NYT Notable Books 2021 - Nonfiction


Showing 21 - 40 of 47  There are a total of 47 valid entries on the list.
Book cover for Festival days.
Description:
A collection that includes seven essays and two pieces of short fiction captures both the small moments of daily existence and times when life and death hang in the balance, including the title work about a searing journey through India.
Book cover for The free world.
Description:
"A history of the thinkers, writers, and artists who shaped intellectual culture in Cold War Europe and America"--
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 How the word is passed.
Author:
Description:
"'How the Word is Passed' is Clint Smith's revealing, contemporary portrait of America as a slave owning nation. Beginning in his own hometown of New Orleans, Smith leads the reader through an unforgettable tour of monuments and landmarks - those that are honest about the past and those that are not - that offer an intergenerational story of how slavery has been central in shaping our nations collective history, and ourselves."-- Provided by publisher....
Book cover for How to slowly kill yourself and others in America.
Description:
"A collection of essays on family, race, violence, celebrity, music, writing, and other topics"--
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 Invisible child.
Description:
"Invisible Child follows eight dramatic years in the life of Dasani Coates, a child with an imagination as soaring as the skyscrapers near her Brooklyn homeless shelter. Born at the turn of a new century, Dasani is named for the bottled water that comes to symbolize Brooklyn's gentrification and the shared aspirations of a divided city. As Dasani grows up, moving with her tightknit family from shelter to shelter, her story reaches back to trace the...
Book cover for JFK.
Description:
"By the time of his assassination in 1963, John F. Kennedy stood at the helm of the greatest power the world had ever seen, a booming American nation he had steered through some of the most perilous diplomatic standoffs of the Cold War era. Born in 1917 to a striving Irish American family that had ascended the ranks of Boston's labyrinthine political machine, Kennedy was bred for government, and his meteoric rise to become the youngest president ever...
Book cover for Kindred.
Description:
In Kindred, Neanderthal expert Rebecca Wragg Sykes shoves aside the cliché of the shivering ragged figure in an icy wasteland, and reveals the Neanderthal you don't know, our ancestor who lived across vast and diverse tracts of Eurasia and survived through hundreds of thousands of years of massive climate change. This book sheds new light on where they lived, what they ate, and the increasingly complex Neanderthal culture that researchers have discovered....
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 Let me tell you what I mean.
Author:
Description:
"From the universally acclaimed, best-selling author of the National Book Award-winning The Year of Magical Thinking: ten pieces never before collected that offer an illuminating glimpse into the mind and process of a legendary writer. Here are six pieces written in 1968 from the "Points West" Saturday Evening Post column Joan Didion shared from 1964 to 1969 with her husband, John Gregory Dunne about: American newspapers; a session with Gamblers Anonymous;...
Book cover for Let the record show.
Description:
"Based on more than two hundred interviews with ACT UP members and rich with lessons for today's activists, Let the Record Show is a revelatory exploration--and long-overdue reassessment--of the coalition's inner workings, conflicts, achievements, and ultimate fracture. Schulman, one of the most revered queer writers and thinkers of her generation, explores the how and the why, examining, with her characteristic rigor and bite, how a group of desperate...
Book cover for Life's edge.
Description:
"We all assume we know what life is, but the more scientists learn about the living world--from protocells to brains, from zygotes to pandemic viruses--the harder they find it is to locate life's edge"--
Book cover for A little devil in America.
Description:
"A Little Devil in America is an urgent project that unravels all modes and methods of black performance, in this moment when black performers are coming to terms with their value, reception, and immense impact on America. With sharp insight, humor, and heart, Abdurraqib examines how black performance happens in specific moments in time and space--midcentury Paris, the moon, or a cramped living room in Columbus, Ohio. At the outset of this project,...
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 freedom.
Description:
"Drawing on a vast range of material, from critical theory to pop culture to the intimacies and plain exchanges of daily life, Maggie Nelson explores how we might think, experience, or talk about freedom in ways responsive to the conditions of our day"--
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 People love dead Jews.
Description:
"A startling exploration of how Jewish history is exploited to comfort the living. Reflecting on subjects as far-flung as the international veneration of Anne Frank, the blockbuster travelling exhibition called "Auschwitz," the Jewish history of the Chinese city of Harbin, and the little known "righteous-gentile" Varian Fry, Dara Horn challenges us to confront the reasons why there might be so much fascination with Jewish deaths, as emblematic of...
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 Putting it together.
Description:
"A behind-the-scenes look at the making of the iconic Broadway musical Sunday in the Park with George"--