The best nonfiction books of 2020 offer wisdom and insight – Christian Science Monitor

Curious minds deserve insightful books, and there was no shortage of excellent titles this year. Here is the Monitors list of superlative nonfiction books published in 2020, from histories to memoirs and everything in between.

Casteby Isabel Wilkerson

In her stirring follow-up to The Warmth of Other Suns, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Isabel Wilkerson persuasively argues that racism alone does not explain Americas social divisions. Rather, the United States ought to be understood as having a race-based caste system, one whose hierarchies, though artificial, are remarkably enduring.

Demagogueby Larry Tye

Courtesy of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Demagogue: The Life and Long Shadow of Senator Joe McCarthy by Larry Tye, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 597 pp.

Bestselling biographer Larry Tye writes a long and comprehensive biography of Sen. Joseph McCarthy, the polarizing spearhead of the Red Scare of the 1950s and Tye contends the origin of some disturbing features in our 21st-century political landscape.

Warholby Blake Gopnik

In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes, Andy Warhol is credited with saying. But there is nothing fleeting about his legacy as an artist, filmmaker, and self-created pop-culture phenomenon. His life and work are examined in detail in Blake Gopniks biography. Warhol devotees will rejoice, and more casual readers will receive an education in all things Andy.

Unionby Colin Woodard

Colin Woodard tells not the story of how America became a nation, but rather of how America crafted its own version of its national history, and how that national mythology has changed over the decades.

Stories of the Saharaby Sanmao

Courtesy of Bloomsbury Publishing

Stories of the Sahara by Sanmao, translated from the Chinese by Mike Fu, Bloomsbury, 416 pp.

As a Chinese woman born in 1943, Sanmao was a pioneering global citizen. These 20 essays about living in one of the harshest areas of the world in the 1970s are testimony to her audacity and courage.

Just Usby Claudia Rankine

Claudia Rankine follows her prize-winning Citizen: An American Lyric with a brilliant and timely examination of whiteness in America. This consciousness-raising, bravura combination of personal essays, poems, photographs, and cultural commentary works on so many levels and is a skyscraper in the literature on racism.

Dark Mirrorby Barton Gellman

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Barton Gellman writes an insider account of the breaking of Edward Snowdens story and its wider implications for the modern world, all told in prose as gripping as a spy thriller.

Cross of Snowby Nicholas A. Basbanes

Courtesy of Penguin Random House

Cross of Snow: A Life of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow by Nicholas A. Basbanes, Alfred A. Knopf, 465 pp.

The poems of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow arent in fashion today, but in the first major biography of the fabled New England poet in many years, Nicholas A. Basbanes argues that Longfellow is making a comeback. His exhaustively researched account of Longfellows career should give that reappraisal a boost.

Becoming Wildby Carl Safina

Carl Safina looks at three species the sperm whale, the scarlet macaw, and the chimpanzee to chart all the ways they build and sustain their societies. He explores how those cultures echo and differ from our own.

The Golden Threadby Ravi Somaiya

U.N. Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjld was negotiating an end to the Congolese civil war when he died in a plane crash in 1961. To this day, many believe he was assassinated. Journalist Ravi Somaiya explores one of the most compelling mysteries of the Cold War in this grim and absorbing book.

Abeby David S. Reynolds

Abraham Lincoln had less than a year of formal education; he has often been portrayed as inexperienced and unprepared to lead. David S. Reynolds monumental, reverential biography rejects that narrative, arguing that Lincolns immersion in the high and low culture of 19th-century America, along with his deep moral convictions, equipped him to steer the Union through the Civil War.

Eleanorby David Michaelis

This riveting, cinematic biography of Americas longest-serving first lady spans Eleanor Roosevelts lonely childhood, her frosty marriage to FDR, their White House years, her intimate relationships outside their marriage, and her widowhood, during which she became an advocate for human rights.

Veritasby Ariel Sabar

Veritas: A Harvard Professor, a Con Man and the Gospel of Jesus's Wife by Ariel Sabar, Doubleday, 416 pp.

In 2012, a religion scholar announced a discovery: an ancient papyrus fragment that suggested that Jesus Christ and Mary Magdalene may have been married. Expanding on his 2016 article for The Atlantic, Ariel Sabar digs into the story of the papyrus and the couple who tried to pass it off as real.

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The Adventurers Sonby Roman Dial

Renowned biologist and explorer Roman Dial searches for his 27-year-old son, who has gone missing in the jungles of Costa Rica. Part memoir, part mystery, The Adventurers Son is a story of a fathers love for his son, and for the natural world.

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The best nonfiction books of 2020 offer wisdom and insight - Christian Science Monitor