LIST: Our Ten Best Non-Fiction Books of the Year

1 The Yellow House by Sarah M. Broom (Grove)

Hurricane Katrina destroyed Broom family home in swampy New Orleans East, but The Yellow House is not just another tale of surviving one of America’s most horrific disasters. Instead, Broom, the “babiest” of 12 children, has conjured shards of memory, history, and anthropological investigation into this exquisitely composed epic of injustice involving money, wetlands, “dreaming and draining and emergence and fate.” From her metaphoric title, which refers to the yellow aluminum siding covering the house’s rotting wood, to her heartbreaking last pages, Broom illustrates how she and her family remain emotionally tied to the ground on which the house once stood, guardians of its memories.

2. If: The Untold Story of Kipling’s American Years by Christopher Benfey (Penguin Press)

In his elegant, engaging book, Benfey focuses on the decade that the Bombay-born, English-educated Rudyard Kipling lived in America, particularly outside Brattleboro, Vermont, and became an American writer. Benfey suggests that this age of rising nationalism and cultural antagonism is a perfect time to take a closer look at the gravitational pull that Kipling – who has been called the “jingoist Bard of Empire” – exerts in politics and culture.  Kipling’s influence remains strong both around the world and here in the United States – his poem “If” has been appropriated by everyone from Serena Williams to The Simpsons. Benfey argues that much of Kipling’s most creative work – including The Jungle Book and Captains Courageous – is rooted in his American experience, and he brilliantly shows how it reverberates, shapes, and reflects American culture.

3. An American Summer: Love and Death in Chicago by Alex Kotlowitz (Nan A. Talese/Doubleday)

These dispatches from the front lines of what is considered one of America’s most violent cities are a master class in empathy. With its roots in his 1992 classic There Are No Children Here: The Story of Two Boys Growing Up in the Other America, Kotlowitz’s latest work of non-fiction describes, with poetic grace, neighborhoods like Englewood and North Lawndale, where violence is part of the fabric of everyday life, and where the abbreviation “R.I.P.” is everywhere. Kotlowitz notes that by Chicago standards, the summer of 2013 – the summer of his title – which had 172 people killed and 793 wounded by gunfire, was “a tamer season than most.” Rather than write a prescriptive policy book, Kotlowitz aims to make sense of what has been lost and what it takes to emerge from the rubble. “You can’t talk about death,” he notes in this eloquent and compassionate book, “without celebrating life.”

4.  The Queen: The Forgotten Life behind an American Myth by Josh Levin (Little, Brown)

Chicago headlines described Cadillac-driving Linda Taylor as a “welfare queen,” fueling public hysteria about welfare abuse that campaigner Ronald Reagan amplified as an outrageous example of fraud. In his great work of investigation, Levin, who is editorial director of Slate, uncovers this creation myth and argues that it hardened into a stereotype deployed to chip away at benefits for the poor. Levin has written a fascinating tale of how the myth was constructed, but he has also dug deeply into Taylor’s story, revealing her as to be a grifter, a thief, and possibly a murderer — a woman who was victimized, but who also victimized more vulnerable people.

5. Antisocial: Online Extremists, Techno-Utopians, and the Hijacking of the American Conversation by Andrew Marantz (Viking)

With unusual force and clarity, New Yorker staff writer Marantz documents social media’s empowerment of bigotry, propaganda, and right-wing extremism. His deeply reported book offers the story of “how a few disruptive entrepreneurs, motivated by naivete and reckless techno-utopianism, built powerful new systems full of unforeseen vulnerabilities, and how a motley cadre of edgelords, motivated by bigotry and bad faith and nihilism, exploited those vulnerabilities to highjack the American conversation.” Marantz’s far-ranging narrative, which spans from mass-printed books to trending hashtags, is robust with stories of tech entrepreneurs, alt-right extremists, misogynists and racists, and gatekeepers like Mark Zuckerberg, who make it all possible.

6. The Guarded Gate: Bigotry, Eugenics, and the Law That Kept Two Generations of Jews, Italians, and Other European Immigrants Out of America by Daniel Okrent (Scribner)

In this big, engrossing social history, which resonates strongly today, Okrent sheds light on a particularly shameful part of the early 20th century, when American xenophobia ran highest. With the keen eye he brought to his previous book, Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition, Okrent focuses on an epic exclusionary immigration law that changed the course of American immigration in 1924. He employs the journalistic skills he honed as managing editor of Life magazine and editor at large at Time Inc. to expose the unholy alliance among upper crust Bostonians and New Yorkers and leading scientists who celebrated eugenics. Together, they persuaded President Calvin Coolidge and Congress to enact immigration quotas to keep out “undesirable” people.

7. Our Man: Richard Holbrooke and the End of the American Century by George Packer (Knopf)

Packer’s Our Man is in a class with Ronald Steel’s 1980 Walter Lippmann and the American Century, truly great biographies of outsized, complicated men who were at the center of political life at the height of the American empire. Packer enlarges Holbrooke’s story, identifying the “blind spot behind his eyes that masked his inner life” and the mix of idealism and egotism in his quest for influence on the world stage. Packer draws from extraordinary access to Holbrooke’s personal papers and from extensive interviews with friends, foes, and allies to explore his subject’s journey from Vietnam to the Balkans and Afghanistan. Packer’s scrupulously documented book pushes the boundaries of traditional biography in a form that speaks to readers and reflects his own work as a novelist (for example, Central Square, 1998) and his National Book Award-winning The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America.

8. No Visible Bruises: What We Don’t Know About Domestic Violence Can Kill Us by Rachel Louise Snyder (Bloomsbury)

“Domestic violence is like no other crime,” writes Snyder, in her powerful new book. “It’s violence from someone you know, from someone who claims to love you.” Snyder, winner of the J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Award, brings rigor and passion to her investigation of domestic violence, focusing not only on the victims and perpetrators, but also on how these crimes are prosecuted – if at all – and programs of rehabilitation for batterers and support for the women and families destroyed. In forceful, urgent prose, Snyder illuminates the cycle of violence and its legacy, and her deeply reported, vividly drawn case studies become short portraits that capture the dramatic stories of how family dynamics play out and how trauma echoes through society.

9. The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee: Native America from 1890 to the Present by David Treuer (Riverhead)

Dee Brown’s Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee recast American history in 1970 by exposing in detail the injuries of Native American displacement, and now Treuer dramatically picks up where Brown left off with this beautifully written narrative. Treuer, who is Ojibwe from the Leech Lake Reservation in northern Minnesota, draws on his talents as a fiction writer and memoirist, his training as an anthropologist, and his personal experience in this prismatic book. He investigates the destructive effects of federal policy, the politics of tribal government, and youth culture, and reveals the resilience that has led to bold, inventive new activism. Treuer’s book is a worthy successor to Dee Brown’s powerful polemic, and it should soon be a classic in its own right.

10. The Impeachers: The Trial of Andrew Johnson and the Dream of a Just Nation by 9. Brenda Wineapple (Random House)

Wineapple’s dramatic account of the first impeachment of a U.S. president may evoke comparison with current events, but it also adds enormous nuance to our understanding of the political and social dynamics of the Reconstruction era. With the same keen insight she demonstrated in her earlier works on the 19th century, most recently Ecstatic Nation: Confidence, Crisis, and Compromise, 1848-1877, Wineapple zeros in on the story of Southern Democrat Andrew Johnson, the accidental president elevated after the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. She details his reckless attitude toward Congress and government, his faux populism, and the aid and comfort he gave white supremacists as a Unionist who fought Reconstruction. Wineapple depicts the full scope of Johnson’s promise and the disappointing actions he took once he achieved power, along with a woeful catalog of the damage he did to the country.