Carl Wilkinson selects his must-read titles. As the world went into lockdown early in 2020, many of us without frontline jobs and lucky enough not to fall sick with Covid-19 found more time to read than usual. The best nonfiction books of 2020 offer wisdom and insight Explore the life of intrepid explorer Sanmao, how America rewrote its own history, and Abraham Lincoln’s legacy in the best … Please enable Cookies and reload the page. He tells the fascinating story of these epic voyages, but also cuts it down to size. I was in India a year ago and travelling through Delhi and other towns and every spare patch of ground, every park, was full of kids playing cricket. There are some journalistic works like that—though some journalists also write really superb, well-researched history. It’s a great piece of detective work into some very obscure sources. Is that your impression as well? Read, We’re now at book number three on the 2020 Wolfson History Prize shortlist. A Fistful of Shells: West Africa from the Rise of the Slave Trade to the Age of Revolution I’ve been following the prize a number of years now, and this one seems particularly strong on world history. A History of the Bible is another example of global history. It gives equal weight to the whole range of seagoing civilizations. RELATED: 40 … There are quite lot of surprises. Then we meet. It’s a moving book. If you're looking for the best history books published this past year, the annual Wolfson History Prize is a great place to start. Featured image: @OlgaM. A History of the Bible “Global history has made great strides in the last 15 years or so and The Boundless Sea is a very good example of how history on a global scale is being written in Britain at the moment.”. It’s intriguingly subtitled ‘a European life.’. It’s always had a central part in the Christian faith. It was very representative of Indian society in general. If Hallie Rubenhold’s The Five is a book that concentrates on the minutiae of a small number of people in the East End of London in a specific period of time, David Abulafia’s The Boundless Sea goes to the opposite extreme: it’s a historical study of the human dimension of the oceans throughout the whole of recorded history. 2020 is a banner year for nonfiction releases. At a time of Brexit and cutting ties with Europe, it’s salutary to be reminded that English literature is deeply embedded in the broader European context. Five Books participates in the Amazon Associate program and earns money from qualifying purchases. It was the Indian elite, the great maharajahs, who financed and put this tour together, but it was a multi-religious Indian team, and even included two so-called ‘untouchables.’. Read. Jack the Ripper was a notorious late Victorian murderer who killed a number of women in the East End of London and has somehow inspired a very large literature, known colloquially as ‘Ripperology.’ The identity of the murderer was never discovered. We’re talking about the history books that made the shortlist of the 2020 Wolfson History Prize and it’s a fantastic list. We all know that life gets away from us, and so I wanted to make a priority list among my list of 20 so that you can see which ones are my favorite :) It’s called Cricket Country: An Indian Odyssey in the Age of Empire and it’s by Prashant Kidambi, a professor at the University of Leicester. The Best Books to Look Out for in 2020: Non-Fiction Posted on 19th December 2019 by Mark Skinner Whether it is broadening our understanding of the past or helping to craft a delicious, nutritious meal, 2020 promises a plethora of must-read non-fiction. He in fact had rather an exciting life, including being a French prisoner of war. But for anyone who routinely gravitates to the nonfiction titles, this is the list for you. Provocative and compassionate, Bennett’s book traces fascinating threads of American identity and is our hands-down winner for the 2020 Historical Fiction award. The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper We started the year with a list of our most anticipated historical fiction books. Her first novel, The Lightness, was published by William Morrow/HarperCollins in June 2020. … Performance & security by Cloudflare, Please complete the security check to access. This is a book that’s verging on the true crime genre, so I think will also appeal to people who don’t read history books that much. It’s a long process, but we manage it fairly successfully. These stories are well researched, thought provoking, and are just as riveting as fiction. This is a biography of Chaucer by Marion Turner, who is a professor of English literature at Oxford. Here are the best non-fiction books, including celebrity memoirs, investigations into the royal family, and more, to publish in 2020. It’s a great shortlist this year. This is a fascinating history of West Africa, isn’t it? It really does lift the lid on the surprising and engrossing origins of the Indian game, which has now come to play such a dominant part in Indian cultural and sporting life. by Toby Green Untamed: Stop Pleasing, Start Living by Glennon Doyle. This time I've got macabre science stories, tales of obsession, badass women of World War II, current social and political commentary, multiple trips to Paris and Siberia,… Read Read. We ask experts to recommend the five best books in their subject and explain their selection in an interview. These first 10 books are my recommended must-reads. The Bible has had a huge influence all over the world and in many different cultures. Given the importance of the Bible to Western culture, it’s definitely a subject worth knowing more about. Completing the CAPTCHA proves you are a human and gives you temporary access to the web property. Sir Richard Evans is a British historian known for his work on German and European history. The New York Times Non-Fiction Best Sellers of 2020. Congratulations to all of our nonfiction books that made the 100 Notable Books of 2020 list by the editors of The New York Times Book Review! 2 If you are at an office or shared network, you can ask the network administrator to run a scan across the network looking for misconfigured or infected devices. Let’s move on to A History of the Bible next, by John Barton. The sudden change to a slower gear also left more room to reflect on … It’s very wide-ranging scholarship, but it’s written in a witty, engaging style and it’s very, very accessible. Congratulations to Fareed Zakaria on Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World, our pick for the best nonfiction book of the year.See the full list below, or browse all of the best books of 2020 • There are a lot of academic books which are very good indeed but are not aimed at the general public. Let’s talk about the history books that made the 2020 shortlist individually. Thanks so much, Richard. It’s a fascinating work. The Old Testament—I suppose what we would now call ‘the prequel’—is closely tied to Judaism. Note: The selections below are from January through April of 2020. First of all, as I said, it’s for a book that is a serious historical work, based on serious research, but also readable and accessible to the wider public. Why don’t we start with The Five by social historian Hallie Rubenhold, which is about the five known victims of Jack the Ripper. Cricket Country: An Indian Odyssey in the Age of Empire In the book, you’re pulled along by the narrative of their lives, but it also gives a very good sense of the desperate conditions of the poor in Victorian London, doesn’t it? So, for example, famously in the Middle Ages, the Chinese emperor had fleets built that sailed to at least Africa. If you’re interested in global history, this is probably the best book to pick up and read during lockdown. It is also a summation of a lifetime’s work and knowledge: John Barton has been studying and writing about the Bible for decades. Five Books aims to keep its book recommendations and interviews up to date. Global history has made great strides in the last 15 years or so, and The Boundless Sea is a very good example of how history on a global scale is being written in Britain at the moment. He is also a Fellow of the British Academy. You don’t have to know a lot about cricket, or even be an enthusiast, to enjoy this book. It’s not just a European topic, because the Christianization of Latin America puts the Bible at the centre of their culture too. Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. Let’s go to A Fistful of Shells next. Cloudflare Ray ID: 613a58b2d85a32bd Hallie Rubenhold has rescued them, to use Edward Thompson’s famous phrase, from “the enormous condescension of posterity.” It’s a very moving book. O, the Oprah Magazine, presents the best books released in 2020—from Elena Ferrante to Raven Leilani, this is the best fiction, non-fiction, poetry, and more. Whether you're a history major in college, or you just want to expand your worldview, here's a list of the best history podcasts for anyone looking to add historical nonfiction to their media diet. The Newsweek staff has chosen some of the best of this season's fiction and nonfiction that should keep your mind far away from viruses all the way through Labor Day. He is Regius Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Cambridge and Provost of Gresham College in the City of London. For two to three hours, we discuss the various books each of us has shortlisted and narrow it down to six. What’s impressive about it is that it’s not Eurocentric. Each year, the judges pick out outstanding books that are both originally researched and readable. If you are the interviewee and would like to update your choice of books (or even just what you say about them) please email us at editor@fivebooks.com. If you’re reading one of the books submitted and you find three quotations of ancient Greek on page two, then you know it’s not for the general reader. This list includes books about the importance of an address, the opioid crisis in Appalachia, a trip to every U.S. National Park, and much more. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount. It’s a terrific shortlist and it reflects the extraordinarily high quality of historical research and writing in the UK—because the prize is for the best book written by an historian and author living in Britain. But it is one of my favorite books and I would be remiss not to include in our list for best nonfiction of the ... the managing editor at Lit Hub. The Bible is one of the most influential books in the whole of human history and he explores it in a broad way. When the British tried to conquer the Ashanti, for example, it took them eight or nine wars to do so. It will fit the taste of those individuals who love stories about … Is that because it was based on talent and so they set aside the social stigma of the time? Share on Twitter (opens new window) Share on Facebook (opens new window) A knowing, loving evocation of people trying to survive with their personalities and traditions intact. Yes. Some authors revisited historical figures to ask how their perspectives on race and religion shaped the world, for better or worse. The Best Nonfiction Books of 2020 As the world went into lockdown early in 2020, many of us without frontline jobs and lucky enough not to fall sick with Covid-19 found more time to read than usual. By Dan Kois and Laura Miller It is only May, and I have read more fabulous nonfiction than I did all of last year. Marion Turner follows him around on his travels as an official—his daytime job. Cricket is an English game originally, but in the introduction the author explains that nowadays it’s the Indians who are completely cricket mad. They couldn’t understand why the Africans kept on resisting them and refused to be defeated. Read T he best nonfiction books published in 2019 look to the past in order to better understand the present. It’s humane, it’s scholarly, and it challenges, from a feminist position, a whole library of books on Jack the Ripper. This site has an archive of more than one thousand interviews, or five thousand book recommendations. We’re appointed and reappointed year by year; we’re all professional historians. Can you tell me a bit about why you chose it for the 2020 shortlist and why it’s so good? I ask a version of this question every year, but I’ll ask it again for the 2020 shortlist: with so many good history books to choose from, how did you narrow it down to these six? 5 It depicts a very sophisticated society, doesn’t it? It’s by Toby Green, who is at King’s College London, and it’s a history of West Africa before its colonisation by Europe—beginning with the Portuguese and going on to the French and the British and the Germans. Whether you’re looking for a work of historical fiction that highlights the resonances between the past and the present, or pure escapism into the past so that you don’t have to think about the present at all, we’ve got a recommendation for you! Tell me about it. by Hilary Mantel. Read it on Blinkist Untamed. She comes up with the absolutely convincing conclusion that only one of the women was a prostitute. The following books are some of the best books in the genre. Darkly compelling, illuminated by the light of compassion and tenderness: Donoghue’s best novel since Room (2010). It’s also brilliant to get away from the slightly dull stereotype of Chaucer a lot of us have from studying him at school and find out what he was really like. It was called an ‘all Indian tour’ so they had Muslims as well as Hindus and different castes were represented. Cricket is the game in India. The range is quite astonishing. Each of the judges has to draw up a personal shortlist of ten. He uses a lot of archival material, and presents a lot of original research, but writes it in a very engaging way. It’s a very important book. Jump to navigation Jump to search. And after their death, they were dismissed as prostitutes, when they weren’t. It’s a rounded picture of Chaucer the man and, in a very convincing way, it relates the experiences of his life closely to his poetry and what he wrote about. Read. I thoroughly enjoyed reading them. If, on the other hand, you’re reading a very racily told, well-written book and you go to the bibliography and the notes and find that it’s based on a handful of secondary, printed works, and not seriously researched, you can narrow it down from that end as well. You might think a study of Chaucer would be a study of literature, but this is history as well as literature. You can't have informed opinions about anything without understanding its historical context. The maharajahs who put the team together, the selectors, were keen that the first Indian team to tour Britain and play cricket against the English sides should be representative. by Hallie Rubenhold And you end up with probably a couple of dozen books that you have to consider really carefully—maybe 30, perhaps more, it depends. We’re now at the last of the books on the 2020 Wolfson History Prize shortlist, which I’m embarrassed to say I left till the end because it’s about cricket, a subject I don’t know much about. That was a lovely introduction to all these history books. Best nonfiction of 2020. Historian and Wolfson judge Richard Evans talks us through the six history books that made the 2020 shortlist. It’s sweeping in its coverage across time and space, and he has a magisterial command of the scholarship on the extraordinarily diverse range of regions, periods and events tackled. It’s another example of how broad the scope of historical research and writing in the UK is. It’s an authoritative, knowledgeable and readable survey of the early Biblical manuscripts, how they came together, how they changed in later versions, and what its influence was. The Big Watch Book 2020 Is Here; Top-5 non-fiction books to look out for; It’s called A Fistful of Shells because cowrie shells were the main medium of the exchange until the Portuguese arrived with their coins. Legends have inflated the size of these fleets to quite unbelievable levels, and Abulafia takes a more realistic view without in any way diminishing their achievement. The Boundless Sea: A Human History of the Oceans • The others were just rough sleepers, down on their luck; they were alcoholics or ill. She really disproves what the ‘Ripperologist’ literature says about the victims and recovers these women’s lives with a good deal of sympathy. Yes, it lifts the lid on the underbelly of Victorian London and shows you these poor, downtrodden women really suffering—and then ending in this squalid way. This literature has assumed that the women he killed were prostitutes. It says, I think, two things about the historical profession. David Abulafia is a historian of the Mediterranean, but here he’s expanded his vision to encompass the whole of human history. You may need to download version 2.0 now from the Chrome Web Store. Hallie Rubenhold, the author of The Five, has researched the lives of these five women absolutely brilliantly. Here are the 10 Best Books of 2020, along with 100 Notable Books of the year. It has exciting accounts of the matches in England. It’s a multi-millon pound business and the great cricketers are national heroes. Here at Read it Forward, we love losing ourselves in stories of past tragedies and triumphs. by John Barton Or try any of these new books that our editors recommend . From powerful memoirs to historical biographies to eclectic essay collections, 2020 boasts fascinating nonfiction releases from both debut and … The book is highly praised by critics thanks to a clever combination of a gripping novel, spy thriller, and historical events. by Prashant Kidambi Cricket Country is really a story of the beginnings of the Indian game. 4 It’s staggeringly learned but it’s also very readable. The book really does establish their equality with other parts of the world. 6 He—and we assume it’s a he—partially dissected and eviscerated the women he murdered. The Best Nonfiction Books of 2020 Sex, Facebook, and an empty planet: 29 reads we're diving into this year. The author and broadcaster Gyles Brandreth selects five of his favourite books about the theatre from the thousands that grace his bookshelves, taking in nonfiction, histories of music hall and amateur dramatics, plus a 16th century ‘romp’ starring one William Shakespeare. First of all, in Britain, we’re very, very strong indeed, probably the best in the world, on writing serious history that is readable and accessible and not just written by academics for other academics. 3 He makes the interesting point that there isn’t complete overlap between Judaism and Christianity as religions and the Bible as a book—and that some parts of the Bible are actually quite problematic for Christianity. Secondly, we write and research on an amazing range of topics, not just on British history but on European history, on American history, on global history. Yes, exactly. Historical nonfiction is so much more than the history books you read in school. This is historical nonfiction at its most important and most ... (which I do constantly). So, it’s mainly an economic history, or perhaps you can call it a political history with the economy as its centre. From powerful memoirs to historical biographies to eclectic essay collections, these are the nonfiction books we're excited to read in 2020. Read Read. Read. It’s focused on the first all-Indian cricket tour of Britain in 1911, but it’s not a sports history, it’s really social history. Nevertheless, attempts to rework the Bible without the Old Testament—such as happened in Nazi Germany, because the Nazis condemned it as a Jewish book—have never worked. The sudden change to a slower gear also left more room to reflect on the state of the world and our place as humans in it. by David Abulafia The sea covers most of the globe, but here we have a history that takes it as a single topic. 2020 has been a rough year for the world, and one that many of us are anxious to see come to a close. At the moment, Christianity is expanding faster in Africa than anywhere else. by Louise Erdrich. You don’t have to be religious to read this book. 1 Read The Best Nonfiction Books Published in 2020 So far, 2020 hasn’t ... Coe shows readers many sides of the glorified general, proving that the historical hero was just as human as the rest of us. Yes, it does. Before very long, the majority of Christians in the world will be Africans. The NYTimes Notable Nonfiction Books of 2020. 21 Life Changing Non-Fiction Books Every Christian Woman Should Read in 2021. We’re talking about the history books that made the 2020 Wolfson shortlist. These were complex political systems. Best Historical Fiction of 2020. by Emma Donoghue. This year of course it’s been a virtual meeting, by Zoom. Sophie Roell, editor of Five Books, takes us through her personal choice of the best nonfiction books of 2020. Yes, it is. Some revisit conflicts that have shaped the modern world, as … Whether you’re looking for a book that will help you love the body you’re in or a riveting memoir about postpartum depression, 2020’s newest offerings have you covered. via Twenty20. By Keith Rice • 12 months ago. It sums up a whole range of historical research of a very specialized kind and establishes West Africa as an important part of the world before the brief period of European colonization. One stays home in her Black community; the other passes for white in the wider world. Harder to put down, because all of this stuff really happened eclectic essay collections these... Small amount that really is unexpected, that there were two Dalits included in the team new! Detective work into some very obscure sources might think a study of literature, writes. Of global history important and most... ( which I do constantly ) it says, I,... 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