This
was a remarkably rich and capacious year for nonfiction. While we all continued
to grapple with urgent developing news about the
coronavirus,
climate change
and
global politics, authors widened the aperture, publishing books on a
dizzying number of subjects: the history of Black artists in the film industry;
an American woman who joined the Nazi resistance in Germany; mid-century
creative ferment in New York City; groundbreaking mathematician Kurt Gödel;
playwright Tom Stoppard. Other books told the stories of an 18th-century Irish
poem, the “first civil rights movement”, one modest cotton sack that reflects
the immense trauma of slavery. And all of this does not nearly cover the entire
list.
اضافة اعلان
In fiction and
poetry, it was a year of well-established names delivering strong work, with
new novels from
Rachel Cusk,
Jonathan Franzen,
Colm Toibin,
Dana Spiotta,
Gary Shteyngart and
Katie Kitamura, brilliant second novels by Atticus Lish and
Asali Solomon, and a vital collection of poems about history and mortality by
Rita Dove.
Below,
selections by The New York Times’ daily book critics of their favorite titles
from the past 12 months. The choices come from our four staff critics, Dwight
Garner, Jennifer Szalai, Molly Young and Alexandra Jacobs, as well as Parul
Sehgal, who was a critic for the Times until July.
An annual note
on methodology: The critics limit themselves in this process, each choosing
only from those books he or she reviewed for the Times since last year at this
time. — John Williams
NONFICTION
“Reign of Terror: How the 9/11 Era Destabilized America and Produced Trump”, by
Spencer Ackerman. (Viking.) Ackerman contends that the US response to 9/11 made
President Donald Trump possible. He presents the evidence for this thesis with
an impressive combination of diligence and verve, guiding us through two
decades and showing how any prospect of national unity in response to 9/11
buckled under the incoherence of the wars that followed. The resulting
narrative, Jennifer Szalai wrote, is “upsetting, discerning and brilliantly
argued”.
“Traveling Black: A Story of Race and Resistance”, by
Mia Bay. (The Belknap Press of
Harvard University.) In this superb history, the question of literal movement
becomes a way to understand the civil rights movement writ large. “Once one of
the most resented forms of segregation, travel segregation is now one of the
most forgotten,” Bay writes.
“Journey to the Edge Of Reason: The Life of Kurt Gödel”, by
Stephen Budiansky.
(Norton.) Mathematician Gödel upended his profession’s assumptions with his
“incompleteness theorem”, presented in 1930, when he was 24. But expertise in
formal logic is not essential for anyone’s enjoyment of this moving biography.
Budiansky brings a polymath’s interest to bear on a man whose life intersected
with the political and philosophical upheavals of the 20th century.
“On Juneteenth”, by Annette Gordon-Reed.
(Liveright.) Gordon-Reed, a Pulitzer-winning historian best known for her work
on Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, takes a more personal approach in her
latest book. In a series of short, moving essays, she explores “the long road”
to June 19, 1865, when the end of legalized slavery was announced in Texas, the
state where Gordon-Reed was born and raised.
“Colorization: One
Hundred Years of Black Films in a White World”, by
Wil Haygood. (Knopf.)
“Colorization” tells the story of Black artists in the film industry, those in
front of and behind the camera. It moves from pioneer Oscar Micheaux through
the careers of Paul Robeson, Dorothy Dandridge and Lena Horne, and up to the
work of Spike Lee, Ava DuVernay and Jordan Peele.
“In the Eye of
the Wild”, by Nastassja Martin. Translated from the French by Sophie R. Lewis.
(New York Review Books.) In 2015, anthropologist Martin barely survived an
attack by a bear in the mountains of Kamchatka, in eastern Siberia. This
slender yet expansive book is her haunting, genre-defying memoir of the year
that followed. She writes about the attack; about her work among the Indigenous
Even people; and about philosophy, questioning the human propensity to try to
assimilate everything into familiar terms.
FICTION &
POETRY
“Playlist
for the Apocalypse: Poems”, by
Rita Dove. (Norton.) Dove’s new
collection is about the weight of American history, and it is also about
mortality. It is the first time she has publicly acknowledged that she has had
a form of multiple sclerosis for more than 20 years. Some of these poems
address health troubles. Some are about Martin Luther King Jr., Robert F.
Kennedy, Muhammad Ali and Barack Obama. Garner called the poems “among her
best,” and wrote: “Dove’s books derive their force from how she so deftly stirs
the everyday — insomnia, TV movies, Stilton cheese, rattling containers of
pills — into her world of ideas and intellection, in poems that are by turns
delicate, witty and audacious.”
“Intimacies”, by Katie Kitamura. (Riverhead
Books.) Kitamura’s fourth novel is about an unnamed woman who goes to work as
an interpreter at an international court at The Hague. She is in flight from
New York City, where her father recently died. Like nearly everyone in this
novel, she leads a globalized, deracinated life. At work, she interprets for —
and thus climbs inside the heads of — notorious criminals. The novel’s heat
lies in Kitamura’s abiding interest in the subtleties of human power dynamics.
“The War for Gloria”, by Atticus Lish. (Knopf.) “The War for Gloria” is a solemn, punishing,
kinetic portrait of a mother and son facing her mortal illness. The book’s
protagonist, Corey, grows up all but fatherless in and around Boston and seeks
ways to prove himself. He tends to his mother, Gloria, this book’s great,
glowing presence, who has Lou Gehrig’s disease and only a few years to live.
Garner said it is “powerful, intelligent, brooding and most of all convincing;
it earns its emotions”.
“The Magician”,
by Colm Toibin. (Scribner.) This subtle and substantial novel imagines the life
of Thomas Mann, the Nobel Prize-winning author of “Death in Venice” and “The
Magic Mountain”, among other classics. Garner called it a “symphonic and
moving” work.
“Our Country Friends”, by Gary Shteyngart (Random House.) Shteyngart’s new novel begins at
the onset of the pandemic, with seven friends and one nemesis gathered at an
estate in the Hudson Valley to wait out what they are sure will be a quick blip
in their convenient and prosperous lives. Predicaments abound, mysteries
multiply and betrayals proliferate.
“The Days of Afrekete”, by Asali Solomon. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux.) Solomon’s novel is
a reverie, a riff on “Mrs. Dalloway” and a love story. Liselle, its
protagonist, is a Black woman living in Philadelphia. Her husband, who is
white, cut corners while running for the state legislature, and the FBI is
closing in on him.
“Wayward”, by Dana
Spiotta. (Knopf.) For Sam Raymond, the restless heroine of Spiotta’s latest
novel, menopause is reason enough to reevaluate everything. Her body revolts
just as her mother is starting to ail and her teenage daughter is growing
remote and secretive. Sam is rash, funny, searching, entirely unpredictable.
Read more Books
.jpg)
.jpg)
