Best non-fiction books of 2017

The summer of 1969 saw astronauts land on the moon for the first time and hippie hordes descend on Woodstock for a legendary music festival. For Neil M. Maher, the conjunction of these two era-defining events is not entirely coincidental. Apollo in the Age of Aquarius shows how the celestial aspirat

The public intellectual, as a person and ideal, has a long and storied history. Writing in venues like the New Republic and Commentary, such intellectuals were always expected to opine on a broad array of topics, from foreign policy to literature to economics. Yet in recent years a new kind of think

"A succinct, powerful explanation of why much of what we think about the incarceration boom is probably wrong." -Bloomberg View A groundbreaking examination of our system of imprisonment, revealing the true causes of mass incarceration as well as the best path to reform In the 1970s, the Unite

From one of the most singular presences in American fiction comes a searingly intelligent book of essays on matters literary, social, cultural, and personal. Whether she's writing about date rape or political adultery or writers from John Updike to Gillian Flynn, Mary Gaitskill reads her subjects de

“This is the best book about the Beatles ever written”  —Mashable Rob Sheffield, the Rolling Stone columnist and bestselling author of Love Is a Mix Tape offers an entertaining, unconventional look at the most popular band in history, the Beatles, exploring what they mean today and why they still

Rising Star is the definitive account of Barack Obama's formative years that made him the man who became the forty-fourth president of the United States—from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Bearing the Cross Barack Obama's speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention instantly catapulte

An Economist Best History Book 2017   “History as it should be written.”—Barry Cunliffe, Guardian   “Scott hits the nail squarely on the head by exposing the staggering price our ancestors paid for civilization and political order.”—Walter Scheidel, Financial Times   Why did humans abandon

Literature, from the Chinese perspective, makes manifest the cosmic patterns that shape and complete the world--a process of "worlding" that is much more than mere representation. In that spirit, A New Literary History of Modern China looks beyond state-sanctioned works and official narratives to re

A major reimagining of how evolutionary forces work, revealing how mating preferences--what Darwin termed "the taste for the beautiful"--create the extraordinary range of ornament in the animal world. In the great halls of science, dogma holds that Darwin's theory of natural selection explains e

Rarely has a state changed its character so completely in so short a period of time. Previ- ously content to play a role befitting its small size, Qatar was a traditional, risk-averse Gulf monarchy until the early 1990s. A bloodless coup in 1995 brought to power an emerging elite with a progressive

In this sweepingly ambitious volume, the nation s foremost experts on the American presidency and the U.S. Constitution join together to tell the intertwined stories of how each American president has confronted and shaped the Constitution. Each occupant of the office the first president to the fort

The Holy Roman Empire lasted a thousand years, far longer than ancient Rome. Yet this formidable dominion never inspired the awe of its predecessor. Voltaire distilled the disdain of generations when he quipped it was neither holy, Roman, nor an empire. Yet as Peter Wilson shows, the Holy Roman Empi