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It’s abacus and laurels time here at Book Marks HQ.
We, the industrious and sun-starved Book Marks miners, have spent 12 months chiseling reviews from more than 150 publications—from the Washington Post to the Irish Times, the San Francisco Chronicle to the London Review of Books—all so that we can now tell you, our dear readers, with absolute mathematical certitude, that these are the best reviewed nonfiction titles of 2024.
Happy reading!
Brought to you by Book Marks, Lit Hub’s home for book reviews.
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1. Grief is for People by Sloane Crosley
(MCD)
15 Rave • 1 Positive
Listen to an interview with Sloane Crosley here
“If Crosley’s descriptions of love for Russell are often dazzling and unexpected, her meditations on grief are occasionally clichéd. But bromides are par for the course when it comes to bereavement, and this, too, is part of the indignity of loss … Grief may follow a familiar path in every instance, but Russell himself was fiercely original, and Crosley paints a vivid and moving portrait of a singularity … Not a philosophical meditation on grief but an honest account of its cruelties and contradictions. It contains no lessons, no morals and no solutions. It is not didactic. It is as messy, rollicking and chaotic as life isnot a philosophical meditation on grief but an honest account of its cruelties and contradictions. It contains no lessons, no morals and no solutions. It is not didactic. It is as messy, rollicking and chaotic as life is … Crosley holds Russell in her heart with humor and humanity, and although she emphasizes that writing is not a consolation or an act of therapy, it is nonetheless a testament.”
–Becca Rothfeld (The Washington Post)
2. The Bookshop: A History of the American Bookstore by Evan Friss
(Viking)
12 Rave • 1 Positive
“A spirited defense … Friss’s book is organized like the best of such literary emporiums: a little higgledy-piggledy, with surprise diversions here and there … Considers how little overhead is required to nourish the fundamental human hunger for knowledge.”
–Alexandra Jacobs (The New York Times)
3. When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracies, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s by John Ganz
(Farrar, Straus, and Giroux)
11 Rave • 1 Positive
“Devotees of Ganz’s pugilistic writing on Substack may be surprised by the restraint he displays in his first book. When the Clock Broke is a work of narrative history that is comparatively light on confrontation and polemic … Opponents of the far right have an unfortunate tendency to caricature it as a coalition of hapless fools, incapable of mustering ideas and therefore beneath serious consideration. Ganz knows better than to take this condescending and intellectually dishonest approach. Instead, he tackles reactionary belligerence with appropriate rigor.”
–Becca Rothfeld (The Washington Post)
4. Shakespeare: The Man who Pays the Rent by Judi Dench
(St. Martin’s Press)
9 Rave • 2 Positive
“Part intimate memoir, part insightful commentary, the book shows how the Dame and the Bard make a winning combination … This book could have been a cross between a starchy academic study and a meandering trawl through Dench’s past glories. Instead, it is a delight, at once lively, captivating and informative.”
–Malcolm Forbes (The Washington Post)
5. Roman Year: A Memoir by André Aciman
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
10 Rave • 1 Positive • 1 Mixed
Read an excerpt from Roman Year here
“This is not, in style or spirit, a sad book. It’s filled with canny adaptiveness and invention … Aciman is a sensitive and passionate writer, and this volume’s packed with human incident … A brave, sensuous, tender chronicle.”
–Joan Frank (The Boston Globe)
6. Traveling: On the Path of Joni Mitchell by Ann Powers
(Day Street Books)
9 Rave • 4 Positive
Read an excerpt from Traveling here
“Remarkably insightful … Keeping a distance pays great dividends here. Powers proves an adroit codebreaker for the uniquely complex cross-pollination of romantic ennui, class consciousness, spiritual striving and occasional narcissism that characterizes the full sweep of the Joni Mitchell enterprise … Astute … It is a great compliment to Powers’s ebullient style that her accruing sense of fatigue and wonder around her subject never reads as less than fascinating. Visceral prose, pure fusion.”
–Elizabeth Nelson (The Washington Post)
7. My Good Bright Wolf: A Memoir by Sarah Moss
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
9 Rave • 3 Positive • 1 Mixed
Read an excerpt from My Good Bright Wolf here
“Full of daring. It is a complicated tale and her telling is many-sided, as full of devastation as it is wisdom … A lesser writer would overdo these refrains. But Moss wears them lightly, subtly using the doubting voice and the heroic wolf to tangle preconceptions of reality as she forges her own way of writing memoir.”
–Ellen Peirson-Hagger (The Observer)
8. The Friday Afternoon Club: A Family Memoir by Griffin Dunne
(Penguin)
10 Rave • 7 Positive
Read an interview with Griffin Dunne here
“Dunne largely bears…slings and arrows with good humor and equanimity, conscious, perhaps, that in retelling them he becomes the hero of the joke. He gets terrific mileage from his own bad luck … What makes these unimaginable events so readable, and allows Dunne to find a kind of grace even amid tragedy, are his unshakable black humor and unfailing nose for a good story.”
–Charles Arrowsmith (The Los Angeles Times)
9. The Rebel’s Clinic: The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon by Adam Shatz
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
9 Rave • 8 Positive
Read an excerpt from The Rebel’s Clinic here
“..a superb example of historical biography … For Shatz, Fanon must be criticised as well as admired. And his writings must be contextualised within the different historical epoch in which he lived. But Fanon is still relevant because ‘the racial divisions and economic inequalities that he protested were not so much liquidated as reconfigured.’ It is no wonder, then, that Fanon is an icon for many anti-racist activists today. Fanon speaks to us because he sought to create a new world free of the domination of the old.”
–Daniel Geary (The Irish Times)
10. The Freaks Came Out to Write: The Definitive History of the Village Voice, the Radical Paper That Changed American Culture by Tricia Romano
(PublicAffairs)
8 Rave • 8 Positive
“A well-made disco ball of a book—it’s big, discursive, ardent, intellectual and flecked with gossip … Romano, who worked at The Voice for eight years in its later stages, clearly asked good questions, and she has a snappy sense of conversational rhythm … The tone of The Freaks Came Out to Write is a symphonic kind of anarchy.”
–Dwight Garner (The New York Times)
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Our System:
RAVE = 5 points • POSITIVE = 3 points • MIXED = 1 point • PAN = -5 points
The fifteen books with the highest points totals are ranked by weighted average, and the top ten make the list
