Best Non-Fiction Books

Carl Sagan's companion to his landmark PBS series explores the history of science, the nature of the universe, and humanity's place in the cosmos with breathtaking scope and lyrical prose.

Known publicly as 'Emily Doe,' Chanel Miller reclaims her full identity and tells the complete story of the assault, trial, and aftermath of the Brock Turner case.

Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt explains why people disagree so fiercely about politics and religion — not because some are moral and others aren't, but because human moral psychology contains multiple foundations that different people and cultures weight differently.

William Shirer's definitive account of Nazi Germany — from Hitler's birth to the Reich's collapse — written by a journalist who witnessed much of it firsthand.

Wall Street Journal reporter John Carreyrou tells the complete story of how Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos defrauded investors and endangered patients with a blood-testing technology that didn't work.

Surgeon Atul Gawande examines how medicine has failed dying patients by prioritizing survival over quality of life, and what better approaches to aging and end-of-life care look like.

A narrative history of the first month of World War I — August 1914 — tracing how Europe's powers stumbled into catastrophe through a combination of rigid military planning, diplomatic failure, and the momentum of mobilization.

Michelle Alexander's landmark argument that mass incarceration is the newest system of racial caste control in America — the functional successor to Jim Crow laws and before them, slavery.

Erik Larson's account of Winston Churchill's first year as Prime Minister — May 1940 to May 1941 — when Britain stood alone against Nazi Germany and Churchill forged a nation's will to endure.

David McCullough narrates the military history of 1776 — the year of American independence — through the campaigns, retreats, and nearly disastrous reverses that shaped the Revolutionary War's decisive year.

Written as a letter to his teenage son, Ta-Nehisi Coates examines the history and present reality of anti-Black racism in America — its origins in the destruction of Black bodies, its persistence through white supremacy — with unsparing intellectual force.

The Japanese Breakfast musician writes about her Korean-American identity, her mother's death from cancer, and how food became the medium for grief and memory.

The story of the final voyage of the Lusitania in May 1915, the German U-boat that sank her, and the nearly 1,200 people who died in eighteen minutes.

The true story of the Black female mathematicians who served as 'human computers' at NASA during the Space Race — women whose calculations helped launch America into space while they navigated the segregated South.

The late Michelle McNamara chronicles her obsessive investigation into the East Area Rapist, later called the Golden State Killer — a serial criminal who terrorized California in the 1970s and 80s.

In 1920s Oklahoma, members of the Osage Nation were being systematically murdered for their oil wealth in a conspiracy that eventually drew in J. Edgar Hoover's nascent FBI.

The story of how Oakland A's general manager Billy Beane used statistical analysis to build a competitive baseball team on a fraction of the payroll of richer clubs.

The story of the small group of outsiders who bet against the American mortgage market and won as the 2008 financial crisis unfolded.

The intertwined stories of the 1893 Chicago World's Fair — one of the most ambitious construction projects in American history — and the serial killer H.H. Holmes, who used the fair's crowds as cover for his murders.

The true story of the 1741 shipwreck of HMS Wager off the coast of Patagonia, the murderous castaways who survived, and the competing accounts of what happened that constituted a kind of 18th-century trial.

Sportswriter Mitch Albom reconnects with his dying professor Morrie Schwartz for a series of life lessons delivered in the shadow of death.

Walter Isaacson's definitive biography of Albert Einstein traces the physicist's life from his rebellious childhood to the development of the theory of relativity, his Nobel Prize, and his political activism as a refugee from Nazi Germany.

A comprehensive, revisionist history of ancient Rome from its murky origins to the extension of citizenship across the empire, written with the authority of Britain's greatest living classicist.

A radical reorientation of world history centered on the Silk Roads — the trade routes connecting East and West — arguing that Asia, the Middle East, and Central Asia have been the world's true centers for most of recorded history.