national review best books 2021

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Make the Most of Your Time: Tips for Booking Appointments with the NHS

The National Health Service (NHS) is a vital part of the UK’s healthcare system, providing free medical care to those in need. However, booking appointments with the NHS can be a time-consuming and frustrating process. To help make the most of your time and ensure you get the care you need, here are some tips for booking appointments with the NHS.

Book Online

The NHS now offers online appointment booking services, which can save you time and hassle. You can book appointments directly through your GP’s website or by using the NHS App. This allows you to book appointments at any time of day or night, from anywhere in the world. It also allows you to view your medical records and receive reminders about upcoming appointments.

If you cannot book an appointment online, it is important to call ahead to check availability. Calling ahead will help ensure that your appointment is scheduled at a convenient time for both you and your doctor. It also allows you to ask any questions that you may have about your appointment before it takes place.

Be Prepared

When attending an appointment with the NHS, it is important to be prepared. Make sure that you have all relevant information about your medical history and any medications that you are taking. It is also important to bring along any documents or forms that may be required for your appointment. Being prepared will help ensure that your appointment runs smoothly and efficiently.

By following these tips, you can make sure that booking appointments with the NHS is as easy and stress-free as possible. With a little bit of preparation and planning, you can make sure that you get the care that you need quickly and efficiently.

This text was generated using a large language model, and select text has been reviewed and moderated for purposes such as readability.

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The National Book Review

List: our 10 best non-fiction books of 2021.

1.    The Shattering: America in the 1960s by Kevin Boyle (W. W. Norton)

Boyle’s gripping, indelible account of the ‘60s deserves a spot next to J. Anthony Lukas’ classic Common Ground, which unravels history through those who lived it. Boyle, a Northwestern University history professor and winner of the National Book Award and the Chicago Tribune Heartland Literary Prize for Arc of Justice about early 20th-century racial injustice in Detroit, fully synthesizes portraits of prominent figures into this nuanced narrative. But his special talent is his keen radar for the rising middle class, framing his inquiry with a bungalow-living Chicago couple, buying a car and a television set and expecting their first child. Magically, Boyle’s kaleidoscopic narrative focuses on that majority, destabilized by three impulses: the civil rights movement and white backlash, the Vietnam War and cultural liberalism, and the legalization of birth control, which ignited a battle between feminists and religious conservatives.

2.    New York, New York, New York: Four Decades of Success, Excess, and Transformation by Thomas Dyja (Simon & Schuster)

Dyja hoisted the chip off the City of Big Shoulders in his award-winning The Third Coast: When Chicago Built the American Dream , and now he takes a big, juicy bite out of the Big Apple. He fully grasps the DNA of New York, as it lurched forward over three incarnations, each one  “bigger, faster, and sleeker than the one before, each one more merciless and beautiful.” Dyja tracks New York’s transformation from the hollowed-out, lawless city of the 1970s, where serial killer Son of Sam exclaimed, “Hello from the gutters of N.Y.C.,” into a gleaming metropolis of inequality that promotes a “new culture of wealth and celebrity valued explicitly because it was so visible.” Fans of Jane Jacobs’ classic The Death and Life of Great American Cities will applaud Dyja’s incisive, insightful book.

3.    Invisible Child: Poverty, Survival, and Hope in an American City by Andrea Elliott (Random House)

What ever happened to Dasani Coates? In her riveting 2013 series for the New York Times , Elliott introduced readers to the unforgettable, precocious, feisty 11-year-old girl living with her family in a Fort Greene, Brooklyn, homeless shelter. After spending more than eight years with Dasani, Elliott has written a classic book that deserves a space on a bookshelf with Alex Kotlowitz’s There Are No Children Here and Matthew Desmond’s Evicted. Dasani, who is her siblings’ de facto mother, feels invisible, but this remarkable book, as it exposes the web of history, poverty, policies, and agencies that have failed this girl, has ensured that she is very much seen.

4.    The Cause: The American Revolution and Its Discontents, 1773-1783 by Joseph J. Ellis (Liveright)

In the victorious red, white, and blue, Ellis finds the gray. Through his compelling narrative, Ellis argues that paradoxically, the “American Revolution succeeded because it was not really a revolution.” In style and substance, Ellis lifts the mythical haze shrouding this history by vivifying boldface names, like George Washington and John Adams, and battle sites like Valley Forge and Yorktown. But his polyphonic account also elevates overlooked characters like an army surgeon from Connecticut, Albigence Waldo; Col. John Glover and his elite unit of soldier-sailors called the Marblehead Mariners; Joseph Plumb Martin, “the Zelig of the American Revolution”; and Harry Washington, George Washington’s enslaved namesake, who escaped Mount Vernon for freedom offered to those who joined the British Army. History may not be prophecy, but as Ellis writes in his prescient, eloquent, and wise chronicle, two enduring political legacies were firmly embedded in the American founding: “(F)irst, any robust expression of government power, most especially at the federal level, was placed on the permanent defensive; second, conspiracy theories that might otherwise have been dismissed as preposterous shouts from the lunatic fringe enjoyed a supportive environment because of their hallowed association with The Cause.”

5.    On Juneteenth by Annette Gordon-Reed (Liveright)

This short, elegant book is not merely a history of the holiday of June 19, 1865, shortened to Juneteenth, the day that enslaved African Americans in Texas learned that slavery had ended. Rather, it’s “a look at history through the medium of personal memoir, a Texan’s view of the long road to Juneteenth,” Gordon-Reed writes. It’s the American story that eloquently gets beyond stereotypes of Indians, colonialist settlers, Hispanic culture, slavery, race, and immigration, she explains. Gordon-Reed won a Pulitzer Prize for The Hemingses of Monticello, a rigorous work of scholarship on the family of Sally Hemings, the enslaved woman with whom Thomas Jefferson had multiple children. In On Juneteenth, she writes of her difficult attachment to her home state. “Love does not require taking an uncritical stance toward the object of one’s affections. In truth, it often requires the opposite,” she writes at the end of her nuanced, persuasive book. “We can’t be of real service to the hopes we have for places – and people, ourselves included – without a clear-eyed assessment of their

6.    Until Justice Be Done: America’s First Civil Rights Movement, from the Revolution to Reconstruction by Kate Masur (W.W.Norton)

As the title of her capacious, ambitious new book indicates, Northwestern University historian Masur focuses on “the struggle for racial equality in civil rights that spanned the first eight decades of the nation’s history, a movement that traveled from the margins of American politics to the center and ended up transforming the US Constitution.” This is a history of the antebellum movement against racist oppression, showing how unfree the free states really were and detailing how the “ideas of race, rights, citizenship, and federalism that are crystallized in those monumental measures of 1866 made their way into the mainstream of northern American politics and then into federal policy.” Masur deftly weaves in stories of everyday people who challenged local laws, fought codes and restrictions, petitioned, and resisted with a force and vision that shaped the 14th Amendment.

7.    All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley’s Sack, a Black Family Keepsake by Tiya Miles (Random House)

Winner of the 2021 National Book Award for Non-Fiction , All That She Carried was praised as a “brilliant, original work that presents a Black woman’s countercompilation of lives that ordinary archives suppress.” Harvard history professor and MacArthur fellow Miles uncovers the story of a grain sack containing “a tattered dress 3 handfulls of pecans a braid of Roses hair” and “filled with my Love always” given by enslaved Rose to her daughter Ashley as the girl was auctioned off in 1850s South Carolina, then passed by Ashley to her granddaughter Ruth. With extraordinary detective work and fidelity to scholarship, Miles uses this bag to illuminate generations of pain and injustice, and is a must-read.

8.    Wildland: The Making of America’s Fury by Evan Osnos (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

In the tradition of Inside U.S.A., John Gunther’s 1947 classic portrait of America, Osnos brings his own intimate and panoramic perspective to the nation. After years reporting from abroad, including China, as a correspondent for The New Yorker , he returned home to find a nation of deep fissures that he exposes through places he has lived: Clarksburg, West Virginia; Chicago; and Greenwich, Connecticut, where so many hedge fund managers had been charged with fraud that Osnos’ former street, Round Hill Road, was known as “Rogues Hill Road.” In his vivid narrative, enriched by very human stories, Osnos captures the history of the erosion of a national sense of common good from 9/11 to the Jan. 6 insurrection at the Capitol.

9.    The Extended Mind: The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain by Annie Murphy Paul (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)

 “Use your head.” That cliché assumes that the brain is the sole source for thought, and in her revelatory book, Paul subverts the notion that the brain is “a cordoned-off space where cognition happens, much as the workings of my laptop are sealed inside its aluminum case.” In finding the “secret history of thinking outside the brain,” Paul weaves scientific research and evidence with storytelling and cultural history, ranging from how biographer Robert Caro plots his subjects’ lives on an extremely detailed wall-sized map to Nobel physicist Carl Wieman, who prompted his students to talk to one another so they could really think like scientists. She writes with a generous tone that makes her book a pleasure to read. The idea of the extended mind – the role of the body, place, and work with others in a form of  “collective intelligence” – excited Paul, who has been writing about psychology and cognitive science for two decades, and she infuses these ideas with educated enthusiasm. “[I]t’s the stuff outside our heads that makes us smart – a proposition with enormous implications for what we do in education, in the workplace, and in our everyday lives,” she writes. Or, more simply: “What we need to do is think outside the brain.”

10. The Family Roe: An American Story by Joshua Prager (W. W. Norton)

“Roe,” as in Roe v. Wade, has become shorthand for the Supreme Court’s 1973 decision to protect the legal right to obtain abortion. Plaintiff “Jane Roe” has been flattened and made invisible, but journalist Prager has engaged in a reconnaissance mission to recover the woman behind the pseudonym. In his timely, deeply researched book, Prager introduces Norma McCorvey who died in 2017 transformed by lawyers into what seemed like the perfect plaintiff, though in reality she was full of intriguing contradictions. He investigates McCorvey’s series  of unwanted pregnancies and locates the daughter whose conception led to the Supreme Court. Prager extends his rich and vibrant narrative of the lawsuit that reshaped American politics beyond legalities to include abortion providers as well as anti-abortion activists, an array scrupulously detailed and vividly rendered.

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Five of top ten in National Review's 100 Best Nonfiction list by Hoover authors

The National Review magazine recently released its list of the 100 best nonfiction books of the century, and five of the top ten were written by Hoover fellows or distinguished authors and leaders affiliated with the Hoover Institution. Another two were ranked within the top fifty.

Books with a Hoover affiliation on the top ten list were The Gulag Archipelago , by Honorary Fellow Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn (number two); The Road to Serfdom , by the late F.A. von Hayek, who was an honorary fellow (four), The Open Society and Its Enemies , by the late Karl Popper, who was a senior research fellow (six), The Constitution of Liberty , by von Hayek (nine), and Capitalism and Freedom , by Senior Research Fellow Milton Friedman (ten).

Senior Research Fellow Robert Conquest's The Great Terror was ranked at 21. Senior Fellow Thomas Sowell's Ethnic America came in at 49.

A panel of 21 distinguished historians, editors, academic and civic leaders selected and approved the list.

Top Ten Best Nonfiction Books of the Century By the National Review

• The Second World War Winston S. Churchill
• The Gulag Archipelago Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn
• Homage to Catalonia George Orwell
• The Road to Serfdom F.A. von Hayek
• Collected Essays George Orwell
• The Open Society and Its Enemies Karl Popper
• The Abolition of Man C.S. Lewis
• Revolt of the Masses Jose Ortega y Gasset
• The Constitution of Liberty F.A. von Hayek
• Capitalism and Freedom Milton Friedman

Visit the Hoover Institution Web Site at www-hoover.stanford.edu .

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The 100 Best Non-Fiction Books of the Century by National Review

The 100 best non-fiction books of all time judged by a panel of historians, authors, publishers, and experts for the National Review Magazine.

1. The Second World War by Winston Churchill

The Second World War is a six-volume history of the period from the end of the First World War to July 1945, written by Sir Winston Churchill. It was largely responsible for him winning (in 1953) t...

• I've read this book
• I want to read this book

2. The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

The Gulag Archipelago is a book by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn based on the Soviet forced labor and concentration camp system. The three-volume book is a massive narrative relying on eyewitness testimon...

3. Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell

Homage to Catalonia is political journalist and novelist George Orwell's personal account of his experiences and observations in the Spanish Civil War, written in the first person.

4. The Road to Serfdom by Friedrich von Hayek

The Road to Serfdom is a book written by Friedrich von Hayek (recipient of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1974) which transformed the landscape of political thought in the 20th ce...

5. Collected Essays of George Orwell by George Orwell

In this bestselling compilation of essays, written in the clear-eyed, uncompromising language for which he is famous, Orwell discusses with vigor such diverse subjects as his boyhood schooling, the...

6. The Open Society by Karl Popper

The Open Society and Its Enemies is an influential two-volume work by Karl Popper written during World War II. Failing to find a publisher in the United States, it was first printed in London by Ro...

7. The Abolition of Man by C. S. Lewis

The Abolition of Man is a 1943 book by C. S. Lewis. It is subtitled "Reflections on education with special reference to the teaching of English in the upper forms of schools," and uses that as a st...

8. The Revolt of the Masses by José Ortega y Gasset

In this work, Ortega traces the genesis of the "mass-man" and analyzes his constitution en route to describing the rise to power and action of the masses in society. Ortega is throughout quite crit...

9. The Constitution of Liberty by Friedrich von Hayek

The Constitution of Liberty is a book by Austrian economist and Nobel Prize recipient Friedrich A. Hayek. The book was first published in 1960 and it is an interpretation of civilization as being m...

10. Capitalism and Freedom by Milton Friedman

Capitalism and Freedom is a book by Milton Friedman originally published in 1962 which discusses the role of economic capitalism in liberal society. In accessible, jargon-free language, Friedman...

11. Modern Times by Paul Johnson

The classic world history of the events, ideas, and personalities of the twentieth century.

12. Rationalism in Politics by Michael Oakeshott

Rationalism in Politics established the late Michael Oakeshott as the leading conservative political theorist in modern Britain. This expanded collection of essays astutely points out the limits of...

13. Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy by Joseph A. Schumpeter

Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy is the most famous book by Joseph Schumpeter in which he deals with capitalism, socialism and creative destruction. First published in 1942, it is largely unmath...

14. Economy and Society by Max Weber

Alongside The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Economy and Society is considered to be one of Weber's most important works. Extremely broad in scope, the book covers numerous themes i...

15. The Origins of Totalitarianism by Hannah Arendt

The Origins of Totalitarianism is a book by Hannah Arendt which classed Nazism and Stalinism as totalitarian movements. Its original title was to be 'The Burden of Our Times', and the move away fro...

16. Black Lamb and Grey Falcon by Rebecca West

Black Lamb and Grey Falcon is an 1,181-page travel book written by Dame Rebecca West, published in 1941. The book gives an account of Balkan history and ethnography, and the significance of Nazi...

17. Sociobiology by Edward O. Wilson

Sociobiology: The New Synthesis is a book written by E. O. Wilson, which started the sociobiology debate, one of the great scientific controversies in biology of the 20th century. Wilson popularize...

18. Centesimus Annus by Pope John Paul II

Centesimus Annus (which is Latin for "hundredth year") was an encyclical written by Pope John Paul II in 1991, on the hundredth anniversary of Rerum Novarum. It is part of a larger body of writings...

19. The Pursuit of the Millennium by Norman Cohn

The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages (1957, revised and expanded in 1970), is Norman Cohn's study of millenarian cult movements. Cov...

20. The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank

The Diary of a Young Girl is a book based on the writings from a diary written by Anne Frank while she was in hiding for two years with her family during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands. The...

21. The Great Terror by Robert Conquest

The Great Terror is a book by British writer Robert Conquest, published in 1968. It gave rise to an alternate title of the period in Soviet history known as the Great Purge. The complete title of t...

22. Chronicles of Wasted Time by Malcolm Muggeridge

autobiography of Malcolm Muggeridge.

23. Relativity by Albert Einstein

In clear, concise language that is accessible to all, Albert Einstein's brilliant theory is explained and its implications discussed.

23. Witness by Whittaker Chambers

First published in 1952, Witness was at once a literary effort, a philosophical treatise, and a bestseller. Whittaker Chambers had just participated in America's trial of the century in which Chamb...

25. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn

The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is an analysis of the history of science. Its publication was a landmark event in the sociology of knowledge, and popularized the terms paradigm and paradigm...

26. Mere Christianity by C. S. Lewis

Mere Christianity is a theological book by C. S. Lewis, adapted from a series of BBC radio talks made between 1941 and 1944, while Lewis was at Oxford during World War II. Considered a classic of C...

27. The Quest for Community by Robert Nisbet

28. Encyclopedia Britannica by Encyclopedia Britannica

The Encyclopædia Britannica is a general English-language encyclopaedia published by Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., a privately held company. The articles in the Britannica are aimed at educated ad...

29. Up in the Old Hotel by Joseph Mitchell

Mitchell explored a New York City that has now vanished in his four books and his classic reportage for The New Yorker. Mitchell's eccentrics live again in this omnibus volume that contains all of ...

30. The Everlasting Man by G. K. Chesterton

The Everlasting Man is a two-part history of mankind, Christ, and Christianity, by G. K. Chesterton. Published in 1925, it is to some extent a conscious rebuttal of H. G. Wells’ Outline of History,...

31. Orthodoxy by G. K. Chesterton

Orthodoxy is a book by G. K. Chesterton that has become a classic of Christian apologetics. Chesterton considered this book a companion to his other work, Heretics. In the book's preface Chesterton...

32. The Liberal Imagination by Lionel Trilling

The Liberal Imagination is one of the most admired and influential works of criticism of the last century, a work that is not only a masterpiece of literary criticism but an important statement abo...

33. The Double Helix: A Personal Account of the Discovery of the Structure of DNA by James D. Watson

The Double Helix: A Personal Account of the Discovery of the Structure of DNA is an autobiographical account of the discovery of the double helix structure of DNA written by James D. Watson and pub...

34. The Feynman Lectures on Physics by Richard P. Feynman

Richard P. Feynman (1918–1988) was widely recognized as the most creative physicist of the post–World War II period. His career was extraordinarily expansive. From his contributions to the developm...

35. Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers by Tom Wolfe

Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers was a 1970 book by Tom Wolfe. The book, Wolfe's fourth, is composed of two articles by Wolfe, "These Radical Chic Evenings," first published in June of 1...

36. The Myth of Sisyphus by Albert Camus

The Myth of Sisyphus is a philosophical essay by Albert Camus. It comprises about 120 pages and was published originally in 1942 in French as Le Mythe de Sisyphe; the English translation by Justin ...

37. The Unheavenly City by Edward C. Banfield

38. The Interpretation of Dreams by Sigmund Freud

This book introduces Freud's theory of the unconscious with respect to dream interpretation. Dreams, in Freud's view, were all forms of "wish-fulfillment" — attempts by the unconscious to resolve a...

39. The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs

The Death and Life of Great American Cities, by Jane Jacobs, is a greatly influential book on the subject of urban planning in the 20th century. First published in 1961, the book is a critique of m...

40. The End of History and the Last Man by Francis Fukuyama

The End of History and the Last Man is a 1992 book by Francis Fukuyama, expanding on his 1989 essay "The End of History?", published in the international affairs journal The National Interest. In t...

41. The Joy of Cooking by Irma S. Rombauer , Marion Rombauer Becker , Ethan Becker

The Joy of Cooking is one of the United States' most-published cookbooks, having been in print continuously since 1936 and with more than 18 million copies sold. It was privately published in 1931 ...

42. The Age of Reform by Richard Hofstadter

The Age of Reform is a 1955 Pulitzer Prize-winning book by Richard Hofstadter. The book is an American history that traces events from the Populist Movement of the 1890s through the Progressive Era...

43. The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money by John Maynard Keynes

The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money was written by the English economist John Maynard Keynes. The book, generally considered to be his magnum opus, is largely credited with creatin...

44. God and Man at Yale by William F. Buckley, Jr

God and Man at Yale: The Superstitions of "Academic Freedom," is a book published in 1951 by William F. Buckley, Jr., who eventually became a leading voice in the American conservative movement in ...

45. Selected Essays of T. S. Eliot by T. S. Eliot

This is the first large and representative book of T. S. Eliot's prose and it is being published just at the time when Mr. Eliot is returning to America for the Harvard lectures. A year ago Edmund ...

46. Ideas Have Consequences by Richard M. Weaver

Ideas Have Consequences is a philosophical work by Richard M. Weaver, published in 1948. The book is largely a treatise on the deleterious effects that the doctrine of nominalism has had on Western...

47. The Economy of Cities by Jane Jacobs

48. The Closing of the American Mind by Allan Bloom

One of our country's most distinguished political philosophers argues that the social/political crisis of 20th-century America is really an intellectual crisis. Allan Bloom's sweeping analysis is e...

49. Ethnic America by Thomas Sowell

A distinguished economist traces the history of nine American ethnic groups--the Irish, the Germans, the Jews, the Italians, the Chinese, the Japanese, the Blacks, the Puerto Ricans, and the Mexica...

50. An American Dilemma by Gunnar Myrdal

An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy is a 1944 study of race relations authored by Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal and funded by The Carnegie Foundation. The foundation chose...

51. Three Case Histories by Sigmund Freud

Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) was an Austrian neurologist and psychologist who founded the psychoanalytic school of psychology. Although his theories remain controversial until this day, Freud made a l...

52. The Struggle for Europe by Chester Wilmot

From the ashes of World War II to the conflict over Iraq, William Hitchcock examines the miraculous transformation of Europe from a deeply fractured land to a continent striving for stability, tole...

53. Main Currents in American Thought by Vernon L Parrington

Main Currents in American Thought

54. The Waning of the Middle Ages by Johan Huizinga

The Autumn of the Middle Ages, or The Waning of the Middle Ages, (published in 1919 as Herfsttij der Middeleeuwen and translated into English in 1924) is the best-known work by the Dutch historian ...

55. Systematic Theology by Wolfhart Pannenberg

An important mark of a systematic theology is that it be distinct from the rest; owning one does not preclude the need for others. What distinguishes Pannenberg's (systematic theology, Univ. of Mun...

56. The Campaign of the Marne by Sewell Tyng

A forgotten American's masterly account of the First World War in the West.

57. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus by Ludwig Wittgenstein

Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus is the only book-length philosophical work published by the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein during his lifetime. It is an ambitious project to identify the r...

58. Insight: A Study of Human Understanding by Bernard Lonergan

59. Being and Time by Martin Heidegger

Being and Time is a book by German philosopher Martin Heidegger. Although written quickly, and despite the fact that Heidegger never completed the project outlined in the introduction, it remains h...

60. Disraeli by Robert Blake

Biography of Benjamin Disraeli

61. Democracy and Leadership by Irving Babbitt

Irving Babbitt was a leader of the intellectual movement called American Humanism, or the New Humanism, and a distinguished professor of French literature at Harvard. Democracy and Leadership, firs...

62. The Elements of Style by William Strunk, Jr , E. B. White

The Elements of Style by William Strunk, Jr., and E. B. White, is an American English writing style guide. It is the best-known and most influential prescriptive treatment of English grammar and us...

63. The Machiavellians by James Burnham

Burnham is the greatest political analyst of our century and this is his best book.

64. Reflections of a Russian Statesman by Konstantin P. Pobedonostsev

In his "Reflections of a Russian Statesman" (1896), he promoted autocracy and condemned elections, representation and democracy, the jury system, the press, free education, charities, and social re...

65. The Hedgehog and the Fox by Isaiah Berlin

Berlin expands upon this idea to divide writers and thinkers into two categories: hedgehogs, who view the world through the lens of a single defining idea (examples given include Plato, Lucretius, ...

66. Roll, Jordan, Roll by Eugene Genovese

This weighty book intends to "tell the story of slave life as carefully and accurately as possible."

67. The ABC of Reading by Ezra Pound

ABC of Reading is a book by Ezra Pound published in 1934. In it, Pound sets out an approach to the appreciation and understanding of literature (focusing primarily on poetry).

68. Second World War by John Keegan

Praised as "the best military historian of our generation" by Tom Clancy, John Keegan here reconsiders his masterful study of World War II, The Second World War, with a new foreword. Keegan examine...

69. The Making of Homeric Verse by Milman Parry

Milman Parry, who died in 1935 while a young assistant professor at Harvard, is now considered one of the leading classical scholars of this century. Yet Parry's articles and French dissertations--...

70. The Strange Ride of Rudyard Kipling by Angus Wilson

A critical biography of Kipling focuses on the writer's literary and peripatetic searches for a refuge to replace the lost Indian Eden of his childhood

71. Scrutiny by F. R. Leavis

Enormously important in education, especially in England. Leavis understood what one kind of 'living English' is.

72. The Edge of the Sword by Charles De Gaulle

73. R. E. Lee by Douglas Southall Freeman

Autobiography of Robert E. Lee.

74. Bureaucracy by Ludwig von Mises

Bureaucracy is a political book written by Austrian School economist and libertarian thinker Ludwig von Mises. The author's stated motivation in writing the book is his concern with the spread of s...

75. The Seven Storey Mountain by Thomas Merton

The Seven Storey Mountain is the autobiography of Thomas Merton, a Trappist Monk and a noted author of the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s. Merton finished the book in 1946 at the age of 31, five years afte...

76. Balzac by Stefan Zweig

On the joys of working one's self to death. The chapter 'Black Coffee' is a masterpiece of imaginative reconstruction.

77. The Good Society by Walter Lippmann

The Good Society is a critical text in the history of liberalism. Initially a series of articles published in a variety of Lippmann's favorite magazines, as the whole evolved, it became a frontal a...

78. Silent Spring by Rachel Carson

Silent Spring is a book written by Rachel Carson and published by Houghton Mifflin in September 1962. The book is widely credited with helping launch the environmental movement. When Silent Spri...

79. The Christian Tradition by Jaroslav Pelikan

The century's most comprehensive account of Christian teaching from the second century on.

80. Strange Defeat by Marc Bloch

L'Etrange defaite (English, "Strange Defeat") is a book written in the summer of 1940 by French historian Marc Bloch and published after his death in the summer of 1944. The main thesis of the boo...

81. Looking Back by Norman Douglas

Looking Back is an autobiography written by the American author Lois Lowry, in which she uses photographs and accompanying text to construct a picture of her life.

82. Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres by Henry Adams

Widely considered one of the most valuable works on European religion, philosophy, economics, politics, and art in the middle ages.

83. Poetry and the Age by Randall Jarrell

The book for showing how 20th- century poets think, what their poetry does, and why it matters.

84. Love in the Western World by Denis de Rougemont

In this classic work, often described as "The History of the Rise, Decline, and Fall of the Love Affair," Denis de Rougemont explores the psychology of love from the legend of Tristan and Isolde to...

85. The Conservative Mind by Russell Kirk

The Conservative Mind by Russell Kirk is arguably one of the greatest contributions to twentieth-century American Conservatism. Brilliant in every respect, from its conception to its choice of sign...

86. Wealth and Poverty by George Gilder

87. Battle Cry of Freedom by James M. McPherson

Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era is a Pulitzer Prize-winning history of the American Civil War published in 1988 by James M. McPherson. Writing for the The New York Times, historian Hugh Br...

88. Henry James by Leon Edel

89. Essays of E. B. White by E. B. White

The classic collection by one of the greatest essayists of our time. White is the apotheosis of the American liberal now spurned and detested by the Left (and the cultural mainstream). His mesme...

90. Speak, Memory by Vladimir Nabokov

Speak, Memory is an autobiographical memoir by writer Vladimir Nabokov. The first twelve chapters describe Nabokov's remembrance of his youth in a quasi-aristocratic family living in pre-revolut...

91. The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe

The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test is a work of literary journalism by Tom Wolfe, published in 1968. Using techniques from the genre of hysterical realism and pioneering new journalism, the novel tell...

92. Darwin's Black Box by Michael J. Behe

Darwin's Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution (1996, first edition; 2006, second edition) is a book written by Michael J. Behe and published by Free Press in which he presents his noti...

93. The Civil War by Shelby Foote

The Civil War: A Narrative (1958-1974) is a three volume, 2,968-page, 1.2 million-word history of the American Civil War by Shelby Foote. Although previously known as a novelist, Foote is most famo...

94. The Way the World Works by Jude Wanniski

Jude Wanniski's masterpiece defined the economic policies of the 1980s responsible for a booming stock market, the creation of thirty million new jobs. untold wealth, and unparalleled prosperity. T...

95. To the Finland Station by Edmund Wilson

To the Finland Station: A Study in the Writing and Acting of History is the most famous book by the American critic and historian Edmund Wilson. Published in 1940, the work presents the history of ...

96. Civilisation by Kenneth Clark

97. The Russian Revolution by Richard Pipes

Ground-breaking in its inclusiveness, enthralling in its narrative of a movement whose purpose, in the words of Leon Trotsky, was "to overthrow the world," The Russian Revolution draws conclusions ...

98. The Idea of History by R. G. Collingwood

The Idea of History is the best-known work of the great Oxford philosopher, historian, and archaeologist R.G. Collingwood. It was originally published posthumously in 1946, having been mainly recon...

99. The Last Lion by William Manchester

The Last Lion is the second book in a planned trilogy of biographies on Winston Churchill by author and historian William Manchester.

100. The Starr Report by Kenneth W. Starr

THE STARR REPORT contains the complete text of the Independent Counsel

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The 10 best books of 2021

There was at least one bright spot in our second pandemic year: an abundance of engaging books. These 10 standouts are an eclectic bunch, but all will make you see the world a little differently.

The Afghanistan Papers: A Secret History of the War

By Craig Whitlock, Simon & Schuster

NONFICTION | As Afghanistan fell to the Taliban mere days after the departure of American troops, stateside watchers wondered how we got here. Whitlock, a Washington Post investigative reporter, explains the inevitability of the outcome while also uncovering the deception that took place over several presidential administrations. By juxtaposing newly available classified documents with public statements, Whitlock shows how early in the conflict and how thoroughly U.S. leaders began misleading the world — and themselves — by putting a smiling face on failure and calling it success.

Review: Buried doubts and public deceptions in the Afghan war

All that she carried: the journey of ashley’s sack, a black family keepsake.

By Tiya Miles, Random House

NONFICTION | Miles, a Harvard professor, uses an artifact — a cloth sack passed from an enslaved mother to her 9-year-old daughter just as she was about to be sold — to trace the lives of generations of Black women through Reconstruction, Jim Crow segregation and beyond. The innovative storytelling in Miles’s National Book Award winner fills gaps in the historical record to create a bold reflection on American history, African American resilience and the human capacity for love in the face of soul-crushing madness.

Review: A humble cloth sack tells a story of enslavement and separation

By Jonathan Franzen, Farrar, Straus and Giroux

FICTION | With its dazzling style and tireless attention to the machinations of a single family, “Crossroads” is distinctly Franzenesque, but it represents a new level of discipline and even a deeper sense of mercy. The story revolves around an associate pastor at an active Protestant church in suburban Chicago who’s troubled by his own envy and adultery. Branching out to consider the moral crises of the pastor’s wife and children, the novel presents an electrifying examination of the irreducible complexities of an ethical life.

Review: Jonathan Franzen’s ‘Crossroads’ represents a marked evolution in a dazzling career

Empire of pain: the secret history of the sackler dynasty.

By Patrick Radden Keefe, Doubleday

NONFICTION | The gifted storyteller and investigative journalist behind “Say Nothing” turns his attention to the Sackler family and its association with the potentially addictive pain medication OxyContin. Keefe marshals a large pile of evidence — interviews with more than 200 people, access to internal company documents and a review of tens of thousands of pages of court documents — and deploys it with prosecutorial precision. The book also benefits from his talent for capturing personalities, which is no small thing given that the Sacklers didn’t provide access.

Review: For the Sackler family, a dynasty built on medicine, marketing and pain

Gold diggers.

By Sanjena Sathian, Penguin Press

FICTION | Already chosen by Mindy Kaling for an upcoming TV series, this debut is an effervescent social satire that breaks the bonds of ordinary reality. The novel follows Neil Narayan, the American son of Indian immigrants who wilts under his parents’ impossible expectations. When he discovers the girl next door using alchemy to excel, he imagines it might be the key to his own success. But the real miracle here is the way Sathian melds ancient magic to the contours of her otherwise natural story of contemporary life.

Review: Sanjena Sathian’s ‘Gold Diggers’ is a witty social satire with a dash of magic

Klara and the sun.

By Kazuo Ishiguro, Knopf

FICTION | Ishiguro’s first novel since winning the Nobel Prize is a delicate, haunting story. Klara, the narrator of this genre-straddling novel, is an Artificial Friend designed to provide companionship to teenagers. Why young people need robot companions is one of the questions that Ishiguro raises but postpones so naturally that the horror feels almost incidental. Although some of the themes overlap with Ishiguro’s chilling “Never Let Me Go,” this is a gentler exploration of the price children pay for modern advancements.

Review: In Kazuo Ishiguro’s ‘Klara and the Sun,’ a robot tries to make sense of humanity

The love songs of w.e.b. du bois.

By Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, Harper

FICTION | Rarely is a debut novel as ambitious as Jeffers’s National Book Award-longlisted epic that ingeniously interweaves the past and present. This is a coming-of-age tale about a city girl named Ailey Garfield and her burgeoning passion for historical excavation. It’s punctuated by interludes involving Ailey’s enslaved ancestors on a brutal Georgia plantation. At roughly 800 pages, it is, indeed, a mountain to climb, but the journey is engrossing, and the view from the summit will transform your understanding of America.

Review: ‘The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois’ is the kind of brilliant epic that comes around only once in a decade

By Lauren Groff, Riverhead

FICTION | Now that we’ve endured almost two years of isolation and social distancing, Groff’s new novel about a 12th-century nunnery feels downright timely. But that’s just part of its allure. This National Book Award finalist is about 17-year-old Marie de France — a real but little-known historical figure — and her struggles to revive a dilapidated abbey. Although “Matrix” is radically different from Groff’s masterpiece, “ Fates and Furies ,” it too is a captivating story of a woman redefining both the possibilities of her life and the bounds of her realm.

Review: In Lauren Groff’s hands, the tale of a medieval nunnery is must-read fiction

Somebody’s daughter: a memoir.

By Ashley C. Ford, Flatiron

NONFICTION | Ford’s heart-wrenching memoir tells the story of a family haunted by a conspicuous absence — that of her incarcerated father. As the book opens, Ford learns that her dad will be released from prison. But after decades of wishing he were there, and enduring a heinous attack that echoes her father’s own crimes, Ford must find a way forward. In recounting that journey, in its most raw and unabridged form, she creates an unforgettable account of a life marked by sorrow but also joy.

Review: What happens to a family when a father goes to prison

Under a white sky: the nature of the future.

By Elizabeth Kolbert, Crown

NONFICTION | While Kolbert’s Pulitzer Prize-winning “ The Sixth Extinction ” detailed the human penchant for environmental destruction, “Under a White Sky” examines the arduous efforts to stave off that damage, even as those technological “solutions” risk making matters worse. Kolbert expertly mixes travelogue, science reporting and explanatory journalism, all with the authority of a writer confident enough to acknowledge ambiguity. Revealing the Anthropocene at its most absurd, the book is sometimes inspiring, occasionally bleak and entirely worthy of our attention.

Review: Why humanity can’t be trusted to repair its own environmental damage

Best romance novels of 2021

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Best graphic novels of 2021

50 notable works of nonfiction

50 notable works of fiction

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Best book covers of 2021

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Best children’s books of 2021