15 nonfiction standouts

Rebecca Wragg Sykes argues that we’ve spent too much time studying the way Neanderthals interacted with Homo Sapiens and too little studying the way Neanderthals interacted with each other. So she tells us how they lived, treating them not as one of evolution’s failures but as our close behavioral cousins.

“The fate of the Neanderthals has monopolised enormous amounts of attention,” she writes, “yet it may be the least interesting thing about them.”

“I’ve often despaired at my ignorance toward my own species,” writes Camilla Pang, who was diagnosed at age 8 with autism spectrum disorder. Whether or not you agree with Pang that humans are basically code, her sharp-eyed observations about behavior, emotion and relationships should help us understand ourselves a little better.

The fascinating story by Steve Inskeep tells of the nation’s first abolitionist presidential candidate and the wife who was rarely beside him but relentlessly pushed his career.

Frémont the explorer named San Francisco Bay the Golden Gate; Frémont the general was a favorite of the Republican party even after Lincoln was president.

Simulmatics was an early effort in the 1960s to harness computer-drive analytics to predict the behavior of voters and consumers.

The company didn’t do the work all that well, but it made a lot of influential friends and anticipated the world we inhabit.

Suppose the right to exit is more important than the right to vote? Whether switching jobs, moving to different states or crossing international borders, Somin argues, the ability to change our lives by changing our surroundings is a vital and personal freedom too often taken for granted.

Gretchen Sorin weaves together gruesome tales of Black accident victims, the way Black affluence led corporations to try to profit from integration, and much more.

An overlooked tour de force.

Perhaps, contrary to common assumption, the loss of belief over the past three centuries has been driven less by the advance of science than by the rise of a kind of emotionalism with which we’re nowadays all too familiar: anxiety and anger as things go wrong.

Author Zachary D. Carter has come under fire for downplaying his subject’s attraction to the eugenics movement, but that aside, this biography not only of Keynes but of Keynsianism is consistently fascinating, and manages to deploy the jargon of the profession in ways that always illuminate rather than confuse.

Highly relevant to the moment.

This provocative tome by Ismail K. White and Chryl N. Laird makes you rethink a broad set of prior assumptions.

Bloomberg Opinion columnist Virginia Postrel offers a bold retelling of history through an emphasis on cloth — cloth as decoration, cloth as currency, cloth as ritual and much more.

One of the most extraordinary volumes in years.

Who knew that nearly all of us breathe wrong, to the detriment of our health? Or that the culprit might be “dysevolution” caused by the development of speech?

A bit overconfident in places, but a fascinating view of a function we take for granted.

Maybe they’re right, maybe they’re wrong, but here’s what to like about this controversial volume by Jay Belsky, Avshalom Caspi, Terrie E. Moffitt, and Richie Poulton: Reams of data and plenty of controlled experiments.

This book by Joseph Henrich is the rare case of a volume that deserves all its many accolades. The title says it all.

One can quibble over details (for example, some of what he says about the Western church), but overall, it’s a remarkable tome that makes a powerful case.

A fascinating retelling of the continent’s history from a series of different perspectives.

Arana notes that most who write about Latin America assume a commonality based on culture and miss the continent’s deep and abiding divisions based on skin color. A sad, grand, important volume.

So many of us are drawn to the water, for recreation, for beautiful vistas, for food. And then there’s those who go to swim.

In elegant prose, Tsui explores her own love of plunging into the water, and combines history, psychology, and interviews to explain the same emotion in others. Also, why humans are like salmon.