Reporting that still holds up

SN

Say Nothing

Patrick Radden Keefe

A murder during the Troubles used as the spine for forty years of a society, and it never takes a side it cannot source. The best narrative non-fiction of its year.

EO

Empire of Pain

Patrick Radden Keefe

The Sackler family and the opioid crisis, built from court filings and interviews. Angry, and every angry sentence is documented.

BB

Bad Blood

John Carreyrou

The reporter who broke the Theranos story, telling it with the source list you would expect from someone who kept 150 people on the record.

TI

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

Rebecca Skloot

The cell line that made modern medicine possible came from a woman who never consented and whose family could not afford health insurance. Reported over a decade.

TE

The Emperor of All Maladies

Siddhartha Mukherjee

A biography of cancer written by an oncologist who can also write. The history of the treatments is more dramatic than any of the cures.

IT

Into Thin Air

Jon Krakauer

A first-hand account of the 1996 Everest disaster by someone who was there, and unusually honest about his own part in it. Read alongside Boukreev’s rebuttal.

NT

Nothing to Envy

Barbara Demick

Six defectors from one North Korean city, told in their own words. The ordinariness of their lives is what makes the book unbearable.

KL

King Leopold’s Ghost

Adam Hochschild

How a private colony in the Congo killed millions while presenting itself as philanthropy. The archival work is meticulous and the subject is enormous.

TL

The Looming Tower

Lawrence Wright

The road to 9/11 traced through people on all sides, including the FBI agents who saw it coming and were blocked. Exhaustively sourced.

TM

The Making of the Atomic Bomb

Richard Rhodes

Physics, politics and the people, at a length that is fully justified. The last hundred pages are among the best writing about the twentieth century.

SS

Silent Spring

Rachel Carson

The book that made an environmental movement possible, and it is still readable as science rather than relic. Its method — trace the evidence, follow the consequence — has not improved on.

TS

The Sixth Extinction

Elizabeth Kolbert

Thirteen species or sites, each one a report from the field. Written before the subject became a genre, and still the clearest.

TS

The Selfish Gene

Richard Dawkins

The gene’s-eye view explained better than anyone has managed since, and the chapter that named the meme is in here too. Dated in places and still the best introduction.

TF

Thinking, Fast and Slow

Daniel Kahneman

The two-systems account from the person who did the work. The replication crisis has since taken some of the studies it leans on, and the framework survived it.

E

Educated

Tara Westover

A memoir about a childhood without school or doctors that is careful not to turn its family into villains. Its restraint is why it is believable.

WS

Wild Swans

Jung Chang

Three generations of one Chinese family across the twentieth century, told through the women. Personal testimony that has been contested, and worth reading alongside the criticism.

TU

The Undoing Project

Michael Lewis

The friendship between Kahneman and Tversky, which is the part the textbooks leave out and the reason their work happened at all.