Year-End Lists

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of notable year-end lists.
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Highlights

2020 Books

BookPage: Best Books of 2020: Nonfiction

30 December 2020

BookPage: Best Books of 2020: Nonfiction

[see also The Best Nonfiction of 2025 • The Best Fiction of 2025 • The Best Nonfiction of 2024 • The Best Fiction of 2024 • The Best Nonfiction of 2023 • The Best Fiction of 2023 • Best Nonfiction of 2022 • Best Fiction of 2022 • Best Books of 2020: Fiction • Best Nonfiction Books of 2019 • Best Fiction Books of 2019]

  1. Notes on a Silencing
    Lacy Crawford
  2. Caste
    The Origins of Our Discontents
    Isabel Wilkerson
  3. Fathoms
    The World in the Whale
    Rebecca Giggs
  4. Memorial Drive
    A Daughter's Memoir
    Natasha Trethewey
  5. The Dead Are Arising
    The Life of Malcolm X
    Les Payne and Tamara Payne
  6. Hidden Valley Road
    Inside the Mind of an American Family
    Robert Kolker
  7. Is Rape a Crime?
    A Memoir, an Investigation, and a Manifesto
    Michelle Bowdler
  8. Conditional Citizens
    On Belonging in America
    Laila Lalami
  9. Children of the Land
    Marcelo Hernandez Castillo
  10. World of Wonders
    In Praise of Fireflies, Whale Sharks, and Other Astonishments
    Aimee Nezhukumatathil
  11. Nobody Will Tell You This But Me
    A true (as told to me) story
    Bess Kalb
  12. Vesper Flights
    Helen Macdonald
  13. To Start a War
    How the Bush Administration Took America into Iraq
    Robert Draper
  14. Inferno
    A Memoir of Motherhood and Madness
    Catherine Cho
  15. Wow, No Thank You.
    Samantha Irby
  16. Just Us
    An American Conversation
    Claudia Rankine
  17. Once I Was You
    A Memoir of Love and Hate in a Torn America
    Maria Hinojosa
  18. Wilmington's Lie
    The Murderous Coup of 1898 and the Rise of White Supremacy
    David Zucchino
  19. Minor Feelings
    An Asian American Reckoning
    Cathy Park Hong
  20. The Splendid and the Vile
    A Saga of Churchill, Family, and Defiance During the Blitz
    Erik Larson

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Year-end lists are fingerprints; aggregate statistics are smudges. Therefore, I make no tallies.