Best Non-Fiction Books

David Grann investigates the disappearance of British explorer Percy Fawcett, who vanished in the Amazon in 1925 while searching for an ancient lost civilization he called Z.

George Orwell's first book: a memoir of destitution — months spent penniless in Paris, working as a plongeur in restaurant kitchens, and then weeks tramping between workhouses in England — written with the observational precision that would define everything that followed.

Physicist Brian Greene explains superstring theory and the quest for a unified theory of everything — the attempt to reconcile quantum mechanics and general relativity in a single mathematical framework.

Twenty-one meditations on pressing questions of our time — from artificial intelligence and political disillusionment to terrorism, nationalism, and the challenge of staying sane in the information age.