Books of 2020: Best Non-Fiction

In a grand year for reading, my grandest books were non-fiction.  After briefly wrestling with whether I should confine myself to one or two recommendations, I have decided to share in the bounty I enjoyed so much.  Really, I just couldn't bring myself to choose.  I do end with my most engaging and memorable book of the year, but if I hadn't read that one this year, others would have easily earned that title.

Best Memoir*

Maybe you Should Talk to Someone; A Therapist, Her Therapist, and our Lives Revealed, Lori Gottlieb, 2019

As of mid-May, this was the best book I'd read this year.  Therapist Lori Gottliieb has written a most interesting book, weaving together her own story of needing and finding her own good therapist, and the stories of her patients (her term), focusing on four in particular.  A skilled writer, she has crafted a work that touches multiple genres *while creating its own.  She takes the reader on a ride, the joyous and sad parts equally moving.  She doesn't take herself too seriously, and parts of this book really made me laugh.  I appreciated the several surprises and turns in the stories and found myself savoring the book, turning to another book partway through to extend my time with this one.  That other book didn't pull me to reading nearly as much as this one.  As someone who has had several rounds of therapy, I appreciated the confessional peeks behind the curtain.  She's especially effective when revealing herself on both sides of the therapist-patient divide.  Maybe you Should Talk to Someone delighted and moved me deeply.

Strangers Tend to Tell Me Things; A Memoir of Love, Loss, and Coming Home, Amy Dickinson, 2017

Having enoyed Amy Dickinson as a panelist on NPR's Wait Wait Don't Tell Me news quiz and
occasionally read her advice column, the idea of a book behind the advice column grabbed my attention.  This book had sat on my to-read list for a few years, however, before the pandemic hit.  At that last library book grab before they shut down, I focused on that list.  Still, it took me four months to get to this book.  Thank goodness the library doesn't want their materials back in any hurry at present.  

This wonderful book must also be described as a bait and switch.  The title implies that the author will focus on the advice column and show the reader the secret sauce.  Perhaps she reveals that indirectly, but a warning to other would-be readers: the advice column comes up vanishingly rarely in this memoir.  Dickinson advances a thesis about why she can give good advice: because her life has been anything but perfect.  Rather, she has survived through obstacles, crises, and her own mistakes.  She calls that survival the basis of a good advice column.  Instead of advice column inside scoop, the reader gets what the subtitle promises.  Dickinson and her siblings saw rocky patches in their childhood in small-town finger lakes New York.  She's terribly honest about decisions and actions she wishes she'd done differently in young adulthood (although her particular set of actions might differ from what that sentence may imply).  Her tiny hometown and her extended family's generational outsize influence there have played a big role in Dickinson's life and likewise take center stage here.  I found reading this book an intense experience - sometimes too intense.  I could read it during the day but not before bed sometimes because her real stresses come to the fore.  Dickinson writes clearly and engagingly, and I finished the book in large chunks outside.  The backyard lounge chair had to stand in for beach reading in a strange summer lacking a normal family vacation.

Best Personal Essay Collection

What's the difference between a memoir and a personal essay collection?  That may be in the eye of the beholder.  I want to say that the above two books stick closely to a theme and an arc, but that could also describe this collection.  In the below book, the chapters can stand on their own more easily than in the above two, so I'll use that to justify the category distinction.

At the Strangers' Gate, Adam Gopnik, 2018

When an author one has read for years here and there comes to town - in this case as part of a Moth Main Stage event - and tells a delightful story and is then waiting with no line at his book table after, one might go up and buy a book.  I'm glad I did that in 2018.  Gopnik had several books on his table in the lobby of Pittsburgh's Byham Theater.  I decided to ask him which one I should buy.  He picked up At the Strangers' Gate and said "people say this is my best book."  I didn't realize it was the book that was just published, the book that had a version of the story he'd told that night.

I really shouldn't go into all of this preamble.  I really should start with: this essay collection is sublime.  I have railed before about Barbara Kingsolver's self-consciously polished sentences.  Gopnik achieves something Kingsolver apparently cannot: un-self-consciously polished sentences.  Multiple sentences in this book stopped me dead in my tracks with their perfection.  Of course, gem-like sentences rule. The overall arc really matters, though, and Gopnik lays it out both systematically and meanderingly.  Or rather, when the reader detects meandering he is only failing to see the larger system the apparent diversion serves.  At the Stranger's Gate introduces Gopnik and his wife Martha Parker as a young Canadian couple arriving in a rough-around-the-edges megalopolis and traces the development of their bond with the city's places, people, and the higher ranks of its unique culture.  At the Stranger's Gate moved me with its romance and its nostalgia for a grittier New York that I encountered from nearby in New Jersey and Connecticut.  It also made me laugh.  Mostly, it made me appreciate the writer's craft - which Gopnik reduces to "choosing the right words and putting them in the right order" -  honed over decades.

Best History

The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of how our Government Segregated America, Richard Rothstein, 2017

The Color of Law appeared on many people’s "get woke" reading lists in 2020 and for good reason.  Rothstein’s 2017 book encompasses ten years of research and writing on the sadly systematic and pervasive de jure segregation of America in the 20th century.  The polite fiction with which many Americans console themselves is that our segregated neighborhoods and municipalities all result from de facto segregation.  It just happens; like sorts with like.  Rothstein lays out in devastating detail (but with surprising efficiency and clarity) how our segregation is de jure, legally recognized and enforced.  Multiple factors contribute including the racist orientation of the Fair Housing Administration, whose loans built and populated the suburbs, restrictive covenants, the placement of public housing and school catchment boundaries, the passive allowance (or active participation) of police in white mob violence when intact, employed African American families attempted the "sin" of moving into a white neighborhood.  Rothstein tells the stories of these families and individuals to demonstrate the impacts of the hydra that has fought at every opportunity against African Americans specifically living near white people specifically.  It’s hard to face all of these facts.  I had to as a reader, and we must as a nation.  I’m grateful for the succinct summation Rothstein offers.

Best Book on Life 

Breath; the New Science of a Lost Art, James Nestor, 2020

Since I don't love buying or owning books, I don't always get my hands on runaway bestsellers, but James Nestor's interview on Fresh Air piqued my curiosity.  When the library fulfilled my request rather quickly, I cleared the decks and figured out how many pages I'd have to read in a three-week lending period, figuring I would not be able to renew it.  That's a lot of mechanics before I get to: this book could change lives; it's changed mine.  Nestor combines modern science with ancient knowledge and myth about breathing to point out that post-industrial humanity has emerged to become - as a group - the most singularly poor breathers in the animal kingdom.  The book covers complicated material in a straightforward fashion, but it remains difficult to summarize.  Our post-industrialization soft food diet has rearranged our faces to make us breathe through our mouths more when we should be breathing through our noses.  Nestor traveled the world and submitted himself to both mild and radical breathing experiments to provide his personal account of a multitude of ideas and techniques about breathing.  He assembles a fascinating read by weaving together science journalism and his personal experience.  If there's one takeaway from the book, it's that we should all breathe through our noses as much as possible in order to get all of the benefits of that organ.  The nose moderates the temperature of our breath and cleans it.  There are more takeaways and more radical ideas about breathing to different ends.  In the end, it's a quick read that may have you contemplating taping your mouth shut when you go to sleep (like I do now) before you know it.

Honorable Mentions

But What if We're Wrong?  Thinking About the Present As If It Were the Past, Chuck Klosterman, 2016

The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry, John Mark Comer, 2019

Sick in the Head; Conversations about Life and Comedy, Judd Apatow, 2016