Year-End Lists

Kirkus Reviews: Best Nonfiction Books of 2021

[see also Best Fiction Books of 2021]

• Homo Irrealis
  André Aciman
• 1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows
  Ai Weiwei
• Fear of a Black Universe

  An Outsider's Guide to the Future of Physics
  Stephon Alexander
• Boyz n the Void

  a mixtape to my brother
  G'Ra Asim
• The Sound of the Sea

  Seashells and the Fate of the Oceans
  Cynthia Barnett
• Welcome to Dunder Mifflin

  The Ultimate Oral History of The Office
  Brian Baumgartner and Ben Silverman
• Twelve Caesars

  Images of Power from the Ancient World to the Modern
  Mary Beard
• The Rise and Fall of Osama bin Laden
  Peter L. Bergen
• Carefree Black Girls
  Zeba Blay
• The Devil You Know

  A Black Power Manifesto
  Charles M Blow
• The Shattering

  America in the 1960s
  Kevin Boyle
• Liner Notes for the Revolution

  The Intellectual Life of Black Feminist Sound
  Daphne A. Brooks
• Punch Me Up to the Gods
  Brian Broome
• Rock Me on the Water

  1974-The Year Los Angeles Transformed Movies, Music, Television, and Politics
  Ronald Brownstein
• Journey to the Edge of Reason

  The Life of Kurt Gödel
  Stephen Budiansky
• Unbound

  My Story of Liberation and the Birth of the Me Too Movement
  Tarana Burke
• Surviving the White Gaze
  Rebecca Carroll
• Floating in a Most Peculiar Way
  Louis Chude-Sokei
• Unwell Women

  Misdiagnosis and Myth in a Man-Made World
  Elinor Cleghorn
• How to Make an Apple Pie from Scratch

  In Search of the Recipe for Our Universe
  Harry Cliff
• Children Under Fire

  An American Crisis
  John Woodrow Cox
• What White People Can Do Next

  From Allyship to Coalition
  Emma Dabiri
• Nice White Ladies

  The Truth about White Supremacy, Our Role in It, and How We Can Help Dismantle It
  Jessie Daniels
• King of the Blues

  The Rise and Reign of B.B. King
  Daniel de Vise
• Letters to Camondo
  Edmund de Waal
• Belonging and Betrayal

  How Jews Made the Art World Modern
  Charles Dellheim
• Those We Throw Away Are Diamonds

  A Refugee's Search for Home
  Mondiant Dogon and Jenna Krajeski
• The Glitter in the Green

  In Search of Hummingbirds
  Jon Dunn
• Entertaining Race

  Performing Blackness in America
  Michael Eric Dyson
• The Ground Breaking

  An American City and Its Search for Justice
  Scott Ellsworth
• Covered with Night

  A Story of Murder and Indigenous Justice in Early America
  Nicole Eustace
• A Human History of Emotion

  How the Way We Feel Built the World We Know
  Richard Firth-Godbehere
• Dress Codes

  How the Laws of Fashion Made History
  Richard Thompson Ford
• Being a Human

  Adventures in Forty Thousand Years of Consciousness
  Charles Foster
• The Black Church

  This Is Our Story, This Is Our Song
  Henry Louis Gates Jr.
• Featherhood

  A Memoir of Two Fathers and a Magpie
  Charlie Gilmour
• The Bomber Mafia

  A Dream, a Temptation, and the Longest Night of the Second World War
  Malcolm Gladwell
• The Dawn of Everything

  A New History of Humanity
  David Graeber and David Wengrow
• Racism, Not Race

  Answers to Frequently Asked Questions
  Joseph L. Graves Jr. and Alan H. Goodman
• Read Until You Understand

  The Profound Wisdom of Black Life and Literature
  Farah Jasmine Griffin
• I Live a Life Like Yours

  A Memoir
  Jan Grue
• The 1619 Project

  A New Origin Story
  Nikole Hannah-Jones (creator)
• Operation Pedestal

  The Fleet That Battled to Malta, 1942
  Max Hastings
• There Is Nothing for You Here

  Finding Opportunity in the Twenty-First Century
  Fiona Hill
• Liberty Is Sweet

  The Hidden History of the American Revolution
  Woody Holton
• People Love Dead Jews

  Reports from a Haunted Present
  Dara Horn
• A Brave and Cunning Prince

  The Great Chief Opechancanough and the War for America
  James Horn
• Dvorak's Prophecy

  And the Vexed Fate of Black Classical Music
  Joseph Horowitz
• Mothers, Fathers, and Others

  Essays
  Siri Hustvedt
• The Letters of Shirley Jackson
  Shirley Jackson
• Empire of Pain

  The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty
  Patrick Radden Keefe
• Tacky

  Love Letters to the Worst Culture We Have to Offer
  Rax King
• Corruptible

  Who Gets Power and How It Changes Us
  Brian Klaas
• Under a White Sky

  The Nature of the Future
  Elizabeth Kolbert
• Everybody

  A Book about Freedom
  Olivia Laing
• Walk with Me

  A Biography of Fannie Lou Hamer
  Kate Clifford Larson
• Tom Stoppard

  A Life
  Hermione Lee
• Nuestra América

  My Family in the Vertigo of Translation
  Claudio Lomnitz
• State of Emergency

  How We Win in the Country We Built
  Tamika D. Mallory
• The Secret of Life

  Rosalind Franklin, James Watson, Francis Crick, and the Discovery of DNA's Double Helix
  Howard Markel
• A Worse Place Than Hell

  How the Civil War Battle of Fredericksburg Changed a Nation
  John Matteson
• Who Will Pay Reparations on My Soul?

  Essays
  Jesse McCarthy
• All That She Carried

  The Journey of Ashley's Sack, a Black Family Keepsake
  Tiya Miles
• The Power of Women

  A Doctor's Journey of Hope and Healing
  Denis Mukwege
• The Education of Corporal John Musgrave

  Vietnam and Its Aftermath
  John Musgrave
• Names for Light

  A Family History
  Thirii Myo Kyaw Myint
• A Bigger Picture

  My Fight to Bring a New African Voice to the Climate Crisis
  Vanessa Nakate
• A Ghost in the Throat
  Doireann Ní Ghríofa
• A Quantum Life

  My Unlikely Journey from the Street to the Stars
  Hakeem Olusey and Joshua Horwitz
• Squirrel Hill

  The Tree of Life Synagogue Shooting and the Soul of a Neighborhood
  Mark Oppenheimer
• Wildland

  The Making of America's Fury
  Evan Osnos
• Last Best Hope

  America in Crisis and Renewal
  George Packer
• Disruption

  Inside the Largest Counterterrorism Investigation in History
  Aki J. Peritz
• Sometimes I Trip On How Happy We Could Be
  Nichole Perkins
• This Is Your Mind on Plants
  Michael Pollan
• The Baseball 100
  Joe Posnanski
• The Disordered Cosmos

  A Journey into Dark Matter, Spacetime, and Dreams Deferred
  Chanda Prescod-Weinstein
• Geniuses at War

  Bletchley Park, Colossus, and the Dawn of the Digital Age
  David A. Price
• Becoming Abolitionists

  Police, Protests, and the Pursuit of Freedom
  Derecka Purnell
• The Plant Hunter

  A Scientist's Quest for Nature's Next Medicines
  Cassandra Leah Quave
• Seek You

  A Journey Through American Loneliness
  Kristen Radtke
• Mud Sweeter than Honey

  Voices of Communist Albania
  Margo Rejmer
• Letters to My White Male Friends
  Dax-devlon Ross
• Smile

  The Story of a Face
  Sarah Ruhl
• Every Day the River Changes

  Four Weeks Down the Magdalena
  Jordan Salama
• Looking for the Good War

  American Amnesia and the Violent Pursuit of Happiness
  Elizabeth D. Samet
• App Kid

  How a Child of Immigrants Grabbed a Piece of the American Dream
  Michael Sayman
• Toxic Legacy

  How the Weedkiller Glyphosate Is Destroying Our Health and the Environment
  Stephanie Seneff
• Economy Hall

  The Hidden History of a Free Black Brotherhood
  Fatima Shaik
• Smalltime

  A Story of My Family and the Mob
  Russell Shorto
• How the Word Is Passed

  A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America
  Clint Smith
• The Young H. G. Wells

  Changing the World
  Claire Tomalin
• As You Were
  David Tromblay
• The Empathy Diaries

  A Memoir
  Sherry Turkle
• In the Midst of Civilized Europe

  The Pogroms of 1918–1921 and the Onset of the Holocaust
  Jeffrey Veidlinger
• Horizontal Vertigo

  A City Called Mexico
  Juan Villoro
• It's Better to Be Feared

  The New England Patriots Dynasty and the Pursuit of Greatness
  Seth Wickersham
• Power and Liberty

  Constitutionalism in the American Revolution
  Gordon S. Wood
• The Plague Year

  America in the Time of Covid
  Lawrence Wright
• Pessoa
  Richard Zenith