NYT Best Nonfiction 2019


Showing 1 - 14 of 14  There are a total of 47 valid entries on the list.
Book cover for "The education of an idealist"
Star rating for The education of an idealist
Average Rating:
3.8 stars
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"
Star rating for Furious hours
Average Rating:
3.7 stars
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 "The heartbeat of Wounded Knee"
Star rating 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...
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 "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 "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 "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 "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 "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 yellow house"
Star rating for The yellow house
Average Rating:
3.7 stars
Description:
A brilliant, haunting and unforgettable memoir from a stunning new talent about the inexorable pull of home and family, set in a shotgun house in New Orleans East.