The 20 Best Works of Nonfiction of the Decade Literary Hub

YOU ARE READING: The 20 Best Works of Nonfiction of the Decade Literary Hub AT PhebinhvanhocEN

Friends, it’s true: the end of the decade is approaching. It has been a difficult, anxiety-provoking, and morally compromising decade, but at least it has been populated by excellent literature. we’ll take our silver fittings where we can.

so, as is our sacred duty as a literary and cultural website, while fully aware of the potentially fruitless and endlessly contestable nature of the task, over the next few weeks, we’ll be taking a look at the best and most important books ( not always the same) of the decade that was. we will do this, of course, by means of a variety of lists. We start with the best debut novels, the best short story collections, the best poetry collections, the best memoirs of the decade, and the best essay collections of the decade. but our sixth list was a little more difficult: we were looking at what we (perhaps foolishly) consider “general” nonfiction: all nonfiction except memoirs and essays (these are included on their own lists) published in English between 2010 and 2019.

You are reading: Best non fiction books of all time

reader, we cheated. we picked a top 20. it just made sense, with such a big field. And 20 isn’t even enough, really. but that’s how it is, in the world of lists.

The following books were finally chosen after much debate (and multiple meetings) by the literary center staff. tears were shed, feelings were hurt, books were reread. and as you’ll see shortly, we had a hard time choosing just ten, so we’ve also included a list of dissenting opinions and an even longer list of rans too. As always, feel free to add any of your favorites that we may have missed in the comments below.

***

Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow (2010)

i read michelle alexander’s the new jim crow when it was first published, and i vividly remember its colossal impact, not only in the academic world (it is, technically, an academic book, and alexander is an academic), but in all parts. . It was published during the Obama administration, an interval that many (whites) thought marked a new dawn of race relations in America, of a kind of post-racial fantasy. While it’s hard to look back on this particular zeitgeist now (when, and I still can’t believe I’m writing this, Donald Trump is President of the United States) without denouncing the ignorance and naivety of this mindset, the book alexander called this is the insistence on a phenomenon of “colorblindness” in 2012, as a varnish, as a farce or, simply, as another form of ignorance. “We haven’t ended racial caste in America,” she declares, “we’ve just redesigned it.” alexander’s meticulous investigation concerns the mass incarceration of black men primarily through the war on drugs, alexander explains how the united states government itself (the justice system) carries out a major racist pattern of injustice, which not only does it literally subordinate black men by imprisoning them, but it also then strips them of their rights and makes them second-class citizens after the fact. Working with the ACLU, she learns that ex-felons will face discrimination (discrimination supported and justified by society) including restrictions on voting rights, juries, food stamps, public housing, student loans, and job opportunities. “Unlike in the days of Jim Crow, there were no ‘whites only’ signs.” Alexander explains. “This system is out of sight, out of mind.” His book, which exposes this subtler but still horrible new mode of social control, is an essential and groundbreaking achievement that does more than expose the hypocrisy of our infrastructure, but provides you with obvious steps for change. -olivia rutigliano, crimereads editorial staff

Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Emperor of All Maladies (2010)

In this fascinating (albeit nearly 600 pages) and highly influential book, Mukherjee traces the known history of our most feared ailment, from its first appearances more than five thousand years ago to the wars still waged by contemporary physicians, and all the confusion, the success stories and the failures in between, hence the subtitle “a biography of cancer”, although, of course, it is also a biography of humanity and human ingenuity (and the lack thereof). /p>

mukherjee began writing the book after a surprising interaction with a patient who had stomach cancer, he told the new york times. “She said, ‘I’m willing to keep fighting, but I need to know what I’m fighting for.’ it was an embarrassing moment. I couldn’t answer him, and I couldn’t point him to a book that did. answering her question, that was the urgency that drove me, really. the book was written because it wasn’t there.”

Your work was certainly appreciated. the emperor of all ills won the 2011 pulitzer for general nonfiction (the jury called it “an elegant investigation, both clinical and personal, into the long history of an insidious disease that, despite advances in treatment , still haunts medical science”). the guardian prize of the first book and the inaugural pen/e. o Wilson Literary Science Writing Award; It was a New York Times bestseller. but most importantly, it was the first book that many laymen (read: not scientists, doctors, or those whose lives had already been severely affected by cancer) had read about this most feared of all diseases, and while science advances, it is still widely read and referenced today. -emily temple, senior editor

Rebecca Skloot, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (2010)

As a very focused person in the humanities, it’s hard for me to connect with books about science. what can I say other than that public education and I failed each other? When I read that Henrietta’s Immortal Life is missing, I found myself thinking that if all scientific knowledge was part of this kind of incredibly compelling and humane narrative, I’d probably be a doctor by now. (I mean, it’s possible). rebecca skloot tells the story of henrietta lacks, a black woman who died of cervical cancer in 1951, and her cells (called hela cells) that were grown without her permission, and were the first human cells. to reproduce in a laboratory, making them immensely valuable to scientists in research laboratories around the world. hela cells have been used for the development of vaccines and treatments, as well as in drug treatments, gene mapping, and many, many other scientific pursuits. They were even sent into space so scientists could study the effects of zero gravity on human cells.

skloot set out on a tremendously ambitious project with this book. he not only writes about the (immortal) life of cells, as well as the life of the lack and their descendants (human, not just cellular), but he also writes about racism in the medical field and medical ethics in general . That the book feels cohesive and compelling is a great testament to Skloot’s abilities as a writer. “Immortal Life reads like a novel,” writes Eric Roston in his Washington Post review. “the prose is unadorned, crisp and transparent.” for a book that encompasses so much, he never feels slack. nearly ten years later, it remains a time-sensitive text taught in high schools, colleges, and medical schools across the country. is both an incredible achievement and, quite simply, a very good read. -jessie gaynor, social media editor

Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands (2010)

timothy snyder’s brilliant bloodlands has changed world war ii scholarship more, perhaps, than any other work since hannah arendt’s eichmann in jerusalem, an apt comparison given that bloodlands includes within it a response to arendtian theory of the banality of evil (snyder no i don’t think so, and provides compelling evidence that eichmann was more of a run-of-the-mill hateful Nazi and less of a bland bureaucrat just doing his job). Snyder reads in 10 languages, which is key to his ability to synthesize international scholarship and present new theories in an accessible way. but before i go on praising this book i should probably tell you what it is about: bloodlands is a story of mass murder in the double occupied zone of eastern europe, where the soviets showed up, killed everyone they wanted and then the nazis showed up and killed all the others. By focusing on mass murder, rather than genocide, Snyder is able to draw connections between totalitarian regimes and examine the mechanisms by which small nations can suddenly and horribly become much smaller. -molly odintz, crimereads associate editor

isabel wilkerson, the heat of other suns: the epic story of the great migration of america (2010)

Wilkerson’s story of the great migration is an eye opener. When we talk about migration in the context of United States history, we tend to focus on triumphant stories of immigrants coming to the United States, but what about the great migrations that have occurred internally? between 1920 and 1970, millions of African Americans migrated north from the prejudice-ridden south, lured by relatively well-paying and relatively less racist jobs. It takes a lot to drive someone from their home, and Wilkerson does an excellent job of reminding us how horrible life in the South was for black people (and still is, in many ways). the warmth of other suns is not only fascinating, it’s also exciting as it takes us into the lives of hard-to-reach people who were equal parts refugee and adventurer, and truly epic, telling a big story on a grand scale. Don’t think that means there aren’t little moments of humanity strewn throughout the book; for every sentence about the behavior of millions, there is a detail that reminds us that we are reading about individuals, with their own hopes, desires, dreams. and fights. -molly odintz, crimereads associate editor

Robert A. Caro, The Passage of Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson (2012)

While Robert Caro first rose to fame for The Power Broker, his 1974 biography of divisive urban planner Robert Moses is the ongoing multi-volume biography of LBJ, America’s most unjustly maligned president ( fight me kennedy heads!), which has cemented his legacy. it’s hard to pick one in particular to recommend, but the passage of power, spanning the years 1958-1964, captures the most tumultuous period of lbj’s political life, when he went from feared senator to outcast vice president and suddenly becoming into the most powerful figure in the world. There is something deeply moving about the immensity of these works: Caro is now 83 years old and has dedicated a large part of his life to this unique project. His wife is his only approved research assistant, and together they have upended a half-century of lbj’s criticism to reveal the complex, troubled, but always striving core of a sensitive soul.

I had a teacher in high school who spent 20 years working on her lbj dissertation. she spent every weekend at the lbj library in ut austin, while working full time as a public school teacher, and kicked butt at both. there is something about lbj that inspires people to spend their entire lives trying to figure it out and, in the process, trying to understand the world that created it and that he created. Thanks to caro, we can all understand lbj a little better. -molly odintz, crimereads associate editor

Tom Reiss, The Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal, and the Real Count of Monte Cristo (2012)

tom reiss opens his biography of thomas alexandre-dumas, father of writer alexandre dumas, with a scene straight out of an academic heist movie. In a library in rural France, Reiss convinces a city official to open a safe whose combination was only in the hands of the late librarian. What Reiss discovers are the rudiments of a great and, until then, largely unknown story of the man who inspired some of his son’s most beloved tales. The Black Count is also a case study of complex racial politics during the time of Revolutionary France. Dumas was born in 1762 in Saint-Domingue, the French Caribbean colony that would become Haiti. As the son of a French marquis and a freed black slave, Dumas was subject to both the privileges of the former and the kind of indignities suffered by the latter. His father, for example, sells him into slavery when he is 12 years old only to buy his freedom later and take him to France, where he receives an aristocratic education. A final break with his father leads Dumas to join the army. Reiss creates a dynamic, if somewhat speculative, portrait of Dumas based on letters, battlefield reports, Dumas’ writings, and more. By the time he is 30, Dumas has risen through the ranks from corporal to general and commands a division of more than 50,000 soldiers. It’s no accident that the thrilling militaristic exploits Reiss describes sound like events out of the Count of Monte Cristo or the Three Musketeers. Although the general becomes a cavalry commander under Napoleon Bonaparte, Reiss suggests that it was Napoleon himself who ruined Dumas not only from a personal point of view, but also from a civilizational point of view. Napoleon reintroduced slavery in Haiti, after all, in contradiction to the republican dreams of Dumas’s contemporary, Toussaint Louverture, another rare and successful 18th-century Afro-descendant general. Reiss uncovers the tragic story of a man who was infamous in his own time for enjoying social and professional advantages that would have been unheard of for a mixed-race man in the United States, a nation that, of course, went through his own revolution. previous generation. -aaron robertson, assistant editor

Elizabeth Kolbert, The Sixth Extinction (2014)

the premise of elizabeth kolbert’s pulitzer prize-winning book is a simple scientific fact: there have been five mass extinctions in the history of the planet, and soon there will be six. the difference, explains kolbert, is that it is caused by humans, who have drastically altered the earth in a short time. she points out on the first page that humans (meaning homo sapiens, humans like us) have only been around for two hundred thousand or more years, an incredibly short amount of time to cause enough damage to destroy most life on Earth. . . However, Kolbert’s book is unique in that it combines research from several disciplines (scientific and socio-scientific) to prepare an extremely comprehensive and comprehensive argument about how our oceans, air, animal populations, bacterial ecosystems, and other natural elements are dangerously adapting. (or dying from) human impact, while also tracing the history of both approaches to these things (theories of evolution, extinction, and other principles). It’s a depressing and horrible plot at first glance, but it’s done so delicately, even poetically: Kolbert’s occasional concerned first-person narration, and her many interviews with professionals capable of the most concise and perfect quotes (not to mention that she interview these experts, sometimes over pizza) make this book a conversation rather than a treatise. Kolbert talks us through some of the most heady and complicated science, breaking down this massive disaster bite-by-bite. this could be the greatest achievement of the sixth extinction: it is so smart and at the same time so everyday, so urgent and at the same time so present. And this fits the tone of her argument: our current mass extinction doesn’t feel like an asteroid hitting the planet. it is accumulated by the little ways we live our lives. we are crawling, she illuminates, towards the end of the world. -olivia rutigliano, crimereads editorial staff

Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me (2015)

Between me and the world by ta-nehisi coates 1) won the national nonfiction book award in 2015, 2) was a new york times bestseller, and 3) was considered “required reading” by Tony Morrison. What more is there to say? calling it “timely” or “urgent” or even “an excellent example of how the personal is, in fact, political” (as I am tempted to do) does not quite capture the unique, pivotal, and harrowing experience of reading this book. . Framed as a letter to his teenage son, Between the World and Me is as much a scathing interrogation of American history and current society as it is an intimate look at the concerns and hopes a father passes on to his son. In just 152 pages, this book addresses the creation of race (“but race is the daughter of racism, not the father”), the countless acts of violence perpetrated against black bodies, gun control, and anecdotes from life itself. From the writer. ta-nehisi coates, a correspondent for atlantic, wields the conciseness and clarity of a journalist and fuses them with the flourish of a novelist and the sympathetic instinct of a father. it is a wonderful hybrid. the way the themes, the tones, mix with each other reads so naturally: “I am writing to you in your fifteenth year. I’m writing to you because this was the year you saw Eric Garner suffocated for selling cigarettes; because now you know that renisha mcbride was shot for seeking help, and john crawford was killed for nosing around a department store…” the list, of course, goes on. between me and the world brilliantly forces us to confront these tragedies anew, to recall our own experiences watching news coverage, to see them in the context of history filtered through the unsurprised perspective of ta-nehisi coates, and to see them again. new through the eyes. of his disillusioned young son. there is an amazing generosity in these personal glimpses, the moments when the writer turns to his son (says “you”). they catch you off guard. (there are even photographs everywhere, like a scrapbook that you’re not sure if you’re allowed to look at). There have been many books on race, on institutionalized violence and injustice and identity, and there will be more, but none at all. as beautifully shattering as this. -katie yee, assistant marker editor

Andrea Wulf, The Invention of Nature (2015)

andrea wulf’s 2015 biography of 18th century german naturalist alexander von humboldt, one of the most famous men of his time, for whom literally hundreds of towns, rivers, streams, glaciers and more are named, is so much more than the story of a single life. In addition to narrating a remarkably fertile moment in the history of European ideas (von Humboldt was a good friend of his neighbor from Weimar, Goethe), Wulf reveals in Humboldt a true ancestor of today’s ecology, a polyvalent scientist less more concerned with reduction of the natural world to its constituent specimens than to our place in a larger ecosystem.

And while it doesn’t seem particularly radical now, Humboldt’s proto-environmentalist ideas about the rest of the world, many of which he mapped and explored, contrasted sharply with prevailing notions of Christian rule, that dubious theological position conjured up in aid of empire. . Insofar as Humboldt was one of the first to understand and articulate the complex systems of a living forest, he was also the first to sound the alarm about the impacts of deforestation (many of which he encountered on his epic journey through from northern South America). Part adventure thread, part intellectual history, part ecological meditation, the invention of nature brings back prominence to an exemplary life and reminds us of the tectonic force of ideas paired with action. -jonny diamond, editor in chief

stacy schiff, the witches (2015)

It is surprising that with such a popular and recurring theme in American culture as the Salem witch trials there have not been more books of this type. Stacy Schiff, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of the bestselling Cleopatra, approaches the Salem Witch Trials with curiosity and a historian’s loupe, and sets out to uncover the mystery that has baffled, amazed and terrified generations ever since. . she talks about the spectacle that salem has become in artistic and conventional representations, how it has mixed with folklore and fiction and has thus far become a tabloid event in american history that has, however, never been fully understood. Schiff writes that despite the imagination surrounding the Salem witch trials, in reality, there is still a gap in her story of, to be exact, nine months; Therefore, the impetus of the book and Schiff’s intention is to penetrate the mass hysteria and panic that swept Salem at the time and led to the execution of fourteen women and five men. In the first chapter of Ella, Ella Schiff chillingly sets the mood of the book and asks key questions that will drive the next narrative: “Who was plotting against you? could you be a witch and not know? Can an innocent person be guilty? Could anyone, a group of men wondered in late summer, consider themselves safe? At the heart of Schiff’s historical investigation is New England Puritan culture, but part of her masterful synthesis is that she analyzes every strand of Salem culture and assesses the witch trials from every perspective. Praised for her research, as well as her prose and narrative abilities, Schiff’s the Witches has been described by the Times (London) as “an oppressive, forensic psychological thriller”; Schiff herself, according to the New York Book Review, for having “dominated the entire history of early New England.” A phrase that still haunts me for its resonance throughout human history is: “Even at the time, it was clear to some that Salem was the story of one thing behind which was a story about something else.” -eleni theodoropoulos, editorial member

Svetlana Alexievich, tr. Bela Shayevich, Secondhand Time (2016)

A landmark work of oral history, Svetlana Alexievich’s Secondhand Time chronicles the decline and fall of Soviet Communism and the rise of oligarchic capitalism. Through a multitude of interviews conducted between 1991 and 2012 with ordinary citizens—doctors, soldiers, waitresses, communist party secretaries, and writers—Alexievich’s account is as important to understanding the Soviet world as Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag archipelago. second-hand time first appeared in russia in 2013 and was translated into english in 2016 by bella shayevich. As David Remnick wrote in the New Yorker, “There are many worthwhile books on the post-Soviet period and the rise of Putin…but the volume of nonfiction that has done the most to deepen emotional understanding of Russia during and after the collapse of the soviet union lately is svetlana alexievich’s oral history…” is surprisingly intimate, alexievich’s interviewees share their darkest traumas and deepest regrets. in their kitchens, in their tombs, each character tells the story of a nation abandoned by the kremlin. Like much of Alexievich’s work, it is radical in its composition, challenging with its polyphony of distinctive human voices the “official story” of a society that presented itself as homogeneous and monolithic—an achievement the Nobel committee recognized when cited the Belarusian journalist for developing “a new kind of literary genre… a story of the soul.” Like his most recent The Tomboyish Face of War and the Last Witnesses: An Oral History of the Children of World War II, Alexievich’s project is one of the most important narratives in production today. -emily firetog, deputy editor

Jane Mayer, Dark Money (2016)

In addition to being an incredible piece of reporting, Jane Mayer’s Dark Money is a landmark document of what happened to America when a small group of plutocrats financed the rise of political candidates who adopted policies and beliefs that had been , until then, considered part of the right-wing fringe of the Republican party. Mayer describes this group as “a small, rarefied group of enormously wealthy arch-conservative families who for decades poured money, often with little public disclosure, into influencing the way Americans thought and voted.” Mayer’s painstakingly reported work is a monumental achievement; she lays out, in as much detail as possible, the mechanisms that allowed this group to channel its wealth and power, with the help of federal law, to a set of institutions that aim to fight scientific advance, movements aimed at justice and climate change. in doing so, they have revised American policy. As Alan Ehrenhalt put it in a book review for the New York Times, she describes “a private political bank capable of awarding unlimited amounts of money to favored candidates, and doing so with virtually no disclosure of its source.”

The stakes here extend beyond US politics; Mayer points out that Koch Money supports some of the institutions that most vigorously fight climate activism and defend the fossil fuel industry. In 2017, he told the Los Angeles Times, “There are a lot of things you can fix and you can take back, and there are kind of cycles in American history and the pendulum swings back and forth, but there are things you can irreparably damage, And that’s what I’m worried about right now…and that’s why this book in particular, because it’s about the money that’s keeping this country from doing anything useful about climate change.” -Corinne Segal, Senior Editor

david france, how to survive a plague (2016)

Calling how to survive a plague extensive would be an understatement; France’s account of the early days of the epidemic is overwhelmingly generous, allowing the reader to experience those days, and all that followed, from within the community that first faced it. France recounts the ways scientists and doctors first responded to the virus, tracing the evolution of that understanding from within a small circle to a wide cry for awareness and resources; Meanwhile, she shows how a community of people fighting for their lives mobilized alternative systems of communication, education, and support while facing an almost inconceivable wall of barriers to such work. The importance of language in this fight is at the forefront here, from the scientific question of what to call the virus, to its reputation in popular culture as “gay cancer,” to disagreements within activist groups about how to tell their stories to the public. a public. unfriendly world.

This is an outrageous story, one of several institutional failures, missed opportunities, hypocrisies and acts of malice towards a community in crisis, motivated by hatred and horror towards queer people and gay men in particular. but I felt equally enraged and astonished. This is a sobering story to read, especially if, like me, you come from a generation of queer people who have been accused of forgetting. I am grateful for the testimony from France; she won’t let any of us forget. -corinne segal, senior editor

Andrés Reséndez, The Other Slavery (2016)

reséndez’s other bondage is nothing less than an epic recalibration of american history, one that has been long overdue and is sorely needed at the present moment. The history of the assault on indigenous peoples in the Americas is perhaps well known, but what is less well known is how many of those people were enslaved by the colonizers, how that enslavement led to mass death, and how complicit the American legal system was. in bringing that oppression on and keeping it for years beyond the supposed emancipation in regions in which the indigenous peoples were enslaved. this was not an isolated phenomenon. it spread from Caribbean plantations to Western mining interests. it was an integral part of the European effort to colonize the “new world” and was one of the driving motivations behind the first expeditions and colonies. Reséndez places the number of indigenous enslaved between the arrival of Columbus and 1900 between 2.5 and 5 million people. The institution took many forms, but reading through legal obfuscation and delving into the archival record and first-hand accounts of the eras, Reséndez shows how slavery permeated the continents. native tribes were not simply wiped out by disease, war, and brutal segregation. they were also worked, against their will, without pay, en masse, to death. it was a sustained and organized slavery. the other slavery also tells the story of the uprising: communities who resisted, individuals who fought. it is a complex and tragic story that required a skillful historian to bring to contemporary consciousness. In addition to his abilities as a historian and researcher, Resendez is a skilled storyteller with a truly remarkable subject matter. this is historical nonfiction at its most important and necessary. -dwyer murphy, editor in chief of crimereads

Rebecca Traister, All the Single Ladies (2016)

One night, facing a brief gap between plans with different people, I took all of Rebecca Traister’s single women out to a bar. a few minutes after i ordered, deep in traister’s incredible and extensive history of single women in america, a waiter came over to offer me another more secluded seat at the end of the bar, “so you don’t feel embarrassed to be alone”. ”, she said, in a low voice. I assured her I was fine, trying not to laugh. she was so worried.

I went back to my book to find a traitor who described this kind of cultural angst (a woman, alone, in public?!) in a new generation of single adult women, who today are more autonomous and numerous than ever. far from marking a crisis in the social order, traister writes, this change “was in fact a new order…women’s paths were increasingly marked with choices, off-ramps, variations on what had historically been a very popular theme.” limited”. examines the history of single women as a social and political force, including the activists who dedicated their lives to establishing a greater variety of educational, family, and economic options for women, with particular attention to the ways in which that history is also one of racial and economic justice in the united states. Traister also highlights the social support networks that women have created to survive patriarchy and establish lifestyles that do not depend on it; Intimacy and communication among single women, she shows, were the backbone of activist and reform movements that successfully challenged the dominant order.

The book is based on interviews with dozens of women from diverse backgrounds, and their first-hand accounts are a portrait of life in the midst of a historic shift toward female autonomy. Her stories and Traister’s analysis make it clear that while options for many women are expanding, those options are not equally available or beneficial to all women. this is a stunning reckoning with the status of women’s independence and the policies that still seek to curtail it. -corinne segal, senior editor

Caroline Fraser, Prairie Fires (2017)

prairie fires, caroline fraser pulitzer prize, and the national book critics circle award-winning biography of laura ingalls wilder is not just a painstakingly researched and lyrically performed account of how the author of little house on the prairie decanted the poverty and precariousness of its existence as a peasant family in narratives of self-sufficiency and perseverance—although it is that—it is also a meditation on the human need to “transform the raw materials of the past into art”. full disclosure, i didn’t read the little house on the prairie books as a kid and i don’t have any sentimental attachments to laura, pa, or ma. But looking at the life behind the books, Wilder emerges as a tenacious, sometimes fragile figure, and as a literary operator of rare nous and self-awareness. Drawing on unpublished manuscripts, letters, diaries, and land and financial records, Prairie Fires has all the essentials of a great history book. More importantly, fraser’s great skill lies in drawing back the veils of mythology that have shrouded his subject matter and the era his works helped define, allowing us to see both the real people and the myths themselves with fresh eyes. and critics. there is no idealization of the frontier, and a very real understanding of the sentimentality and bias of an openly racist understanding of “westward expansion.” it is an extraordinary book. -emily firetog, deputy editor

David W. Blight, Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom (2018)

in 2017, monuments commemorating confederate heroes were being debated, defaced, and torn down across the united states. that same year, months before president trump signed legislation creating a commission to plan the bicentennial of frederick douglass’s birth, he infamously seemed to suggest that douglass was still around, doing “incredible work” and “being increasingly recognized . The irony was hard to miss: it was easy to praise a past that wasn’t fully, or even fundamentally, understood. One of the achievements of historian David Blight’s monumental study of the former slave-turned-abolitionist is the thoroughness with which he examines the man’s development through three autobiographies he produced over the span of ten years. The popular image of Douglas has long been that of a bushy-haired man plastered next to Abraham Lincoln, delivering rousing speeches on abolition and the sins of slavery. And while there is a basic truth to that, Blight sets out to fill in the gaps in public understanding, guiding readers from the Maryland slave plantation where Douglas was born to the many stops along his European speaking circuit, when established himself as one of the world leaders. most recognizable opponents of slavery. the vague circumstances of douglass’s birth (he was born to a slave woman and a white man who may also have owned him) forced him later to create his own life narratives, a task he accomplished both in writing and in oratory. Blight’s engagement with Douglas’s writing also marks the biography as a public-facing triumph of textual criticism. For decades before The Prophet of Liberty wowed critics and readers alike, Blight had made a name for himself as one of the leading Douglas scholars in the United States. blight’s work was not historical revisionism, but rather a considered analysis of a man that was based on actions as well as words. Many may be surprised to learn, for example, that Douglas was a vocal supporter of civil war and violence as a necessary means of dismantling the system that had nearly destroyed him. Liberty’s Prophet feels as definitive as a Robert Fagles translation of Homer; we hope it won’t be the last word, though it will take quite a successor to produce a worthwhile follow-up. -aaron robertson, assistant editor

Robert Macfarlane, Underland (2019)

one hesitates to label any book by a living writer his “magnitude work”, but macfarlane’s underland, a deeply ambitious work that somehow pushes the boundaries it imposes on itself, reads like an offertory and elegy to at the same time, finding wonders in the world even as we mourn its destruction by our own hand. if you’re not familiar with your project, as the name suggests, underland is an exploration of the world beneath our feet, from the legendary catacombs of paris to the ancient caverns of somerset, from the hyperborean shores of distant norway to the mephitic karst of the Slovenian-Italian borderlands.

Macfarlane has always been a generous guide on his wanderings, the gleam of his erudition softening as if through the welcoming haze of a fireside story in the pub. Even when he considers all that we have wrought on earth, plunging into the darkest chambers of human creation (our mass graves, our toxic tombs), Macfarlane never succumbs to pessimism, instead finding in the contemplation of deep time a path to humility. this is a landmark work, as deep and resonant as its subject matter, and would represent to any writer the achievement of a lifetime. -jonny diamond, editor in chief

patrick radden keefe, say nothing: a true story of memory and murder in northern ireland (2019)

trying, in a single volume, to cover the scale and complexity of the problems of Northern Ireland, a protracted and bloody political and ethno-nationalist conflict that came to dominate Anglo-Irish relations for more than three decades, at the same time conveying a sense of the tortured humanity and fickle motivations of some of its most influential and iconic individual players and investigating one of the most notorious unsolved atrocities of the era is, well, a herculean task most writers would never consider. attempt. Fortunately, investigative journalist Patrick Radden Keefe (whose 2015 New Yorker article on Gerry Adams, “Where the Bodies Are Buried,” is a searing forerunner to say nothing) isn’t most writers. his riveting tale, at once sweeping and painfully intimate, uses the disappearance and murder of the widowed mother of ten, jean mcconville, in belfast in 1972 as a fulcrum, around which the larger labyrinthine narrative of the film can revolve. problems. The book, while meticulously researched and reported (Radden Keefe interviewed over a hundred different sources, painstakingly sorting out contradictory and corroborating accounts), also employs a novelistic structure and style that in less skilled hands might seem exploitative, but here only serves to Deepen our understanding of both historical events and the complex personalities of ultimately tragic figures like Dolours Price, Brendan Hughes, and McConville herself, protagonists in a drama of attrition who have all too often been reduced to the status of monster or martyr. once you’ve caught your breath, what you’ll be left with at the end of this revealing hybrid work is a deep and abiding feeling of sadness, which is exactly how it should be. -dan sheehan, bookmark editor

***

The following books were barely knocked out of the top ten, but we (or at least one of us) couldn’t let them pass without comment.

Maggie Nelson, The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning (2011)

maggie nelson, if you first look at her works, it can seem like a paradox. That the author of bluets, a moving lyrical essay that explores personal suffering through the color blue, also wrote the red parts, an autobiographical account of the trial of her aunt’s murderer, may seem surprising. It’s not that anyone can’t and doesn’t contain crowds, but the two aesthetics can seem diametrically opposed until one looks at the art of cruelty and understands Nelson’s fascination with art on the one hand and violence on the other. Nelson analyzes the intersection of the two through multiple essays. “One of the charges of this book,” he writes, “is to find out how one might differentiate between works of art whose use of cruelty I find valuable (for lack of a better word), and those that I find redundant, in bad faith.” , or simply despicable”. the art of cruelty is a self-proclaimed diagram of recent art and culture and does not promise to take sides, to offer ethical or aesthetic claims disguised as declarative truth about the matter. then cruelty is very approached from nelson’s poetic sensibility, with a degree of nuance, and an attitude of reflection and curiosity but also from a certain distance so that all emotions —anger, disgust, discomfort, trembling, etc.— can be seen as part of a whole and not in isolation. Cruelty, countered with compassion—especially with reference to Buddhism—is certainly not hailed by Nelson as a cause for celebration, but it is worthy of reflection and analysis lest it be used tacitly and without recourse. No book could ever, I think, provide a comprehensive evaluation of this topic, nor is Nelson’s approach that of a philosopher or art historian seeking to propose a theory. however, with dexterity and creativity, she manages to hold up a mirror to our culture’s fascination with cruelty and invites us to reflect on our personal reasons for indulging her. -eleni theodoropoulos, editorial member

Óscar Martinez, The Beast (2013)

for more than a decade, martinez has been a witness and chronicler of the ground-level effects of the drug war, reporting from across latin america with a special focus on central america and his home country of el salvador, where more recently he has been writing about the bloody culture of ms-13 and other narco-cliques that have expanded their power. Before that, he was tracing the plight of migrants who go through the terrible challenge across borders and drug-controlled territories. Martínez traveled on the dreaded train known as “the beast” and collected the stories of those who traveled north on this dangerous journey. Although crime is not strictly the central theme of the book, Martínez analyzes the direct effects of mass crime on a regional/global level, as well as the outlaw communities that emerge to prey on the vulnerable. the subject is dark, but martinez writes with the terrible, penetrating clarity of a cormac mccarthy. the beast is a dispatch from an almost lawless land, where families fight and suffer, drug traffickers get rich, violence spreads, drugs head north, guns head south, and so on. forget about rhetoric, politics and propaganda. the beast is the true story of the war on drugs. “where can you get away from bandits?” Martinez asks. “Where do the drugs go? Where can you avoid being kidnapped by drug traffickers? where is a place without a wall, without thieves and without drug traffickers? no one has been able to answer this last question.” Calling this book prophetic ignores how long our problems have persisted and how long we have managed to ignore the chaos our country’s policies have created. -dwyer murphy, editor in chief of crimereads

Matthew Desmond, Evicted (2016)

there are more evictions now, per capita, in the united states than during the great depression. It turns out that there is a lot of money to be made out of poverty, not, of course, to those who need it, but to homeowners who orchestrate the kind of housing turnover that traps people in deeper and longer cycles of debt. Poverty in America has long been associated with moral failure, but as the eviction of Matthew Desmond illustrates in great detail, if there is any moral failure, it is with those who would profit from such systemic and generational inequities.

desmond, a princeton-trained sociologist and macarthur fellow, went to see for himself in 2008, at the height (depth?) of the housing crisis, conducting a year-long study of eight families in the milwaukee area, spending six months in a mobile home and another six months in a rooming house, creating much more than a journalist’s snapshot of life as an American renter. With Dispossessed, Desmond has expanded our perspective on cyclical hardships and their disproportionate impact on people of color, illustrating (without the leering and patronizing of so much reporting on the poor) that eviction is more often a cause of poverty than a symptom. -jonny diamond, editor in chief

Yuri Slezkine, The House of Government (2017)

I recommend this book to those who want to show off their physical strength in public and brag that they can read a giant book of Russian history with one hand, but I also recommend this book to everyone, ever, in the world, because it’s So fantastical at first glance, this is a sprawling tome inspired by a Tolstoyan approach to lyrical history, ostensibly related to the story of an apartment complex that was home to much of the early Soviet elite and was subsequently depopulated by the Stalinist purges. Within this apartment building, however, lay the central irony of the revolution: those who believed deeply enough in an idealistic system to adopt violent and repressive means of revolution were soon subjected to those same mechanisms of repression. From this central irony, Slezkine, always worried about how the micro fits into the macro, turns away to see the Soviets as just another bunch of millenarians (and to understand what an insult that is, you’ll have to pick up the book). -molly odintz, crimereads associate editor

Richard Lloyd Parry, Ghosts of the Tsunami (2017)

richard lloyd parry, tokyo bureau chief for the times of london, begins his book by describing how his office building in tokyo shook in march 2011 when an earthquake rocked the city. he called his family and checked that they were okay and then walked the streets to see the damage. accustomed to tremors, this one seemed bad, but not the worst he had ever experienced. however, less than an hour after the earthquake, a tsunami killed an estimated 18,500 Japanese men, women, and children. In Ghosts, Parry centers his story in Okawa, a small seaside town where an entire school and 74 children were swept away. In somewhat fragmentary threads, Parry explores the families that survived, the ghosts that follow them, and the landscape of a place that will never be the same. By setting the story in a community, Parry is able to clearly define the painful individual consequences of a national tragedy. reading it is emotionally draining, which is a warning I give everyone when I recommend the book (which I do all the time). but it is one of my favorite books and I would be remiss not to include it in our list of the best non-fiction of the decade. -emily firetog, deputy editor

jenny odell, how to do nothing (2019)

i grew up in a town named after a body of water, rye brook, and went to a high school that was also named after that body of water, blind brook, but growing up no one seemed to know where the stream. At least none of the children. we don’t talk about it, except to note how hidden it is behind the school, someone told me once, while another person said it was behind that hotel, behind the park, behind the airport. I recently decided to look it up on a map and noticed, for the first time, that the creek, far from being hidden, defines most of Rye Brook’s borders. Recognizing this critical feature of my hometown for the first time, more than a decade after I left it, was disorienting, completely re-enacting my perception of the place I thought I knew best.

my search that day came after reading jenny odell’s account of her similar awakening to the ecology of her hometown cupertino and all the features in or around it: pumpkin creek, nearby mountains and the bay from San Francisco. “How could I not have noticed the shape of the place where she lived?” she writes her, and, later, describing her own disorientation in a way that resonates with mine, she added, “nothing is as familiar and strange as what has been present all along.” /p>

One way to describe the premise of this book is to say that “what has been present all along” is reality itself: each of us, day by day, living our physical lives in a physical place. but in 2019, life is not usually like that; it feels like an avalanche of forces that intend to divert our attention from this reality and monetize it in a formless virtual space. In that environment, Odell writes, “doing nothing” or finding some way to interrupt the capitalist drive to monetize is an act of political resistance, even while acknowledging that not everyone has the economic security or social capital to choose not to. “The fact that this right is denied to many people does not make it any less important or less important,” he writes. this book also draws on philosophy, utopian movements, and labor organizing to describe how various people have tried to “do nothing” in their own way throughout history, with an ecologically based perspective. (And birdwatching!) Ultimately, Odell writes, the act of doing nothing creates space for the kind of contemplation and reflection that is essential for activism and sustaining life. I lived this book as a space of sanity and as a beginning; I hope you do too. -corinne segal, senior editor

***

honorable mentions

a selection of other books we seriously considered for both lists, just to be extra about it (and because decisions are tough).

peter hessler, country driving (2010) · ron chernow, washington: a life (2010) · barbara demick, nothing to envy (2010) · marina warner, strange magic (2012) · jon meacham, thomas jefferson: the art of power (2012) · oscar martinez, the beast (2013) · katherine boo, behind the beautiful forevers (2013) · mary ruefle, madness, rack, and honey (2013) · david epstein, the sports gene (2013) · sheri fink, five days at the memorial (2013) · david finkel, thank you for your service (2013) · george packer, relaxation (2013 ) · naomi klein, this changes everything (2013) · roxanne dunbar-ortiz, the story of an indigenous people of the united states (2014) · sarah ruhl, 100 essays I don’t have time to write (2014) · olivia laing, the trip to echo spring (2014) · hermione lee, penelope fitzgerald (2014) · mary barba, spqr (2015) · sam quinones, dreamland (2015 ) · ibram x. kendi, stamped from the start (2016) · ruth franklin, shirley jackson (2016) · arlie russell hochschild, strangers in their own land (2016) · margot lee shetterly, hidden figures (2016) · laura dassow walls, henry david thoreau: a life (2017) · david grann, assassins of the moon of the flowers (2017) · elizabeth mcguire, red heart (2017) · frances fitzgerald, the evangelicals (2017) · jeff guinn, the road to jonestown (2017) · michael tisserand, krazy (2017) · lawrence jackson, chester himes (2017) · zora neale hurston, barracoon (2018 ) · beth macy, dopesick (2018) · shane bauer, american prison (2018) · eliza griswold, friendship and prosperity (2018) · david quammen, the tangled tree (2018).

Other content