New York Times Notable Books For 2006: Non Fiction Top 40
Discover the New York Times' Notable Nonfiction Books of 2006 with our curated top 40 list. From Michael Pollan's *Omnivore's Dilemma* to Lawrence Wright's *The Looming Tower* and Elizabeth Gilbert's *Eat, Pray, Love*, explore biographies, history, and political science classics that defined the year.
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The Afterlife
by Donald Antrim
"In the winter of 2000, shortly after his mother's death from cancer and malnourishment, Donald Antrim, author of Elect Mr. Robinson for a Better World, The Hundred Brothers, and The Verificationist, began writing about his family. In pieces that appeared in The New Yorker and were anthologized in Best American Essays, Antrim explored his intense and complicated relationships with his mother, Louanne, an artist and teacher who was, at her worst, a ferociously destabilized and destabilizing alcoholic; his gentle grandfather, who lived in the mountains of North Carolina and who always hoped to save his daughter from herself; and his father, who married Louanne twice. The Afterlife is not a temporally linear coming-of-age memoir; instead, Antrim follows a logic of unconscious life, of dreams and memories, of fantasies and psychoses, the way in which the world of the alcoholic becomes a sleepless, atemporal world. In it, he comes to terms with--and fails to comes to terms with--the nature of addiction and the broken states of loneliness, shame, and loss that remain beyond his power to fully repair. This is a tender and even blackly hilarious portrait of a family--faulty, cracked, enraging. It is also the story of the way the author works, in part through writing this book, to become a man more fully alive to himself and to others, a man capable of a life in which he may never learn, or ever hope to know, the nature of his origins"--Publisher's description.
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America at the Crossroads
by Francis Fukuyama
Presents a critique of the Bush Administration's Iraq policy, arguing that it stemmed from misconceptions about the realities of the situation in Iraq and a squandering of the goodwill of American allies following September 11th.
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Andrew Carnegie
by David Nasaw
"Andrew Carnegie, whose lifetime spanned the era from the beginning of the Industrial Revolution to the First World War, was America's first modern titan. In his biography, celebrated historian David Nasaw brings to life this period of unprecedented transition - a time of self-made millionaires, scabs, strikes, and a new kind of philanthropy - through the fascinating rags-to-riches story of one of our most iconic business legends." "The Scottish-born son of a failed weaver and a mother who supported the family by binding shoes, Andrew Carnegie is the embodiment of the American dream. After emigrating to America with his family, this smart and eager lad rose from his job as a bobbin boy in a Pittsburgh cotton factory to become a telegraph messenger, Pennsylvania Railroad employee, bridge builder, bond trader, iron and steel maker, and, eventually, the richest man in the world. In this climb to power and in the accumulation of his fortune he was single-minded and relentless and a major player in some of the most violent and notorious labor strikes of the time. The prototype of today's billionaire, he was a visionary in the way that he earned his money and in the way that he gave it away. Upon his retirement, he dedicated himself to giving away every penny of the wealth he had amassed and to crusading for international peace." "Nasaw explains how Carnegie made his early fortune and what prompted him to give it all away, how Carnegie became obsessively consumed with his prescient predictions of world war, and how he masterly politicked with presidents and prime ministers to try to pull the world back from the brink of disaster. With a trove of new material - unpublished chapters of Carnegie's Autobiography, personal letters between Carnegie and his future wife, his prenuptial agreement, diaries of family members and close friends, and private letters to and from presidents Grant, Cleveland, McKinley, and Roosevelt, and British prime ministers Gladstone and Balfour, as well as Henry Clay Frick, Herbert Spencer, Matthew Arnold, and Mark Twain - Nasaw plumbs the core of this fascinating and complex man, at last fixing him in his rightful place as one of the most compelling, elusive, and multifaceted personalities of the twentieth century."--BOOK JACKET.
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At Canaan's Edge
by Taylor Branch
King and his movement stand at the zenith of America's defining story, one decade into an epic struggle for the promises of democracy. Branch opens with the authorities' violent suppression of a voting-rights march in Alabama on March 7, 1965.
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Ava Gardner
by Lee Server
The author of "Baby, I Don't Care," the "New York Times" bestselling biography of Robert Mitchum, takes on the dramatic life of the stunning swaggering star Ava Gardner.
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Blind Side
by Michael Lewis
The author examines the phenomenon of the high value of the left tackle in football, using as his example an underprivileged youngster from Tennessee.
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Blood and Thunder
by Hampton Sides
In the summer of 1846, the Army of the West marched through Santa Fe, en route to invade and occupy the Western territories claimed by Mexico. Fueled by the new ideology of "Manifest Destiny," this land grab would lead to a decades-long battle between the United States and the Navajos, the fiercely resistant rulers of a huge swath of mountainous desert wilderness. In Blood and Thunder, Hampton Sides gives us a magnificent history of the American conquest of the West. At the center of this sweeping tale is Kit Carson, the trapper, scout, and soldier whose adventures made him a legend. Sides shows us how this illiterate mountain man understood and respected the Western tribes better than any other American, yet willingly followed orders that would ultimately devastate the Navajo nation. Rich in detail and spanning more than three decades, this is an essential addition to our understanding of how the West was really won. Book jacket.
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Clemente
by David Maraniss
On New Year's Eve, 1972, following eighteen magnificent seasons in the major leagues, Roberto Clemente died a hero's death, killed in a plane crash as he attempted to deliver supplies to Nicaragua after an earthquake. Journalist Maraniss now brings the great baseball player back to life. Anyone who saw Clemente play will never forget him--he was a work of art in a game too often defined by statistics. But Clemente was that rare athlete who rose above sports to become a symbol of larger themes. Born in rural Puerto Rico, at a time when there were no blacks or Puerto Ricans playing organized ball in the United States, Clemente went on to become the greatest Latino player in the major leagues, a ballplayer of determination, grace, and dignity who paved the way and set the highest standard for waves of Latino players who followed in later generations.--From publisher description.
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Consider the Lobster
by David Foster Wallace
Do lobsters feel pain? Did Franz Kafka have a funny bone? What is John Updike's deal, anyway? And what happens when adult video starlets meet their fans in person? David Foster Wallace answers these questions and more in essays that are also enthralling narrative adventures. Whether covering the three-ring circus of a vicious presidential race, plunging into the wars between dictionary writers, or confronting the World's Largest Lobster Cooker at the annual Maine Lobster Festival, Wallace projects a quality of thought that is uniquely his and a voice as powerful and distinct as any in American letters.
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The Courtier and the Heretic
by Matthew Stewart
An analysis of the volatile relationship between and ongoing influence of Baruch de Spinoza and Gottfried Wilhelm Liebniz, citing their role at the center of intense religious, political, and personal battles at the onset of the modern age. 25,000 first printing.
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Eat Pray Love
by Elizabeth Gilbert
One of the most iconic, beloved, and bestselling books of our time. This beautifully written, heartfelt memoir touched a nerve among both readers and reviewers. Elizabeth Gilbert tells how she made the difficult choice to leave behind all the trappings of modern American success (marriage, house in the country, career) and find, instead, what she truly wanted from life. Setting out for a year to study three different aspects of her nature amid three different cultures, Gilbert explored the art of pleasure in Italy and the art of devotion in India, and then a balance between the two on the Indonesian island of Bali. By turns rapturous and rueful, this wise and funny author (whom Booklist calls “Anne Lamott’s hip, yoga- practicing, footloose younger sister”) is poised to garner yet more adoring fans.
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Falling Through the Earth
by Danielle Trussoni
"Told without an ounce of self-pity, Danielle Trussoni's deeply affecting book shows how war keeps changing everything - even after the last shots are fired."--BOOK JACKET.
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Fiasco
by Thomas E. Ricks
"Drawing on the exclusive cooperation of an extraordinary number of American military personnel, including more than one hundred senior officers, and access to more than thirty thousand pages of official documents, many of them never before made public, Thomas E. Ricks has written the definitive account of the American military's tragic experience in Iraq."--BOOK JACKET.
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Field Notes from a Catastrophe
by Elizabeth Kolbert
Explores the issue of global warming from every angle, incorporating interviews with researchers and environmentalists, explaining the science and the studies, and presenting the personal tales of those who are being affected most.
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Flaubert
by Frederick Brown
From the highly acclaimed author of Zola: A Life comes the definitive biography of Gustave Flaubert, author of Madame Bovary.Gustave Flaubert (1821-1880), whose Madame Bovary outraged the right-thinking bourgeoisie, is now brought to life as the singular person and artist he was. As Frederick Brown reveals, Flaubert was fraught with contradiction--a sedentary man who took epic voyages through Egypt and the Middle East; a man of genius who could be flamboyantly uncouth, but was fanatically devoted to beautifully cadenced prose. While making much of his camaraderie with male friends, Flaubert depended upon the emotional nurture of maternal women, notably George Sand, with whom he engaged in a justly celebrated correspondence. His assorted mistresses--French, Egyptian, and English--fed both his richly erotic imagination and his fictional characters, and his letters provide a record of them.Flaubert's time and place literally put him on trial for portraying lewd behavior in Madame Bovary. His milieu also made him a celebrity and, indirectly, brought about his financial ruin. Flaubert died suddenly at the age of fifty-nine, and soon afterward, his beloved retreat near Rouen was torn down and converted into a distillery to cover his niece's debts. He privately dreamed of popular success, which he in fact achieved with Madame Bovary, but never sacrificed to it his ideal of artistic integrity. Frederick Brown's magisterial biography honors his subject's life, times, and legacy.
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The Ghost Map
by Steven Johnson
"It is the summer of 1854. Cholera has seized London with unprecedented intensity. A metropolis of more than 2 million people, London is just emerging as one of the first modern cities in the world. But lacking the infrastructure necessary to support its dense population - garbage removal, clean water, sewers - the city has become the perfect breeding ground for a terrifying disease that no one knows how to cure." "As their neighbors begin dying, two men are spurred to action: the Reverend Henry Whitehead, whose faith in a benevolent God is shaken by the seemingly random nature of the victims, and Dr. John Snow, whose ideas about contagion have been dismissed by the scientific community, but who is convinced that he knows how the disease is being transmitted. The Ghost Map chronicles the outbreak's spread and the desperate efforts to put an end to the epidemic - and solve the most pressing medical riddle of the age."--BOOK JACKET.
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The Greatest Story Ever Sold
by Frank Rich
Reveals the spin campaign of the Bush administration that the author contends enabled the support of a war against a non-September 11 enemy, furthered conservative agendas, and consolidated presidential power.
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Heat
by Bill Buford
A staff writer for The New Yorker and author of Among the Thugs offers an exuberant, witty account of his entry into the world of a professional cook-in-training, documenting his experiences in the kitchen of Mario Batali's acclaimed restaurant Babbo, his apprenticeships with Batali's former teachers, his relationship with Batali, and his immersion in the world of food. 100,000 first printing.
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Jane Goodall
by Dale Peterson
Peterson shows clearly and convincingly how truly remarkable Goodall's accomplishments were and how unlikely it is that anyone else could have duplicated them. Peterson details not only how Jane Goodall revolutionized the study of primates, but how she helped set radically new standards and a new intellectual style in the study of animal behavior.
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Kate
by William J. Mann
The first major Katharine Hepburn biography independent of her control reveals the smart, complicated, and sophisticated woman behind the image Onscreen she played society girls, Spencer Tracy's sidekick, lionesses in winter. But the best character Katharine Hepburn ever created was Katharine Hepburn: a Connecticut Yankee, outspoken and elegant, she wore pants whatever the occasion and bristled at Hollywood glitter. So captivating was her image that she never seemed less than authentic. But how well did we know her, really? Was there a woman behind the image who was more human, more driven, and ultimately more triumphant because of her vulnerability? William J. Mann--a cultural historian and journalist, a sympathetic admirer but no mere fan--has fashioned an intimate, often revisionist, and truly unique close-up that challenges much of what we think we know about the Great Kate. Previous biographies--mostly products of friends and fans--have recycled the stories she hid behind, taking Hollywood myths at face value. Mann goes deeper, delivering new details from friends and family who have not been previously interviewed and drawing on materials only available since Hepburn's death. With affection, intelligence, and a voluminous knowledge of Hollywood history, Mann shows us how a woman originally considered too special and controversial for fame learned the fine arts of movie stardom and transformed herself into an icon as durable and all-American as the Statue of Liberty.
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The Looming Tower
by Lawrence Wright
Explores both the American and Arab sides of the September 11th terrorist attacks in an account of the people, ideas, events, and intelligence failures that led to the attacks.
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The Lost
by Daniel Adam Mendelsohn
Mendelsohn grew up in a family haunted by the disappearance of six relatives during the Holocaust--an unmentionable subject during his childhood. Decades later, spurred by the discovery of a cache of desperate letters written to his grandfather in 1939, he embarked on a hunt for the remaining eyewitnesses of his relatives' fates. This is their story.
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Mayflower
by Nathaniel Philbrick
A history of the Pilgrim settlement of New England challenges popular misconceptions, discussing such topics as the diseases of European origin suffered by the Wampanoag tribe, the fragile working relationship between the Pilgrims and their Native American neighbors, and the devastating impact of the King Philip's War. By the author of Sea of Glory. 450,000 first printing.
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The Omnivore's Dilemma
by Michael Pollan
One of the New York Times Book Review's Ten Best Books of the Year Winner of the James Beard Award Author of How to Change Your Mind and the #1 New York Times Bestsellers In Defense of Food and Food Rules What should we have for dinner? Ten years ago, Michael Pollan confronted us with this seemingly simple question and, with The Omnivore’s Dilemma, his brilliant and eye-opening exploration of our food choices, demonstrated that how we answer it today may determine not only our health but our survival as a species. In the years since, Pollan’s revolutionary examination has changed the way Americans think about food. Bringing wide attention to the little-known but vitally important dimensions of food and agriculture in America, Pollan launched a national conversation about what we eat and the profound consequences that even the simplest everyday food choices have on both ourselves and the natural world. Ten years later, The Omnivore’s Dilemma continues to transform the way Americans think about the politics, perils, and pleasures of eating.
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The Places in Between
by Rory Stewart
Rory Stewart recounts the experiences he had walking across Afghanistan in 2002, describing how the country and its people have been impacted by the Taliban and the American military's involvement in the region.
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Programming the Universe
by Seth Lloyd
In this clear, informative, and entertaining narrative, a quantum computer scientist examines the history of the universe through the lens of a new theory--that the universe is computing its own dynamic evolution.
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Redemption
by Nicholas Lemann
A study of the campaign of organized racial violence that followed the Civil War describes efforts on the part of white Southern Democrats to prevent the rise of black political power.
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State of Denial
by Bob Woodward
After two #1 "New York Times" bestsellers on the Bush administration's wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, Woodward's new book on the Bush White House again provides an unparalleled, intimate account of the present state of national security decision-making.