The Best Books of 2022: Nonfiction

Best Books of 2022: Nonfiction!

The final list of the year seems like an appropriate place to point out what many of the previous lists have hinted: 2022 was a lackluster year for mainstream books in the American market. 95% of the novels brought out by the major publishers contained no fiction; a solid 80% of the entire sprawl of nonfiction titles seemed written for freshmen in high school (no coincidence, surely, that so many books therefore had cartoonishly awful covers); works characterizing themselves as serious history had no notes or bibliographies and substantial digressions about family picnics or rocky therapy sessions; egregious fluff was packaged for entirely uncritical audiences (Bono, Ishiguro, Tarantino, Dylan … an entire row of bobbleheads); disgraceful hemi-publishers doled out book contracts for fascist apparatchiks who shouldn’t have had their first phone calls returned, and so on. Even an omnivorous reader was pressed to search far and wide for any kind of magic. I have no idea why this particular year was so disappointing, but at least there were still bright lights in the nonfiction realm. These were the best of them:

10 Rayguns and Rocketships: Vintage Science Fiction Book Cover Art by Rian Hughes (Korero Press) – This glorious collection of old science fiction paperback covers covers many years of the industry and every kind of story, and I surely won’t be the only veteran sci-fi reader who pretty much always found these covers more entertaining than the cheesy yarns they adorned. Rian Hughes provides lively and informative text throughout, but of course it’s the cover art itself that makes this one of the most delightful books of the year. Old-time science fiction readers will find this a priceless collection, and for newcomers, well, there’s always eBay.

9 Sold Out: How Broken Supply Chains, Surging Inflation, and Political Instability Will Sink the Global Economy by James Rickards (Portfolio) – Printed works of prognostication are always tricky things, particularly in an era of daily U-turns in international news. James Rickards has a fairly robust track record of avoiding the pitfalls of predicting the future, and beside this he’s a fascinating writer. In this book he predicts that the current global supply chain will collapse if it’s not overhauled (he offers an overhaul plan), and he makes a convincing case. Time will tell how prescient all this is, but it’s certainly stimulating to read in the moment.

8 The Blessings of Disaster: The Lessons That Catastrophes Teach Us and Why Our Future Depends On It  by Michel Bruneau (Prometheus Books) – It’s an odd but perhaps fittingly paradoxical thing when a book that hinges on tragic disasters manages to be uplifting, but somehow Michel Bruneau manages to pull it off. In these pages he looks at a wide array of catastrophes, everything from earthquake to floods to hurricane superstorms, and instead of dwelling on the climate conditions and human short-sightedness that facilitated many of those disasters, he concentrates instead on what these crises can teach us about adapting for the future, even if the future is dark. 

7 Cheap Land Colorado: Off-Gridders at America’s Edge by Ted Conover (Knopf) – In his latest fantastic work of deep reporting, Ted Conover goes to the ‘off-the-grid’ wildlands of Colorado, buys one of the cheap plots of land out there occupied by a variety of paranoid misfits, drug addicts, gun nuts, fugitives from the rat race, and others, living as far from the electric grids and the Internet as they can manage, trying to grow their own food, intersecting with the “prepper” community enough to stockpile food and medical supplies against what they view as the inevitable societal moment when the you-know-what hits the fan. Conover is a tough observer but an endlessly interesting one, the kind of nonfiction writer who can make any subject interesting – and this subject dovetails alarmingly with the millenarian mindset that fills so much of the 21st century. 

6 The End of Solitude: Selected Essays on Culture and Society  by William Deresiewicz (Henry Holt) – As with Ted Conover, so too with William Deresiewicz: thanks to his piercing intelligence and beautiful prose line, anything he writes about will be interesting. This collection of pieces includes looks at subjects as widely separated as the nature of the Internet and the nature of Harold Bloom. This is a can’t-miss author; having a new collection in such a glum year was a treat.

5 Nomad Century: How Climate Migration Will Reshape Our World by Gaia Vince (Flatiron) – As mentioned, books that dare to make predictions are on shaky ground, but this incredibly insightful, sobering book by Gaia Vince is basing its predictions on extremely known quantities: the world is warming, the climate is harshening at an increasing pace, and many of humanities poorest or most exposed communities will be hit first and hardest. As those communities – or whole industries – are disrupted, the number of climate refugees will only increase in the new century. Vince’s insights will form the basis of a new field of study.

4 Into the Great Emptiness: Peril and Survival on the Greenland Ice Cap by David Roberts (WW Norton) – This evocative work by David Roberts chronicles the 1930 Greenland expedition led by Henry George Watkins, in which he took thirteen fellow explorers to the east coast of Greenland at a time when it was as unknown as the far side of the moon – and then further, to the immense Greenland ice cap, an alien world of brutal weather and weird beauty. Roberts captures all of this wonderfully, and he seems well aware of the tragic contemporary resonance of his story. The Greenland ice cap will almost certainly be gone by the end of this decade, which makes this tale of exploration and wonder all the more moving.

3 Tradition and Apocalypse: An Essay on the Future of Christian Belief by David Bentley Hart (Baker Academic) – One of the year’s most pleasing little surprises in the nonfiction realm was this sharply-reasoned and quietly passionate book by the great New Testament scholar, looking at a central topic in his career: the living nature of the Christian faith and, in this case, the existential threats to that nature. In a sweeping, hugely insightful look at the Christian tradition, Hart produces nothing less than a prognosis of a faith system. 

2 The Invisible Kingdom: Reimagining Chronic Illness by Meghan O’Rourke (Riverhead Books) – The entire vexed subject of chronic illness has experienced new time in the limelight thanks to the prevalence — and the persistent mysteries – of the long COVID that currently afflicts thousands of people. Meghan O’Rourke here takes a compassionate and deeply informed demystifying look at the nature chronic illness, and it’s endlessly thought-provoking.

1 Home in the World: A Memoir by Amartya Sen (Liveright) – In this, the best nonfiction work of the year, the always-impressive Amartya Sen reflects on a broad array of subjects loosely arranged around the fact that although he’s traveled widely around the world, he’s lived most deeply in a handful of places, each beautifully evoked in these pages as Sen writes about all the social and economic issues that have preoccupied him for decades. In an increasingly xenophobic age, a book this winningly, commandingly cosmopolitan is a great gulp of fresh air.

The Worst Books of 2022: Nonfiction

The Worst Books of 2022: Nonfiction

On January 6, 2020 then-US President Donald Trump organized, incited, and wanted to lead in person an armed insurrection to throw out a US election, overthrow the country’s democracy, execute his Vice President, and install himself in power illegally, presumably for the remainder of his life. His coup attempt failed, and as the full realization of what happened spread and deepened among the various feckless fascist remorae who’d spent the previous few years with their suckers firmly puckered to Trump, they each had to decide how they would respond to the lock-certain condemnation of history. Not one single architect of the insurrection offered any apologies to the country. Instead, they started podcasts, congregated with actual Nazis, and, in the most infamous cases, dedicated themselves to succeeding in their next insurrection. And since many of these creatures decided to spend 2021 writing books, 2022 was full of the noxious results – hence their prevalence on this list, although they certainly had company among the year’s crappy books. These were the worst of them:

10 Breaking History by Jared Kushner (HarperLuxe) – Donald Trump’s creepy son-in-law spent every minute of his time in Trump’s administration working industriously behind the scenes (and behind the backs of the Pentagon and the State Department) in order to enrich himself by making venal cash-and-carry deals with some of the worst international actors in the world. But this book, brow-beaten out of some cringing underling for peanuts, is the carnival-mirror distortion of that looting spree.

9 The Great Reset: Global Elites and the Permanent Lockdown by Marc Morano (Regnery Publishing), The Great Reset: Joe Biden and the Rise of Twenty-First Century Fascism by Glenn Beck & Justin Haskins (Forefront Books) – Despite this year’s public mental breakdown of Kanye West, one of the keys to the rise and mainstreaming of the 21st century version of the 20th century’s fascism has been crafting an elaborate system of euphemisms for the anti-Semitism that’s so essential to the creed. Hence “The Great Reset” (usually accompanied by some kind of allusion to George Soros) that forms the basis of some of the year’s worst books. 

8 Leadership: Six Studies in World Strategy by Henry Kissinger (Penguin Press) – Another aspect of the early 21st century’s disastrous embrace of authoritarianism has been the efforts of writers to falsely contextualize that authoritarianism. And when it comes to whitewashing the brutality of national abuse, who has more experience than seemingly-immortal ghoul Henry Kissinger? In this latest production of his, he mixes profiles of a couple of monsters with profiles of ordinary people solely, solely in order to launder the reputations of the monsters.

7 All The White Friends I Couldn’t Keep: Hope – and Hard Pills to Swallow – about Fighting for Black Lives by Andre Henry (Convergent Books) – The author’s nonplussed astonishment over the fact that so many of his white friends don’t actually like it when he calls them racists, coupled with his entirely unquestioned presumption that because they’re white, they obviously are racists, is such an on-the-nose depiction of the year’s socially acceptable Twitter-bigotry that Henry’s book is almost comical.

6 Don’t Burn This Country: Surviving and Thriving in Our Woke Dystopia by Dave Rubin (Sentinel) – The sheer towering irony of Dave Rubin, a gay man who’s embraced a living by calling himself a “classical liberal” while shilling for the very fascist social forces that would disenfranchise, incarcerate, and execute him immediately if they gained governmental control, writing a book about how “the woke agenda,” the very thing that makes his career and family life possible, is the real threat to freedom in the United States virtually guarantees a spot on this list.

5 Taking Back Trump’s America: Why We Lost the White House and How We’ll Win It Back by Peter Navarro (Bombardier Books) – Given the fact – broadcast to a national TV audience – that indicted Trump lackey Peter Navarro’s “how we’ll win it back” is a plan combining systematic fraud and the threat of violence, the first word of “Taking Back Trump’s America” gains a new gloss of malevolence.

4 Here’s the Deal by Kellyanne Conway (Threshold Editions) – In many ways the worst of Trump’s lackeys, Kellyanne Conway here presents an entire book (again, flogged out of a brow-beaten underling in the wee small hours) of “alternative facts” in which she managed a super-successful populist presidential campaign and then served in a super-successful populist presidential administration as one of its best and brightest. Ten people read the book; I wish I hadn’t been one of them.

3 How to Prevent the Next Pandemic by Bill Gates (Knopf) – It would be nice if the ongoing utterly appalling spectacle of Elon Musk’s bungling management of Twitter finally put to rest the idea that 99.9999% of humanity somehow have anything to learn from the small group of the world’s billionaires, but this new know-nothing book by idiotic billionaire Bill Gates proves that glorious moment has yet to arrive. 

2 The Bomber Mafia: A Dream, a Temptation, and the Longest Night of the Second World War by Malcolm Gladwell (Back Bay Books) – Gradually, in the course of this seemingly normal Malcolm Gladwell production (over-egged, under-sourced, ridiculously pompous), an entirely darker and more dangerous subtext emerges, a protracted apologia for violence and state-sponsored terrorism. Gladwell has made a long career of writing ridiculous meme-hungry wads of fluff. But this is his first genuinely dangerous book.

1 How to Read Now by Elaine Castillo (Viking) – Like a braying, bigoted dolt, apparently.

The Best Books of 2022: Fiction

Best Books of 2022: Fiction

2022 was one of the most dire years for fiction in living memory, mainly for one stark and bizarre reason: the entire genre of fiction virtually disappeared from the map, washed away in a tsunami of so-called “auto-fiction,” in which authors abandoned even the pretense of actually, you know, making things up, deciding instead to transcribe their Twitter feeds and sprinkle in a few quotation marks. When confronted with this obvious, naked marketing fraud, various writers of “auto-fiction” have affected affront, virtually saying, “How can you possibly criticize my novel? Every word of it really happened!” This is an End Times kind of situation for a literary genre, but fortunately, the rot isn’t universal quite yet; the Year of Auto-Fiction was also a year of several first-rate works of legitimate fiction. These were the best of them:

10 The Singularities by John Banville (Knopf) – Given how disastrously certain other authors dealt with quantum physics in fiction this year, the mere hint that John Banville likewise touches on that dilettante’s paradise might have been cause for alarm. But instead we’re starting this list with the quiet, quicksilver competence this author always brings to this story of a man confronting a quantum-infused variety of roads not taken.

9 Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver (Harper) – Pastiches of any kind always traffic in lowered expectations, which makes Barbara Kingsolver’s modern-day southern-Appalachia adaptation of David Copperfield all the more surprising for its sheer inventive energy in telling the story an unwanted but terrifically charismatic young boy making his way in the world. This is as sharply passionate and funny as Kingsolver’s books have been in a decade.

8 Night of Plague by Orhan Pamuk (translated by Ekin Oklap) (Knopf) – If this sumptuous and fantastic new book by Orhan Pamuk was honed by the real-life experience of a world-wide pandemic, then it’s easily one of the best books to appear in the direct wake of that collective trauma, which is here transported to the Ottoman Empire of 1900, when a sultan must try to contain a plague. All of Pamuk’s skills are here in lavish amounts, without every resorting to the bathos of cheap allegory.

7 Lessons by Ian McEwan (Knopf) – This surprisingly sprawling novel from Ian McEwan plays out its young protagonist’s across the whole of the second half of the 20th century as he develops a passionate relationship with his piano teacher and then deals with the fallout of that for the rest of his life. The narrative is baggier than McEwan’s customary approach, and it oddly suits the breadth of his canvas. 

6 Booth by Karen Joy Fowler (Putnam’s) – The celebrated – and now infamous – Booth family of actors has occasioned their share of group-biographies, but the weird confluence of social and national forces running through their lives has never been captured more elaborately, more honestly, than in this piece of historical fiction from Karen Joy Fowler, which is shot through with such an alarming variety of darknesses that it ends up making the book feel like a fictional X-ray of an entire century.

5 Haven by Emma Donoghue (Little, Brown) – Emma Donoghue’s knack for locating her stories in the middle of exigent circumstances continues strong in this novel about three men in seventh-century Ireland seeking to found a monastery on a bare rock jutting out of the Atlantic. This isn’t the first time Donoghue has examined the clash of raw faith and raw isolation, and in this case the result is vividly memorable.

4 Horse by Geraldine Brooks (Viking) – In the mid-20th century, a New York City gallery owner unearthing the story of a equestrian oil painting forms the narrative vector for Geraldine Brooks to flesh out the story a strange three-way relationship between a champion racing horse, the groom who understand the horse best, and the painter who captures both of them on canvas. The narrative winds and uncoils in the manner Brooks has mastered. 

3 The Kingdom of Sand by Andrew Holleran (FSG) – This novel, Andrew Holleran’s first in nearly two decades, continues the beautiful and bewildering reading experience of watching this author’s narrative voice grow older and more whetted with every new work. In these pages an unnamed narrator looks back at decades of gay life in post-AIDS American gay life (with insistent digressions on the ironies of old age), and it’s all shaped with Holleran’s undimmed brilliance.

2 Young Mungo by Douglas Stuart (Grove Press) – This follow-up by Douglas Stuart to his universally-praised Shuggie Bain is likewise a story of doomed, thwarted gay love in working-class Glasgow, and it demonstrates that Stuart’s debut was no lucky fluke by being every bit as beautiful and jagged and moving as its predecessor. In a mere two novels, Stuart has firmly established himself as a major talent. 

1 Poguemahone by Patrick McCabe (Biblioasis) – Considering how strange a year 2022 was for fiction, with 90% of the things labeled “novels” containing no fiction, with “novelists” complaining about the grindstone while spending all day on Twitter, and so on, it’s perhaps fitting that this, the best novel of 2022, is likewise very strange, rushing forth in a flow of verse and black humor and real pathos in telling an Irish story to end all Irish stories. This has been a deeply disappointing year when it comes to fiction; it’s gratifying to end it with a masterpiece.

Worst Books of 2022: Fiction

Worst Books of 2022: Fiction

Every publishing year represents the crashing assault of the unnumbered hordes of King Crapola against the brave 300 at the Thermopylae of Good Work, but in 2022 an enormous section of that bulwark simply caved in. In 2022, readers largely lost an entire genre: this one, fiction, which all but disappeared into the navel-gazing narcissism of “auto-fiction.” And since that fad combines the laziness of most authors with their ironclad self-centeredness, it’s unlikely to go away in our lifetime. Ninety percent of the books released in the mainstream US market in 2022 labeled “novels” were in fact memoirs containing not a single particle of fiction, which presents added challenges for a year-end fiction list. Those challenges are increased by my reluctance to put debut novels in a year’s-worst list; since the “auto-fiction” fad most strongly appeals to the combination of ‘no experience’ and ‘no talent,’ it’s taken hold most strongly among debut writers. And all this is before factoring in all the usual sins of bad fiction. The result was a year absolutely choked with bad books. These were the worst of them:

10 Pure Color by Sheila Heti (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) – The idea of this flimsy scarf of an attempt at a book, presumably, is a kind of new mythology spun by its author, a kind of Book of Genesis in which Eve meets Eve, but readers won’t need to worry about following the world-building, since Heti loses interest in it – and everything else she tries here – in about a dozen pages. 

9 Either/Or by Elif Batuman (Penguin Press) – It was probably too much to hope that any continuation of Batuman’s less-than-stellar The Idiot would be better than its wretched template, but even so, this windy, vapid sequel starring Batuman’s self-insertion character Selin in her continuing wacky adventures draped in flat prose takes the customary derivativeness of sequels and, TikTok-style, dumbs it down.

8 The Last White Man by Moshin Hamid (Riverhead Books) – Some of the entrants on the list this year have unbroken histories of writing gawd-awful books, and Hamid is one of the foremost of these repeat offenders, offering up, almost reluctantly, the kernel of a good premise and then demonstrating on page after uninspired page that he understands the potential of that kernel less than his most inexperienced reader. This ridiculous exercise in Twitter-racism, complete with its tacked-on epiphany, keeps his streak going.

7 The Last Chairlift by John Irving (Simon & Schuster) – If it’s annoying every year to find writers coming up with new ways to write bad books, it’s just that much more annoying to find some writers skipping even that minimal effort and coming up with old ways to write bad books, but that’s pretty much all that ersatz literary lion Irving does in this bloated, tedious, and most of all dated story of all the different ways a stupid man can have sex or think about having sex. Can we call an official end to the 1970s? Or do we have to wait for the actual obituaries of every single overrated wordsmith who made so much of the decade’s fiction so unbearable?

6 The Passenger by Cormac McCarthy (Knopf) – It’s been nearly 20 years since Cormac McCarthy’s 2006 Pulitzer Prize-winning moronic post-apocalyptic novel The Road, and since the author is nearly 90, there was a flicker of hope that either McCarthy had quit writing or learned how to do it. Both those hopes were completely dashed this year, when McCarthy released not one but two sloppy, incoherent, misogynistic, lazy, almost unbelievably self-indulgent novels, starting with this one, which tells the story of Who The Hell Knows as he does Who The Hell Cares for Manly Reasons that are intimately connected with the fact that The World’s Not As Good As It Used To Be. 

5 Stella Maris by Cormac McCarthy (Knopf) – When the emperor has no clothes, there’s nothing more embarrassing than a fawning fashion show, but that’s exactly what The Passenger got; the first of Cormac McCarthy’s bloated, conjoined 2022 novels received a cascade of frothingly adulatory reviews (most of which had been written as early as 2008 and were published in 2022 once the character names were added – honestly, what’s the point of writing or reviewing if an author’s canonization is pre-ordained?), but there was still fanboy hysteria left over for its quasi-sequel Stella Maris, which has all the weird octogenarian preoccupations of its predecessor, plus some freshman-level quantum physics for the (surely sizable?) stoner contingent of McCarthy’s readership. Having two different books on a year’s-worst list is quite the accomplishment – maybe time to rest on those laurels?

4 Best of Friends by Kamila Shamsie (Riverhead)  – In these forsaken latter days when a collection of photocopied Sephora receipts can be outright called “fiction” by a publisher and “groundbreaking” by critics, it might seem impossible for books to get on a year’s-worst list simply by being old-fashioned flawed, but it does still happen. This novel by Shamsie is a good example: the premise – following two friends as their life takes them from Karachi to London – is strong. But Shamsie only bothers to write to the strength of that premise for about half the book, after which, like so many authors on this list this year, she seems to lose interest in her own story. 

3 The Furrows by Namwali Serpell (Hogarth) – Likewise with this novel by Namwali Serpell: the premise – a young woman quite literally haunted by the disappearance of her brother when they were children – has lots of potential, but the potential itself seems somehow to disinterest the author; the book loses focus fairly early on, wanders around quite a bit, and of course (it being the 21st century and this being a work of contemporary lit’rary fiction, after all) completely falls apart like a bad soufflé at the end. 

2 Be Here To Love Me At the End of the World by Sara Fletcher (Melville House) – Since taking your current MSNBC obsessions, attaching them to the social media feeds of yourself and your friends, and publishing the results unchanged and unedited – in other words, “auto fiction” – has now all but entirely eradicated both the act and the concept of the genre of fiction, you’d think any book that didn’t do that would be a breath of fresh air. But no - it turns out that if you take your current MSNBC obsessions, attach the social media feeds of yourself and your friends, and then mix in some embarrassingly juvenile dystopian fantasies, you get something almost as bad as “auto-fiction” – you get, as Fletcher has written in this decidedly un-promising debut, Twitter fiction.

1 Fairy Tale by Stephen King (Scribner) – As purely comforting as it would be to put a new Stephen King novel at the #1 spot on the year’s-worst list in light of how bitterly disappointing 2022’s fiction crop was, the temptation would have to be resisted if Fairy Tale were any good. Fortunately for me and unfortunately for the Republic of Letters, it’s resoundingly not: it’s an almost-formless mess in which the National Book Award grandee mostly just shows up and natters. It’s the worst book in an entire year of “My name on the dust jacket is pretty much all the effort I plan to make.” True, even that is more effort than we get in “auto fiction,” but that’s small consolation.

The Best Books of 2022: Biography

Best Books of 2022: Biography

2022 wasn’t quite an outright grim year for new books, but it was hardly cause for handsprings either, generally speaking. I read more than in any previous year of my life, but in 2022 those starburst moments of “I loved this book!” were very thin on the ground, and after a while, I started pinning more and more of my hopes on my favorite genre, biography. And once again, the field of biography didn’t let me down. There were long-expected items that lived up to expectations, and there were surprises, things that shouldn’t have worked but did. I read every mainstream biography published in 2022, happily, and these were the best of them:

10 A Private Spy: The Letters of John le Carré, edited by Tim Cornwell (Viking) – Letters collections of authors can be oddly satisfying reading experiences, glimpses into both the works and the psyche of the worker, and this remarkable volume put together by Tim Cornwell is a prime example of this process when it’s done very well: here we get the famous and beloved author schmoozing, deflecting, caustically entertaining, and also flailing himself in letter after letter to a wide array of recipients. The rhetorical talent and human insight that make his novels so memorable are on full display in almost every one of these letters.

9 The Grimkes: The Legacy of Slavery in an American Family by Kerri Greenridge (Liveright) – The kneejerk slander-impulse of the modern era has very predictable stages: find a person who’s lauded for good works, check to make sure the person doesn’t belong to any of the protected categories of the moment, and if the coast is clear, attack the figure as both a fraud and a hypocrite, actually guilty of the very injustices they built their reputation on fighting. So a new biography of the famous abolitionist Grimke sisters, Sarah and Angelina, seems like a recipe for boring depression – but Kerri Greenridge manages to avoid the excesses of generational vengeance in favor of telling a very intriguing story about the Black relatives of the Grimke sisters.

8 We Were Dreamers: An Immigrant Superhero Origin Story by Simu Liu (William Morrow) – 

Virtually every year, the field of biography will present me with a genuine surprise, something that should have been pureéd cow-crap but turned out to be substantial – call it the Trevor Noah Born a Crime phenomenon. This year that book was certainly this slim memoir from Marvel Cinematic Universe star Simi Liu, which turns out to be a heartfelt and funny story of a young actor and immigrant uprooted from one family and planted in another but always striving to hope for the best. The 21st century tendency to turn literally everything in existence into a condescending lecture is here steadfastly resisted. 

7 I Used To Live Here Once: The Haunted Life of Jean Rhys by Miranda Seymour (WW Norton) – The preponderance of writing-biographies on the list this year might very well be a long-term after-effect of COVID-driven inwardness, but whatever the cause, the result is a bounty of excellent biographies of some of the least dramatic people in history. This excellent book by Miranda Seymour takes readers in exquisitely-chosen detail through the life of Jean Rhys, from her Caribbean girlhood to her disappointed elder years, with copious insightful commentary on this author’s handful of disturbing novels. 

6 Eliot after “The Waste Land” by Robert Crawford (FSG) – Robert Crawford’s follow-up to his terrific Young Eliot with this generous volume about the poet’s years of fame, and as in that earlier volume, here Crawford brings enormous, wide-ranging research to the task of fleshing out every facet of Eliot’s life. This older and more cynical Eliot is a formidable figure, his inner self leeching deeper and deeper into layers of celebrity and evasion, but Crawford has searched into every detail to find the living man. This volume added to the previous one forms a biography of Eliot that’s unlikely to be bettered in this century.

5 Man of Iron: The Turbulent Life and Improbable Presidency of Grover Cleveland  by Troy Senik (Threshold Editions) – When it comes to biographical surprises, the year hardly had a greater example than this captivating book by Troy Senik about President Grover Cleveland, virtually the poster child for Forgotten Presidents With Odd Names. With a good deal of research and a bracingly energetic enthusiasm, Senik restores to Cleveland all the stature he actually enjoyed in his lifetime. It won’t work to raise Cleveland’s reputation – Washington and Lincoln can sleep easy – but it will delight every presidential biography fan into reconsidering the man.

4 The Huxleys: An Intimate History of Evolution  by Alison Bashford (University of Chicago Press) – Alison Bashford’s densely-packed book works as both a double biography, of Victorian T. H. “Darwin’s Bulldog” Huxley and zoologist Julian Huxley, and a surprisingly rollicking broad-canvas portrait of popular scientific progress over the course of a century. These two Huxleys barely met – an old T.H. once remarked approvingly about how disobedient little Julien was – and they faced radically different challenges, but thanks to Bashford’s lively narrative skill, a unity emerges in their separate quests for scientific literacy. This is perhaps the least likely biography this year to be this entertaining.

3 The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams by Stacy Schiff (Little, Brown) – Stacy Schiff’s biography of Cleopatra set a bar for popular biography that hardly any other writer could clear, and in this new book, a life of key American Revolution string-puller Samuel Adams, lesser-known cousin to future President John Adams, she scores another hit. Her main strength is her readability; here she writes the most fluid, insightful, and gripping life of Samuel Adams since 1885.

2 Come Back in September: A Literary Education on West Sixty-seventh Street, Manhattan by Darryl Pinckney (FSG) – This intricate and oddly moving memoir chronicles Darryl Pinkney’s long interaction with the great critic Elizabeth Hardwick, first as a student in the 1970s and then later as a doting but clear-eyed apprentice in Hardwick’s literary world of the New York literary scene. Pinckney very effectively works in a good deal of autobiography, but the weird glory of his book is its lovingly nit-picking portrait of Hardwick, here rendered more knowingly and believably than half a dozen full-dress biographies could likely do. 

1 Shirley Hazzard: A Writing Life by Brigitta Olubas (FSG) – Just as author biographies featured prominently on the list this year, so too the best biography of the year was a writer’s life: the long-awaited authorized biography of Shirley Hazzard by Brigitta Olubas, drawing on a broad variety of archives and interviews to paint an elegant portrait of this reserved and recondite author. Hazzard herself was sometimes mordantly witty on the prospect of somebody raking through her documents and writing about her life, but Olubas does such a graceful and even-handed job that it’s hard to think her subject would have objected. 

The Best Books of 2022: History

The Best Books of 2022: History

The grueling solipsism of the 21st century would seem to sound the death-knell for the responsible writing of history, but many of this year’s entries in the genre worked a happy alchemy on this trend. Many scholars and historians did indeed go at their subjects in a far more individual-centered way than we’ve seen in earlier decades, but they often turned those individual stories into mosaics that actually managed to show old and settled topics from new and fascinating vantage points. In a world still reeling with COVID and the knock-on effects of a land war raging in Europe, it was curiously encouraging to see how alive the writing of history still is. These were the year’s best examples:

10 The Ruin of All Witches: Life and Death in the New World by Malcolm Gaskill (Knopf) – Gaskill centers his surprisingly boisterous book in 17th century Springfield, Massachusetts, where a wave of hysteria gripped the population, and eventually the suspicions of witchcraft started falling on the two kinds of people most vulnerable to those kinds of suspicions: the jerks and the mentally troubled. Gaskill digs deep into the records and produces an account fit to share a shelf with some of the best books on witchcraft crazes. 

9 Silent Spring Revolution: John F. Kennedy, Rachel Carson, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, and the Great Environmental Awakening by Douglas Brinkley (Harper) – Readers who are still interested in the subject of Douglas Brinkley’s new book even after they’ve read the 5000 words of the subtitle will find details and flourishes in the actual text that will fascinate them: the story of a group of anti-nuclear and pro-environment activists who reacted against the hyper-industrialization that kicked off in the mid-20th century. Brinkley here relies on his strengths as a writer, most especially his skill at conveying personalities (something very evident in his “American Moonshot,” among other books). His Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas in particular is winningly memorable.

8 Mercy: Humanity in War by Cathal Nolan (Oxford University Press) – Readers who were impressed by Cathal Nolan’s The Allure of Battle (and it’s hard to imagine a reader who wouldn’t be) will find his new book a marvelous pendant, a tremendously insightful study of the compassions that seep up through the violence and depravity of war even at its most savage pitch. As with that earlier volume, here Nolan’s passion and scholarship reveals levels and nuances in a monolithic subject that previously felt both settled and sadly trivial. 

7 A Commonwealth of Hope: Augustine’s Political Thought by Michael Lamb (Princeton University Press) – One of the joys of reading history and biography is the endless capacity for surprising even the long-time reader. Scholars chase their own curiosity and often find veins of promise others have dismissed or overlooked. This meaty, engaging book by Michael Lamb is a perfect example: a study of the worldly political views of St. Augustine, who’d lived through the sack of Rome and famously written his mammoth City of God in order to reflect on the Heavenly world. In clear and inviting prose, Lamb steadily, enthusiastically reveals a new side of St. Augustine. 

6 The Abyss: Nuclear Crisis Cuba 1962 by Max Hastings (Harper) – A crucial hinge-point of 20th century history, the near-brink of thermonuclear war, is the subject of Hastings big new book, and he brings the reader right into those thirteen days in 1962. The Cuban Missile Crisis has been exhaustively documented and recounted, but even so, the subject yields extra points and insights under Hastings’s normal approach of telescoping his narrative from specific testimonies to broader narrative. I’d been half-assuming that no author could make a new Cuban Missile Crisis book interesting to me, and Hastings delightfully proved me wrong.

5 The Grandest Stage: A History of the World Series by Tyler Kepner (Doubleday)  – One of the measures of first-rate history-writing is that it will instruct and delight readers even on a subject they don’t find interesting, and this fantastic book by Tyler Kepner is a perfect illustration. Beyond a benign interest in the leisurely afternoon activities of portly millionaires, I have no compelling fascination with the World Series, and yet Kepner crafts such a varied, fascinating soap opera out of the con men, hucksters, giants, and connivers who created one of the great American sporting events that even the most indifferent readers will find themselves eagerly turning the pages to find out who cheats next.

4 Blood and Ruins: The Last Imperial War, 1931-1945 by Richard Overy (Viking) – Given the 21st century’s obsession with colonialism and its sins, a book like this by Richard Overy was certainly inevitable, a book assessing the Second World War specifically through the lens of thwarted imperialism and empires either dying or changing hands. The thing that saves the book from feeling as trivially retaliatory as so much 21st-century historical maundering is Overy’s tremendous narrative skill and deeply impressive scholarship. The result of all this is an account of WWII that feels genuinely revelatory. 

3 River Kings: A New History of the Vikings from Scandinavia to the Silk Roads by Cat Jarman (Pegasus Books) – It would hardly be a year-in-history without a rip-snortingly good Viking book, and here archeologist Catrine Jarman builds just such a book from the ground up, as it were, studying tiny potsherds and fragments and even teeth in order build an entire account of the world of the Vikings – not just the warriors in their longships but the women and children they left behind on all those raids. As the chapters move on, a startlingly human version of the Vikings emerges.

2 Rebels Against the Raj: Western Fighters for India’s Freedom by Ramachandra Guha (Knopf) – Guha takes his basic story, the profiles of seven people who devoted themselves to the cause of Indian independence, and steadily, skillfully expands on that framework in the marvelously strong and seeking way of all his previous books. The men and women he profiles come wonderfully to life, and so do their individual spheres of passion, from journalism to environmentalism. Like so many books on the list this year, Guha’s book takes a settled and well-covered subject and makes it feel new.

1 After the Romanovs: Russian Exiles in Paris from the Belle Époque Through Revolution and War by Helen Rappaport (St. Martin’s Press) – A common thread running through many of this year’s best works of history is the approach of presenting readers with the past through personalities, the approach of filling the pages with character studies in order to illuminate an epoch. And in Helen Rappaport’s new book, the best in the genre for 2022, the technique is brought to a terrific pitch of craft, telling the stories of the Russians dreamers, poets, artists, and nobility who fled revolution and war and fetched up in Belle Époque Paris and tried in their various ways to make sense of their new world. 

The Best Books of 2022: Nature

Best Books of 2022: Nature!

As with science, so too with nature: in the modern moment, the news seems either hopeless or threatening or both. The news was full of species in danger, horizons on fire, and experts predicting various kinds of apocalypse. And correspondingly, a great many nature books of 2022 had subtly (or not-so-subtly) eulogistic undertones, as though more and more books of the genre were knowingly saying farewell. But not all! Some of them – perhaps tellingly, usually the ones with very small-scale, very local concentrations – brim with defiant hope. And whether hopeful or not, many of these books were first-rate. These were the best of them:

10 A Line in the World: A Year on the North Sea Coast by Dorthe Nors (Graywolf Press) – Dorthe Nors’s travel memoir chronicles the year she spent on the North Sea coast, from the tip of Denmark to the Frisian Islands, and in the course of the book’s sections, she reflects on many of those bleak, beautiful hours – and on both her own family history and the history of the region. Nors employs a prose line that’s often as crystalline as the subject, and the book as a result is intensely memorable.

9 Wild New World: The Epic Story of Animals and People in America by Dan Flores (WW Norton) – Dan Flores, author of Coyote America, broadens his canvas for this terrific new book about the almost impossibly profuse and diverse natural world of North America in the Pleistocene, a world full of wolves, bears, bison, mammoths, and thousands of other species … and about the incredible changes wrought on that world by the addition of one extra species: Homo sapiens. 

8 Slow Birding: The Art and Science of Enjoying Birds in Your Own Backyard by Joan E. Strassmann (TarcherPerigee) – Shaped almost as a gift to every armchair birdwatcher who looks dubiously on their more active colleagues out tramping in all weathers, notebook in one hand, binoculars in the other, this wonderful book by Joan Strassmann invitingly fleshes out the world of “slow birding,” which encourages those armchair birders to pay attention to their own immediate surroundings. And Strassmann’s lively descriptions of birds and their behaviors is likely to make converts.

7 How to Speak Whale: A Voyage into the Future of Animal Communication by Tom Mustill (Grand Central) – At the heart of Tom Mustill’s book is something that seems to have stepped out of a science fiction story: maverick entrepreneurs developing AI that will allow them to crack the code of cetacean communication. And Mustill chases this science fiction angle until even the most skeptical reader will be a believer. And the author’s descriptions of the “fieldwork” of testing these new technologies are surprisingly poetic. 

6 Endless Forms: The Secret World of Wasps by Seiran Sumner (Harper) – If using AI to communicate with whales sounds like science fiction, a book asking its readers to see the bright side of wasps sounds like blatant fantasy. And yet, that’s exactly the impossible task Seiran Sumner sets for herself in this wacky, wonderful book, which takes readers deep inside the world of these hateful little murder-beasts that are hated by gods and men alike. Sumner is a warm, enthusiastic writer, and she brings to light in these pages all the ways in which wasps are important to their ecosystems and misunderstood by all the innocent bystanders they savagely attack on beautiful summer days. And although this book certainly won’t make converts – some tasks are beyond even the formidable talents of a writer like Sumner – it’ll entertain even the victims of these infernal little monsters.

5 What Bees Want: Beekeeping as Nature Intended by Susan Knilans & Jacqueline Freeman (Countryman Press) – Any book with the sheer nerve to attempt defending wasps will necessarily take resentful swipes at bees, which have far better public relations teams. And this delightful, informative book by Susan Knilans and Jacqueline Freeman will add to that divide; it’s not only a vivid evocation of the world of bees but also a passionate call to preserve that world, which is under siege from human depredation on all sides. 

4 Life Between the Tides by Adam Nicolson (FSG) – Anyone who’s ever spent hours poking around in rock pools left behind by a receding tide knows the particular allure these impromptu little biomes have. Adam Nicholson’s eloquent new book takes a deep look at those rock pools and the life-forms that have evolved specifically for the liminal world that exists between the tides. Nicolson is wonderful at describing that world, and he also does a surprisingly effective job broadening its scope to include much more of the natural world.

3 The Hawk’s Way: Encounters with Fierce Beauty by Sy Montgomery (Atria Books) – The combination of a nature-writer with Sy Montgomery’s skills and a subject as arresting as the ancient sport of hawking is irresistible in this slim book, which is full of both vivid personalities (only a few of which are humans) and absolutely gorgeous descriptions of what it’s like to step into a working partnership with hawks in all their unknowable dignity. This is one of those little ‘bird-books’ that slips into a pocket and stays with you for a long time.

2 Pig Years by Ellyn Gaydos (Knopf) – This memoir of farming life is stark and surprisingly harsh; unlike many back-to-the-farm books of the 21st century, this one has no sheen of romanticism. And yet, through dint of her narrative skills, Ellyn Gaydos manages to make this bare-knuckled look at the sheer work of farming oddly eloquent and moving. The lives of the farmers, the workers, and the animals are portrayed in unsparing detail – this book will be a much-needed discouragement to many an aspiring DIY-farmer – but with an arresting simple beauty.

1 Fen, Bog, and Swamp: A Short History of Peatland Destruction and Its Role in the Climate Crisis by Annie Proulx (Scribner) – This slim new book by Annie Proulx, the best work of nature-writing in 2022, has both the beautiful writing and the sobering tone that characterized so many works in the genre this year. It’s a paradoxically lovely call for the preservation and restoration of the wetlands that perform so many vital ecological functions, as well as a short and quietly furious history of the wide-scale destruction that humans have visited upon these ‘waste’ areas over the centuries. The result is a work of urgent eloquence.

The Best Books of the Year: Science

Best Books of 2022: Science!

In 2022 science was once again a nightmare inversion of the onward-and-upward ethos of half a century ago; as in the last five years, so too in 2022 – science seemed to become not only a shorthand term for ‘dread’ but also a savage field of contention, with sizeable portions of society simply deciding that whole chunks of empirical science isn’t real or doesn’t count. Virtually all the science that made any kind of news in 2022 was the bad kind – insidious (lurking new pandemics), alarming (tech communication platforms being bought by single individuals), or outright terrifying (armed robot attack-police) – but even the worst such situation can still lead to some wonderful books! These were the best of them:

10 The Complete Guide to Absolutely Everything (Abridged) by Adam Rutherford & Hannah Fry (WW Norton) – What better way to start a list of the best science books of the year than with this lively concise look at what science is and how it’s worked throughout human history? This “everything but the kitchen sink” approach is admittedly tired (although still possessing enough kick to make Bill Bryson a pile of money doing the same kind of thing 20 years ago), but Rutherford and Fry go at it with a good deal of wit, and although the temptation must be pressing in a modern age of almost unprecedented scientific illiteracy, they never condescend to their readers, instead presenting them with what amounts to one of the greatest stories ever told.

9 A Molecule Away from Madness: Tales of the Hijacked Brain by Sarah Manning Peskin (WW Norton) – Peskin’s arresting book is full of horror stories of people whose brains suddenly began malfunctioning and causing them to do all kinds of strange things, but the heart of the narrative here is compassion, which makes this all the more remarkable a performance. Every one of Peskin’s stories about bizarre brain abnormalities is wreathed in pity and sympathy for the people whose lives were upended by the simple fact that we ARE our brains – and that the dividing line between business as usual and hospitalization or even death can sometimes be only a molecule wide. 

8 Impact: How Rocks from Space Led to Life, Culture, and Donkey Kong by Greg Brennecka (Morrow) – One of the small illicit pleasures of books whose subtitles ridiculously over-promise their contents is the losing-team fascination of seeing just how close they come to succeeding. Greg Brennecka doesn’t really come close – innocent space rocks cannot be fairly blamed for video games – but even so, his raucous account of the literally life-changing effects that meteor bombardments have had on Earth’s biosphere is hugely engaging. Even if you go into this book already knowing there’s a lot more to killer asteroids than a bunch of dead dinosaurs, you’ll still learn a lot and have a good deal of fun along the way.

7 Otherlands: A Journey Through Earth’s Extinct Worlds by Thomas Halliday (Random House) – Perhaps it’s a sad reflection of the current state of things that so many of the year’s popular science books dealt with lost worlds and vanished eras – and the ways they were screwed up or ended. Thomas Halliday’s book is a wonderfully evocative look at long-gone epochs in Earth’s history, as reconstructed through whatever slim evidence we might still have. That evidence is run through Halliday’s imagination and given shape by some standout storytelling skills, all in order to give shape to dramas that played out on this planet sometimes millions of years before there was anything even resembling a human being to observe them. 

6 The Last Days of the Dinosaurs: An Asteroid, Extinction, and the Beginning of Our World  by Riley Black (St. Martin’s Press) – Riley Black’s book likewise looks to a vanished world, perhaps the most famous one of all: the late Cretaceous, when a bewildering variety of dinosaurs ruled a lush, thriving world and seemed poised to do so forever – when, famously, one of those rogue killer asteroids struck the planet, instantly deep-frying millions of land and sea animals and plunging the world into a nuclear winter that killed off all but a handful of the remainders. This is also an often-told story, and Black tells it with terrific energy, while incorporating the latest research into that cataclysm’s details.

5 The Elephant in the Universe: Our Hundred-Year Search for Dark Matter by Govert Schilling (Harvard University Press) – Calculations about all the celestial objects we can see has long made astronomers aware of the fact that there’s a great deal of something out there they aren’t seeing, something altering all those measurements without ever being visible itself. In this very pleasingly granular popular study, Grovert Schilling not only explains in fluid detail the scientific thinking about this so-called “dark matter” but also perfectly captures the lively scientific debates that have circled around the subject for decades. Those debates are far from settled, and Schilling very effectively conveys the excitement of that.

4 The Monster’s Bones: The Discovery of T. Rex and How It Shook Our World by David K. Randall (WW Norton) – The most famous of all the dinosaurs, the Tyrannosaurus Rex, is belatedly the star of this wonderfully readable book by David Randall, who fills these pages with the story of the so-called “Bone Wars,” in which Gilded Age prospectors risked life and fortune in the badlands in order to uncover the fossilized remains of dinosaurs – and the prize of all prizes, the T. rex. Although this is at heart a story of insatiable scientific enquiry, Randall also very effectively turns it into a grand adventure of outsized personalities, amazing coincidences, and unexpected moments of very human wonder. 

3 The Rise and Reign of Mammals by Steve Brusatte (Mariner Books) – Paleontologist Steve Brusatte here follows up his hit book The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs with its natural sequel: the rise of the little mammals who survived the catastrophe that killed the dinosaurs, and their gradual flourishing to fill every ecological niche on the planet. That story is less well-known than the stars of the famous dinosaur saga, but Brusatte finds an enormous amount of fascination in its twists and turns. 

2 The Song of the Cell: An Exploration of Medicine and the New Human by Siddhartha Mukherjee (Scribner) – In this fascinating book, Siddhartha Mukherjee gives readers a sweeping history of the discoveries and innovations that made clearer and clearer over the course of centuries the study of cellular nature and mechanics. Mukherjee, the author of hugely popular books like The Emperor of All Maladies, combines the stories of cellular-study pioneers with the stories of people whose lives have been changed by the behaviors, good, bad, and sometimes awful, of groups of cells in their own bodies. 

1 Breathless: The Scientific Race to Defeat a Deadly Virus by David Quammen (Simon & Schuster) – The global phenomenon of the COVID-19 pandemic has spawned hundreds of books, but so far only one masterpiece: this book by David Quammen, the best science-title of 2022. In these pages, in his usual incredibly knowing and readable prose, Quammen sketches everything that’s known about the origins, spread, and public danger of the virus, plus all the efforts made to understand its nature and develop countermeasures in record time. This historic event now has its epic account.