We’re well familiar with the expression May you live in interesting times. But the supposed curse never said anything about just how interesting the times should be. Can we all agree that they’ve been interesting enough? Can we have a bit of a breather?
Until the times get uninteresting, there’s plenty to keep us preoccupied. Mercifully, writers are here to help make sense of it all. Many of the volumes they’ve written about our current troubles are among the Best Nonfiction Books of the Year.
Let’s start with politics, shall we? It’s been a frenzied time for political books, understandably, and a few rise to the top for digging into issues and providing valuable context. One of them is Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson’s Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice To Run Again (Penguin Press, May 20). Interviewing roughly 200 people, Tapper and Thompson make a strong case that the former president’s loyalists were among “the chief deniers of his deterioration.”
Biden’s successor will certainly keep authors busy for years to come. Given President Trump’s defiance of norms—his attack on freedom of speech, his use of the Justice Department to exact retribution on foes—it’s worth reading Clay Risen’s Red Scare: Blacklists, McCarthyism, and the Making of Modern America (Scribner, March 18). Risen’s sober study is a window onto a past that is disturbingly familiar again. Less known to readers—but an important parallel to that history—is the Sunshine State’s assault on people’s freedoms, documented in Robert W. Fieseler’s powerful American Scare: Florida’s Hidden Cold War on Black and Queer Lives (Dutton, June 17).
Several prominent history books also speak to the present moment. Scott Anderson’s Kirkus Prize–winning King of Kings: The Iranian Revolution: A Story of Hubris, Delusion and Catastrophic Miscalculation (Doubleday, August 5) expertly lays the groundwork for the heightened tension that exists between the U.S. and Iran—now that the latter is a nuclear state. Greg Grandin’s Kirkus Prize finalist, America, América: A New History of the New World (Penguin Press, April 22), does much the same, explaining how fraught relations with Latin America have deep historical roots. And Kevin Sack’s Mother Emanuel: Two Centuries of Race, Resistance, and Forgiveness in One Charleston Church (Crown, June 3) gets at the origins of the race-based hatred and violence that have long plagued this country.
That’s a lot of serious material. Some books do offer glimmers of hope about the future. They include Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s pragmatic and promising Abundance (Avid Reader Press, March 18) and Replaceable You: Adventures in Human Anatomy (Norton, September 16) by the forever cheery and amusing Mary Roach. Come what may, artificial intelligence won’t save us during interesting times, nor will a far-fetched idea like colonizing Mars. So says Adam Becker, author of More Everything Forever: AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley’s Crusade To Control the Fate of Humanity (Basic Books, April 22). An astrophysicist and science journalist, Becker debunks Silicon Valley’s “ideology of technological salvation.” He writes, “As long as billionaires like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos…say that they’re doing what they’re doing in order to save the future of humanity—then they can cast their critics as enemies of civilization and our species.” What do you think, fellow humans?
John McMurtrie is the nonfiction editor.
