Are you having trouble deciding what nonfiction book to read for class?
Click here for Time magazine's list of the 100 best nonfiction books of all time.
Click here for The Guardian newspaper list of greatest nonfiction books.
Click here for the New York Times "Combined Print & E-Book Nonfiction Bestseller List" as of February 8th, 2015.
Click here for More magazine's "The Top 100 Books Every Woman Should Read" list.
Click here for the The Root list of the 15 Best Nonfiction Books by Black Authors in 2014.
Below are a few choice cuts from the
Time list. (All book blurbs were written for the
Time list and were not created by Mr. Wermeling.)
* denotes a
Mr. Wermeling Personal Favorite
A HEARTBREAKING WORK OF STAGGERING GENIUS
It may seem arrogant to refer to one’s first published book as a
Work of Staggering Genius, but in Dave Eggers’s case, the truth is in the pages. The Pulitzer Prize nominated memoir, published in 2000, is easy to get lost in with its conversational narrative that’s at once paranoid and adept, casual yet sincere. And while it is
heartbreaking to witness the deterioration of an otherwise unremarkable suburban family, as both Eggers’ parents succumb to cancer within a span of 32 days, the book is also undeniably uplifting and succeeds as an honest (if partly fictionalized) portrayal of the strength of family in the face of adversity. Eggers excels at conveying the weight of the burden laid upon him when, at age 21, he accepts the role of parent to his 8-year-old brother Toph. Though his “new model” parenting methods might not be considered normal by society’s standards, Eggers doesn’t hide from the fact that nothing about his and his brother’s situation is “normal.” Instead, he demands that the universe repay him and Toph for the heartache they’ve endured. Eleven years, six books, a successful publishing imprint and numerous nonprofits later, it seems that Eggers has been repaid in full.
A MOVEABLE FEAST
Ernest Hemingway begins his memoir of Paris in the 1920s with a scene from autumn, when “all the sadness of the city came suddenly with the first cold rains of winter.” It’s a mood that returns when he leaves Paris at the end of the book, his first marriage in shambles but his faith in the transformative power of the city intact. In between, we relive his heady encounters with Gertrude Stein, his friendship with F. Scott Fitzgerald, warm days in the Jardin du Luxembourg and walks along cramped and ancient streets where goatherds still ply their trade, calling for customers to come down with pots and milk the animals. It was a Paris of another time, not just for modern readers but for Hemingway: he wrote the book in the 1950s, long after he’d left France and not long before he died in 1961. Reading it can be a wistful experience, but as he says on the last page, “Paris was always worth it.
THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF MALCOLM X
During Alex Haley’s interview sessions with Malcolm X, the then spokesman for the Nation of Islam scribbled notes on small pieces of paper. Eventually Haley would use them to form his autobiography and the basis of much of the study of his character.
The book begins with his description of his tumultuous childhood and takes the reader into his youth in Harlem’s heyday. It also places him inside the criminal underworld, in prison and finally in the center of the civil rights movement. The prose follows Malcolm X’s direct manner of speaking to ensure that readers see his life through his eyes and is gripping enough to capture both subject and environment.
Malcolm X predicted that he would not live to see its publication, a prophecy fulfilled as friction between himself and the Nation of Islam, and a subsequent falling-out culminated in his 1965 assassination. But the pages chronicling the years leading up to it reveal the world of a man who had gone from being a hustler to being one of history’s most controversial civil rights icons."
FAST FOOD NATION
“I aimed for the public’s heart,” wrote Upton Sinclair, referring to his muckraking hit
The Jungle, “and by accident, I hit it in the stomach.” When Eric Schlosser came out with
Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal in 2001, it was hailed as a modern-day
Jungle, and with good reason. The book’s most memorable sections pull back the veil of the fast-food infrastructure and reveal the horrific conditions of modern American slaughterhouses — both for the cattle who were eviscerated in bloody fashion and for the immigrant labor force paid too little for work that was too dangerous.
But it would be a mistake to treat
Fast Food Nation as just another piece of stomach-turning, muckraking literature. Schlosser did far more, connecting the rise and consolidation of the fast-food industry in America to the declining power of labor unions, sliding blue-collar wages and growing income inequality. “The basic thinking behind fast food has become the operating system of today’s retail economy,” writes Schlosser. We all live in Fast Food Nation.
AGAINST INTERPRETATION AND OTHER ESSASYS
Among her many identities — novelist, playwright, film director and human-rights activist — Susan Sontag was perhaps most widely known as a searing intellectual. Her first work of nonfiction,
Against Interpretation, published in 1966, was a sweeping assessment of art and contemporary culture — as well as an instant classic. With her insatiable appetite for creativity in all its forms, Sontag produces a collection of essays that is an ambitious work. Discussing everything from Sartre to camp, Godard to science fiction — the highbrow-lowbrow distinction wasn’t one that Sontag was concerned with — the book aimed to be a critique of modern thinking about art. In the title essay, Sontag makes the case against overintellectualizing art. Rather than dissect art and its context and consequently eviscerate its beauty, she argues that the beauty of art should be appreciated for what it is. The book was an immediate hit and established Sontag as an influential cultural critic.
A SUPPOSEDLY FUN THING I'LL NEVER DO AGAIN*
David Foster Wallace has been the recipient of so much praise since his death in 2008 that perhaps it’s best to contribute a gripe. Wallace is a disquieting read. Not just because of the acid insights or creeping melancholy, but because his mastery of language and powers of observation so dwarf our own. This 1997 collection of essays features some of the writer’s best, including a dispatch from the set of a David Lynch movie (where Wallace never gets closer to Lynch than a glimpse of his subject peeing), a piece from the Illinois State Fair (“the air like wet wool”), the title meditation on the existential sadness of luxury cruises (maid service complete with “a creeping guilt, a deep accretive uneasiness, a discomfort that presents … a weird kind of pampering-paranoia”) and a profile of middling tennis pro Michael Joyce that eclipses his better-known essay on tour ace Roger Federer. This is Wallace at the top of his game.
BURY MY HEART AT WOUNDED KNEE*
Drawing on government records and first-person accounts, Brown exposed how the U.S. government sought systematically to destroy the American Indian in the late 19th century. Beginning with the forced relocation of the Navajo in 1864 and ending with the massacre of the Sioux at Wounded Knee in 1890, Brown revealed the broken treaties, condescending diplomacy and discriminatory policies that helped extend America’s border to the Pacific. Published in 1970,
Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee attracted some criticism from scholars, who called it one-sided, but Brown didn’t care. To lay out how the West was really won, he wrote, it was necessary to approach history from a new direction: “Americans who have always looked westward when reading about this period should read this book facing eastward.”
THE HERO WITH A THOUSAND FACES
Since its publication in 1949, Joseph Campbell’s seminal work on the archetypal heroes and myths shared by world religions and traditions has focused countless artists and academics on our cultural commonalities rather than our differences. Legend has it that George Lucas used Campbell’s book as a foundation for his
Star Wars trilogy.
Harry Potter also closely hews to the classic hero’s journey that Campbell drew from ancient allegories in dozens of cultures and codified into one rollicking human epic, a universal saga that he referred to as the monomyth and that, he argued, sits deep in our subconscious, woven into all our rituals, from marriage to burial. A prolific author and editor, he believed that people need these superhuman figures because they are “the symbols that carry the human spirit forward.” But in a wistful last chapter, he noted that modernity has devalued this collective consciousness in favor of self-expression and a fragmented culture tilted toward science and economics. In his view, we are enriched and supported when we embrace the “oneness of the individual and the group.” Today that bond is frayed. “The lines of communication between the conscious and unconscious zones of the human psyche have all been cut,” Campbell wrote, “and we have been split in two.”
LET US NOW PRAISE FAMOUS MEN*
Former TIME magazine movie critic James Agee (who reviewed films, in the memorable words of writer David Thompson, “like someone who had not just viewed the movie but been in it — out with it, as if it were a girl; drinking with it; driving in the night with it”) may be best known for writing a book that sprang from a FORTUNE assignment that, ironically, never ran. In 1936, Agee and photographer Walker Evans were sent to the Deep South to document the travails of sharecropping cotton farmers, three years into Roosevelt’s New Deal.
By turns captivating and exhausting (the third sentence lasts 16 lines),
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men tells the story of three families. Agee states that his mission is to “pry intimately into the lives of an undefended and appallingly damaged group of human beings,” and pry he does, but he also ruminates about poverty, farming, animals and racism, all supplemented by Evans’ stark black-and-white images.
Hardly anyone read the book on its original publication in 1941. It wasn’t until 1960, when it was reissued after Agee’s death, that it garnered recognition and its stylistic influence rubbed off on the likes of Norman Mailer and Hunter S. Thompson. In 2001 the New York Public Library declared it one of the most influential books of the 20th century.
A PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
Howard Zinn’s
People’s History, first published in 1980, is a story of America through the lens of the oppressed. It’s a rethinking of history, a narrative you almost certainly didn’t read in school. From Columbus’ voyage to President Bush’s “war on terror” (he revised the book in 2003), Zinn writes through the writings of others: factory workers, union leaders, blacks, Native Americans, the men who went off to war and the women who took their places. While Zinn’s recurring focus on the labor movement is often criticized, it’s important to note he wasn’t simply a historian. He was a social activist who fought for those without a voice. Zinn’s history isn’t a textbook and sometimes doesn’t even feel like a history book. It’s just a brilliantly written story about the U.S. through the lives of those too often overlooked.
IN COLD BLOOD
The seed from which Capote’s genre-bending 1966 book grew was a newspaper blurb about the grisly murder of a Kansas farmer and his family. Intrigued, Capote spent years digging into the context and aftermath of the crime, interviewing the killers and recreating the carnage.
In Cold Blood blurred the line between fact and fiction, laying the foundation for the New Journalism later practiced by Tom Wolfe. But apart from its role in forging a new branch of literature, the book also stands on its own as a masterpiece of reportage. Though critics claim Capote took creative license, the book is nonetheless a meticulously crafted account of a heinous killing — one as gripping to readers as it was to its author.
NICKEL AND DIMED
“I can’t imagine getting involved in a problem as a journalist and not wanting to do something about it,” wrote Ehrenreich of her activist brand of investigative journalism. Published in 2001,
Nickel and Dimed was a response to the rhetoric surrounding welfare reform — namely, the notion that unskilled jobs could lift people out of poverty. Ehrenreich (who also has a Ph.D. in cellular biology) suspected differently. So she went undercover as a waitress in Florida, a maid in Maine and a store clerk in Minnesota, working alongside impoverished people with few options. Outraged but never sanctimonious, she spotlighted the vulnerability of wage workers — and how all of us are implicated when we accept the benefits of cheap labor.
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