Best nonfiction of 2024

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This is a list of nonfiction books I enjoyed, admired, wished I’d published in 2024. Like Sutherland House, I gravitate toward researched nonfiction with good writing and a strong narrative line. The list includes a mix of big books that received considerable attention and others that did not receive enough. All are guaranteed to leave you feeling that your time and money have been well spent.

In general, the world of nonfiction is still leaning hard on hectoring, feel-bad vibes. I’ve again tried to lean a bit in the direction of enjoyment. The list does not include Sutherland House books—you can’t choose among your children—and it does not include books by any of our Canadian peers because it would be weird to mention theirs and not ours. It does contain one book that originated in the UK and that we published in North America; I wasn’t going to mention it until it showed up on both the Times and Spectator best-of-year lists, at which point it seemed fair to make an exception.

In no particular order:

Sing Like Fish: How Sound Rules Life Under Water by Amorina Kingdon (Scribe/Penguin)

It was a strong year for natural history, particularly of the behavioural variety. Zoë Schlanger’s The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth and Arik Kershenbaum’s Why Animals Talk are both recommendable, but my favourite is Kingdon’s Sing Like Fish, which completely over-turned my impressions of the silent deep. I probably should have known better, given that sound travels better through water than air, and whales can hear each other from hundreds of miles away. I was still surprised to learn that crustaceans have ears (or something like them) in their joints. “Underwater sounds range from funny to gorgeous to, honestly, kind of boring to humans,” writes Kingdon. “Yet to my ear the most beautiful sound is the trill of the bearded seal. These seals’ pure whistles sweep up and down, criss-crossing each other on the spectrogram.” The author is from Victoria, BC.

Charlie Hustle: The Rise and Fall of Pete Rose, and the Last Glory Days of Baseball by Keith O’Brien (Pantheon)

Not a great year for sports books, unless you’re into European football, but Keith O’Brien’s Charlie Hustle impresses. As one review said, “The author paints a vivid portrait of the simultaneously glorious and reckless life of Major League Baseball’s hit king, whose raw strength and work ethic symbolized baseball and the American dream itself, yet who gambled his way permanently out of baseball and its Hall of Fame, leaving a wake of bitter disappointment as he sped through life with the same air of tenacious invincibility that marked his play.” It’s a great feat of reportage. O’Brien talks to everyone: Rose, his teammates, the commissioners who banned him, his wife, mistress, dealer, bookie… a fascinating read.

The Corporation in the Twenty-First Century: Why (Almost) Everything We Are Told About Business Is Wrong by John Kay (Yale)

If you want to know how corporations get huge and dominant, why that dominance is short-lived and in many respects illusory, why big companies are weird and awful places to work, and why they’re both hated and admired by their own customers, this is the book for you. It’s a serious, ambitious effort that aims for “a better understanding of how business works, and an explanation of how it does not work in the ways many people—both critics and apologists—think.” Insightful. Even-handed. Much of the blame falls on a relentless pursuit of shareholder value and obsessive attention to short-term financial metrics.

Linguaphile by Julie Sedivy (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

I was really impressed by Farrar, Straus & Giroux’s list this year. It has Peter Godfrey-Smith’s Living on Earth: Forests, Corals, Consciousness, and the Making of the World and Jean Stouse’s Family Romance: John Singer Sargent and the Wertheimers, but let’s highlight Julie Sedivy’s Linguaphile: A Life of Language Love. Its subject is the “daily miracle” of language and its filled with insight into the relationship between language and psychology, observations about how we learn and incessantly recreate languages, and revelations about what we really mean when we say “um” (it’s almost always uttered before something we consider important). Sedivy is an elegant writer who grew up speaking a handful of languages and now teaches at University of Calgary.

Seven Deadly Sins: The Biology of Being Human by Guy Leschziner (William Collins)

“A journey through the domains of sex, murder, infidelity, criminality, and violence resides within the pages of this book.” How’s that for an opening line? The London neurologist Leschziner examines such human failings as wrath, sloth, gluttony, and lust—behaviour that has long been framed by theologians and philosophers in moral terms—as natural outcomes of our genetic, neurological, and psychological makeup. Our bodies and minds, not our souls are to blame. Leschziner draws on historical examples and his clinical practices for illustrative purposes. We meet a gluttonous woman with a genetic disorder that impairs her brain’s ability to signal fullness, and a prim British soldier who after a head injury develops a sex obsession. Unfailingly interesting.

Woodrow Wilson: The Light Withdrawn, by Christopher Cox (Simon & Schuster)

About time someone wrote a corrective biography of the too-oft-lauded Wilson, among the least appealing and most over-rated of American presidents. Vain, priggish, misogynistic, virulently racist, temperamental, imperious, and sometimes spectacularly untruthful, he botched the Treaty of Versailles, the League of Nations, and US demobilization after the Great War, handing his successor, Warren Harding, a nation in the grip of manifold crises. Those are my feelings. Cox, an historian at University of California, Irvine, is a straight-shooter and his biography is not so much severe as clear-headed. The Economist called it “dispassionate… a doggedly researched and soberly told story of American progress—and the president who stood in its way.”

Ingrained by Callum Robinson (Ecco)

The author is a second-generation master woodworker whose shop specializes in luxurious display cabinets and furnishings that can cost tens of thousands of pounds. The book is notionally about the craft of carpentry, but it’s also about a son’s relationship with his father, the personalities of wood, the profound satisfaction derived from manual labour, and the extreme difficulty of maintaining a creative in the era of disposability. The writing is clean and precise, like I imagine his woodworking to be.

When Women Ran Fifth Avenue: Glamour and Power at the Dawn of American Fashion by Julie Satow (Doubleday)

A fine work of social history concentrating on three American women who led important luxury department stores in the mid-twentieth century: Hortense Odlum at Bonwit Teller, Dorothy Shaver at Lord & Taylor, and Geraldine Stutz at Henri Bendel’s. All three stores are now gone—there’s no longer a single place in Manhattan you can go to buy gloves, a hat, and a pair of rare green parakeets—but the women had lasting impacts on American fashion and retail, industries that were otherwise dominated by men. Said the Wall Street Journal: "Ms. Satow’s carefully researched book is compulsively readable: I found myself dashing through it like a novel. She portrays the women with verve; we get a glimpse into their lives, as well as a sense of what it was like at each of these retail meccas."

The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt (Allen Lane)

Haidt’s book got all the attention this year, and deservedly so. He makes a strong case for an epidemic of teen mental illness, and attributes it to the changing nature of childhood, or, more precisely, the “great rewiring of childhood” that came with the introduction of addictive technology—smartphones, social media, video games, etc. Among the results, he says, are sleep deprivation, attention fragmentation, loneliness, social contagion, endless social comparison, addiction, and perfectionism. Not everyone buys the direct links Haidt sees between technology and mental health issues, but the sheer volume of data he brings to this book will have you stealing your kids’ phones and pushing them outdoors.

The Work of Art by Adam Moss (Penguin Press)

Moss was the much-admired editor of New York magazine. Paul Wells directed me to this one, so I’ll let him introduce it: “[Moss] retired not long before COVID broke out all over, and now he’s come out the other side with a book. It’s called The Work of Art. It’s concerned with that irreducibly mysterious question: Where does art come from? Moss interviews 43 creators—from legends like Stephen Sondheim and the playwright Tony Kushner to architects, poets, painters, composers, sand-castle sculptors and the showrunner for Veep—about how they made specific works. But he didn’t just interview them. He asked each one to show their work: early sketches, rough drafts, rejected efforts, diaries, text-message logs, the ‘creative entrails’ of the process. So you find yourself going through each artist’s work week, while the artist discusses the stress, epiphanies and trade-offs of creation, and Moss stands at their elbow, refusing to let them off the hook.”

Question 7 by Richard Flanagan (Chatto)

Richard Flanagan’s won the Booker, perhaps the world’s most prestigious fiction prize, and now the Baillie Gifford, the world’s best nonfiction prize (for my money). I can’t describe it better than Sam Leith did in the Spectator: “I was hugely moved and impressed by Richard Flanagan’s Question 7, which uses an eccentric toolkit—part memoir, part history, part fictional imagining—to produce a book quite unlike anything else, and which gathers Anton Chekhov, Leo Szilard, H.G. Wells and Rebecca West, the bombing of Hiroshima and the Tasmanian genocide, as well as the author’s own family history and traumatic early experiences—not to mention an unexpected cameo from Boris Johnson—into its pages. It’s an anguished and extraordinary book—Flanagan’s masterpiece, I think.”

The Haunted Wood: A History of Childhood Reading by Sam Leith (Sutherland House)

Speaking of Sam Leith, this is what the Cambridge Critique said of his latest: “Sometimes a book appears, destined to be a classic. The Haunted Wood is so dense, so detailed and so packed with amazing insight it simply captivates the imagination—even as you boggle at the sheer brilliance of the whole project.” And The Times: “This playful, thoughtful and nostalgia-inducing history of childhood reading will keep you up way past bedtime.” And The Literary Review: Leith has synthesized a vast amount of material and produced a marvellously charming and enjoyable history for the general reader, as well as a spirited polemic on the importance of children’s literature.”

Carson McCullers by Mary V. Dearborn (Knopf)

Carson McCullers is perhaps best known for being young, famous at twenty-three thanks to her début novel, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter. It’s easy to forget what a singular debut it was, with its oddball cast of characters and treatments of homosexuality, alcoholism, cross-dressing, mental illness, Communism, racism, suicide, and adolescent sex—uncommon subjects in the polite literature of 1940. The author herself was not only precocious, but captivating, difficult, self-indulgent, a serious drinker, and unlucky in health. From the Washington Post: “In this extraordinary biography, Dearborn brings Carson McCullers to life, revealing the debilitating physical ailments and near-constant psychic torment she had to conquer to produce four works of fiction imbued with some of the most emotionally sensitive poetic prose ever produced in American letters—a testament to why McCullers will live on as a unique and enduring artist.”

A Travel Guide to the Middle Ages by Anthony Bale (Norton)

Traders and merchants, religious pilgrims, diplomats, scholars, spies, the wealthy—I had no idea so many people travelled in the Middle Ages. They ventured to such destinations as Constantinople, Rhodes, North Africa, Iceland, Russia. It was possible in 1350 to book an all-inclusive tour of Jerusalem, including transportation, meals, and lodging. These people not only travelled, they left records and guides for those who would follow in their footsteps. Many of their newly-translated documents inform English medievalist Anthony Bale’s relentlessly entertaining book. The road was never easy: “No one should travel who does not desire hardship, trouble, tribulation and the risk of death,” said a pilgrim from 1384.

Failed State: Why Nothing Works and How We Fix It by Sam Freedman (Macmillan)

It turns out the Canada’s federal government isn’t the only one that’s broken. Sam Freedman, a British policy analyst, looks at his own government and finds all the problems that beset ours: it has become ridiculously centralized, leaving it overwhelmed and inefficient and incapable of strategic direction; the executive branch has far too much power and uses it to avoid proper scrutiny, resulting in poor quality legislation and minimal accountability; it is obsessed with communications—winning the twenty-four hour news cycle to an extent that makes deliberative governance and long-term focus on serious problems all but impossible. Fortunately, Freedman has ideas for how to deal with all of it: decentralization, accountability, strategic planning, etc. Failed State is a surprise bestseller in the UK. It deserves some attention here.

The Freaks Came Out to Write by Tricia Romano (PublicAffairs)

You might think you don’t want to read 600 pages about a dead newspaper, especially one where most of the writers weren’t particularly well known (although Norman Mailer was a founder), and most of the stories and controversies they covered are now forgotten, but the Village Voice wasn’t any newspaper. It was a special place where they literally fought in the newsroom, called each other “old school male fuckheads” and “absolute oppositional pieces of shit,” and cared very deeply about what they were trying to accomplish, not that that was always clear. From The New York Times: “For many oddballs and lefties and malcontents out in America’s hinterlands, finding their first copy of The Voice was more than eye-opening. Here was a dispatch from another, better planet. There was nothing else like it. It drove many to go into journalism, or to move to New York, or both.”

Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here: The United States, Central America, and the Making of a Crisis by Jonathan Blitzer (Penguin)

Blitzer is a staff writer at The New Yorker, one of the last places a journalist can do sustained long-form reporting on crucial issues, in this case the humanitarian crisis at the US’s southern border. He leaves you cheering for the migrants, so many of whom are fleeing disastrous situations in El Salvador, Guatemala, and neighbouring countries. He left me lamenting the utter collapse of our magazine industry and our resultant inability to sustain massive journalistic projects.

Mixed Signals: Alien Communication Across the Iron Curtain by Rebecca Charbonneau (Polity)

I can’t recommend this one. It’s not out for a couple of weeks yet. I’m including it simply because I’m extremely curious. The author is a big-time Washington-based historian at the American Institute of Physics, PhD from Cambridge. From the description: “In the shadow of the Cold War, whispers from the cosmos fuelled an unlikely alliance between the US and USSR. The search for extraterrestrial intelligence (or SETI) emerged as a foundational field of radio astronomy characterized by an unusual level of international collaboration…”

Charbonneau reveals the triumphs and challenges of American and Soviet radio astronomers “as they sought to detect evidence of extraterrestrial civilizations, they faced amidst a hostile political atmosphere…. This is not just a story of radio waves and telescopes; it's a revelation of how scientists on both sides of the Iron Curtain navigated the complexities of the Cold War, blurring the lines between espionage and the quest for cosmic community. Filled with tension, contradiction, and the enduring human desire for connection, this is a history that transcends national boundaries and reaches out to the cosmic unknown, ultimately asking: how can we communicate with extraterrestrials when we struggle to communicate amongst ourselves?”

Honourable mentions

• Of this year’s presidential biographies, I thought Cox’s Wilson brought most to the table, although Max Boot’s Reagan: The Life and Legend is a very near runner-up and perhaps more relevant to our times.

• Chloe Dalton’s Raising Hare: The Heart-warming True Story of an Unlikely Friendship begins like this: “When I returned, four hours later, I had almost forgotten the leveret. But there it was, on the open track, exactly as I had left it. It lay without a scrap of cover, with buzzards wheeling in the sky above, keening mournfully like lost souls. I hesitated, considering the several hours of daylight that still remained. It seemed odd that the mother hare had not come back to reclaim her young…”

• It’s fashionable these days to dismiss globalization and free-trade as a failed neo-liberal project, but Marc-William Palen’s Pax Economica excavates the progressive origins of the globalist movement. His timely reminder of the advantages pacifists, socialists, feminists, and Christian missionaries saw in open markets—a bulwark against nationalism, imperialism, and war—bring missing nuance to the debate.

• Vanity Fair has this to say about Street-Level Superstar: A Year with Lawrence: "Elitist and legend in his own mind, the mononymous Lawrence, auteur behind the bands Felt, Denim, and Go-Kart Mozart, is one of the great British pop eccentrics of the last fifty years. A curmudgeon of the highest order, seemingly ennobled by failure, he was once described by The Guardian as ‘the greatest pop star that Britain never had’…. Journalist Will Hodgkinson spent a year trailing Lawrence on walks around the suburbs of London… he comes across as equal parts Bartleby and Sisyphus: a self-sabateur whose singular pursuit of pop success, though undone by his myriad obsessions, remains as steadfast as ever.”

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On a brilliant sunny day at the height of the season, July 2024, residents and visitors to the picturesque tourist community of Jasper, Alberta, learned that fast-moving forest fires were burning both south and north of town. That left only one westward road out of harm’s way. Over three frantic days, 5,000 residents and 20,000 tourists were evacuated from Jasper as firefighters used helicopters to battle flames reaching 100-feet high and leaping from treetop to treetop behind 100-kilometre-per-hour winds. The 25,000-hectare fire was so intense it created its own weather system and lightning. Despite heroic efforts, a third of the town was lost. In this gripping narrative, Calgary Herald reporter Matthew Scace talks to the emergency managers who organized the evacuation, the woman who was about to go into labour when the fire broke, the firefighters who fought through the night to save what they could of the town, and the recovery team leaders now trying to put Jasper back together again. Jasper on Fire also takes a hard look at why the blaze happened and what can be done to prevent future disasters in our increasingly volatile climate.

A percentage of proceeds from this book will be donated to the Jasper Community Team Society, a long-running local non-profit operated by community volunteers, and the preferred registered charity of Jasper townspeople.

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