people have led the way in pushing toward a brighter future.

The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World by Robin Wall Kimmerer (November 19)

Potawatomi author Robin Wall Kimmerer made her name with Braiding Sweetgrass , the bestselling book full of stunning nature writing that ruminates on the wisdom human beings can learn from the natural world. Now, Kimmerer is back with The Serviceberry , a book that examines what the land gives to humankind and how we should be more than willing to give back in return.

The White Ladder: Triumph and Tragedy at the Dawn of Mountaineering by Daniel Light (November 19)

Long before the trail up Everest became overwhelmed with wealthy adventurers looking to conquer the world’s tallest mountain, people around the world explored the world’s highest peaks without guides on well-trodden trails. Daniel Light gives readers an overview of those early adventures, highlighting the early pioneers who led the way up the mountains.

American Bulk: Essays on Excess by Emily Mester (November 26)

America is riddled with overconsumption. But what drives us to keep purchasing more and more goods, even when we don’t need them? Emily Mester’s new essay examines this question and more as she ponders America’s obsession with owning more stuff.

There are so many good books—I don’t know where to start! If you’re looking for even more nonfiction book recommendations, check out 10 New Nonfiction Books of October and 10 New Nonfiction Book Releases of September .

As always, you can find a full list of new releases in the magical New Release Index , carefully curated by your favorite Book Riot editors, organized by genre and release date.

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Breaking News

The week’s bestselling books, Nov. 10

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Hardcover fiction

1. Intermezzo by Sally Rooney (Farrar, Straus & Giroux: $29) Two grieving brothers come to terms with their history and the people they love.

2. The Grey Wolf by Louise Penny (Minotaur: $30) The 19th mystery in the Armand Gamache series.

3. Playground by Richard Powers (W.W. Norton & Co.: $30) The Pacific Ocean-set novel explores one of the last wild places we have yet to colonize.

4. The Waiting by Michael Connelly (Little, Brown & Co.: $30) LAPD Det. Renée Ballard tracks a serial rapist whose trail has gone cold.

5. James by Percival Everett (Doubleday: $28) An action-packed reimagining of “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.”

6. Creation Lake by Rachel Kushner (Scribner: $30) A seductive and cunning American woman infiltrates an anarchist collective in France.

7. Tell Me Everything by Elizabeth Strout (Random House: $30) A return to the town of Crosby, Maine, and its colorful cast of characters.

8. All Fours by Miranda July (Riverhead Books: $29) A woman upends her domestic life in this irreverent and tender novel.

9. Karla’s Choice by Nick Harkaway (Viking: $30) A new novel set in the world of John le Carré’s most iconic spy, George Smiley.

10. Colored Television by Danzy Senna (Riverhead Books: $29) A novelist in L.A. gets the opportunity to cash in on her biracial background..

Hardcover nonfiction

1. Be Ready When the Luck Happens by Ina Garten (Crown: $34) The Barefoot Contessa shares the story of her rise in the food world.

2. The Message by Ta-Nehisi Coates (One World: $30) The National Book Award winner travels to three sites of conflict to explore how the stories we tell, and the ones we don’t, shape our realities.

3. Patriot by Alexei Navalny (Knopf $35) The memoir of a political opposition leader who paid the ultimate price for his beliefs.

4. Revenge of the Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell (Little, Brown & Co.: $32) The bestselling author reframes the lessons of his first book 25 years later.

5. Sonny Boy by Al Pacino (Penguin Press: $35) The legendary actor opens up about his life and creative journey.

6. War by Bob Woodward (Simon & Schuster: $32) The Pulitzer winner’s account of one of the most tumultuous periods in presidential politics and American history.

7. Nexus by Yuval Noah Harari (Random House: $35) How the flow of information has shaped us and our world across the centuries.

8. Brothers by Alex Van Halen (Harper $32) The rock ’n’ roll drummer shares his personal story in a tribute to brother and bandmate Eddie.

9. Meditations for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman (Farrar, Straus and Giroux: $27) A guide to living a more meaningful life.

10. The Small and the Mighty by Sharon McMahon (Thesus: $32) A portrait of 12 ordinary Americans whose courage formed the character of our country.

Paperback fiction

1. The Vegetarian by Han Kang (Hogarth: $17)

2. Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin (Vintage: $19)

3. Blackouts by Justin Torres (Picadors: $20)

4. My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante (Europa Editions: $17)

5. North Woods by Daniel Mason (Random House Trade Paperbacks: $18)

6. Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver (Harper Perennial: $22)

7. The Thursday Murder Club by Richard Osman (Penguin: $18)

8. The Secret History by Donna Tartt (Vintage: $18)

9. On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong (Penguin: $18)

10. The Alchemist by Paulo Coelh (Harper One: $18)

Paperback nonfiction

1. The Art Thief by Michael Finkel (Vintage: $18)

2. The Body Keeps Score by Bessel van der Kolk M.D. (Penguin: $19)

3. Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari (Harper Perennial: $26)

4. The Backyard Bird Chronicles by Amy Tan (Knopf: $35)

5. STEM for All by Leena Bakshi McLean (Jossey-Bass: $30)

6. Sinéad O’Connor (Melville House: $20)

7. The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron (TarcherPerigree: $20)

8. All About Love by bell hooks (Morrow: $17)

9. Of Time and Turtles by Sy Montgomery, ill. by Matt Patterson (Mariner: $22)

10. Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer (Milkweed Editions: $20)

More to Read

The week’s bestselling books, Nov. 3

Oct. 30, 2024

The week’s bestselling books, Oct. 27

Oct. 23, 2024

The week’s bestselling books, Oct. 20

Oct. 16, 2024

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