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. 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. Error rating book. (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. He is a well-read, brilliant contextualizer. 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. And in his propulsive, idiosyncratic style, Chang situates the revolution in the political and social context of 20th-century New York (and America): deeply racist, economically cruel, and ready to explode. “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. The three giants of historical fiction are of course Tolstoy, Graves, and Vidal. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. In 25 years of casual history reading, I have found myself becoming more interested in intellectually challenging history books. He left a pretty good path behind him, too. As a result, The Unwinding is almost disorienting, like coming inside after a day spent walking into a stiff wind. 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. Talk about low concept: Stuff Matters is about, among other things, concrete, glass, porcelain, paper, graphite, stainless steel, and plastic. 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 writer is reconciling herself not to loss but to life, a thing as beautiful and terrible, as merciless and vital, as the goshawk. By Keith Rice • 12 months ago. Some revisit conflicts that have shaped the modern world, as … 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. 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. Instead of putting together a list of the 223,546 best historical fiction books, I opted instead for adult historical fiction showstoppers that present a wide array of time periods, places, characters, and more. Like all of Macfarlane’s work, this book is a charm against the streamlined, the global, the generically virtual. Read 33 166 reviews from the world's largest community for readers. Blood, it turns out, is not always enough, but neither are many other commonalities in identity. 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. But what if humanity itself went poof and left behind the entire apparatus of our existence without a single soul remaining to start over? Of course not! 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. 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 Night of the Gun makes plain how hard, and how necessary, it is to face the past with diligence and humility. But over the years, Alexander’s work as a lawyer for the ACLU ultimately led her to agree with the sign’s author. Essays by Montaigne – The original polemicist and essayist. 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. If you're looking for the best history books published this past year, the annual Wolfson History Prize is a great place to start. 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. Find our notable fiction books here and their complete list here. This list, I believe, gives you the broadest view of our world’s shared past. 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. Take a quick look back at five centuries of great writing 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.”. He comically works on a novel to avoid his Lawrence book when he’s not working on the Lawrence book to avoid his novel. Flagging a list will send it to the Goodreads Customer Care team for review. 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. It explains to readers how the average men and women (as opposed to the ‘Great men of history’) have been the main driving force behind change. Whose arm is that, flailing from the sea behind J.M.W. 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. Batuman seems to attract Borgesian peculiarity like a magnet. Welcome back. One is too cacophonous; another is too tranquil. And he’s funny as hell, one of the funniest writers alive. Many of them didn’t. Carr was mulling over the difference between fiction and nonfiction, the novelist’s art and the reporter’s craft. Slate relies on advertising to support our journalism. Gourevitch digs down to the roots of the genocide, locating them in the leftover resentments fostered by colonialism and a civil war. 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. 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. It’s 2018, and we’ve all heard the phrase "New Year, New You"…but here’s the thing: being you is actually the best, because you’re the only you there could ever be! Fortunately, hers is an insightful analysis, identifying the similarities among fundamentalists of all three major monotheistic religions: Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. He is patient and observant. 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. ’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. people who have voted for it and how highly those voters ranked the book. Deraniyagala’s story alone would have made this book unusual, but it is her artistry that makes it indelible. 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. Howard ZinnLively written and well researched, A People’s History narrates the story of the US through the eyes of ordinary people and their experiences, something that most history books tend to ignore. Martin Luther King Jr. once said, “We are not makers of history. 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. Holmes is our greatest living biographer. (eg. The Devil in the White City book. Add to Bag. 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. 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. 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. Here, the best nonfiction books of 2020. It can be easy to dismiss these forms as the worthwhile but fundamentally unliterary assemblage of facts into paragraphs. 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. Just a moment while we sign you in to your Goodreads account. This is the man-made stuff all around us and so mundane we barely give it a second thought. Media reports during the genocidal 1994 massacres in Rwanda were spotty and confusing. Doctors at the American hospital where her family sought treatment prescribed an elaborate drug regimen to control her seizures. This memoir is less a narrative than a collage of mysteriously potent moments: a favorite teacher’s kitchen, a dead puppy, a new dress. 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. or for being critical of a book. 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. “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. Kolker refuses to let their murderer define them. Gene Marks Contributor. Lucid, wide-ranging, and persuasive, The Battle for God provides a framework for understanding more than the three religions it focuses on. Pinging from Paris to Rome to Greece to Taos, New Mexico, Dyer makes literary pilgrimages that result in no epiphanies. The best history books . Another is that the authorities did not take their disappearances seriously until four of them were found buried in the same place. And yet, through the cracks between Dyer’s torpor and his dissatisfaction, a tribute to Lawrence—that great proponent of passionate living—finally emerges. Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own. 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. 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. 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. Here is a book capable of flooding a reader with the same sense of astonishment. 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. 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. To read Stuff Matters is to see the humble objects around us afresh and to grasp the wonders they represent for the first time. 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. This book might just be the perfect exposé: a consummate journalist writing about an outrageously malfeasant subject and raising urgent themes. 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. The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair That Changed America (Hardcover) by. Announcing the best books of the year! Far from soberly rational, these thinkers were as galvanized by the exhilarating spirit of their times as the poets Holmes usually writes about. 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. 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. I suspect most history 'consumers' have a similar experience. 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. At the heart of this extraordinary project is the mystery of what makes a group of people a family. 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. With the recent 75th anniversary of D-Day and the fast approaching anniversaries of VE Day and VJ day, now is the perfect time to dive into these best WWII nonfiction books that read like gripping novels. I … As a result, Armstrong’s take on fundamentalism has shaped our understanding of the phenomenon more than perhaps any other thinker’s. 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. If you were a semifeckless, amply flawed but eminently clever twentysomething Gen Xer at the turn of the 21st 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. By joining Slate Plus you support our work and get exclusive content. 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. 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. 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. Which history books did we miss? It teaches world civilisation - East and West - from the beginning to the present, including history, economics, sociology, literature, science, philosophy, and religion. 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. Historical nonfiction is so much more than the history books you read in school. 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. 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. 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. 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). “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. 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. The Top 50 greatest nonfiction books of all time determined by 129 lists and articles from various critics, authors and experts. 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. 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. “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.”. 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. 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. Want to Read. Percy Fawcett was the last of the great white explorers, a dashing Brit who, in the first decades of the 20th century, became obsessed with a fabled ancient civilization deep within the Amazon jungle. 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. He reports fully and deeply on both. Join Slate Plus to continue reading, and you’ll get unlimited access to all our work—and support Slate’s independent journalism. 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. Small Business Strategy. Hers is a lifelong quest for the grandiose, the melancholic, and—crucially—the absurd. A practiced falconer, Macdonald understands how ill-advised her project is; the species is famously hard to train, stubborn in its wildness. 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. 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. Best History Books Of All Time: 12 Essential Reads On Western Civilization. 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. Congratulations to all of our nonfiction books that made the 100 Notable Books of 2020 list by the editors of The New York Times Book Review! 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. In Cold Blood book. (“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. 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. Having interviewed more than 300 people over the course of 10 years, Solomon explores the experience of parenting a child fundamentally different from oneself. 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. 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. They light the way, even while enabling temporary escape from life’s worries, which is why here, we wanted to share 20 of the best books 2020 had to offer. Books are both solace and inspiration. 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? 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. 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. 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