Year-End Lists

Literary Hub: The 20 Best Works of Nonfiction of the Decade

[see also Our 65 Favorite Books of the Year • The 20 Best Novels of the Decade • Favorite Books of 2018]

The Top Twenty

• The New Jim Crow

  Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness
  Michelle Alexander
• The Emperor of All Maladies

  A Biography of Cancer
  Siddhartha Mukherjee
• The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
  Rebecca Skloot
• Bloodlands

  Europe Between Hitler and Stalin
  Timothy Snyder
• The Warmth of Other Suns

  The Epic Story of America's Great Migration
  Isabel Wilkerson
• The Passage of Power

  The Years of Lyndon Johnson
  Robert A. Caro
• The Black Count

  Glory, Revolution, Betrayal, And The Real Count Of Monte Cristo
  Tom Reiss
• The Sixth Extinction

  An Unnatural History
  Elizabeth Kolbert
• Between the World and Me
  Ta-Nehisi Coates
• The Invention of Nature

  Alexander von Humboldt’s New World
  Andrea Wulf
• The Witches

  Suspicion, Betrayal, and Hysteria in 1692 Salem
  Stacy Schiff
• Secondhand Time

  The Last of the Soviets
  Svetlana Alexievich
• Dark Money

  The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right
  Jane Mayer
• How to Survive a Plague: The Inside Story of How Citizens and Science Tamed AIDS
  David France
• The Other Slavery

  The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America
  Andrés Reséndez
• All the Single Ladies

  Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation
  Rebecca Traister
• Prairie Fires

  The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder
  Caroline Fraser
• Frederick Douglass

  Prophet of Freedom
  David W. Blight
• Underland

  A Deep Time Journey
  Robert Macfarlane
• Say Nothing

  A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland
  Patrick Radden Keefe

Dissenting Opinions

• The Art of Cruelty

  A Reckoning
  Maggie Nelson
• The Beast

  Riding the Rails and Dodging Narcos on the Migrant Trail
  Oscar Martinez
• Evicted

  Poverty and Profit in the American City
  Matthew Desmond
• The House of Government

  A Saga of the Russian Revolution
  Yuri Slezkine
• Ghosts of the Tsunami

  Death and Life in Japan's Disaster Zone
  Richard Lloyd Parry
• How to Do Nothing

  Resisting the Attention Economy
  Jenny Odell

Honorable Mentions

• Country Driving

  A Chinese Road Trip
  Peter Hessler
• Washington

  A Life
  Ron Chernow
• Nothing to Envy

  Ordinary Lives in North Korea
  Barbara Demick
• Stranger Magic

  Charmed States and the Arabian Nights
  Marina Warner
• Thomas Jefferson

  The Art Of Power
  Jon Meacham
• Behind the Beautiful Forevers

  Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity
  Katherine Boo
• Madness, Rack, and Honey
  Mary Ruefle
• The Sports Gene

  Inside the Science of Extraordinary Athletic Performance
  David Epstein
• Five Days at Memorial

  Life and Death in a Storm-Ravaged Hospital
  Sheri Fink
• Thank You for Your Service
  David Finkel
• The Unwinding

  An Inner History of the New America
  George Packer
• This Changes Everything

  Capitalism vs. The Climate
  Naomi Klein
• An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States
  Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
• 100 Essays I Don't Have Time to Write

  On Umbrellas and Sword Fights, Parades and Dogs, Fire Alarms, Children, and Theater
  Sarah Ruhl
• The Trip to Echo Spring

  On Writers and Drinking
  Olivia Laing
• Penelope Fitzgerald

  A Life
  Hermione Lee
• SPQR

  A History of Ancient Rome
  Mary Beard
• Dreamland

  The True Tale of America’s Opiate Epidemic
  Sam Quinones
• Stamped from the Beginning

  The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America
  Ibram X. Kendi
• Shirley Jackson

  A Rather Haunted Life
  Ruth Franklin
• Strangers in Their Own Land

  Anger and Mourning on the American Right
  Arlie Russell Hochschild
• Hidden Figures

  The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race
  Margot Lee Shetterly
• Henry David Thoreau

  A Life
  Laura Dassow Walls
• Killers of the Flower Moon

  The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI
  David Grann
• Red at Heart

  How Chinese Communists Fell in Love with the Russian Revolution
  Elizabeth McGuire
• The Evangelicals

  The Struggle to Shape America
  Frances FitzGerald
• The Road to Jonestown

  Jim Jones and Peoples Temple
  Jeff Guinn
• Krazy

  George Herriman, a Life in Black and White
  Michael Tisserand
• Chester B. Himes

  A Biography
  Lawrence P. Jackson
• Barracoon

  The Story of the Last “Black Cargo”
  Zora Neale Hurston
• Dopesick

  Dealers, Doctors, and the Drug Company That Addicted America
  Beth Macy
• American Prison

  A Reporter’s Undercover Journey Into the Business of Punishment
  Shane Bauer
• Amity and Prosperity

  One Family and the Fracturing of America
  Eliza Griswold
• The Tangled Tree

  A Radical New History of Life
  David Quammen