Politics and war, science and sports, memoir and biography — there's a great big world of nonfiction books out there just waiting to be read. We picked the 100 best and most influential written in English since 1923, the beginning of TIME ... magazine
The gold standard of contemporary political reporting, Cramer’s 1,000-page epic follows six candidates in the 1988 presidential election through the Iowa dinners and New Hampshire motels that are the mileposts of the road to the White House. Armed with thousands of interviews, the author, a Pulitzer Prize–winning former foreign correspondent, shows how the American political system has fashioned a gauntlet that grinds down candidates as a way of assessing their worthiness for the job. Setting out to examine why candidates sacrifice their lives (and occasionally their souls) in the service of unthinkable ambition, he ends up answering a different question altogether: “What did we do to them?” Published in the midst of the 1992 campaign, Cramer recreates the ’88 contest with empathy and artistry.
There are a lot of things easier than writing a book that no one may understand in order to answer questions that most people weren’t even asking — and selling 10 million copies of it. Steven Hawking’s A Brief History of Time, published in 1988, did all of those things. The genius of Hawking was to understand that while people weren’t losing much sleep over such matters as event horizons, space-time geodesics and stellar contraction, they were deeply, primally interested in such questions as “Why does the universe go to all the bother of existing?” as he elegantly put it. In that riddle lives the smaller but more anthropocentrically relevant one, Why do we exist? Hawking provided answers — with hard physics, gentle metaphor, and ideas so big they fill up space itself. And you know what? We got it — and we’re smarter and better because of that.
TIME meets the female Banksy bringing royalty to London’s streets
Melissa
Reblogged this on Swamp of Boredom and commented:
I’m reblogging this for my own reference and also to share with my readers (all 34 of you;)). Since the release of the 1001 Books App on Tuesday, I’ve been book list crazy. Since I like non-fiction – especially non-fiction centered on historical events and people, not so much current people – and have read a couple of excellent non-fiction books in the last year (Only Yesterday, Empire of the Summer Moon) I wondered if there was a list of recommended non-fiction books. Of course there is. I found one from the Guardain (UK) that is, obviously, geared towards British readers and that, unlike Time’s list, encompasses all non-fiction ever written. This list from Time consists of books only since Time began publishing, 1923. There are a few that don’t interest me at all and the biography choices focus too heavily on women and African Americans, IMO, but overall the list is excellent.
Enjoy!
As we prepare for the Game of Thrones finale, we recognize Joffrey and nine other baddies who showed us that terrible, horrible things can come in small packages