This was not my most productive year for reading, lots of things got in the way, but here are my five favorite books from 2021. The first two on the list are books I will likely reread within a year or two.
Amitav Ghosh, The Nutmeg's Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis (Chicago University Press, 2021)
This is not for everyone but it is marvelously written (it is a case of an award-winning novelist producing first-rate non-fiction). Ghosh puts climate change and inequality into historical and cultural perspectives in an accessible way without simplifying. His conclusions about the direction our politics and intellectual culture should take may seem odd to many, but they seem worth consideration.
David Rooney, About Time: A History of Civilization in Twelve Clocks (Norton, 2021)
This is not just one of those cases where a writer picks a subject and pulls together ten or a dozen interesting stories. Rooney grew up in the clock repair business and has spent years as a curator of clock collections in some of the finest museums in the world. This is not about clocks as we normally think of them, he ranges from sundials and sand glasses to atomic clocks, and what he has to say about their roles in our culture and economy are eye opening to say the least. I have been reading a lot about clocks and watches over the past year or two, and this opened up several new perspectives for me.
Alexander Nemerov, Fierce Poise: Helen Frankenthaler and 1950s New York (Penguin, 2021)
I have been curious about Frankenthaler for decades but never dug into her life. Nemerov focuses one the years of her rise and the height of her reputation by taking a single work from a year and then branching off from there. This was a very good read. It left me with a much better idea of what Frankenthaler was doing and filled in a lot of background that made the culture of the 50s art world more intelligible.
Amanda Montell, Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism (Harper Wave, 2021)
Montell does a terrific job looking at the language tricks of suicide cults, Scientology, multi-level marketing schemes, and cult-like fitness businesses. The style is journalistic but the insights are deeper. The young woman who sold it to me at Skylark told me she was dying to read this as Montell's previous book, Wordslut: A Feminist Guide to Taking Back the English Language was one of her favorites.
Brian T. Brown, Someone Is Out to Get Us: A Not So Brief History of Cold War Paranoia and Madness (Twelve, 2021)
This is not just about delusions, but Brown does a masterful job of showing how our false beliefs that the Soviets were more powerful and more technically advanced than they were drove the Cold War itself and shaped our culture. If this is a topic of interest, two other books I read in 2020 would pair well with it:
-Thomas Rid, Active Measures: The Secret History of Disinformation and Political Warfare (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020)
-Kathryn Olmsted, Real Enemies: Conspiracy Theories and American Democracy (Oxford University Press, 2008)
