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.