Kids are back in school. Weather’s changing. And you’ve burned through all your summer page-turners. Time to re-up with this fall’s best books.
Read more new and notable nonfiction for September.
Here are our 10 can’t-miss nonfiction picks for fall:
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Rosamund Bartlett
Count Tolstoy (a title he later eschewed) lived more than several lives, and Bartlett explores them all with understanding and a sympathetic but also critical eye…[she] does not linger overlong on any of his most celebrated works, though she does point out that he used family members in War and Peace and employed an actual case of suicide under a train to inform Anna Karenina. The author is most attentive to the growing celebrity of Tolstoy—and the emergence of groups of devoted followers, especially when he began to embrace his own form of Christianity, dress like a peasant, advocate education for the masses and assail violence, the government and the Orthodox church…A rich, complex life told in rich, complex prose.
Joan Didion
In her 2005 book, The Year of Magical Thinking, the much-decorated journalist laid bare her emotions following the death of her husband, John Gregory Dunne. The same year that book was published, she also lost her adopted daughter, Quintana Roo, after a long hospitalization. Like Magical Thinking, this book is constructed out of close studies of particular memories and bits of medical lingo…The author also ponders her own mortality, and she does so with heartbreaking specificity…Didion’s clipped, recursive sentences initially make the book feel arid and emotionally distant. But she’s profoundly aware of tone and style—a digression about novel-writing reveals her deep concern for the music sentences make—and the chapters become increasingly freighted with sorrow without displaying sentimentality. The book feels like an epitaph for both her daughter and herself, as she considers how much aging has demolished her preconceptions about growing old.
Love and Capital: Karl and Jenny Marx and the Birth of a Revolution
Mary Gabriel
[Gabriel] strives mightily—and largely succeeds—in maintaining balance and perspective in her view of Karl and Jenny Marx and their family, long demonized by the Right and sanctified by the Left. Gabriel begins in 1851; the exiled Marxes were in London, enduring penury and near starvation as Karl struggled to do the research and writing that would later culminate in Das Kapital, the multi-volume work completed by his longtime friend, collaborator and patron, Friedrich Engels…The author relies heavily on the massive Marx family correspondence to help her bring to life these most remarkable people…Gabriel gracefully achieves an impressive, challenging agenda: the joint biographies of the Marxes (parents, daughters), the career of Engels, the rise of socialism and organized labor, the theoretical background of Marxian economics and politics and the historical and economic contexts for all.
The Swerve: How the World Became Modern
Stephen Greenblatt
More than 2,000 years ago, Roman poet and philosopher Lucretius wrote On the Nature of Things, which spoke of such things as the atomic structure of all that exists, of natural selection, the denial of an afterlife, the inherent sexuality of the universe, the cruelty of religion and the highest goal of human life being the enhancement of pleasure. It was a dangerous book and wildly at odds with the powers that be through many a time period. That Greenblatt came across this book while in graduate school is a wonder, for it had been scourged, scorned or simply fallen from fashion from the start…In the 15th century, along came Poggio Bracciolini—humanist, lover of antiquity, former papal secretary, roving hunter of books—and the hub of Greenblatt’s tale. He found the book, perhaps the last copy, in a monastery library, liked what he saw (even if he never cottoned to its philosophy) and had the book copied; thankfully, history was preserved. Greenblatt’s brilliantly ushers readers into this world, which is at once recognizable and wholly foreign.
Inferno: The World at War, 1939-1945
Max Hastings
A World War II history by Hastings (Winston’s War: Churchill, 1940–1945, 2010, etc.) may seem like a tautology, but readers familiar with his previous books will expect an enthralling account of his favorite subject. They will not be disappointed…Most general histories sprinkle their pages with anecdotes, but Hastings has this down to a science. He employs numerous specialists, delving into Russian and Italian archives and personally tracking down obscure, vivid, often painful stories from the usual combatants as well as Poles, Bengalese, Chinese and Japanese. Excellent general WWII accounts abound—including those by historical superstars such as Stephen Ambrose and John Keegan—but Hastings is matchless.
Hemingway’s Boat: Everything He Loved in Life, and Lost, 1934-1961
Paul Hendrickson
“You know you love the sea and would not be anywhere else,” wrote Ernest Hemingway in Islands in the Stream. In 1934, already the “reigning monarch of American literature” for The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms, he bought a 38-foot motorized fishing vessel [Pilar] at a Brooklyn boatyard and set out for the Caribbean. “Mr. H. is like a wild thing with his boat,” wrote Pauline, his second wife. An integral part of his final 27 years, Pilar offered afternoons of solace on waters between Key West and Cuba, during which Hemingway fished, drank, wrote, bickered with wives and sons and entertained visitors…Hendrickson (Nonfiction Writing/Univ. of Pennsylvania; Sons of Mississippi: A Story of Race and Its Legacy, 2003, etc.) offers a moving, highly evocative account of Hemingway’s turbulent later years, when he lost the favor of critics, the love of wives and friends and, ultimately, his ability to write…Seven years in the making, this vivid portrait allows us to see Hemingway on the Pilar once again, standing on the flying bridge and guiding her out of the harbor at sunrise.
Christopher Hitchens
Whether on the invasion of Iraq or the merits of Vladimir Nabokov’s fiction, master controversialist Hitchens has an informed opinion. Here he gathers a hefty helping of work over the last few years, published in venues such as the Atlantic and Vanity Fair. Sometimes his pieces concern passing matters, though they are seldom ephemeral themselves; more often he writes about what he wishes to write about, topics that require weighty but not dense (and usually not heavy-handed) consideration…Hitchens balances old interests with new discoveries; he was one of the first to write at length about Stieg Larsson, for instance, whose death by “causes that are symptoms of modern life” he endorses. He also turns to his long-standing fascination for the totalitarian mind. He characterizes Adolf Hitler as holding opinions that are “trite and bigoted and deferential,” while “the prose in Mein Kampf is simply laughable in its pomposity.”…Vintage Hitchens. Argumentative and sometimes just barely civil—another worthy collection from this most inquiring of inquirers.
Death in the City of Light: The Serial Killer of Occupied Paris
David King
In King’s third work of historical nonfiction (Vienna, 1814: How the Conquerors of Napoleon Made Love, War, and Peace at the Congress of Vienna, 2008, etc.), he turns to World War II and the city of lights, narrating a frightening tale. When a chimney fire led to the discovery by Paris police of countless bodies hacked into pieces, they immediately suspected the home’s owner, the respectable doctor Marcel Petiot, of committing these unspeakable crimes. A manhunt ensued, and Petiot managed to elude authorities for a time. Set against the backdrop of the Allied invasion of Normandy and the Nazi’s retreat from Paris, King successfully weaves together the search for Petiot with the world-changing events surrounding the chase…expertly written and completely absorbing.
Rin Tin Tin: The Life and the Legend
Susan Orlean
The author combines all her skills and passions in this astonishing story of Lee Duncan (1893–1960), a young American soldier and dog-lover who found the German shepherd puppy that became Rin Tin Tin (Rinty) in France, got the dog home and spent the rest of his life training and promoting Rinty, breeding other German shepherds and living with the belief of Rinty’s immortality…Orlean—who belongs to the generation that remembers the cry “Yo ho, Rinty!” from the popular The Adventures of Rin-Tin-Tin, which premiered in 1954 and ran for 164 episodes—recalls that her grandfather kept on his desk a little Rinty figure…[she]tells the story of silent films (where Rinty began his career), the transition to talkies and to color, the rise of television, the popularity of dog ownership in America (especially of German shepherds and collies—because of Lassie) and the evolving tastes of American youth. For years, Orlean chased Rinty—even to his grave in Paris—and by the end, began to question her sanity…a terrific dog’s tale that will make readers sit up and beg for more.
Lennon: The Man, the Myth, the Music—the Definitive Life
Tim Riley
After hundreds of books on the former Beatle, is there anything left to say? Surprisingly, yes, and music journalist Riley delivers intriguing news and commentary in this incisive biography. The news comes mostly in the form of fresh insights, some closely argued, some merely observed in passing…Riley is much more respectful of Yoko Ono than have been many previous biographers, more forgiving of McCartney, more sympathetic even to Lennon, who can’t have been easy to live or work with. He is also attentive to others of great but sometimes unsung influence in Lennon’s life—not just Mimi and Julia, but also George Harrison, who helped shape the Beatles’ sound more profoundly than he’s often given credit for. Lennon had what Riley characterizes as “another kind of mind,” and his book is a careful exploration of the man’s musical genius, as well as his many shortcomings in the realm of personal relations. Essential for Lennon fans, and one of the most thorough yet accessible rock biographies to appear in recent years.
Blue Nights
Arguably
