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.
By global standards, the traffic congestion that afflicts Taiwan’s urban areas isn’t horrific. But nor is it something the country can be proud of. According to TomTom, a Dutch developer of location and navigation technologies, last year Taiwan was the sixth most congested country in Asia. Of the 492 towns and cities included in its rankings last year, Taipei was the 74th most congested. Taoyuan ranked 105th, while Hsinchu County (121st), Taichung (142nd), Tainan (173rd), New Taipei City (227th), Kaohsiung (241st) and Keelung (302nd) also featured on the list. Four Japanese cities have slower traffic than Taipei. (Seoul, which has some
In our discussions of tourism in Taiwan we often criticize the government’s addiction to promoting food and shopping, while ignoring Taiwan’s underdeveloped trekking and adventure travel opportunities. This discussion, however, is decidedly land-focused. When was the last time a port entered into it? Last week I encountered journalist and travel writer Cameron Dueck, who had sailed to Taiwan in 2023-24, and was full of tales. Like everyone who visits, he and his partner Fiona Ching loved our island nation and had nothing but wonderful experiences on land. But he had little positive to say about the way Taiwan has organized its
The entire Li Zhenxiu (李貞秀) saga has been an ugly, complicated mess. Born in China’s Hunan Province, she moved to work in Shenzhen, where she met her future Taiwanese husband. Most accounts have her arriving in Taiwan and marrying somewhere between 1993 and 1999. She built a successful career in Taiwan in the tech industry before founding her own company. She also served in high-ranking positions on various environmentally-focused tech associations. She says she was inspired by the founding of the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) in 2019 by Ko Wen-je (柯文哲), and began volunteering for the party soon after. Ko
Writing of the finds at the ancient iron-working site of Shihsanhang (十 三行) in New Taipei City’s Bali District (八里), archaeologist Tsang Cheng-hwa (臧振華) of the Academia Sinica’s Institute of History and Philology observes: “One bronze bowl gilded with gold, together with copper coins and fragments of Tang and Song ceramics, were also found. These provide evidence for early contact between Taiwan aborigines and Chinese.” The Shihsanhang Web site from the Ministry of Culture says of the finds: “They were evidence that the residents of the area had a close trading relation with Chinese civilians, as the coins can be
RSS