The 50 Best Nonfiction Books of the Past 25 Years
Slate’s books team selects the definitive works of reporting, memoir, and argument of the past quarter-century.
By Dan Kois and Laura Miller
Nov 18, 2019
https://www.goodreads.com/list/show/141719.Slate_s_50_Best_Nonfiction_Books_of_the_Past_25_Years
NOTE: Sondheim’s collected lyrics took up one spot.
In order of average goodread rating, highest to lowest:
| Title | Author |
|---|---|
| The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures | Anne Fadiman |
| The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks | Rebecca Skloot |
| Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life | William Finnegan |
| One Day: The Extraordinary Story of an Ordinary 24 Hours in America | Gene Weingarten |
| Into the Wild | Jon Krakauer |
| We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families: Stories from Rwanda | Philip Gourevitch |
| Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder: Pronged Ants, Horned Humans, Mice on Toast, and Other Marvels of Jurassic Technology | Lawrence Weschler |
| Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic | Alison Bechdel |
| Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble, and Coming of Age in the Bronx | Adrian Nicole LeBlanc |
| The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness | Michelle Alexander |
| Columbine | Dave Cullen |
| The Possessed: Adventures With Russian Books and the People Who Read Them | Elif Batuman |
| Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity | Katherine Boo |
| Far from the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity | Andrew Solomon |
| The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History | Elizabeth Kolbert |
| People Who Eat Darkness | Richard Lloyd Parry |
| Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief | Lawrence Wright |
| Wave | Sonali Deraniyagala |
| Lost Girls: An Unsolved American Mystery | Robert Kolker |
| How to Survive a Plague: The Inside Story of How Citizens and Science Tamed AIDS | David France |
| Lab Girl | Hope Jahren |
| Madeleine’s World: A Child’s Journey from Birth to Age Three | Brian Hall |
| A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments | David Foster Wallace |
| Out of Sheer Rage: Wrestling With D.H. Lawrence | Geoff Dyer |
| The Tennis Partner | Abraham Verghese |
| Home Comforts: The Art and Science of Keeping House | Cheryl Mendelson |
| The Battle for God | Karen Armstrong |
| A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius | Dave Eggers |
| Borrowed Finery: A Memoir | Paula Fox |
| American Ground: Unbuilding the World Trade Center | William Langewiesche |
| Can’t Stop Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation | Jeff Chang |
| The World Without Us | Alan Weisman |
| The Night of the Gun | David Carr |
| The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science | Richard Holmes |
| The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon | David Grann |
| Finishing the Hat: Collected Lyrics, 1954-1981, With Attendant Comments, Principles, Heresies, Grudges, Whines, and And | Stephen Sondheim |
| Look, I Made a Hat: Collected Lyrics, 1981-2011, With Attendant Comments, Amplifications, Dogmas, Harangues, Digres: | Stephen Sondheim |
| The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires | Tim Wu |
| Travels in Siberia | Ian Frazier |
| The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration | Isabel Wilkerson |
| Citizen: An American Lyric | Claudia Rankine |
| Harlem Is Nowhere: A Journey to the Mecca of Black America | Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts |
| The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood | James Gleick |
| The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot | Robert Macfarlane |
| The Trip to Echo Spring | Olivia Laing |
| The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America | George Packer |
| Stuff Matters: Exploring the Marvelous Materials That Shape Our Man-Made World | Mark Miodownik |
| Dreamland: The True Tale of America’s Opiate Epidemic | Sam Quinones |
| H Is for Hawk | Helen Macdonald |
| Negroland | Margo Jefferson |
| The Odd Woman and the City | Vivian Gornick |