A Note on Covers: Even though book covers are now a diminishing influence on whether a book is picked up or read, I do still love looking back every year at the diversity of creative styles that go into creating distinctive covers. On purely aesthetic grounds, ‘H is for Hawk’ probably has my favorite cover of the year — it perfectly captures the atmosphere of the book, and is immediately arresting. ‘On the Move’, which has on its cover a wonderfully virile photograph of a young Oliver Sacks is a close second.

Probably the most powerful book I read this year, Marsh conveys with fantastic clarity and honesty the ethical, personal, and technical challenges posed by contemporary neurosurgery, where it is often possible to keep someone technically alive, even if they have greatly diminished quality of life. The closest parallel is probably Atul Gawande’s Complications, though Do No Harm is a little broader in scope, and (to me at least) is stylistically superior.

It’s probably a toss-up between this book and Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me as to which book appeared on more year-end lists. The praise is entirely warranted — H is for Hawk is powerful stuff, meditative, revealing, intimate, at times deeply sad. It’s a wonderful book to read, ideally outside, on a wind-swept hill.

This book sent me off on a pretty deep Hessler dive — I think it’s fair to say I’ll now read most anything he writes, from this book, which uses a series of (often hilarious) road trips to explore China circa 2001, to his more recent work for the New Yorker set in Egypt, where he explores the stories of local garbagemen or Chinese lingerie dealers.

A wonderful memoir by an incredible man — ideally read in concert with listening to Sacks’s final episode with Radiolab. Self-recommending, though best read after you’ve read some of Sacks’s other books.

This is probably the most exhaustively reviewed book of 2015, so there’s little I can add, except to recommend that you read it in parallel with Isabel Wilkerson’s The Warmth of Other Suns, and also listen to the Longform podcast’s excellent interview with TNC as well.

A wonderfully warm series of essays about the reading life. Anyone who’s ever curled up with a book on a couch and not wanted to move for a long, long time will love this collection.

A very timely biography of Alexander von Humboldt that traces his influence on the development of modern science. What I like most about this book is that it manages to convey the degree to which the development of modern scientific practice has been a contingent process, with an individual’s ideas spreading onward, influencing future generations in entirely unpredictable ways. I’d also recommend Wulf’s interview on The Diane Rehm Show, which is a good complement to the book.

The word magisterial tends to be overused in book reviews, but it’s quite appropriate here — Beckert does a superb job of telling the history of cotton from a truly global perspective, tracing the degree to which this crop has affected global trade, foreign policy, and culture. Again, a great interview with Beckert on the Diane Rehm Show.

It was a strange feeling to read this book in 2015, with new ISIS-inflicted horrors being reported every day, however, it remains a fantastic history of the events that lead to the formation of Al-Qaeda, and the eventual 9/11 terror attacks. For a contemporary perspective, after reading this, listen to the always excellent Longform podcast interview Rukmini Callimachi who has, in a series of stories, been doing for ISIS what Wright and others did for Al-Qaeda.

A lighter, more reflective book than many of the others on this list, this is a lovely work of writing by a commercial long-haul pilot about the strange process by which we are propelled through the air — something we all take for granted these days.

A fascinating examination of the early days of the commercial computer industry — it’s amazing reading this and realizing how far we’ve come, and yet, how similar the culture of today’s tech companies is in some ways to those of the 1970s and 80s.

An excellent authorized biography of George H.W. Bush. What stands out here is Meacham’s attention to the way in which the Bush family structure and legacy motivated Bush 41 — it’s timely reading in this Presidential cycle as a reminder of how politics used to be. Ideally paired with McKay Coppins’ fantastic The Wilderness, which has some of the best writing about the back-stories of those running this year in the Republican primaries.

One of the reasons I love reading books about the history of science is that they can remind you that scientific progress is not linear or uniform. It’s amazing, in reading this book, to realize how relatively recent our contemporary understanding of the weather is, and the degree to which accurate weather forecasting is a fundamentally modern process.

A close fight between this book and Stephen Witt’s How Music Got Free, but this is slightly better — a fascinating exploration of how contemporary popular music is made, and a book that will definitely change how you listen to the radio.

A frightening, cautionary book that delves into the history of how American nuclear weapons have been secured and thought about over the past decades. You’ll come away feeling amazed that an accidental explosion has never occurred in our history — we’ve certainly come very close.

I read lots of great non-fiction that didn’t make this top-15 list. Probably first among the rest was Melvin Urofsky’s authoritative history of Dissent on the Supreme Court, which the most interesting legal book I read this year.