NYT Notable Books 2024 - Nonfiction


Showing 1 - 44 of 44  There are a total of 44 valid entries on the list.
Book cover for "The Achilles trap"
Star rating for The Achilles trap
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Description:
"From bestselling and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Steve Coll, the definitive story of the decades-long relationship between the United States and Saddam Hussein, and a deeply researched and news breaking investigation into how human error, cultural miscommunication, and hubris led to one of the greatest geopolitical conflicts of our time When the United States invaded Iraq in 2003, its message was clear: Iraq, under the control of strongman Saddam...
Book cover for "All the worst humans"
Star rating for All the worst humans
Description:
"A bridge-burning, riotous memoir by a top PR operative in Washington who exposes the secrets of the $129-billion industry that controls so much of what we see and hear in the media - from a man who used to pull the strings, and who is now pulling back the curtain. After nearly two decades in the Washington PR business, Elwood wants to come clean, by exposing the dark underbelly of the very industry that's made him so successful. The first step is...
Book cover for "All things are too small"
Star rating for All things are too small
Description:
"A glorious call to throw off restraint and balance in favor of excess, abandon, and disproportion, in essays ranging from such topics as mindfulness, decluttering, David Cronenberg, and consent. In her debut essay collection, "brilliant and stylish" (The Washington Post) critic Becca Rothfeld takes on one of the most sacred cows of our time: the demand that we apply the virtues of equality and democracy to culture and aesthetics. The result is a...
Book cover for "The anxious generation"
Star rating for The anxious generation
Average Rating:
4.7 stars
Description:
"From New York Times bestselling co-author of The Coddling of the American Mind, an essential investigation into the collapse of youth mental health - and a plan for a healthier, freer childhood. After more than a decade of stability or improvement, the mental health of adolescents plunged in the early 2010s. Rates of depression, anxiety, self-harm, and suicide rose sharply, more than doubling on most measures. Why? In The Anxious Generation, social...
Book cover for "Be ready when the luck happens"
Star rating for Be ready when the luck happens
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Average Rating:
4.7 stars
Description:
"Ina Garten, the author of thirteen best-selling cookbooks, beloved Food Network personality, Instagram sensation, and the cultural icon whose face has launched a thousand memes, shares her personal story with readers hungry for a seat at her table"--
Book cover for "The black box"
Star rating for The black box
Description:
"A magnificent, foundational reckoning with how Black Americans have used the written word to define and redefine themselves, in resistance to the lies of racism and often in heated disagreement with each other, over the course of the country's history. Distilled over many years from Henry Louis Gates, Jr.'s legendary Harvard introductory course in African American Studies, The Black Box: Writing the Race, is the story of Black self-definition in...
Book cover for "The Black utopians"
Star rating for The Black utopians
Description:
"A memoiristic history of Black utopian movements in the United States"--
Book cover for "The bluestockings"
Star rating for The bluestockings
Description:
This illuminating group portrait delves into the lives of a circle of 18th-century women called the Bluestockings, who came together in glittering salons to discuss and debate as intellectual equals with men, fighting for women to be educated and have a public role in society.
Book cover for "Challenger"
Star rating for Challenger
Description:
"From the New York Times bestselling author of Midnight in Chernobyl comes the definitive, dramatic, minute-by-minute story of the Challenger disaster based on fascinating new archival research and in-depth reporting-a riveting history that reads like a thriller"--
Book cover for "Chop fry watch learn"
Star rating for Chop fry watch learn
Description:
"In 1949, a young Chinese woman arrived in Taiwan, fleeing from the chaos of war on the mainland. At the time, Fu Pei-mei had no idea how to cook. Yet as a young housewife she taught herself and launched a career as a television instructor that would last four decades, entrancing millions of viewers who grew up watching her prepare thousands of delectable dishes with skill and verve. As her fame grew, she traveled beyond the borders of Taiwan, teaching...
Book cover for "Circle of hope"
Star rating for Circle of hope
Description:
"Americans have been leaving their churches. Some drift away. Some stay home. And some have been searching for--and finding--more authentic ways to find and follow Jesus. This is the story of one such "radical outpost of Jesus followers" dedicated to service, the Sermon on the Mount, and working toward justice for all in this life, not just salvation for some in the next. Part of a little-known yet influential movement at the edge of American evangelicalism,...
Book cover for "Cocktails with George and Martha"
Star rating for Cocktails with George and Martha
Description:
An award-winning author presents the history and impact of both the theatrical and cinematic versions of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and how it forced audiences to confront deeply-held concepts about relationships, sex and family.
Book cover for "Cold crematorium"
Star rating for Cold crematorium
Description:
"The first English language edition of a lost memoir by an Auschwitz survivor, offering a shocking and deeply moving perspective on life within the camps. When Jaozsef Debreczeni, a prolific Hungarian-language journalist and poet, arrived in Auschwitz in1944, his life expectancy was forty-five minutes. This was how long it took for the half-dead prisoners to be sorted into groups, stripped, and sent to the gas chambers. He beat the odds and survived...
Book cover for "Connie"
Star rating for Connie
Description:
"In an industry dominated by white men, Connie Chung stood alone, the first and only Asian woman to break into the television news industry. This is her extraordinary story, told with incisive wit and remarkable candor. Connie Chung is a pioneer. In 1969 at the age of 23, this once-shy daughter of Chinese parents took her first job at a local TV station in her hometown of Washington, D.C. and soon thereafter began working at CBS news as a correspondent....
Book cover for "Cue the sun!"
Star rating for Cue the sun!
Description:
"From beloved New Yorker TV critic Emily Nussbaum comes a groundbreaking narrative detailing the fights, egos, drama, and future presidents of reality television. Cue the Sun is a rollicking, deeply reported story about how the early reality TV business metastasized into an industry that now dominates entertainment in the United States. Starting in 1948, Nussbaum pulls back the curtain on the cultural meat grinder that created a generation-defining...
Book cover for "Do something"
Star rating for Do something
Average Rating:
5 stars
Description:
"An evocative coming of age memoir--the story of the education of a wayward wild child and acidhead who, searching for meaning and purpose, found refuge in the demi-monde of the ruined but magical metropolis that was New York City in the 1970s"--
Book cover for "Every valley"
Star rating for Every valley
Description:
"The epic, dramatic story of the 18th century men and women behind the making of Handel's Messiah, one of the world's most beloved works of classical music, from a New York Times bestselling historian and National Book Critics Circle Award finalist. George Frideric Handel's Messiah is arguably the greatest piece of participatory art ever created. Adored by millions, it is performed each year by renowned choirs and orchestras as well as by fans singing...
Book cover for "Fi"
Star rating for Fi
Description:
"From the award-winning New York Times-bestselling author, Alexandra Fuller, comes a career defining memoir about grieving the sudden loss of her twenty-one-year-old child. "Fair to say, I was in a ribald state the summer before my fiftieth birthday." Andso begins Alexandra Fuller's open, vivid new memoir, Fi. It's midsummer in Wyoming and Alexandra is barely hanging on. Grieving her father and pining for her home country of Zimbabwe, reeling from...
Book cover for "Health and safety"
Star rating for Health and safety
Description:
"From the New Yorker staff writer and acclaimed author of Future Sex comes a clever and subtly scathing follow-up about love, sex, drugs, and techno in our time of rage. Everything shifted for Emily Witt the day she met Andrew. It was the summer of 2016, and her first book would soon enter the world. A tour through alt-sex in the Internet age, it would receive widespread acclaim for its sharp and aloof critical eye. And yet here Emily was, pining...
Book cover for "The hidden globe"
Star rating for The hidden globe
Description:
"Borders draw one map of the world; money draws another. A journalist's riveting account exposes a parallel universe exempt from the laws of the land, and how the wealthy and powerful benefit from it. The map of the globe depicts the world we think we know: neatly delineated sovereign nations that bestow and restrict the rights of the citizens and entities within their borders. For wealthy individuals and corporations, however, borders are porous,...
Book cover for "I heard her call my name"
Star rating for I heard her call my name
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Average Rating:
4.5 stars
Description:
"An autobiography-viewing the author's life from the transformative lens of her recent transition-and a critical examination of the trans strain in Western culture"--
Book cover for "I just keep talking"
Star rating for I just keep talking
Description:
"From the New York Times bestselling author of The History of White People and Old in Art School, a finalist for the NBCC Award, comes a comprehensive new collection of essays spanning art, politics, and the legacy of racism that shapes American history as we know it. Throughout her prolific writing career, Nell Painter has published works on such luminaries as Sojourner Truth, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Malcolm X. Her unique vantage on American history...
Book cover for "John Lewis"
Star rating for John Lewis
Description:
"Born into poverty in rural Alabama, Lewis would become second only to Martin Luther King, Jr. in his contributions to the Civil Rights Movement. He was a Freedom Rider who helped to integrate bus stations in the South, a leader of the Nashville sit-in movement, the youngest speaker at the 1963 March on Washington, and the chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), which he made into one of the major civil rights organizations....
Book cover for "Knife"
Star rating for Knife
Average Rating:
4 stars
Description:
The internationally renowned writer and Booker Prize winner speaks out for the first time about the traumatic events of August 12, 2022, when an attempt was made on his life, in this deeply personal meditation on violence, art, loss, love and finding the strength to stand up again.
Book cover for "Language city"
Star rating for Language city
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Description:
"From the co-director of the Endangered Language Alliance, a captivating portrait of contemporary New York City through six speakers of little-known and overlooked languages, diving into the incredible history of the most linguistically diverse place everto have existed on the planet. Half of all 7,000-plus human languages may disappear over the next century and-because many have never been recorded-when they're gone, it will be forever. Ross Perlin,...
Book cover for "Lovely one"
Star rating for Lovely one
Average Rating:
5 stars
Description:
"With this unflinching account, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson invites readers into her life and world, tracing her family's ascent from segregation to her confirmation on America's highest court within the span of one generation. Named 'Ketanji Onyika,' meaning 'Lovely One,' based on a suggestion from her aunt, a Peace Corps worker stationed in West Africa, Justice Jackson learned from her educator parents to take pride in her heritage since birth....
Book cover for "Madness"
Star rating for Madness
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"On a cold day in March of 1911, officials marched twelve Black men into the heart of a forest in Maryland. Under the supervision of a doctor, the men were forced to clear the land, pour cement, lay bricks, and harvest tobacco. When construction finished, they became the first twelve patients of the state's Hospital for the Negro Insane. For centuries, Black patients have been absent from our history books. Madness transports readers behind the brick...
Book cover for "The message"
Star rating for The message
Average Rating:
5 stars
Description:
"Coates originally set off to write a book about writing, in the tradition of Orwell's classic Politics and the English Language, but found himself grappling with deeper questions about how our stories - our reporting and imaginative narratives and mythmaking - expose and distort our realities. The first of the book's three intertwining essays is set in Dakar, Senegal. Despite being raised as a strict Afrocentrist - and named for a Nubian pharaoh...
Book cover for "The New York game"
Star rating for The New York game
Description:
"A hugely entertaining history of baseball in New York City, bursting with bigger than life figures, and long-forgotten heroes, spanning the game's founding to the early 1940s"--
Book cover for "No one gets to fall apart"
Star rating for No one gets to fall apart
Description:
"From television writer and producer Sarah LaBrie, comes a poignant memoir about the love and resilience of a mother and daughter in the midst of mental illness"--
Book cover for "Reagan"
Star rating for Reagan
Description:
"In this “monumental and impressive” biography, Max Boot, the distinguished political columnist, illuminates the untold story of Ronald Reagan, revealing the man behind the mythology. Drawing on interviews with over one hundred of the fortieth president’s aides, friends, and family members, as well as thousands of newly available documents, Boot provides “the best biography of Ronald Reagan to date” (Robert Mann). The story begins not in...
Book cover for "The rebel's clinic"
Star rating for The rebel's clinic
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Description:
A revelatory new biography of the writer-activist Frantz Fanon, who inspired today's movements for racial liberation.
Book cover for "The return of great powers"
Star rating for The return of great powers
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Description:
"The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 dawned what Francis Fukuyama called "The End of History." Three decades later, Jim Sciutto said on CNN's air as the Ukraine war began, that we are living in a "1939 moment." History never ended-it barely paused-and theglobal order as we have known it is now gone. Great powers are reinvigorated and determined to assert dominance on the world stage. And as it escalates, this new order will affect everyone across...
Book cover for "Salvage"
Star rating for Salvage
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"Dionne Brand explores English and American literature, and the colonial aesthetic that shaped her sense of self and the world, of what was possible and what was not"--
Book cover for "Soldiers and kings"
Star rating for Soldiers and kings
Description:
"An intimate and one-of-a-kind look at the world of human smuggling in Latin America, by a MacArthur "genius" grant winner and anthropologist Political instability, poverty, climate change, and the insatiable appetite for cheap labor all fuel clandestinemovement across borders. As those borders harden, the demand for smugglers who aid migrants across them increases every year. Yet media and politicians have always characterized smugglers-or coyotes,...
Book cover for "Splinters"
Star rating for Splinters
Average Rating:
1.5 stars
Description:
From the New York times best-selling author of The Recovering and The Empathy Exams comes the riveting story of rebuilding a life after the end of a marriage--an exploration of motherhood, art and new love.
Book cover for "Stolen pride"
Star rating for Stolen pride
Description:
"An exploration of the "pride paradox" that has given the right's appeals such resonance"-- "In Stolen Pride, Hochschild focuses on a group swept up in the shifting political landscape: blue-collar men. In small churches, hillside hollers, roadside diners, trailer parks, and Narcotics Anonymous meetings, Hochschild introduces us to unforgettable people, and offers an original lens through which to see them and the wider world. In Stolen Pride, Hochschild...
Book cover for "The swans of Harlem"
Star rating for The swans of Harlem
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Description:
"The forgotten story of a pioneering group of five Black ballerinas, the first principals in the Dance Theatre of Harlem, who traveled the world as highly celebrated stars in their field and whose legacy was erased from history until now. At the height of the Civil Rights movement, Lydia Abarça was a Black prima ballerina with a major international dance company-the Dance Theatre of Harlem. She was the first Black ballerina on the cover of Dance...
Book cover for "There's always this year"
Star rating for There's always this year
Description:
"While Hanif Abdurraqib is an acclaimed author, a gifted poet, and one of our culture's most insightful music critics, he is most of all, at heart, an Ohioan. Growing up in Columbus in the '90s, Abdurraqib witnessed a golden era of basketball, one in which legends like LeBron were forged, and countless others weren't. His lifelong love of the game leads Abdurraqib into a lyrical, historical, and emotionally rich exploration of what it means to make...
Book cover for "Undivided"
Star rating for Undivided
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Description:
"In a country torn apart by racial tension, the story of how one Evangelical church tried to bridge the divide, with notable, if not complete, success"--
Book cover for "A walk in the park"
Star rating for A walk in the park
Description:
"From the New York Times bestselling and award-winning author of the epic adventure tale The Emerald Mile comes the most dramatic and deeply moving account ever of walking the Grand Canyon, a highly dangerous, life-changing 750-mile trek. The Grand Canyonis an American treasure, visited by more than 6 million people a year, many of whom are rendered speechless by its vast beauty, mystery, and complexity. Now, in A Walk in the Park, author Kevin Fedarko...
Book cover for "When the clock broke"
Star rating for When the clock broke
Description:
"A history of the right-wing political figures who defined the early 1990s"--
Book cover for "The wide wide sea"
Star rating for The wide wide sea
Average Rating:
3 stars
Description:
"From New York Times bestselling author Hampton Sides, an epic account of the most momentous voyage of the Age of Exploration, which culminated in Captain James Cook's death in Hawaii, and left a complex and controversial legacy still debated to this day On July 12th, 1776, Captain James Cook, already lionized as the greatest explorer in British history, set off on his third voyage in his ship the HMS Resolution. Two-and-a-half years later, on a beach...
Book cover for "A wilder shore"
Star rating for A wilder shore
Description:
"A portrait of the fascinating, unusual and fruitful creative partnership between Fanny and Robert Louis Stevenson"--