When you buy through our links, Insider may earn an affiliate commission. Learn more.
- The National Book Foundation recently published its longlist for the nonfiction National Book Award.
- Find the complete 2021 longlist of the 10 best nonfiction titles below.
- Want more books? Check out the 2021 National Book Award longlists for fiction and poetry.
Every summer since 1989, five National Book Award judges have spent long sunny days reviewing over 500 nonfiction books to determine the best US nonfiction books published that year.
Their top 10 are published in a longlist in September, narrowed to the top five in a shortlist in October. On November 17, one winner is awarded the National Book Award in nonfiction. Past winners include Joan Didion's "The Year of Magical Thinking," Patti Smith's memoir "Just Kids," Ta-Nehisi Coates' "Between the World and Me," and Ibram X. Kendi's "Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America."
The winners receive $10,000, and finalists receive $1,000. Both can expect an uptick in book sales and prestige.
The 10 books on the 2021 National Book Award longlist for non-fiction:
Descriptions are provided by Amazon and edited lightly for length and clarity.
Amazon
Available at Amazon and Bookshop from $15.99
At the March on Washington in 1963, Josephine Baker was 57 years old, well beyond her most prolific days. But in her speech, she was in a mood to consider her life, her legacy, and her departure from the country she was now triumphantly returning to. "I was a devil in other countries, and I was a little devil in America, too," she told the crowd.
Inspired by these few words, Hanif Abdurraqib has written a profound and lasting reflection on how Black performance is inextricably woven into the fabric of American culture. Each moment in every performance he examines — whether it's the 27 seconds in "Gimme Shelter" in which Merry Clayton wails the words "rape, murder," a schoolyard fistfight, a dance marathon, or the instant in a game of spades right after the cards are dealt — has layers of resonance in Black and white cultures, the politics of American empire, and Abdurraqib's own personal history of love, grief, and performance.
"Running Out: In Search of Water on the High Plains" by Lucas BessireAmazon
Available at Amazon and Bookshop from $19.69
The Ogallala aquifer has nourished life on the American Great Plains for millennia. But less than a century of unsustainable irrigation farming has taxed much of the aquifer beyond repair.
Anthropologist Lucas Bessire journeyed back to western Kansas, where five generations of his family lived as irrigation farmers and ranchers, to try to make sense of this vital resource and its loss. His search for water across the drying High Plains brings the reader face to face with the stark realities of industrial agriculture, eroding democratic norms, and surreal interpretations of a looming disaster. Yet the destination is far from predictable, as the book seeks to move beyond the words and genres through which destruction is often known. Instead, this journey into the morass of eradication offers a series of unexpected discoveries about what it means to inherit the troubled legacies of the past and how we can take responsibility for a more inclusive, sustainable future.
"Tastes Like War: A Memoir" by Grace M. ChoAmazon
Available at Amazon and Bookshop from $16.51
Grace M. Cho grew up as the daughter of a white American merchant marine and the Korean bar hostess he met abroad. They were one of few immigrants in a xenophobic small town during the Cold War, where identity was politicized by everyday details — language, cultural references, memories, and food. When Grace was 15, her dynamic mother experienced the onset of schizophrenia, a condition that would continue and evolve for the rest of her life.
Part food memoir, part sociological investigation, "Tastes Like War" is a hybrid text about a daughter's search through intimate and global history for the roots of her mother's schizophrenia. In her mother's final years, Grace learned to cook dishes from her parent's childhood in order to invite the past into the present, and to hold space for her mother's multiple voices at the table. And through careful listening over these shared meals, Grace discovered not only the things that broke the brilliant, complicated woman who raised her — but also the things that kept her alive.
"The Ground Breaking: An American City and Its Search for Justice" by Scott EllsworthAmazon
Available at Amazon and Bookshop from $21.49
And then they were gone.
More than 1,000 homes and businesses. Restaurants and movie theaters, churches and doctors' offices, a hospital, a public library, a post office. Looted, burned, and bombed from the air.
Over the course of less than 24 hours in the spring of 1921, Tulsa's infamous "Black Wall Street" was wiped off the map — and erased from the history books. Official records disappeared, researchers were threatened, and the worst single incident of racial violence in American history was kept hidden for more than 50 years. But there were some secrets that would not die.
A riveting and essential new book, "The Ground Breaking" not only tells the long-suppressed story of the notorious Tulsa Race Massacre. It also unearths the lost history of how the massacre was covered up, and of the courageous individuals who fought to keep the story alive. Most importantly, it recounts the ongoing archaeological saga and the search for the unmarked graves of the victims of the massacre, and of the fight to win restitution for the survivors and their families.
"Covered with Night: A Story of Murder and Indigenous Justice in Early America" by Nicole EustaceAmazon
Available at Amazon and Bookshop from $18.32
On the eve of a major treaty conference between Iroquois leaders and European colonists in the distant summer of 1722, two white fur traders attacked an Indigenous hunter and left him for dead near Conestoga, Pennsylvania. Though virtually forgotten today, this act of brutality set into motion a remarkable series of criminal investigations and cross-cultural negotiations that challenged the definition of justice in early America.
An absorbing chronicle built around an extraordinary group of characters — from the slain man's resilient widow to the Indigenous diplomat known as "Captain Civility" to the scheming governor of Pennsylvania — "Covered with Night" transforms a single event into an unforgettable portrait of early America.
"The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together" by Heather McGheeAmazon
Available at Amazon and Bookshop from $20.90
What would make a society drain its public swimming baths and fill them with concrete rather than opening them to everyone? Economics researcher Heather McGhee sets out across America to learn why white voters so often act against their own interests. Why do they block changes that would help them, and even destroy their own advantages, whenever people of color also stand to benefit? Their tragedy is that they believe they can't win unless somebody else loses. But this is a lie.
McGhee marshals overwhelming economic evidence, and a profound well of empathy, to reveal the surprising truth: even racists lose out under white supremacy. And US racism is everybody's problem. As McGhee shows, it was bigoted lending policies that laid the ground for the 2008 financial crisis. There can be little prospect of tackling global climate change until America's zero-sum delusions are defeated.
Note: This is set to be adapted as a Spotify Podcast series by Barack and Michelle Obama's production company, Higher Ground.
"The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War" by Louis MenandAmazon
Available at Amazon and Bookshop from $20.49
How did elitism and an anti-totalitarian skepticism of passion and ideology give way to a new sensibility defined by freewheeling experimentation and loving the Beatles? How was the ideal of "freedom" applied to causes that ranged from anti-communism and civil rights to radical acts of self-creation via art and even crime?
With the wit and insight familiar to readers of "The Metaphysical Club" and his New Yorker essays, Menand takes us inside Hannah Arendt's Manhattan, the Paris of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, Merce Cunningham and John Cage's residencies at North Carolina's Black Mountain College, and the Memphis studio where Sam Phillips and Elvis Presley created new music for the American teenager.
Stressing the rich flow of ideas across the Atlantic, he also shows how Europeans played a vital role in promoting and influencing American art and entertainment. By the end of the Vietnam era, the American government had lost the moral prestige it enjoyed at the end of the Second World War, but America's once-despised culture had become respected and adored. With unprecedented verve and range, this book explains how that happened.
Note: Menand's earlier book "The Metaphysical Club" won the Pulitzer Prize in 2002.
"All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley's Sack, a Black Family Keepsake" by Tiya MilesAmazon
Available at Amazon and Bookshop from $24.99
In 1850s South Carolina, an enslaved woman named Rose faced a crisis, the imminent sale of her daughter Ashley. Thinking quickly, she packed a cotton bag with a few precious items as a token of love and to try to ensure Ashley's survival. Soon after, the nine-year-old girl was separated from her mother and sold.
Decades later, Ashley's granddaughter Ruth embroidered this family history on the bag in spare yet haunting language — including Rose's wish that "It be filled with my Love always." Ruth's sewn words, the reason we remember Ashley's sack today, evoke a sweeping family story of loss and of love passed down through generations. Now, in this illuminating, deeply moving new book inspired by Rose's gift to Ashley, historian Tiya Miles carefully unearths these women's faint presence in archival records to follow the paths of their lives — and the lives of so many women like them — to write a singular and revelatory history of the experience of slavery, and the uncertain freedom afterward, in the United States.
"How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America" by Clint SmithAmazon
Available at Amazon and Bookshop from $17.84
Beginning in his hometown of New Orleans, Clint Smith leads the reader on an unforgettable tour of monuments and landmarks — those that are honest about the past and those that are not — that offer an intergenerational story of how slavery has been central in shaping our nation's collective history, and ourselves.
It is the story of the Monticello Plantation in Virginia, the estate where Thomas Jefferson wrote letters espousing the urgent need for liberty while enslaving more than four hundred people. It is the story of the Whitney Plantation, one of the only former plantations devoted to preserving the experience of the enslaved people whose lives and work sustained it. It is the story of Angola, a former plantation–turned–maximum-security prison in Louisiana that is filled with Black men who work across the 18,000-acre land for virtually no pay. And it is the story of Blandford Cemetery, the final resting place of tens of thousands of Confederate soldiers.
A deeply researched and transporting exploration of the legacy of slavery and its imprint on centuries of American history, "How the Word Is Passed" illustrates how some of our country's most essential stories are hidden in plain view—whether in places we might drive by on our way to work, holidays such as Juneteenth, or entire neighborhoods like downtown Manhattan, where the brutal history of the trade in enslaved men, women, and children has been deeply imprinted.
"The Black Civil War Soldier: A Visual History of Conflict and Citizenship" by Deborah WillisAmazon
Available at Amazon and Bookshop from $31.50
Though both the Union and Confederate armies excluded African American men from their initial calls to arms, many of the men who eventually served were Black. Simultaneously, photography culture blossomed ― marking the Civil War as the first conflict to be extensively documented through photographs. In The Black Civil War Soldier, Deb Willis explores the crucial role of photography in (re)telling and shaping African American narratives of the Civil War, pulling from a dynamic visual archive that has largely gone unacknowledged.
With over seventy images, "The Black Civil War Soldier" contains a huge breadth of primary and archival materials, many of which are rarely reproduced. The photographs are supplemented with handwritten captions, letters, and other personal materials; Willis not only dives into the lives of Black Union soldiers, but also includes stories of other African Americans involved with the struggle ― from left-behind family members to female spies. Willis thus compiles a captivating memoir of photographs and words and examines them together to address themes of love and longing; responsibility and fear; commitment and patriotism; and ― most predominantly ― African American resilience.
source https://www.businessinsider.com/national-book-award-non-fiction-longlist-2021