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
Green Highlight - Have read
Yellow Highlight - Already on TBR list
Orange Highlight - Did Not Finish
Autobiography / Memoir
- The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas by Gertrude Stein
- Black Boy by Richard Wright
- Dreams from My Father by Barack Obama
- A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers
- I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
- Manchild in the Promised Land by Claude Brown
- Maus by Art Spiegelman
- A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway
- Notes of a Native Son by James Baldwin
- On Writing by Stephen King
- Speak, Memory by Vladimir Nabokov
- A Walk in the Woods by Bill Bryson
Biography
- The Autobiography of Malcolm X, as told to Alex Haley
- The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill by William Manchester
- The Power Broker by Robert Caro
Business
- Capitalism and Freedom by Milton Friedman
- Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser
- The General Theory by John Maynard Keynes
- How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie
- No Logo by Naomi Klein
- Unsafe at Any Speed by Ralph Nader
- What Color Is Your Parachute? by Richard Nelson Bolles
Culture
- The American Cinema by Andrew Sarris
- A Child of the Century by Ben Hecht
- Within the Context of No Context by George W.S. Trow
- Mystery Train by Greil Marcus
- The Story of Art by E.H. Gombrich
Essays
- Against Interpretation, and Other Essays by Susan Sontag
- A Room of One's Own by Virginia Woolf
- Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion
- A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again by David Foster Wallace
Food Writing
- How to Cook a Wolf by M.F.K. Fisher
- Mastering the Art of French Cooking by Julia Child
- The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan
Health
- And the Band Played On by Randy Shilts
- The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care by Dr. Benjamin Spock
- The Joy of Sex by Dr. Alex Comfort
- The Kinsey Reports by Alfred Kinsey
- Our Bodies, Ourselves by the Boston Women's Health Book Collective
History
- The Best and the Brightest by David Halberstam
- Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee by Dee Brown
- Carry Me Home by Diane McWhorter
- The Fatal Shore by Robert Hughes
- The Gnostic Gospels by Elaine Pagels
- Let Us Now Praise Famous Men by James Agee
- A People's History of the United States by Howard Zinn
- The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by William L. Shirer
Ideas
- The Closing of the American Mind by Allan Bloom
- The End of History and the Last Man by Francis Fukuyama
- Godel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter
- The Hero with a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell
- Imagined Communities by Benedict Anderson
- The Nature and Destiny of Man by Reinhold Niebuhr
- Orientalism by Edward Said
- Syntactic Structures by Noam Chomsky
- A Theory of Justice by John Rawls
- Understanding Media by Marshall McLuhan
- Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig
Nonfiction Novels
- The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe
- The Executioner's Song by Norman Mailer
- In Cold Blood by Truman Capote
- Out of Africa by Isak Dinesen
Politics
- All the President's Men by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein
- The Clash of Civilizations by Samuel Huntington
- Conscience of a Conservative by Barry Goldwater
- God & Man at Yale by William F. Buckley Jr.
- Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell
- The Making of the President by Theodore White
- The Origins of Totalitarianism by Hannah Arendt
- The Paranoid Style in American Politics by Richard Hofstadter
- What It Takes by Richard Ben Cramer
Science
- A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking
- Coming of Age in Samoa by Margaret Mead
- The Double Helix by James Watson
- The Emperor of All Maladies by Siddhartha Mukherjee
- The Lives of a Cell by Lewis Thomas
- The Naked Ape by Desmond Morris
- On Human Nature by Edward O. Wilson
- The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins
- Silent Spring by Rachel Carson
- The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas S. Kuhn
Self-Help / Instructional
Social History
- The American Way of Death by Jessica Mitford
- Animal Liberation by Peter Singer
- The Beauty Myth by Naomi Wolf
- The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs
- The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan
- Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond
- Nickel and Dimed by Barbara Ehrenreich
- The Other America by Michael Harrington
- Why We Can't Wait by Martin Luther King Jr.
- Working by Studs Terkel
Sports
War
It makes me wonder how these books are picked... and if they have read all non-fiction there is out there!
I haven't read very many from this list, but I like it - there are some titles in there that I have been meaning to read!
ReplyDeleteWow, so many I haven't heard of, most honestly. You are doing good in the science section. I do like how they put them in categories.
ReplyDeleteI hadn't heard about this list. I'll have to take a closer look at all of these books. I read primarily nonfiction.
ReplyDelete@Aths - there are some (well, many) titles I haven't even heard of, so it's good to see what is out there!
ReplyDelete@Marce - Yes I think it helps to put them in category - I haven't actually read any of the science ones, they are just on my TBR list (and I bought 2 of them back in college days!)
@Shannon - good to meet another NF fan! :)
Wow, the only one of these I know for sure I read is In Cold Blood. I might have read Double Helix in high school, but if I did I clearly don't remember it very well! LOL
ReplyDeleteI think I will refrain from posting this on my blog to avoid further embarrassing myself! LMAO
@ham1299 - I was debating whether to post it or not since it looks rather pitiful! oh well :)
ReplyDeleteLOL Too funny. Well, compared to me, you're doing great! ;-) For what it's worth, I actually was impressed by how many you've read!
ReplyDelete