Year-End Lists

The Washington Post: 50 Notable Works of Nonfiction in 2021

• The 1619 Project

  A New Origin Story
  Nikole Hannah-Jones (creator)
• All In
  Billie Jean King
• The Almost Legendary Morris Sisters

  A True Story of Family Fiction
  Julie Klam
• Amazon Unbound

  Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire
  Brad Stone
• American Baby

  A Mother, a Child, and the Shadow History of Adoption
  Gabrielle Glaser
• American Republics

  A Continental History of the United States, 1783-1850
  Alan Taylor
• Between Two Kingdoms

  A Memoir of a Life Interrupted
  Suleika Jaouad
• The Case of the Murderous Dr. Cream

  The Hunt for a Victorian Era Serial Killer
  Dean Jobb
• Children Under Fire

  An American Crisis
  John Woodrow Cox
• The Code Breaker

  Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race
  Walter Isaacson
• The Confidence Men

  How Two Prisoners of War Engineered the Most Remarkable Escape in History
  Margalit Fox
• Crying in H Mart
  Michelle Zauner
• The Extended Mind

  The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain
  Annie Murphy Paul
• Finding the Mother Tree

  Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest
  Suzanne Simard
• Forever Young
  Hayley Mills
• Four Hundred Souls

  A Community History of African America, 1619-2019
  Ibram X. Kendi and Keisha N. Blain (editors)
• The Free World

  Art and Thought in the Cold War
  Louis Menand
• Fuzz

  When Nature Breaks the Law
  Mary Roach
• Girlhood
  Melissa Febos
• How the Word Is Passed

  A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America
  Clint Smith
• I Alone Can Fix It

  Donald J. Trump's Catastrophic Final Year
  Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker
• The Lyrics

  1956 to the Present
  Paul McCartney
• Nightmare Scenario

  Inside the Trump Administration's Response to the Pandemic That Changed History
  Yasmeen Abutaleb & Damian Paletta
• On Animals
  Susan Orlean
• On Freedom

  Four Songs of Care and Constraint
  Maggie Nelson
• On Juneteenth
  Annette Gordon-Reed
• Oscar Wilde

  A Life
  Matthew Sturgis
• Peril
  Bob Woodward and Robert Costa
• The Private Library

  The History of the Architecture and Furnishing of the Domestic Bookroom
  Reid Byers
• Real Estate

  A Living Autobiography
  Deborah Levy
• Red Roulette

  An Insider's Story of Wealth, Power, Corruption, and Vengeance in Today's China
  Desmond Shum
• Reign of Terror

  How the 9/11 Era Destabilized America and Produced Trump
  Spencer Ackerman
• The Secret to Superhuman Strength
  Alison Bechdel
• Shakespearean

  On Life and Language in Times of Disruption
  Robert McCrum
• Shooting Midnight Cowboy

  Art, Sex, Loneliness, Liberation, and the Making of a Dark Classic
  Glenn Frankel
• Smile

  The Story of a Face
  Sarah Ruhl
• The Sum of Us

  What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together
  Heather McGhee
• Susan, Linda, Nina, and Cokie

  The Extraordinary Story of the Founding Mothers of NPR
  Lisa Napoli
• A Swim in a Pond in the Rain

  In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life
  George Saunders
• Tangled Up in Blue

  Policing the American City
  Rosa Brooks
• Taste

  My Life Through Food
  Stanley Tucci
• There Is Nothing for You Here

  Finding Opportunity in the Twenty-First Century
  Fiona Hill
• Think Again

  The Power of Knowing What You Don't Know
  Adam Grant
• This Is Your Mind on Plants
  Michael Pollan
• Three Girls from Bronzeville

  A Uniquely American Memoir of Race, Fate, and Sisterhood
  Dawn Turner
• The Triumph of Nancy Reagan
  Karen Tumulty
• Two-Way Mirror

  The Life of Elizabeth Barrett Browning
  Fiona Sampson
• The Unquiet Englishman

  A Life of Graham Greene
  Richard Greene
• Vanderbilt

  The Rise and Fall of an American Dynasty
  Anderson Cooper and Katherine Howe
• Zero Fail

  The Rise and Fall of the Secret Service
  Carol Leonnig