Year 2021

Clairvoyant of the Small: The Life of Robert Walser by Susan Bernofsky (Yale) “We don’t need to see anything out of the ordinary,” Robert Walser once wrote. “We already see

Until I Am Free: Fannie Lou Hamer’s Enduring Message to America by Keisha N. Blain (Beacon) The title of Keisha N. Blain’s magnificent biography of Fannie Lou Hamer comes from

Fierce Poise: Helen Frankenthaler and 1950s New York by Alexander Nemerov (Penguin Press) A few months into my five years of teaching philosophy at Bennington College, a faculty colleague, during

Mike Nichols: A Life by Mark Harris (Penguin Press) Igor Mikhail Peschkowsky, a seven-year-old Jewish boy from Berlin, made it by ship to the U.S. in May, 1939. Exquisite timing,

All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days: The True Story of the American Woman at the Heart of the German Resistance to Hitler by Rebecca Donner (Little, Brown) Rebecca Donner’s

The Family Roe: An American Story by Joshua Prager (W.W. Norton) “There is nothing covered up that will not be revealed, and hidden that will not be known,” this Biblical

How the Word Is Passed by Clint Smith (Little, Brown) In How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning With the History of Slavery Across America, Clint Smith visits and probes

Orwell’s Roses by Rebecca Solnit (Viking) Orwell’s Roses is not, Rebecca Solnit tells us, a biography. It is, she writes, “a series of forays from one starting point, that gesture

The Least of Us: True Tales of America and Hope in the Time of Fentanyl and Meth by Sam Quinones (Bloomsbury) Sam Quinones follows up Dreamland, his NBCC-award winning account

Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty by Patrick Radden Keefe (Doubleday) Most of the many books and articles written about America’s opioid crisis focus on its