NYT Notable Books 2020 - Nonfiction


Showing 1 - 19 of 19  There are a total of 48 valid entries on the list.
Book cover for "The beauty in breaking"
Star rating for The beauty in breaking
Average Rating:
2.3 stars
Description:
"A series of connected personal stories drawn from the author's life and work as an ER doctor that explores how we are all broken--physically, emotionally, and psychically--and what we can do to heal ourselves as we try to heal others"-- Michele Harper is a female, African American emergency room physician in a profession that is overwhelmingly male and white. Brought up in Washington, D.C., in an abusive family, she went to Harvard, where she met...
Book cover for "Becoming wild"
Star rating for Becoming wild
Description:
"Some people insist that culture is strictly a human feat. What are they afraid of? This book looks into three cultures of other-than-human beings in some of Earth's remaining wild places. It shows how if you're a sperm whale, a scarlet macaw, or a chimpanzee, you too experience your life with the understanding that you are an individual in a particular community. You too are who you are not by genes alone; your culture is a second form of inheritance....
Book cover for "The book of eels"
Star rating for The book of eels
Average Rating:
4 stars
Description:
"Part H Is for Hawk, part The Soul of an Octopus, The Book of Eels is both a meditation on the world's most elusive fish-the eel-and a reflection on the human condition. Remarkably little is known about the European eel, Anguilla anguilla. So little, in fact, that scientists and philosophers have, for centuries, been obsessed with what has become known as the "eel question": Where do eels come from? What are they? Are they fish or some other kind...
Book cover for "Caste"
Star rating for Caste
Average Rating:
4 stars
Description:
""As we go about our daily lives, caste is the wordless usher in a darkened theater, flashlight cast down in the aisles, guiding us to our assigned seats for a performance. The hierarchy of caste is not about feelings or morality. It is about power--which groups have it and which do not. In this book, Isabel Wilkerson gives us a portrait of an unseen phenomenon in America as she explores, through an immersive, deeply researched narrative and stories...
Book cover for "The dead are arising"
Star rating for The dead are arising
Average Rating:
5 stars
Description:
"An epic biography of Malcolm X finally emerges, drawing on hundreds of hours of the author's interviews, rewriting much of the known narrative. Les Payne, the renowned Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist, embarked in 1990 on a nearly thirty-year-long quest to interview anyone he could find who had actually known Malcolm X-all living siblings of the Malcolm Little family, classmates, street friends, cellmates, Nation of Islam figures,...
Book cover for "Deaths of despair and the future of capitalism"
Star rating for Deaths of despair and the future of capitalism
Description:
"This book documents the decline of white-working class lives over the last half-century and examines the social and economic forces that have slowly made these lives more difficult. Case and Deaton argue that market and political power in the United States have moved away from labor towards capital-as unions have weakened and politics have become more favorable to business, corporations have become more powerful. Consolidation in some American industries,...
Book cover for "Fallout"
Star rating for Fallout
Average Rating:
3 stars
Description:
"New York Times bestselling author Lesley M.M. Blume reveals how a courageous reporter uncovered one of greatest and deadliest cover-ups of the 20th century-the true effects of the atom bomb-potentially saving millions of lives"--
Book cover for "The Hardhat Riot"
Star rating for The Hardhat Riot
Average Rating:
5 stars
Description:
"I am seeking to rescue the poor stockinger, the Luddite cropper, the "obsolete" hand-loom weaver, the "utopian" artisan, and even the deluded . . . from the enormous condescension of posterity. Their crafts and traditions may have been dying. Their hostility to the new industrialism may have been backward-looking. Their communitarian ideals may have been fantasies. Their insurrectionary conspiracies may have been foolhardy. But they lived through...
Book cover for "Hidden Valley Road"
Star rating for Hidden Valley Road
Average Rating:
4.3 stars
Description:
"Don and Mimi Galvin seemed to be living the American dream. After World War II, Don's work with the Air Force brought them to Colorado, where their twelve children perfectly spanned the baby boom: the oldest born in 1945, the youngest in 1965. In those years, there was an established script for a family like the Galvins--aspiration, hard work, upward mobility, domestic harmony--and they worked hard to play their parts. But behind the scenes was a...
Book cover for "Overground railroad"
Star rating for Overground railroad
Average Rating:
5 stars
Description:
"Overground Railroad chronicles the history of the Green Book, which was published from 1936 to 1966 and was the "Black travel guide to America." For years, it was dangerous for African Americans to travel in the United States. Because of segregation, Black travelers couldn't eat, sleep, or even get gas at most white-owned businesses. The Green Book listed hotels, restaurants, department stores, gas stations, recreational destinations, and other businesses...
Book cover for "Owls of the Eastern ice"
Star rating for Owls of the Eastern ice
Description:
"A young field scientist and conservationist tracks the elusive Blakiston's Fish Owl in the forbidding reaches of eastern Russia"--
Book cover for "A peculiar indifference"
Star rating for A peculiar indifference
Description:
"In the United States today, a young black man has a sixteen times greater chance of dying from violence than his white counterpart. Violence takes more years of life from black men than cancer, stroke, and diabetes combined. Even black women are more affected by violence than white men, despite its usual gender patterns. These disparities translate into starkly divergent experiences of life and death for whites and blacks in the United States. Yet...
Book cover for "A promised land"
Star rating for A promised land
Average Rating:
4.9 stars
Description:
Obama tells the story of his improbable odyssey from young man searching for his identity to leader of the free world, describing in strikingly personal detail both his political education and the landmark moments of the first term of his historic presidency--a time of dramatic transformation and turmoil. In the stirring, highly anticipated first volume of his presidential memoirs, Barack Obama tells the story of his improbable odyssey from young...
Book cover for "The quiet Americans"
Star rating for The quiet Americans
Average Rating:
4.5 stars
Description:
"At the end of World War II, the United States dominated the world militarily, economically, and in moral standing - seen as the victor over tyranny and a champion of freedom. But it was clear - to some - that the Soviet Union was already executing a plan to expand and foment revolution around the world. The American government's strategy in response relied on the secret efforts of a newly-formed CIA. THE QUIET AMERICANS chronicles the exploits of...
Book cover for "The splendid and the vile"
Star rating for The splendid and the vile
Average Rating:
4.2 stars
Description:
"The #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Devil in the White City and Dead Wake delivers a fresh and compelling portrait of Winston Churchill and London during the Blitz On Winston Churchill's first day as prime minister, Hitler invaded Holland and Belgium. Poland and Czechoslovakia had already fallen, and the Dunkirk evacuation was just two weeks away. For the next twelve months, Hitler would wage a relentless bombing campaign, killing 45,000...
Book cover for "Uncanny valley"
Star rating for Uncanny valley
Average Rating:
3 stars
Description:
"The story of Anna Wiener's time spent working in Silicon Valley as the tech industry went through monumental changes"--
Book cover for "The undocumented Americans"
Star rating for The undocumented Americans
Average Rating:
5 stars
Description:
"Traveling across the country, journalist Karla Cornejo Villavicencio risked arrest at every turn to report the extraordinary stories of her fellow undocumented Americans. Her subjects have every reason to be wary around reporters, but Cornejo Villavicencio has unmatched access to their stories. Her work culminates in a stunning, essential read for our times. Born in Ecuador and brought to the United States when she was five years old, Cornejo Villavicencio...
Book cover for "Wagnerism"
Star rating for Wagnerism
Description:
"A large-canvas narrative history, charting the impact of the cultural titan Wagner on art and politics. Ross will show how various artists-composers, novelists, poets, filmmakers-wrestled with the legacy of Wagner in the twentieth century"--
Book cover for "A woman like her"
Star rating for A woman like her
Author:
Description:
"In 2016, Pakistan's first social media celebrity, Qandeel Baloch, was murdered in a suspected honor killing. Her death quickly became a media sensation. It was both devastatingly routine and breathtakingly brutal, and in a new media landscape, it couldn't be ignored. Qandeel had courted attention and outrage with a talent for self-promotion that earned her comparisons to Kim Kardashian--and made her the constant victim of harassment and death threats....