NYT Notable Books 2020 - Nonfiction


Showing 21 - 40 of 48  There are a total of 48 valid entries on the list.
Book cover for "The inevitability of tragedy"
Star rating for The inevitability of tragedy
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"A fresh portrait of Henry Kissinger focusing on the fundamental ideas underlying his policies: realism, balance of power, and national interest. The Inevitability of Tragedy is a fascinating intellectual biography of Henry Kissinger that examines his unique role in government through his ideas. It analyzes the continuing controversies surrounding Kissinger's policies in such places as Vietnam and Chile by offering an understanding of his definition...
Book cover for "Just us"
Star rating for Just us
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"At home and in government, contemporary America finds itself riven by a culture war in which aggression and defensiveness alike are on the rise. It is not alone. In such partisan conditions, how can humans best approach one another across our differences? Taking the study of whiteness and white supremacy as a guiding light, Claudia Rankine explores a series of real encounters with friends and strangers - each disrupting the false comfort of spaces...
Book cover for "The man who ran Washington"
Star rating for The man who ran Washington
Average Rating:
3.5 stars
Description:
"Co-authored by the Chief White House correspondent at The New York Times and the Washington columnist at The New Yorker, this is a biography any would-be power broker must own: the story of legendary White House chief of staff and secretary of state James A. Baker III, the man who ran Washington when Washington ran the world. In the latter half of the twentieth century, no Republican won the presidency without his help, and the men he counseled in...
Book cover for "Memorial Drive"
Star rating for Memorial Drive
Average Rating:
5 stars
Description:
At nineteen, Trethewey's world turned upside down when her former stepfather shot and killed her mother. Grieving and still new to adulthood, she confronted the twin pulls of life and death in the aftermath of unimaginable trauma. Here she explores the way this experience lastingly shaped the artist she became. Moving through her mother's history in the deeply segregated South and through her own girlhood as a 'child of miscegenation' in Mississippi,...
Book cover for "Notes on a silencing"
Star rating for Notes on a silencing
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Traces the author's healing journey after a traumatizing sexual assault at infamous St. Paul's boarding school, describing how she helped police uncover proof of the school's institutionalized mandate of silence.
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
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"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
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"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"
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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
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"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
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"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
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"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 "The sirens of Mars"
Star rating for The sirens of Mars
Average Rating:
4 stars
Description:
"A young planetary scientist intimately details the search for life on Mars, tracing our centuries-old obsession with this seemingly desolate planet. Mars was once similar to Earth, but today there are no rivers, no lakes, no oceans. Coated in red dust, the terrain is bewilderingly empty. And yet multiple spacecraft are circling Mars, sweeping over Terra Sabaea, Syrtis Major, the dunes of Elysium, and Mare Sirenum-on the brink, perhaps, of a staggering...
Book cover for "Soul full of coal dust"
Star rating for Soul full of coal dust
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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
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"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
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"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...