NYT Notable Books 2021 - Nonfiction


Showing 1 - 14 of 14  There are a total of 47 valid entries on the list.
Book cover for Beautiful country.
Description:
"Beautiful Country is the real deal. Heartrending, unvarnished, and powerfully courageous, this account of growing up undocumented in America will never leave you."--Gish Jen, author of The Resisters Ba Ba told me this and I in turn carried it in my heart: so long as we didn't stake claim to what wasn't ours--the things, our rooms, America, this beautiful country--we would be okay. An incandescent and heartrending memoir about Qian Julie Wang's five...
Book cover for Between two kingdoms.
Description:
A few weeks shy of her twenty-third birthday, Jaouad received a diagnosis of leukemia, with a 35 percent chance of survival. She would spend much of the next four years in a hospital bed, fighting for her life and chronicling the saga in a column for 'The New York Times'. After countless rounds of chemo, a clinical trial, and a bone marrow transplant she learned that a cure is not where the work of healing ends; it's where it begins. How could she...
Book cover for Crying in H Mart.
Description:
"From the indie rockstar of Japanese Breakfast fame, and author of the viral 2018 New Yorker essay that shares the title of this book, an unflinching, powerful memoir about growing up Korean-American, losing her mother, and forging her own identity. In this exquisite story of family, food, grief, and endurance, Michelle Zauner proves herself far more than a dazzling singer, songwriter, and guitarist. With humor and heart, she tells of growing up the...
Book cover for Empire of pain.
Description:
Presents a portrait of three generations of the Sackler family, who built their fortune on the sale of Valium and later sponsored the creation and marketing of one of the most commonly prescribed and addictive painkillers of the opioid crisis.
Book cover for Everything I have is yours.
Description:
"A turbulent romance meets harrowing medical mystery: the true story of the author's twenty-year marriage defined by her husband's chronic illness-and a testament to the endurance of love. Eleanor met Aaron when she was just a teenager and he was working at a local record store-older, cool, experienced, and with an electric personality. Escaping the cliches of fleeting young love, their summer romance bloomed into a relationship that survived college...
Book cover for The extended mind.
Description:
"A bold new book that proves our bodies and surroundings know more than our brains do"--
Book cover for The family Roe.
Description:
Reports on the Supreme Court's most divisive case, Roe v. Wade, and the unknown lives at its heart.
Book cover for A ghost in the throat.
Description:
In the eighteenth century, on discovering her husband has been murdered, an Irish noblewoman drinks handfuls of his blood and composes an extraordinary lament that reaches across centuries to the young Doireann Ní Ghríofa, whose fascination with it is later rekindled when she narrowly avoids fatal tragedy in her own life and becomes obsessed with learning everything she can about the poem Peter Levi has famously called "the greatest poem written...
Book cover for I came as a shadow.
Description:
"The autobiography of the legendary coach of the Georgetown Hoyas, whose achievements on and off the basketball court reflect America's unresolved struggle with racial justice"--
Book cover for Last best hope.
Description:
A National Book Award-winning author examines America's current descent into a failed state and discusses the ways we can leverage this moment to forge a new path forward that overcomes injustice, legislative paralysis, and political divides.
Book cover for Now beacon, now sea.
Description:
In a memoir of familial grief, the author examines the mystery of his mother's life and her withdrawal from everyone and everything she'd ever loved by excavating his own memories and family folklore.
Book cover for On Juneteenth.
Description:
""It is staggering that there is no date commemorating the end of slavery in the United States." -Annette Gordon-Reed. The essential, sweeping story of Juneteenth's integral importance to American history, as told by a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and Texas native. Interweaving American history, dramatic family chronicle, and searing episodes of memoir, Annette Gordon-Reed, the descendant of enslaved people brought to Texas in the 1850s, recounts...
Book cover for Punch me up to the gods.
Description:
"A poetic and raw coming-of-age memoir in essays about blackness, masculinity, and addiction"-- Playful, poignant and wholly original, this coming-of-age memoir about Blackness, masculinity and addiction follows the author, a poet and screenwriter, as he recounts his experiences, revealing a perpetual outsider awkwardly squirming to find his way in. --
Book cover for Somebody's daughter.
Description:
"One of the most prominent voices of her generation debuts with an extraordinarily powerful memoir: the story of a childhood defined by the ever looming absence of her incarcerated father and the path we must take to both honor and overcome our origins. For as long as she could remember, Ashley has put her father on a pedestal. Despite having only vague memories of seeing him face-to-face, she believes he's the only person in the entire world who...