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10. The Selected Letters of Willa Cather, Andrew Jewell and Janis Stout (editors)

Knopf

When Willa Cather died in 1947, her will stipulated that her letters not be published; she wanted her works of fiction—including My Antonia, O Pioneers! and Death Comes for the Archbishop—to speak for themselves. Until this year, the great writer’s correspondence remained scattered among various libraries and off limits to all but scholars. All that changed with The Selected Letters of Willa Cather, a robust volume that deepens our understanding of the novelist’s witty, tenacious and richly intelligent character. Whether Cather is joking with her family, pressing her publisher for a better dust jacket or despairing of the losses of World War II, her voice comes through on every page as a true American original. —Radhika Jones

9. Falling Upwards, Richard Holmes

Out of an ostensibly placid, dreamy activity, hot air ballooning, Holmes conjures an extraordinarily vivid, violent, thrilling history, full of bizarre personalities, narrow escapes and fatal plunges. A peerless prose artist, infectiously curious, Holmes revives such forgotten heroes as Sophie Blanchard, Napoleon’s official aeronaut, and James Glaisher, who in 1862 rode a balloon to 29,000 feet without oxygen in the name of science, and Thaddeus Lowe, who flew over Civil War battlefields, doing aerial reconnaissance for the Union. —Lev Grossman

8. Men We Reaped, Jesmyn Ward

Bloomsbury USA

Between 2000 and 2004, five men who were close to Ward—a brother, a cousin, friends—died violently: guns, cars, drugs, suicide. Ward, who won the National Book Award in 2011 for her novel Salvage the Bones, weaves their stories around and through her own to create a picture of life as a young black person in the rural south, and what it took for her to get out. Men We Reaped (the title is adapted from a Harriet Tubman quote) is bare of self-pity, but lavishly endowed with literary craft and hard-earned wisdom. —Lev Grossman

7. Going Clear, Lawrence Wright

Knopf

Since its origins in the 1950s, Scientology has fought to control how it’s been portrayed in the mainstream media. In Going Clear, Wright—who won a Pulitzer prize for The Looming Tower, his history of Al Qaeda—fights back, turning a merciless journalistic eye on a bizarre history that has until now been difficult to piece together. His relentlessly researched, skillfully presented work reveals a greedy, paranoid and supremely shrewd organization, the success of which shines a harsh and not especially flattering light on the ease with which otherwise high-functioning people can be manipulated. —Lev Grossman

6. Five Days at Memorial, Sheri Fink

The tragedy of Hurricane Katrina didn’t end with high winds and floods. In her masterful book about the fallout at one hard-hit New Orleans hospital, Fink weaves the terrifying story of patients whose death were hastened by the storm (and allegedly by their caregivers) into a parable of the end-of-life care dilemmas that affect all Americans. With insights from doctors and nurses, family members and survivors, Fink’s account of those five fateful days and their aftermath reminds us how tenuous is the line between life and death, especially in an era of advanced resuscitative technology and expensive medical care. —Radhika Jones

5. The Book of My Lives, Aleksandar Hemon

Hemon was born in Sarajevo, grew up there as a clever and mischievous young man, did a stint in the army, then departed for a cultural exchange in Chicago in 1992. While he was there, the Siege of Sarajevo began, and the world of his childhood destroyed itself. He had to watch it on TV, searching for faces he knew in the disastrous news footage. At the same time Hemon was learning English and slowly, haltingly finding a home for himself in his country of exile. He records it all in this mournful, strangely funny memoir, which reveals a delicate touch with the English language far better than that of most native speakers. —Lev Grossman

4. Forty-One False Starts, Janet Malcolm

Oh, to see the world through Malcolm’s eyes: that intelligence, cool but never cold, and that unerring eye for the telling detail—she is, to paraphrase Henry James, someone on whom nothing is lost. In this magnificent collection of her critical essays she directs her eternally curious gaze at painters, writers, photographers, the Gossip Girls novels, New Yorker editor William Shawn. It almost doesn’t matter what: she has the true essayist’s gift of rendering interesting anything she is interested in. —Lev Grossman

3. The Bully Pulpit, Doris Kearns Goodwin

Goodwin would appear to be going from the sublime, Abraham Lincoln, to the ridiculous, William Howard Taft. But if her subjects are less godlike than they were in Team of Rivals, their stories are no less rich and interesting. The Bully Pulpit is, of course, Theodore Roosevelt’s phrase, and Goodwin’s focus is on Roosevelt and Taft and their complex relationship: Roosevelt groomed Taft as his successor, then became his bitter opponent. And there’s a third party here: the crusading press, particularly McClure’s magazine, with which Roosevelt formed a powerful strategic alliance unlike anything before or since. —Lev Grossman

2. Command and Control, Erik Schlosser

It’s not an obvious progression, going from Fast Food Nation, Schlosser’s 2001 expose of McDonald’s and its greasy ilk, to a history of the United States nuclear arsenal. But the same gifts are on display: meticulous research, enormous narrative flair and a carefully modulated and entirely justified undertone of righteous horror. Schlosser’s book has two parallel threads: one the story of a ghastly nuclear accident at rural Arkansas missile silo in 1980, the other a careful chronicle of how America built its nuclear weapons, starting with Los Alamos, and the terrible chances we took, and how close we came to losing control of the monster we created. —Lev Grossman

1. Book of Ages, Jill Lepore

Virginia Woolf once wrote the tragic story of Shakespeare’s sister: she dies an early death, unknown, her genius stifled by the world’s blindness and indifference. Shakespeare didn’t really have a sister, but Benjamin Franklin did: her name was Jane. Out of 17 children, he was the youngest son, she the youngest daughter. He was among the most celebrated Americans of his era. She was married at 15 to a ne’er do well named Mecom. She bore him 12 children, he kept them in squalor and debt. You can almost feel the resistance as Lepore writes against the grain of history, scouring archives to bring to light the kind of life that our society habitually buries and forgets. But Jane Franklin’s indomitable voice and hungry, searching intellect shine through these pages; she will not be forgotten, and the world is richer for it. —Lev Grossman

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