BOOKS Fiction Nonfiction Ron Charles Becca Rothfeld

50 notable works of
nonfiction
The year’s best memoirs, biographies, history and more

By Washington Post Editors and Reviewers

November 15, 2023 at 7:00 a.m. EST

‘The 272: The Families Who Were Enslaved and

Sold to Build the American Catholic Church,’ by
Rachel L. Swarns
With great detail, Swarns tells the story of the enslaved people sold by the Jesuits in 1838 to save
Georgetown College, today’s Georgetown University. “The 272” makes the case for reckoning with
this painful past that made the wealth of the Catholic Church and our nation. (Book World
review.)

‘Affinities: On Art and Fascination,’ by Brian Dillon

“Affinities” is a compendium of pictures, mostly photographs or stills from films, printed on
otherwise blank pages and followed by bouts of commentary, forays into “the mundane miracle of
looking.” (Book World review.)

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 ‘Althea: The Life of Tennis Champion Althea
Gibson,’ by Sally H. Jacobs
In 1957, Althea Gibson became the first Black tennis player to win the Wimbledon singles title.
She also accomplished a remarkable number of other firsts. Jacobs’s lively book is one of two
Gibson biographies published this year: Ashley Brown’s “Serving Herself,” a bit more academic in
approach, is equally worthy. (Book World review.)

‘American Gun: The True Story of the AR-15,’ by

Cameron McWhirter and Zusha Elinson
“American Gun: The True Story of the AR-15” is a deeply reported, engrossing account of the
rifle, tracing its evolution from battlefield combat to today’s domestic carnage and culture war.
(Book World review.)

‘The Art Thief: A True Story of Love, Crime, and a

Dangerous Obsession,’ by Michael Finkel
Finkel revisits the exploits of Stéphane Breitwieser, the most prolific art robber in history. The
book delves into his methods and reveals how his missteps ultimately led to his capture. (Book
World review.)

‘The Best Minds: A Story of Friendship, Madness,

and the Tragedy of Good Intentions,’ by Jonathan
Rosen
Rosen’s haunting book recounts the author’s friendship, starting at 10 years old, with Michael
Laudor, who as an adult would be diagnosed with schizophrenia and make national headlines
when he murdered his fiancé. Rosen deftly moves from historical analysis to the deeply personal.
(Book World review.)

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 ‘The Big Break: The Gamblers, Party Animals and
True Believers Trying to Win in Washington While
America Loses Its Mind,’ by Ben Terris
Washington Post reporter Terris follows Beltway newcomers and bit players who have come to
D.C. seeking to rise and prosper — or, in some cases, merely survive — amid the chaotic
aftermath of the Trump era. (Book World review.)

‘Built From the Fire: The Epic Story of Tulsa’s

Greenwood District, America’s Black Wall Street,’
by Victor Luckerson
Tulsa’s Greenwood District was a beacon of success and an unapologetic example of Black self-
determination. Over the course of two days in 1921, thousands of White people destroyed it and
killed more than 300 people. Luckerson’s exceptional account is complex and empathetic. (Book
World review.)

‘Collision of Power: Trump, Bezos, and The

Washington Post,’ by Martin Baron
Baron became executive editor of The Post in 2013 after a storied tenure at the Boston Globe.
This memoir provides an inside look at his steering The Post through a change in ownership and
the Trump presidency. (Book World review.)

‘Correction: Parole, Prison, and the Possibility of

Change,’ by Ben Austen

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 Austen constructs this illuminating investigation of the inequities and injustices of the parole
system around intimate portraits of Johnnie Veal and Michael Henderson, two Black men
convicted of murder as teenagers in 1970s Illinois. (Book World review.)

‘The Country of the Blind: A Memoir at the End of

Sight,’ by Andrew Leland
Leland’s memoir is less a ledger of loss than an accounting of how blindness transforms his life,
from performing routine tasks to seeking out new experiences.

‘The Critic’s Daughter: A Memoir,’ by Priscilla

Gilman
Gilman reflects on her relationship with her father, the famed literary critic Richard Gilman,
offering an account of a child’s confounding adoration for her parent. (Book World review.)

‘Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of

America,’ by Heather Cox Richardson
The history professor behind Substack’s wildly popular newsletter “Letters From an American”
looks at our current anxious age as if it’s a crime in a detective novel. (Book World review.)

‘The Dictionary People: The Unsung Heroes Who

Created the Oxford English Dictionary,’ by Sarah
Ogilvie
Behind the estimable Oxford English Dictionary was an army of some 3,000 volunteers who
supplied the quotations that are the particular glory of the OED. Ogilvie tells the fascinating story
of these unsung contributors. (Book World review.)

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 ‘Don’t Tell Anybody the Secrets I Told You: A
Memoir,’ by Lucinda Williams
The singer-songwriter shares the details of her hardscrabble Southern youth, material that fed
some of her more melancholic songs. Williams’s flinty voice comes through without any self-pity.
(Book World review.)

‘Fatherland: A Memoir of War, Conscience, and

Family Secrets,’ by Burkhard Bilger
Bilger’s grandfather was a member of the Nazi party who was accused of murder. In trying to find
the truth, Bilger has written an elegant and ambivalent book animated by an insoluble mystery.
(Book World review.)

‘A Fever in the Heartland: The Ku Klux Klan’s Plot

to Take Over America, and the Woman Who
Stopped Them,’ by Timothy Egan
Egan’s latest is a highly readable chronicle of the Ku Klux Klan’s resurrection during the early
20th century and a terrifying study of one particular Klan leader. (Book World review.)

‘Fire Weather: A True Story From a Hotter World,’

by John Vaillant
Vaillant tells the story of a devastating wildfire that swept through Fort McMurray, Alberta, in
2016, mounting a systematic investigation into all the factors that conspired to wreak such havoc.
(Book World review.)

‘George: A Magpie Memoir,’ by Frieda Hughes

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 Hughes, a poet and artist (and daughter of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes), chronicles the months
she cared for an injured magpie. This poignant, funny book includes Hughes’s sweet drawings of
George. (Book World review.)

‘Gun Country: Gun Capitalism, Culture and Control

in Cold War America,’ by Andrew C. McKevitt
In this crisply written and incisive work, McKevitt chronicles the transformation of guns from
tangible weapons to ideological ammunition, starting with guns arriving in America in
unprecedented quantities after World War II. (Book World review.)

‘An Inconvenient Cop: My Fight to Change Policing

in America,’ by Edwin Raymond, with Jon Sternfeld
Raymond, a former New York City police officer, took a stand against the system, filing a class-
action lawsuit over arrest quotas. Here he spells out what’s wrong with law enforcement in
America, and he calls for meaningful police reform. (Book World review.)

‘Leg: The Story of a Limb and the Boy Who Grew

From It,’ by Greg Marshall
Marshall’s memoir is about being born with cerebral palsy and not being told about it until he
was 30. The book is also a gay coming-of-age story and surprisingly funny, never slowing in its
energy, hope and warmth. (Book World review.)

‘Liliana’s Invincible Summer: A Sister’s Search for

Justice,’ by Cristina Rivera Garza

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 In 1990, Liliana Rivera Garza was killed in Mexico. Nearly 30 years later, her older sister,
Cristina, set out to find out what happened to her. Part memoir, part true-crime story, Garza’s
chronicle is both personal and political. (Book World review.)

‘Lives of the Wives: Five Literary Marriages,’ by

Carmela Ciuraru
Ciuraru studies five literary couples, including Roald Dahl and Patricia Neal, as a way to show
how not to be married. The book highlights the negotiations and compromises in these pairings,
demonstrating how subservience and disparity undermine relationships. (Book World review.)

‘Lou Reed: The King of New York,’ by Will Hermes

Hermes brings a blend of rhapsody and scholarly dispassion, love and skepticism to his
beautifully researched and written biography of the legendary Velvet Underground frontman.
(Book World review.)

‘Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma,’ by Claire Dederer

In her vital, exhilarating book, Dederer considers how to view the work of creative “geniuses” who
are known to be “muscular, unfettered, womanizing, virile, cruel.” How badly must an artist
behave before he is canceled? In this breezy and confessional accounting, the answer isn’t
definitive, but the work of pondering is a thrill. (Book World review.)

‘Number Go Up: Inside Crypto’s Wild Rise and

Staggering Fall,’ by Zeke Faux
This boisterous book by Bloomberg reporter Faux focuses largely on the meteoric rise of the
“stablecoin” Tether. Sam Bankman-Fried makes appearances, but Faux’s entertaining and
disturbing account is about much more than the convicted FTX founder. (Book World review.)

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 ‘Of Time and Turtles: Mending the World, Shell by
Shattered Shell,’ by Sy Montgomery
The naturalist Montgomery captures the wonder of animals without taming them. Here she
revels in the charm and wonder of turtles, while also calling attention to the dangers they face in
the modern world. (Book World review.)

‘Pageboy: A Memoir,’ by Elliot Page

Page, who publicly came out as transgender in 2020, charts the tremendous emotional and
psychological effort it took for him to confront suffocating social messaging about gender and
sexuality. (Book World review.)

‘The People’s Hospital: Hope and Peril in American

Medicine,’ by Ricardo Nuila
Physician Nuila has spent his career at Ben Taub, a “safety net” hospital in Houston, created to
help those without health insurance gain access to care. In writing about that facility, he attempts
‘Built From thethe
to untangle Fire: The Epic Story
labyrinthine of Tulsa’s
system Greenwood
of American District,
hospitals America’s
and, Black Wall
more crucially, Street,’ bymedical
American Victor Luckerson
insurance. (Book World review.)

‘The Possibility of Life: Science, Imagination, and

Our Quest for Kinship in the Cosmos,’ by Jaime
Green
Science journalist Green examines the many ways humans have turned their eyes to the skies in
search of other forms of existence in the cosmos in this wide-ranging survey. (Book World
review.)

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 ‘President Garfield: From Radical to Unifier,’ by
C.W. Goodyear
James Garfield served just 200 days as president, 80 of which he spent dying after being shot by
an assassin. In the hands of Goodyear, his life becomes a fascinating national portrait of an
imperfect union struggling across its first century to live up to the promise of its founding. (Book
World review.)

‘The Red Hotel: Moscow 1941, the Metropol Hotel,

and the Untold Story of Stalin’s Propaganda War,’
by Alan Philps
Most Western journalists in the Soviet Union during World War II ended up confined to
Moscow’s Metropol Hotel, filing censored stories. In telling about the past, Philps’s book raises
questions about our present and how audiences should interpret news about contemporary
conflicts. (Book World review.)

‘The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and

the Unmaking of U.S. History,’ by Ned Blackhawk
Even as the telling of American history has become more complex and nuanced, Native
Americans tend to be absent. Blackhawk, a professor at Yale, confronts that absence in this
sweeping account of how Native Americans shaped the country legally, politically and culturally.
(Book World interview.)

‘Saying It Loud: 1966 — the Year Black Power

Challenged the Civil Rights Movement,’ by Mark
Whitaker

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 Whitaker charts an especially tumultuous period in the history of the civil rights movement.
Focusing on the high-profile events and activists who seized national attention, he has written a
fresh take on a transformative era. (Book World review.)

‘The Secret Gate: A True Story of Courage and

Sacrifice During the Collapse of Afghanistan,’ by
Mitchell Zuckoff
“The Secret Gate” describes, in compelling detail, the excruciating decisions faced by members of
the U.S. diplomatic corps and military as they decided whom to evacuate and whom to leave
behind during the fall of Kabul in the summer of 2021. (Book World review.)

‘Spare,’ by Prince Harry

Perhaps the most talked-about book of 2023 as well as one of the best-selling, the Duke of
Sussex’s memoir delivered all the gossip readers wanted — and more. All the while, the prince
comes off as good-natured, rancorous, humorous, self-righteous and self-deprecating, if long-
winded. (Book World review.)

‘Starkweather: The Untold Story of the Killing

Spree That Changed America,’ by Harry N.
MacLean
In this methodical investigation of a string of murders committed by Charles Starkweather in
Nebraska in 1958, MacLean calls attention to the relative innocence of Starkweather’s teenage
girlfriend and explores the changing national climate that made the killings such objects of
fascination.

‘The Story of a Life: Books 1-3,’ by Konstantin

Paustovsky, translated by Douglas Smith

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 By the time of his death in 1968, Paustovsky was one of the Soviet Union’s most beloved writers.
His autobiographical magnum opus (or part of it), throughout which he is often in the immediate
vicinity of history being made, has now been reissued in this fine new translation. (Book World
review.)

‘To Free the Captives: A Plea for the American

Soul,’ by Tracy K. Smith
This book is mostly about Smith’s genealogical investigations and the archival dead ends created
by racist institutions. Smith is a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, and on nearly every page is a phrase
or sentence to marvel over. (Book World review.)

‘UFO: The Inside Story of the U.S. Government’s

Search for Alien Life Here — and Out There,’ by
Garrett M. Graff
Are we alone? This is, in essence, the question at the heart of Graff’s new book, which explores
the past 80 or so years of UFO history, looking at decades of federal, private and scientific
research. (Book World review.)

‘Under the Eye of Power: How Fear of Secret

Societies Shapes American Democracy,’ by Colin
Dickey
Dickey vividly retells the histories of many of the conspiratorial fables that Americans have used
to frighten and mobilize themselves, offering complex, well-informed analyses. (Book World
review.)

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 ‘The Upside-Down World: Meetings With the Dutch
Masters,’ by Benjamin Moser
If you like visiting the Dutch and Flemish galleries at your favorite museum to commune with
Rembrandt and Vermeer, Moser’s book is an excellent companion: conversational and congenial,
essayistic and elevating. (Book World review.)

‘The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and

Murder,’ by David Grann
A tightly written, relentless account that is hard to put down, the latest by Grann (“Killers of the
Flower Moon”) is an 18th-century tale in which everything goes wrong over and over — and over
— again. (Book World review.)

‘Waiting to be Arrested at Night: A Uyghur Poet’s

Memoir of China’s Genocide,’ by Tahir Hamut Izgil
When mass detentions swept China’s Xinjiang province in 2017, the author of this quietly
terrifying memoir was a rising Uyghur writer. Now safely settled with his family in Washington,
he’s one of the few who escaped. (Book World review.)

‘We Were Once a Family: A Story of Love, Death,

and Child Removal in America,’ by Roxanna
Asgarian
Jennifer and Sarah Hart, a White married couple, adopted a set of three biracial siblings in 2006
and three Black siblings two years later. Asgarian’s riveting gut punch of a book recounts the
family’s horrific headline-making tragedy and the broader story of child welfare in America.
(Book World review.)

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 ‘When Crack Was King: A People’s History of a
Misunderstood Era,’ by Donovan X. Ramsey
Ramsey’s book is a master class in disrupting a stubborn narrative. It’s a deeply personal,
panoramic political history of Black America, crack cocaine, and the disastrous drug laws and
policies that are still on the books. (Book World review.)

‘Winnie and Nelson: Portrait of a Marriage,’ by

Jonny Steinberg
Steinberg’s epic book is about the Mandelas, South Africa’s most famous, beloved and
beleaguered couple, charismatic public figures whose love affair became a national legend and a
personal nightmare. (Book World review.)

‘Without Children: The Long History of Not Being a

Mother,’ by Peggy O’Donnell Heffington
Why aren’t Americans having more babies? Heffington rebuts several unsubstantiated yet
persistent answers, and shows that systemic and institutional explanations are the most useful.
(Book World review.)

‘The Wounded World: W.E.B. Du Bois and the First

World War,’ by Chad L. Williams
This compulsively readable narrative revisits Du Bois’s unsuccessful efforts to complete a
definitive history of Black participation in World War I, following his controversial editorial
urging Black Americans to join the war effort. (Book World review.)

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