In the tough times of 2020, I’ve found myself drawn to nonfiction that made me look at the familiar in a different way. I’ve collected my favorite 10 books of the year here. The first 9 are in random order, followed by my pick for the best nonfiction book of the year.
Why We Swim
Bonnie Tsui
So many of us are drawn to the water, for recreation, for beautiful vistas, for food. And then there’s those who go to swim. In elegant prose, Tsui explores her own love of plunging into the water, and combines history, psychology, and interviews to explain the same emotion in others. Also, why humans are like salmon.
Kindred: Neanderthal Life, Love, Death and Art
Rebecca Sykes
Sykes argues that we’ve spent too much time studying the way Neanderthals interacted with Homo Sapiens and too little studying the way Neanderthals interacted with each other. So she tells us how they lived, treating them not as one of evolution’s failures but as our close behavioral cousins. “The fate of the Neanderthals has monopolized enormous amounts of attention,” she writes, “yet it may be the least interesting thing about them.”
Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art
James Nestor
Who knew that nearly all of us breathe wrong, to the detriment of our health? Or that the culprit might be “dysevolution” caused by the development of speech? A bit overconfident in places, but a fascinating view of a function we take for granted.
If Then: How the Simulmatics Corporation Invented the Future
Jill Lepore
Although I’ve read countless histories of the sixties, I’d never heard of Simulmatics, an early effort to harness computer-drive analytics to predict the behavior of voters and consumers. The company didn’t do the work all that well, but it made a lot of influential friends, and anticipated the world we inhabit.
Driving While Black: African American Travel and the Road to Civil Rights
Gretchen Sorin
I’d never given much thought to how the ability of Black families to afford cars and go places influenced the course of history. Sorin weaves together gruesome tales of Black accident victims, the way Black affluence led corporations to try to profit from integration, and much more. An overlooked tour de force.
The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous
Joseph Henrich
The rare case of a volume that deserves all its many accolades. The title says it all. One can quibble over details (for example, some of what he says about the Western church), but overall, it’s a remarkable tome that makes a powerful case.
An Outsider’s Guide to Humans: What Science Taught Me About What We Do and Who We Are
Camilla Pang
“I’ve often despaired at my ignorance toward my own species,” writes Pang, who was diagnosed at age eight with autism spectrum disorder. Whether or not you agree with Pang that humans are basically code, her sharp-eyed observations about behavior, emotion and relationships should help us understand ourselves a little better.
Free to Move: Foot Voting, Migration, and Political Freedom
Ilya Somin
Suppose the right to exit is more important than the right to vote? Whether switching jobs, moving to different states or crossing international borders, Somin argues, the ability to change our lives by changing our surroundings is a vital and personal freedom too often taken for granted.
The Price of Peace: Money, Democracy, and the Life of John Maynard Keynes
Zachary Carter
The author has come under fire for downplaying his subject’s attraction to the eugenics movement, but that aside, this biography not only of Keynes but of Keynsianism is consistently fascinating, and manages to deploy the jargon of the profession in ways that always illuminate rather than confuse. Highly relevant to the moment.
And my pick as best nonfiction book of the year:
The Fabric of Civilization: How Textiles Made the World
Virginia Postrel
Postrel offers a bold retelling of history through an emphasis on cloth — cloth as decoration, cloth as currency, cloth as ritual and much more. One of the most extraordinary volumes I have read in years.
As always, happy reading.
In the March 9 edition of the Taipei Times a piece by Ninon Godefroy ran with the headine “The quiet, gentle rhythm of Taiwan.” It started with the line “Taiwan is a small, humble place. There is no Eiffel Tower, no pyramids — no singular attraction that draws the world’s attention.” I laughed out loud at that. This was out of no disrespect for the author or the piece, which made some interesting analogies and good points about how both Din Tai Fung’s and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co’s (TSMC, 台積電) meticulous attention to detail and quality are not quite up to
Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairman Eric Chu (朱立倫) hatched a bold plan to charge forward and seize the initiative when he held a protest in front of the Taipei City Prosecutors’ Office. Though risky, because illegal, its success would help tackle at least six problems facing both himself and the KMT. What he did not see coming was Taipei Mayor Chiang Wan-an (將萬安) tripping him up out of the gate. In spite of Chu being the most consequential and successful KMT chairman since the early 2010s — arguably saving the party from financial ruin and restoring its electoral viability —
It is one of the more remarkable facts of Taiwan history that it was never occupied or claimed by any of the numerous kingdoms of southern China — Han or otherwise — that lay just across the water from it. None of their brilliant ministers ever discovered that Taiwan was a “core interest” of the state whose annexation was “inevitable.” As Paul Kua notes in an excellent monograph laying out how the Portuguese gave Taiwan the name “Formosa,” the first Europeans to express an interest in occupying Taiwan were the Spanish. Tonio Andrade in his seminal work, How Taiwan Became Chinese,
Toward the outside edge of Taichung City, in Wufeng District (霧峰去), sits a sprawling collection of single-story buildings with tiled roofs belonging to the Wufeng Lin (霧峰林家) family, who rose to prominence through success in military, commercial, and artistic endeavors in the 19th century. Most of these buildings have brick walls and tiled roofs in the traditional reddish-brown color, but in the middle is one incongruous property with bright white walls and a black tiled roof: Yipu Garden (頤圃). Purists may scoff at the Japanese-style exterior and its radical departure from the Fujianese architectural style of the surrounding buildings. However, the property
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