The Best of the Best of '21
Enough great reading to get you through 2022
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Everyone’s been publishing lists of the best books of the second pandemic year. We’ve rounded up the best of the best for your convenience, concentrating, as usual, on non-fiction.
There’s a lot here. Almost thirty selections. Some have received a lot of attention; others not enough. All are guaranteed not to leave you feeling like you’ve wasted your time or money.
It’s delightful that the major review outlets still take their roles seriously enough to present these lists, and some even dress them up with fabulous illustrations which we’ve showcased above. From the top of the page down, credit to The Guardian, The Wall Street Journal, The Spectator, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Financial Times, and The Daily Telegraph. First prize to the WSJ.
On to the books, in no particular order…
A Fatal Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum: Murder in Ancient Rome
by Emma Southon
“For much of ancient Roman history, most murders weren’t legally crimes. In 81 BCE, the dictator Sulla made laws to discourage elite dudes from killing one another, and purposely inflicting death got more regulated from there. Yet many modes of violent dispatch were cool with the government. Southon, co-host of the podcast History Is Sexy, goes with a broader definition of murder, encompassing gladiatorial combat, crucifixions, offing one’s wife, and more. Her approach is both gleeful (she revels in the deathscapades of the pompous rich) and disgusted (a dead slave was regarded as broken furniture). Southon’s chatty, knowing style makes the book, if not exactly a romp, not un-fun for one about death.” Holly Morris, NPR
Tom Stoppard: A Life
by Hermione Lee
“Tom Stoppard, the 83-year-old author of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, Travesties, The Real Thing, and Arcadia (and an Oscar winner for Shakespeare in Love), to name just a few of his groundbreaking works, is almost without argument the greatest English-language playwright of the past 50 years, perhaps only rivaled for both quantity and quality by his fellow Brit, David Hare. In her authorized biography, Lee… shows a keen understanding of Stoppard’s work, making long-ago productions come to vivid life on the page, and writes empathetically, but with unsentimental clarity, about Stoppard’s sometimes complicated personal life. His marriage to author Miriam Stoppard, whom he had started seeing when he was still married to his first wife, was ended by his affair with actress Felicity Kendal, which was followed by a 10-year relationship with actress Sinead Cusack, which began during a rocky point in her marriage to Jeremy Irons. (In 2014, Stoppard married Sabrina Guinness, of the famed Guinness family and onetime girlfriend of the young Prince Charles, and today they live together in bucolic Dorset.)
The saga of Tomás Straüssler, born in 1937, in Zlín, Czechoslovakia, a wartime refugee who later went on to be the celebrated playwright Tom Stoppard, is a story of almost novelistic proportions. In Tom Stoppard: A Life, we have an author up to the task of telling it.” Stuart Emmrich, Vogue
Think Again
by Adam Grant
The WSJ asks prominent public figures to suggest books in their field. Adam Grant’s latest was touted by three separate people including US Senator Krysten Sinema:
“It’s uncool in American politics to change one’s mind or opinion. In Think Again, Adam Grant—decidedly uncool in today’s political scene—makes the compelling case that not knowing is okay, that unlearning and rethinking is not only an act of courage but an act of mental strength, and that it’s absolutely worth being wrong if you learn and grow from the change. I couldn’t love this more. Guided by research and real-life examples, Mr. Grant helps us all see that the quest for new knowledge, the hunger for ideas, the willingness to challenge or question our own beliefs, creates space for the new ideas and growth we so desperately need for our future. I want to share this book with everyone.”
Orwell’s Roses
by Rebecca Solnit
This is an unusual yet fascinating biographical approach to Orwell, and we’re twinning it here with our next selection.
“Throughout the Trump administration, the term Orwellian was invoked with enough frequency to become all but meaningless. Now, almost a year after Trump’s ouster, comes a brand-new piece of nonfiction from celebrated author and journalist Rebecca Solnit that reconsiders George Orwell’s legacy once and for all. In Orwell’s Roses, Solnit examines Orwell’s lifelong fascination with gardening from all possible directions, tracking his life from his English childhood to his time fighting in the Spanish Civil War and his adult fixation with authoritarianism. And, while she’s at it, she follows the gardening motif to several surprising conclusions, including dictator Josef Stalin’s obsession with lemon growing and novelist Jamaica Kinkaid’s critique of colonialism as it applies to the flower garden. The task that Solnit has set for herself in this book is mighty, but she’s more than up to it as a writer and a thinker; nobody who reads it will ever think of Nineteen Eighty-Four in quite the same way.” E.S. Vogue
Napoleon: A Life in Gardens and Shadows
by Ruth Scurr
“Some 200 years after his death, it might seem an impossible challenge to write something new about Napoleon Bonaparte, but Ruth Scurr has managed it. The University of Cambridge historian examines the French emperor’s interest in the natural world in a book that is stimulating and highly original.” Financial Times
River Kings: A New History of the Vikings From Scandinavia to the Silk Roads
by Cat Jarman
One of our favorite selections from last year’s list was Neil Price’s Children of Ash and Elm: A History of the Vikings. I thought that would be it for the Vikings for a while, but Jarman, a Norwegian, U.K.-based bio-archaeologist, has produced something remarkable. “Tracing the origins of a carnelian bead found in a Viking grave in Derbyshire, she magically transforms modern archeological detective work into a thriller and simultaneously rewrites the history of the Vikings. It turns out that the Vikings traveled much further east than hitherto believed.” Erika Fatland, WSJ.
Magritte: A Life
by Alex Danchev
This is somehow the first biography of the Belgian surrealist painter. What an oversight. “He went to great trouble to maintain a surface existence of the utmost bourgeois respectability. He lived in a middle-class flat in Brussels, painting in the corner of the dining room rather than in a studio. He married his childhood sweetheart, Georgette, whom he met when he was 14 and she was 12. With the usual, highly respectable additions of a midlife lover for her and regular visits to prostitutes for him, they remained happily married…
Most astonishingly, Magritte’s associate, Marcel Mariën, revealed in a memoir of 1988, after Mme Magritte’s death, that Magritte had enjoyed a career forging paintings by Picasso and Klee among others, and had even forged banknotes. There were rumours of this during Magritte’s lifetime, but Mariën’s detailed account does seem to stand up.” Philip Hensher, The Spectator
Neglected No More: The Urgent Need to Improve the Lives of Canada’s Elders in the Wake of a Pandemic
by André Picard
“André Picard is one of Canada's leading health reporters and has been a frequent voice heard during the COVID-19 pandemic. One of the most heartbreaking stories during the pandemic was the state of Canada's long-term care homes, especially in Ontario and Quebec. In Neglected No More, Picard shows that this crisis has been percolating long before COVID. He demonstrates why these homes got to this place, how we are failing our country's seniors because of it, and what we can do to fix it.” CBC
A Swim in a Pond in the Rain
by George Saunders
"‘The part of the mind that reads a story is also the part that reads the world,’ George Saunders writes in A Swim in a Pond in the Rain. It's perhaps the truest distillation of Saunders' visionary life and work, encapsulating the characteristic generosity and humanity of his artistic outlook. Saunders has spent over two decades teaching creative writing in Syracuse University’s MFA program, where his most beloved class explores the 19th-century Russian short story in translation. In A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, Saunders has distilled decades of coursework into a lively and profound master class, exploring the mechanics of fiction through seven memorable stories by Chekhov, Tolstoy, Turgenev, and Gogol. In these warm, sublimely specific essays, Saunders’ astounding powers of analysis come into full view, as does his gift for linking art with life. By becoming better readers, Saunders argues, we can become better citizens of the world.” Esquire
Empire of Pain
Patrick Radden Keefe
This one seems to have appeared on more lists than any other non-fiction book in 2021. “A real-life version of the HBO series Succession with a lethal sting in its tail, this masterful work of narrative reportage recounts how one family became fabulously rich in the 2000s by peddling the opioid OxyContin as a nonaddictive painkiller. The result was an epidemic that kills tens of thousands of Americans per year. As Keefe illustrates, the Sacklers profited less from the development of new pharmaceuticals than from marketing. The dynasty’s founder, Arthur Sackler, made Valium the first $100 million drug in history using a host of deceptive advertising and publicity techniques. He also launched a family tradition of burnishing the Sackler name with high-profile donations to educational and cultural institutions. His heirs continued his legacy, willfully encouraging the rise of pill mills and instilling Purdue Pharma, their cash cow, with the baldly stated mission to ‘protect the family at all costs.’ Quotes like those and other suggested resemblances to the Mafia are definitely intended.” Slate
Sentient
by Jackie Higgins
“Sentient, by Jackie Higgins, takes you into the life and mind of the peacock mantis shrimp, the spook fish, the grey owl and other remarkable species. It is spellbinding — and has surely one of the covers of the year. More than any other book, it has made me think differently about the world this year.” Financial Times
We Have Been Harmonized: Life in China’s Surveillance State
by Kai Strittmatter
“Kai Strittmatter… lived in China first as a student and then as a journalist. Full of interesting anecdotes, his book vividly depicts China as the perfect rendition of George Orwell’s 1984 via its implementation of ‘Smart Cities,’ where surveillance cameras and AI algorithms watch and modify every citizen’s every action. This results in an outwardly ‘harmonized society.’ Mr. Strittmatter not only shares with readers the reality on the ground in today’s China, but also provides historical and philosophical underpinnings of how and why China got there. Even as a China insider, I learned new revelations through Mr. Strittmatter’s vantage point as an independent journalist from a democratic country. If we let China run the world, we may all be harmonized.” Desmond Shum, WSJ
The Young H.G. Wells: Changing the World
Claire Tomalin
“Tomalin’s latest life focuses on the early years of Herbert George Wells, the sickly son of a Kent shopkeeper who grew up to be a prolific and celebrated literary legend. Focusing on the first four decades of Wells’ life, Tomalin lays bare both his work ethic (he’d turn out 7,000 words a day) and relentless philandering in peerless prose.” FT
The Family Roe: An American Story
Joshua Prager
“Roe v. Wade is one of the most talked-about Supreme Court cases. But what about the woman behind Roe? It might surprise you to know she never actually had the abortion she sought; she gave birth to a daughter who reveals her identity here for the first time. This remarkable work of reporting explains why the daughter sought to keep her identity private. But it also explains the difficult roads all the women in this family – most especially the woman who became known as Jane Roe, Norma McCorvey – had to travel as well as the personalities and politics that have continued to make the abortion issue so toxic in American life. The scope is sweeping, the writing is beautiful. It’s an epic story worthy of the impact this one case has had on the American psyche.” Michel Martin, NPR
Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future
by Elizabeth Kolbert
“The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Sixth Extinction returns with another sobering look at our Anthropocene Epoch, this time centered not on the countless calamities ahead, but on the trailblazing efforts of scientists to turn back the doomsday clock. Kolbert describes the subjects of Under a White Sky as ‘people trying to solve problems created by people trying to solve problems;’ she turns her lens to human interventions in nature, like the storied redirection of the Chicago River, and to the pressing need for further intervention to correct our folly. Traveling everywhere from the Great Lakes to the Great Barrier Reef, she chronicles her encounters with scientists, who are pioneering cutting-edge technologies to turn carbon emissions to stone and shoot diamonds in the stratosphere. Heralded by everyone from Barack Obama to Al Gore, Kolbert’s urgent, deeply researched text asks if our ingenuity can outrun our hubris.” Esquire
Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath
by Heather Clark
“It’s daring to undertake a new biography of Plath, whose life, and death by suicide at 30 in 1963, have been thoroughly picked over by scholars. Yet this meticulously researched and, at more than 1,000 pages, unexpectedly riveting portrait is a monumental achievement. Determined to rescue the poet from posthumous caricature as a doomed madwoman and ‘reposition her as one of the most important American writers of the 20th century,’ Clark, a professor of poetry in England, delivers a transporting account of a rare literary talent and the familial and intellectual milieu that both thwarted and encouraged her, enlivened throughout by quotations from Plath’s letters, diaries, poetry and prose.”
Finding the Mother Tree: Uncovering the Wisdom and Intelligence of the Forest
by Suzanne Simard
Some Canadian content. The author is a professor in the department of forest and conservation sciences at the University of British Columbia. This one also made the CBC list. “In her first book, pioneering forest ecologist Suzanne Simard blends her personal history with that of the trees she has researched for decades. Finding the Mother Tree is as comprehensive as it is deeply personal, especially as Simard explores her curiosity about trees and what it has been like to work as a woman in a field dominated by men. Her passion for the subject at the book’s center is palpable on every page, coalescing into an urgent call to embrace our connection with the earth and do whatever we can to protect it.” Time
The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity
by David Graeber and David Wengrow
“The past few years have given us many reasons to wonder: How did we get here? In The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, an anthropologist and an archaeologist attempt to answer that question, while also examining the assumptions upon which most of social history is based. You may be familiar with the basic story that gets told: It starts with hunter-gatherers in their ‘state of nature,’ which is followed by the rise of agriculture, which leads to population growth, private property and eventually hierarchy and bureaucracy, all culminating in the modern state. But what if that narrative is a little too linear and neatly organized? What if that version of history is actually kind of racist and sexist and overlooks many of the most interesting moments in the history of humankind? As we struggle with where to go next as a species, this book asks us to reexamine the story we’ve told about ourselves – and to imagine some new possibilities.” Erin Sells, NPR.
The Afghanistan Papers: A Secret History of the War
by Craig Whitlock
It’s a shame that only his own newspaper put Whitlock on a best-of-the-year list because he’s written an excellent book about a story we’re forgetting too quickly. “As Afghanistan fell to the Taliban mere days after the departure of American troops, stateside watchers wondered how we got here. Whitlock, a Washington Post investigative reporter, explains the inevitability of the outcome while also uncovering the deception that took place over several presidential administrations. By juxtaposing newly available classified documents with public statements, Whitlock shows how early in the conflict and how thoroughly U.S. leaders began misleading the world — and themselves — by putting a smiling face on failure and calling it success.” Washington Post
All About Me!: My Remarkable Life in Show Business
by Mel Brooks
My friend Jacob pointed me to this one, which also made the New York Post’s list. I’ll never get over the fact that a fat little funny man married Anne Bancroft. As they say in the movies, “Make ‘em laugh, make em’ laugh, make ‘em laugh.”
”At age 95, the EGOT (Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, Tony) winner has published his first memoir. Brooks writes of growing up in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, in the 1920s, his father’s death when he was just two years old and his time in the military—as well as his 40-year marriage to Anne Bancroft and unique creative partnership with Rob Reiner. “I hope fans of comedy will get a kick out of the stories behind my work, and really enjoy taking this remarkable ride with me,” Brooks has said.” NY Post
Being You: A New Science of Consciousness
by Anil Seth
“Efforts to understand consciousness face a daunting question. Appropriately named ‘the hard problem,’ it asks why we should have a rich inner life – why is there something it feels like to be you? It is not clear that science has the answer, but in Being You: A New Science of Consciousness, Prof Anil Seth… offers an approach that may get us most of the way there. By focusing on what he calls ‘the real problem,’ modern science can unravel why patterns of brain activity produce particular experiences and not others. It is a brilliant and profound book that explains how our perception of the world, ourselves included, is a ‘controlled hallucination:’ the brain’s best guess of what’s out there, constructed as much from the inside out as the outside in.” Guardian
Aftermath: Life in the Fallout of the Third Reich 1945-1955
by Harald Jähner
“A prizewinning book in Germany, where it appeared in 2019, Aftermath captures brilliantly the atmosphere of everyday life in the destroyed cities of divided postwar Germany. Jähner’s narrative extends beyond familiar stories of the black market and birth of the West German economic miracle to take in art, consumer culture and education.” FT
Trillions: How a Band of Wall Street Renegades Invented the Index Fund and Changed Finance Forever
by Robin Wigglesworth
“Among the most important dynamics in modern financial markets is the role that innovation—and in particular, indexation—plays in determining financial market asset valuations. There is currently more than $26 trillion tied to passive, index-related investing strategies, born largely as a result of the idea that over long periods, most investors do not outperform the major market indices. Robin Wigglesworth describes how this shift gave millions of smaller investors access to markets, and offers a useful, if sanguine, account of how indices ‘morphed from simple snapshots of markets into a force that exerts power over them.’ The first-order effect of index investing is that it distorts and inflates the valuations of companies compared with non-indexed companies, and untethers investing from any analytical process. With index investing, buying and selling is caused by changes in allocations of capital or the addition or removal of a company from an index, not by management success or failure, or by financial results. This turns the price action around indexed companies into a ‘self-fulling prophecy,’ as the cash flowing into index funds causes those securities prices to outperform on no basis other than their inclusion in the index. This feature of indexation makes markets much more risky. A downturn in indexed portfolios compared with ‘active’ portfolios, which could happen for any number of reasons, could cause rapid declines in valuations as long-held expectations are dashed.” Paul Singer, WSJ
A Little Devil in America: Notes in Praise of Black Performance
by Hanif Abdurraqib
“A finalist for the National Book Award, Hanif Abdurraqib’s work of cultural criticism is an astonishing accounting of Black performance. In essays full of snappy prose, Abdurraqib analyzes everything from the rise of Whitney Houston to a schoolyard fistfight. The author, also a poet, seamlessly blends pop culture references with U.S. history and stories from his own upbringing. The connections that he makes between these stories—both small and large, intimate and collective—point to the enduring influence of Black art. He covers broad ground with ease and wit, an impressive balance for a book that is as bold as it is essential.” Time
The Confidence Men: How Two Prisoners of War Engineered the Most Remarkable Escape in History
by Margalit Fox
“This story is so gripping and so extraordinary, I had to keep double-checking to see if it was true. It is. During World War I, two British officers imprisoned in a remote Turkish camp conned their way to freedom using – wait for it – a Ouija board. Margalit Fox weaves in bits of history about the long con, spiritualism, telepathy and the treatment of people experiencing with mental illness. But it’s the plot that rivets (and sometimes makes you laugh out loud).” Carol Ritchie, NPR
Index, A History of the: A Bookish Adventure
by Dennis Duncan
“To me, a truly great history book is one that changes something in the way in which I see the world. Dennis Duncan’s Index, A History of the: A Bookish Adventure certainly achieved that.
I suspect that, like most people, I never spared a thought for the list of words at the back of a book. Who realised that there was such a fascinating, funny and delightful history behind the humble index? Dennis Duncan did, and I am glad he has shared it with us.” History Today
Nothing But the Truth
by Marie Henein
This last one I didn’t see on lists, probably because it’s not what’s popular in memoir today.
I’ve otherwise avoided memoir this year but Henein is a person of substance, one of Canada’s finest trial lawyers, and she doesn’t want anyone’s pity: “Discomfort is a home of sorts to me. I know it, and find myself restless and searching for it the moment I feel myself slipping into any state of ease. The truth is that I feel most acutely when I have pushed into some state of discomfort. For years, I just thought I liked the exhilaration of the new. But that’s not it. It is the unease, the challenge of discomfort, that feels stabilizing.”
Our Newsletter Roll (suggestions welcome)
Gayla Gray’s SoNovelicious: Books, reading, writing, and bookstores.
Esoterica Magazine: Literature and popular culture.
Benjamin Errett’s Get Wit Quick, literature and other fun stuff
Jeet Heer’s The Time of Monsters: political culture and cultural politics
Lydia Perovic’s Long Play: literature and music.
Tim Carmody’s Amazon Chronicles: an eye on the monster.
Jason Logan’s Urban Color Report: adventures in ink (sign-up at bottom of page)
Anne Trubek’s Notes from a Small Press: like SHuSH, but different
Art Canada Institute: a reliable source of Canadian arts info/opinion
Kate McKean’s Agents & Books: an interesting angle on the literary world
Rebecca Eckler’s Re:Book: unpretentious recommendations
Anna Sproul Latimer’s How to Glow in the Dark: interesting advice
John Biggs Great Reads: strong recommendations
THAT’S IT FOR THIS WEEK. THANKS FOR READING. PLEASE SIGN UP OR CONVINCE SOMEONE ELSE TO SIGN UP, OR SHARE, OR LEAVE A COMMENT:
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Great list of books. There are several that I hadn't heard of before. I added a couple to my TBR. Thanks