Literary Hub » November’s Best Reviewed Nonfiction

Featuring Margaret Atwood, Patti Smith, Anthony Hopkins, and More

Margaret Atwood’s Book of Lives, Patti Smith’s Bread of Angels, and Anthony Hopkins’ We Did Ok, Kid all feature among the best reviewed nonfiction titles of the month.

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1. Book of Lives: A Memoir of Sorts by Margaret Atwood
(Doubleday)

13 Rave • 2 Positive • 2 Mixed

“[A] tour-de-force … Might as well be one of Atwood’s novels (with the addition of photos and illustrations). It’s a remarkable read. She makes space for everyone. Her engaging voice is populated by a large cast of beguiling characters, settings are enriched with vivid details, all of it grounded by a compelling story line.”

–Robert Allen Papinchak (The Los Angeles Times)

2. Indignity: A Life Reimagined by Lea Ypi
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

7 Rave • 3 Positive

“Leman led a life so rich in incident that only a novel could do justice to its complexities, and a novel, of sorts, is exactly what Ypi has written … An inward-looking rumination but a desperate attempt to conjure a bygone milieu—and a fitting rejoinder to the tendencies it wishes to contradict … Ypi displays a certain audacity as she sets about reconstructing a world she never witnessed, but she is no more presumptuous than the files she is working from … Remarkable and ambitious.”

–Becca Rothfeld (The Washington Post)

3. Bread of Angels: A Memoir by Patti Smith
(Random House)

7 Rave • 2 Positive • 1 Mixed

“Mesmerizing … Her extraordinary artist’s eye and soulful nature emerged at an age when the rest of us were still content to simply play in our sandboxes … Losses haunt the memoir; she grapples with them by returning to the stage with a fierce new hunger.”

–Leigh Haber (The Los Angeles Times)

4. We Did Ok, Kid by Anthony Hopkins
(Summit Books)

4 Rave • 4 Positive • 3 Mixed

“Like some of his most memorable characters: quiet and restrained but with some darker stuff going on underneath … There’s minimal name-dropping and only sporadic celebrity gossip but significant honesty and thoughtful reminiscence, resulting in a rich, satisfying read.”

–Kathleen McBroom (Booklist)

5. The Insider: Malcolm Cowley and the Triumph of American Literature by Gerald Howard
(Penguin)

5 Rave • 1 Positive

“Sensitive, well-reported, and probing … Howard’s book is not a proper biography of Cowley. One of those already exists, though it’s still in progress … Howard is more interested, profitably, in giving us set pieces and in tracing a series of ideas … I wish The Insider were about a hundred pages shorter. It’s more than 500 pages and sometimes places the reader in the weeds without a scythe … My cavils about Howard’s book are mild ones. He’s a sensitive discriminator; he takes a lot of old battles out of their archival plastic and makes them fresh again.”

–Dwight Garner (The New York Times)