NYT Best Nonfiction 2019


Showing 1 - 20 of 47  There are a total of 47 valid entries on the list.
Book cover for The age of surveillance capitalism.
Description:
"Shoshana Zuboff, named "the true prophet of the information age" by the Financial Times, has always been ahead of her time. Her seminal book In the Age of the Smart Machine foresaw the consequences of a then-unfolding era of computer technology. Now, three decades later she asks why the once-celebrated miracle of digital is turning into a nightmare. Zuboff tackles the social, political, business, personal, and technological meaning of "surveillance...
Book cover for Antisocial.
Book cover for Audience of one.
Description:
"A generational work that, using television, reframes America's identity through the rattled mind of a septuagenarian, insomniac, cable-news-junkie president. In the tradition of great cultural figures like Marshall McLuhan and Neil Postman, New York Times chief television critic James Poniewozik traces the history of television and mass media from the early 1980s to today, and demonstrates how a "volcanic, camera- hogging antihero" merged with America's...
Book cover for The beneficiary.
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"Journalist Janny Scott describes the world that shaped her father, Robert Montgomery Scott (whose mother, Helen Hope Scott, was said to have inspired Katherine Hepburn's character in the play and the film The Philadelphia Story), and provides a look at the weight of inheritance, the tenacity of addiction, and the power of buried secrets"--
Book cover for Bottle of lies.
Book cover for The British are coming.
Description:
"Rick Atkinson ... has long been admired for his unparalleled ability to write deeply researched, stunningly vivid narrative history. Now he turns his attention to a new war, and in the initial volume of the Revolution Trilogy he tells the story of the first twenty months of the bloody struggle to shake free of King George's shackles. From the battles at Lexington and Concord in spring 1775 to those at Trenton and Princeton in winter 1777, the ragtag...
Book cover for The Club.
Description:
"In 1763, the painter Joshua Reynolds proposed to his friend Samuel Johnson that they invite a few friends to join them every Friday at the Turk's Head Tavern in London to dine, drink, and talk until midnight. Eventually the group came to include among its members Edmund Burke, Adam Smith, Edward Gibbon, and James Boswell. It was known simply as "the Club." In this captivating book, Leo Damrosch brings alive a brilliant, competitive, and eccentric...
Book cover for The conservative sensibility.
Description:
"A reflection on American conservatism, examining how the Founders' belief in natural rights created a great American political tradition--one that now finds itself under threat, both from progressives and elements inside the Republican Party"--
Book cover for The crowded hour.
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"The dramatic story of the most famous regiment in American history: the Rough Riders, a motley group of soldiers led by Theodore Roosevelt, whose daring exploits marked the beginning of American imperialism in the 20th century"--
Book cover for The education of an idealist.
Description:
Pulitzer Prize winning humanitarian Samantha Power offers an urgent response to the question "What can one person do?" In this memoir, Power transports us from her childhood in Dublin to the streets of war-torn Bosnia to the White House Situation Room and the world of high-stakes diplomacy. In 2005, her critiques of U.S. foreign policy caught the eye of newly elected senator Barack Obama, who invited her to work with him on Capitol Hill and then on...
Book cover for Furious hours.
Description:
The stunning story of an Alabama serial killer and the true-crime book that Harper Lee worked on obsessively in the years after To Kill a Mockingbird. Reverend Willie Maxwell was a rural preacher accused of murdering five of his family members for insurance money in the 1970s. With the help of a savvy lawyer, he escaped justice for years until a relative shot him dead at the funeral of his last victim. Despite hundreds of witnesses, Maxwell's murderer...
Book cover for Good Talk.
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A bold, wry, and intimate graphic memoir about American identity, interracial families, and the realities that divide us, from the acclaimed author of The Sleepwalker’s Guide to Dancing.

“By turns hilarious and heart-rending, it’s exactly the book America needs at this moment.”—Celeste Ng

How brown is too brown?

Can Indians...
Book cover for Grace will lead us home.
Book cover for The guarded gate.
Description:
By the widely celebrated New York Times best selling author of Last Call, the powerful, definitive, and timely account of how the rise of eugenics helped America close the immigration door to 'inferiors' in the 1920s. A forgotten, dark chapter of American history with implications for the current day, it tells the story of the scientists who argued that certain nationalities were inherently inferior, providing the intellectual justification for the...
Book cover for Guest house for young widows.
Description:
"In early 2014, the Islamic State clinched its control of Raqqa in Syria. Baghdadi, the leader of ISIS, urged Muslims around the world to come join the caliphate. Witnessing the brutal oppression of the Assad regime in Syria, and moved to fight for justice, thousands of men and women heeded his call. At the heart of this story is a cast of unforgettable young women who responded. Emma, from Germany; Sharmeena from Bethnal Green, London; Nour from...
Book cover for The heartbeat of Wounded Knee.
Description:
The received idea of Native American history -- as promulgated by books like Dee Brown's 1970 mega-bestselling Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee -- has been that American Indian history essentially ended with the 1890 massacre at Wounded Knee. Not only did one hundred fifty Sioux die at the hands of the U.S. Cavalry, but Native civilization did as well. Growing up Ojibwe on a reservation in Minnesota, training as an anthropologist, and researching Native...

17. Horizon

Book cover for Horizon.
Book cover for How to be an antiracist.
Description:
""The only way to undo racism is to consistently identify and describe it -- and then dismantle it." Ibram X. Kendi's concept of antiracism reenergizes and reshapes the conversation about racial justice in America -- but even more fundamentally, points us toward liberating new ways of thinking about ourselves and each other. In How to Be an Antiracist, Kendi asks us to think about what an antiracist society might look like, and how we can play an...
Book cover for How we fight for our lives.
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"Written from the crossroads of sex, race, and power in America, How We Fight for Our Lives is a stunning coming-of-age memoir and a haunting reflection of the nation as a whole"--
Book cover for If.
Description:
"Rudyard Kipling once towered over not just English literature, but indeed the entire literary world. In 1907, at just forty-two, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, becoming its youngest winner and the first in the English language. Today, however, when he is read, if indeed he is read at all, it is regarding the history of colonial India, his birthplace and the setting of some his most famous work, and to a lesser extent England, his...