NYT Best Nonfiction 2019


Showing 21 - 40 of 43  There are a total of 47 valid entries on the list.
Book cover for "Know my name"
Star rating for Know my name
Average Rating:
5 stars
Description:
"She was known to the world as Emily Doe when she stunned millions with a letter. Brock Turner had been sentenced to just six months in county jail after he was found sexually assaulting her on Stanford's campus. Her victim impact statement was posted on BuzzFeed, where it instantly went viral--viewed by almost eleven million people within four days, it was translated globally and read on the floor of Congress; it inspired changes in California law...
Book cover for "Kochland"
Star rating for Kochland
Average Rating:
5 stars
Description:
Uses the extraordinary account of how the biggest private company in the world grew to be that big to tell the story of modern corporate America. The annual revenue of Koch Industries is bigger than that of Goldman Sachs, Facebook, and U.S. Steel combined. Koch is everywhere: from the fertilizers that make our food to the chemicals that make our pipes to the synthetics that make our carpets and diapers to the Wall Street trading in all these commodities....
Book cover for "The last whalers"
Star rating for The last whalers
Average Rating:
2 stars
Description:
A journalist draws on his immersive visits to the remote Indonesian island of the Lamalerans, the world's last subsistence whalers, to profile their way of life and illuminate how their indigenous culture is succumbing to the modern world.
Book cover for "The lost art of Scripture"
Star rating for The lost art of Scripture
Book cover for "Maid"
Star rating for Maid
Average Rating:
3.3 stars
Description:
At 28, Stephanie Land's plans of breaking free from the roots of her hometown in the Pacific Northwest to chase her dreams of attending a university and becoming a writer, were cut short when a summer fling turned into an unplanned pregnancy. She turned to housekeeping to make ends meet, and, with a tenacious grip on her dream to provide her daughter the very best life possible, Stephanie worked days and took classes online to earn a college degree,...
Book cover for "The mastermind"
Star rating for The mastermind
Description:
"The incredible true story of the decade-long quest to bring down Paul Le Roux--the creator of a powerful Internet-enabled cartel who merged the ruthlessness of a drug lord with the technological savvy of a Silicon Valley entrepreneur. It all started as an online prescription drug network, supplying hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of painkillers to American customers. It would not stop there. Before long, the business had turned into a sprawling...
Book cover for "Midnight in Chernobyl"
Star rating for Midnight in Chernobyl
Average Rating:
5 stars
Description:
"Journalist Adam Higginbotham's definitive, years-in-the-making account of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant disaster--and a powerful investigation into how propaganda, secrecy, and myth have obscured the true story of one of the twentieth century's greatest disasters. Early in the morning of April 26, 1986, Reactor Number Four of the Chernobyl Atomic Energy Station exploded, triggering history's worst nuclear disaster. In the thirty years since then,...
Book cover for "No visible bruises"
Star rating for No visible bruises
Description:
Snyder explores America's epidemic of domestic violence and show how the roots of America's most pressing social crises are buried in abuse that happens behind closed doors. Domestic violence accounts for 15 percent of all violent crime in the US, and its tendrils are often behind mass shootings, hate crimes, and other forms of public violence. Here, Snyder explodes the common myths of "private" violence, shares the stories of victims, perpetrators,...
Book cover for "Our man"
Star rating for Our man
Description:
Richard Holbrooke was one of the most legendary and complicated figures in recent American history. Brilliant, utterly self-absorbed, and possessed of almost inhuman energy and appetites, he was both admired and detested. From his days as a young adviser in Vietnam to his last efforts to end the war in Afghanistan, Holbrooke embodied the postwar American impulse to take the lead on the global stage. His power lay in an utter belief in himself and...
Book cover for "Say nothing"
Star rating for Say nothing
Average Rating:
4.7 stars
Description:
"Meticulously reported, exquisitely written, and grippingly told, Say Nothing is a work of revelation." --David Grann, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Killers of the Flower Moon From award-winning New Yorker staff writer Patrick Radden Keefe, a stunning, intricate narrative about a notorious killing in Northern Ireland and its devastating repercussions In December 1972, Jean McConville, a thirty-eight-year-old mother of ten, was dragged...
Book cover for "Separate"
Star rating for Separate
Average Rating:
5 stars
Description:
A myth-shattering narrative of how a nation embraced "separation" and its pernicious consequences. Plessy v. Ferguson, the Supreme Court case synonymous with "separate but equal," created remarkably little stir when the justices announced their near-unanimous decision on May 18, 1896. Yet it is one of the most compelling and dramatic stories of the nineteenth century, whose outcome embraced and protected segregation, and whose reverberations are still...
Book cover for "She said"
Star rating for She said
Average Rating:
4.5 stars
Description:
From the Pulitzer-prize winning reporters who broke the news of Harvey Weinstein's sexual harassment and abuse comes the thrilling untold story of their investigation and its consequences for the #MeToo movement.
Book cover for "Solitary"
Star rating for Solitary
Description:
"[This] is the unforgettable life story of a man who served more than four decades in solitary confinement--in a 6-foot by 9-foot cell, 23 hours a day, in notorious Angola prison in Louisiana--for a crime he did not commit. That Albert Woodfox survived was, in itself, a feat of extraordinary endurance against the violence and deprivation he faced daily. That he was able to emerge from his odyssey within America's prison and judicial systems with his...
Book cover for "Stony the road"
Star rating for Stony the road
Average Rating:
4 stars
Description:
"A profound new rendering of the struggle by African-Americans for equality after the Civil War and the violent counter-revolution that resubjugated them, as seen through the prism of the war of images and ideas that have left an enduring racist stain on the American mind. The abolition of slavery in the aftermath of the Civil War is a familiar story, as is the civil rights revolution that transformed the nation after World War II. But the century...
Book cover for "Thick"
Star rating for Thick
Description:
"In these eight ... explorations on beauty, media, money, and more, Tressie McMillan Cottom--award-winning professor and ... author of Lower Ed--embraces her ... role as a purveyor of wit, wisdom, and Black Twitter snark about all that is right and much that is wrong with this thing we call society"--Dust jacket flap.
Book cover for "Trick mirror"
Star rating for Trick mirror
Average Rating:
4 stars
Description:
A breakout writer at The New Yorker examines the fractures at the center of contemporary culture with verve, deftness, and intellectual ferocity--for readers who've wondered what Susan Sontag would have been like if she had brain damage from the internet. Trick Mirror is an enlightening, unforgettable trip through the river of self-delusion that surges just beneath the surface of our lives. This is a book about the incentives that shape us, and about...
Book cover for "Underland"
Star rating for Underland
Average Rating:
4 stars
Description:
In Underland, Macfarland delivers his masterpiece: an epic exploration of the Earth's underworlds as they exist in myth, literature, memory, and the land itself. He takes us on an extraordinary journey into our relationship with darkness, burial, and what lies beneath the surface of both place and mind. Traveling through "deep time" - the dizzying expanses of geologic time that stretch away from the present - he moves from the birth of the universe...
Book cover for "The uninhabitable earth"
Star rating for The uninhabitable earth
Average Rating:
5 stars
Description:
"It is worse, much worse, than you think. If your anxiety about global warming is dominated by fears of sea-level rise, you are barely scratching the surface of what terrors are possible. In California, wildfires now rage year-round, destroying thousands of homes. Across the US, "500-year" storms pummel communities month after month, and floods displace tens of millions annually. This is only a preview of the changes to come. And they are coming fast....
Book cover for "The unwinding of the miracle"
Star rating for The unwinding of the miracle
Average Rating:
4 stars
Description:
"Born blind in Vietnam, Julie Yip-Williams narrowly escaped euthanasia by her grandmother, only to then flee the political upheaval of the late 1970s with her family. Loaded into a rickety boat with three hundred other refugees, Julie made it to Hong Kong and, ultimately, America, where a surgeon at UCLA gave her partial sight. Against all odds, she became a Harvard-educated lawyer, with a husband, a family, a life. Then, at age thirty-seven, with...
Book cover for "The war before the war"
Star rating for The war before the war