NYT Notable Books 2020 - Nonfiction


Showing 21 - 39 of 39  There are a total of 48 valid entries on the list.
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 pilgrimage to eternity"
Star rating for A pilgrimage to eternity
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 "Reaganland"
Star rating for Reaganland
Average Rating:
3.5 stars
Description:
Connects the activities and influence of today's conservative movements to a deliberate shift toward right-wing policies that began during the Carter administration and led to the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980.
Book cover for "The saddest words"
Star rating for The saddest words
Description:
"How do we read William Faulkner in the twenty-first century? asks Michael Gorra, one of America's most preeminent literary critics. Should we still read William Faulkner in this new century? What can his works tell us about the legacy of slavery and the Civil War, that central quarrel in our nation's history? These are the provocative questions that Michael Gorra asks in this historic portrait of the novelist and his world. Born in 1897 in Mississippi,...
Book cover for "The selected letters of Ralph Ellison"
Star rating for The selected letters of Ralph Ellison
Description:
"An autobiography through the previously unpublished letters of the renowned author of Invisible Man, with insights into the riddle of American identity, the writer's craft, and his own life and work. Over six decades (1933 to 1993), Ralph Ellison's extensive and revealing correspondence remarkably details his aspirations and anxieties, confidence and uncertainties throughout his personal and professional life. From early notes to his mother, as...
Book cover for "Shakespeare in a divided America"
Star rating for Shakespeare in a divided America
Description:
"From leading Shakespeare scholar James Shapiro, a timely and insightful examination of what the world's greatest dramatist can teach us about life in an America riven by conflict. The United States has always been divided, but Americans from all walks oflife have also always shared a deep affinity for the plays William Shakespeare, even if their meaning has been fiercely contested. For well over two centuries now, Americans of all stripes--presidents...
Book cover for "Soul full of coal dust"
Star rating for Soul full of coal dust
Author:
Description:
Uncovers the sobering resurgence of black lung disease in Appalachia, the cover-up activities of the coal mining industry, and the awareness activities of regional mining communities.
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 "The third rainbow girl"
Star rating for The third rainbow girl
Description:
"In the early evening of June 25, 1980 in Pocahontas County, West Virginia, two middle-class outsiders named Vicki Durian, 26, and Nancy Santomero, 19, were murdered in an isolated clearing. They were hitchhiking to a festival known as the Rainbow Gathering but never arrived; they traveled with a third woman however, who lived. For thirteen years, no one was prosecuted for the "Rainbow Murders," though deep suspicion was cast on a succession of local...
Book cover for "This is all I got"
Star rating for This is all I got
Description:
"More than forty-five million Americans attempt to survive under the poverty line, day by day. Nearly 60,000 people sleep in New York City-run shelters every night--forty percent of them children. This Is All I Got makes this issue deeply personal, vividly depicting one woman's hope and despair and her steadfast determination to improve her situation, despite the myriad setbacks she encounters. Camila is a twenty-two-year-old new mother. She has no...
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 vapors"
Star rating for The vapors
Description:
Describes the history of Hot Springs, Arkansas. The author plots the trajectory of everything from organized crime to America's fraught racial past, examining how a town synonymous with white gangsters supported a burgeoning black middle class. He reveals how the louche underbelly of the South was also home to veterans hospitals and baseball's spring training grounds, giving rise to everyone from Babe Ruth to President Bill Clinton. Before Vegas...
Book cover for "War"
Star rating for War
Description:
"War, the instinct to fight, is inherent in human nature; peace is the aberration in history. War has shaped humanity, its institutions, its states, its values and ideas. Our very language, our public spaces, our private memories, some of our greatest cultural treasures reflect the glory and the misery of war. War is an uncomfortable and challenging subject not least because it brings out the most vile and the noblest aspects of humanity. Margaret...
Book cover for "Who gets in and why"
Star rating for Who gets in and why
Description:
A higher-education journalist draws on insider access to explain the nuts and bolts of college admissions today, outlining the unexpected agendas that reflect which and why prospective students receive admission into better schools.
Book cover for "Yellow Bird"
Star rating for Yellow Bird
Description:
"When Lissa Yellow Bird was released from prison in 2009, she found her home, the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation in North Dakota, transformed by the Bakken oil boom. In her absence, the landscape had been altered beyond recognition, her tribal government swayed by corporate interests, and her community burdened by a surge in violence and addiction. Three years later, when Lissa learned that a young white oil worker, Kristopher 'KC' Clarke, had disappeared...