List: Our 10 Best Non-Fiction Books of 2021

1.    The Shattering: America in the 1960s by Kevin Boyle (W. W. Norton)

Boyle’s gripping, indelible account of the ‘60s deserves a spot next to J. Anthony Lukas’ classic Common Ground, which unravels history through those who lived it. Boyle, a Northwestern University history professor and winner of the National Book Award and the Chicago Tribune Heartland Literary Prize for Arc of Justice about early 20th-century racial injustice in Detroit, fully synthesizes portraits of prominent figures into this nuanced narrative. But his special talent is his keen radar for the rising middle class, framing his inquiry with a bungalow-living Chicago couple, buying a car and a television set and expecting their first child. Magically, Boyle’s kaleidoscopic narrative focuses on that majority, destabilized by three impulses: the civil rights movement and white backlash, the Vietnam War and cultural liberalism, and the legalization of birth control, which ignited a battle between feminists and religious conservatives.

2.    New York, New York, New York: Four Decades of Success, Excess, and Transformation by Thomas Dyja (Simon & Schuster)

Dyja hoisted the chip off the City of Big Shoulders in his award-winning The Third Coast: When Chicago Built the American Dream, and now he takes a big, juicy bite out of the Big Apple. He fully grasps the DNA of New York, as it lurched forward over three incarnations, each one  “bigger, faster, and sleeker than the one before, each one more merciless and beautiful.” Dyja tracks New York’s transformation from the hollowed-out, lawless city of the 1970s, where serial killer Son of Sam exclaimed, “Hello from the gutters of N.Y.C.,” into a gleaming metropolis of inequality that promotes a “new culture of wealth and celebrity valued explicitly because it was so visible.” Fans of Jane Jacobs’ classic The Death and Life of Great American Cities will applaud Dyja’s incisive, insightful book.

3.    Invisible Child: Poverty, Survival, and Hope in an American City by Andrea Elliott (Random House)

What ever happened to Dasani Coates? In her riveting 2013 series for the New York Times, Elliott introduced readers to the unforgettable, precocious, feisty 11-year-old girl living with her family in a Fort Greene, Brooklyn, homeless shelter. After spending more than eight years with Dasani, Elliott has written a classic book that deserves a space on a bookshelf with Alex Kotlowitz’s There Are No Children Here and Matthew Desmond’s Evicted. Dasani, who is her siblings’ de facto mother, feels invisible, but this remarkable book, as it exposes the web of history, poverty, policies, and agencies that have failed this girl, has ensured that she is very much seen.

4.    The Cause: The American Revolution and Its Discontents, 1773-1783 by Joseph J. Ellis (Liveright)

In the victorious red, white, and blue, Ellis finds the gray. Through his compelling narrative, Ellis argues that paradoxically, the “American Revolution succeeded because it was not really a revolution.” In style and substance, Ellis lifts the mythical haze shrouding this history by vivifying boldface names, like George Washington and John Adams, and battle sites like Valley Forge and Yorktown. But his polyphonic account also elevates overlooked characters like an army surgeon from Connecticut, Albigence Waldo; Col. John Glover and his elite unit of soldier-sailors called the Marblehead Mariners; Joseph Plumb Martin, “the Zelig of the American Revolution”; and Harry Washington, George Washington’s enslaved namesake, who escaped Mount Vernon for freedom offered to those who joined the British Army. History may not be prophecy, but as Ellis writes in his prescient, eloquent, and wise chronicle, two enduring political legacies were firmly embedded in the American founding: “(F)irst, any robust expression of government power, most especially at the federal level, was placed on the permanent defensive; second, conspiracy theories that might otherwise have been dismissed as preposterous shouts from the lunatic fringe enjoyed a supportive environment because of their hallowed association with The Cause.”

5.    On Juneteenth by Annette Gordon-Reed (Liveright)

This short, elegant book is not merely a history of the holiday of June 19, 1865, shortened to Juneteenth, the day that enslaved African Americans in Texas learned that slavery had ended. Rather, it’s “a look at history through the medium of personal memoir, a Texan’s view of the long road to Juneteenth,” Gordon-Reed writes. It’s the American story that eloquently gets beyond stereotypes of Indians, colonialist settlers, Hispanic culture, slavery, race, and immigration, she explains. Gordon-Reed won a Pulitzer Prize for The Hemingses of Monticello, a rigorous work of scholarship on the family of Sally Hemings, the enslaved woman with whom Thomas Jefferson had multiple children. In On Juneteenth, she writes of her difficult attachment to her home state. “Love does not require taking an uncritical stance toward the object of one’s affections. In truth, it often requires the opposite,” she writes at the end of her nuanced, persuasive book. “We can’t be of real service to the hopes we have for places – and people, ourselves included – without a clear-eyed assessment of their

6.    Until Justice Be Done: America’s First Civil Rights Movement, from the Revolution to Reconstruction by Kate Masur (W.W.Norton)

As the title of her capacious, ambitious new book indicates, Northwestern University historian Masur focuses on “the struggle for racial equality in civil rights that spanned the first eight decades of the nation’s history, a movement that traveled from the margins of American politics to the center and ended up transforming the US Constitution.” This is a history of the antebellum movement against racist oppression, showing how unfree the free states really were and detailing how the “ideas of race, rights, citizenship, and federalism that are crystallized in those monumental measures of 1866 made their way into the mainstream of northern American politics and then into federal policy.” Masur deftly weaves in stories of everyday people who challenged local laws, fought codes and restrictions, petitioned, and resisted with a force and vision that shaped the 14th Amendment.

7.    All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley’s Sack, a Black Family Keepsake by Tiya Miles (Random House)

Winner of the 2021 National Book Award for Non-Fiction, All That She Carried was praised as a “brilliant, original work that presents a Black woman’s countercompilation of lives that ordinary archives suppress.” Harvard history professor and MacArthur fellow Miles uncovers the story of a grain sack containing “a tattered dress 3 handfulls of pecans a braid of Roses hair” and “filled with my Love always” given by enslaved Rose to her daughter Ashley as the girl was auctioned off in 1850s South Carolina, then passed by Ashley to her granddaughter Ruth. With extraordinary detective work and fidelity to scholarship, Miles uses this bag to illuminate generations of pain and injustice, and is a must-read.

8.    Wildland: The Making of America’s Fury by Evan Osnos (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

In the tradition of Inside U.S.A., John Gunther’s 1947 classic portrait of America, Osnos brings his own intimate and panoramic perspective to the nation. After years reporting from abroad, including China, as a correspondent for The New Yorker, he returned home to find a nation of deep fissures that he exposes through places he has lived: Clarksburg, West Virginia; Chicago; and Greenwich, Connecticut, where so many hedge fund managers had been charged with fraud that Osnos’ former street, Round Hill Road, was known as “Rogues Hill Road.” In his vivid narrative, enriched by very human stories, Osnos captures the history of the erosion of a national sense of common good from 9/11 to the Jan. 6 insurrection at the Capitol.

9.    The Extended Mind: The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain by Annie Murphy Paul (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)

 “Use your head.” That cliché assumes that the brain is the sole source for thought, and in her revelatory book, Paul subverts the notion that the brain is “a cordoned-off space where cognition happens, much as the workings of my laptop are sealed inside its aluminum case.” In finding the “secret history of thinking outside the brain,” Paul weaves scientific research and evidence with storytelling and cultural history, ranging from how biographer Robert Caro plots his subjects’ lives on an extremely detailed wall-sized map to Nobel physicist Carl Wieman, who prompted his students to talk to one another so they could really think like scientists. She writes with a generous tone that makes her book a pleasure to read. The idea of the extended mind – the role of the body, place, and work with others in a form of  “collective intelligence” – excited Paul, who has been writing about psychology and cognitive science for two decades, and she infuses these ideas with educated enthusiasm. “[I]t’s the stuff outside our heads that makes us smart – a proposition with enormous implications for what we do in education, in the workplace, and in our everyday lives,” she writes. Or, more simply: “What we need to do is think outside the brain.”

10. The Family Roe: An American Story by Joshua Prager (W. W. Norton)

“Roe,” as in Roe v. Wade, has become shorthand for the Supreme Court’s 1973 decision to protect the legal right to obtain abortion. Plaintiff “Jane Roe” has been flattened and made invisible, but journalist Prager has engaged in a reconnaissance mission to recover the woman behind the pseudonym. In his timely, deeply researched book, Prager introduces Norma McCorvey who died in 2017 transformed by lawyers into what seemed like the perfect plaintiff, though in reality she was full of intriguing contradictions. He investigates McCorvey’s series  of unwanted pregnancies and locates the daughter whose conception led to the Supreme Court. Prager extends his rich and vibrant narrative of the lawsuit that reshaped American politics beyond legalities to include abortion providers as well as anti-abortion activists, an array scrupulously detailed and vividly rendered.