Here are our reading groups’ favorite nonfiction books of 2021 based on our survey results.
THE YELLOW HOUSE
Sarah M. Broom
Winner of the 2019 National Book Award in Nonfiction, The Yellow House is a brilliant, haunting and unforgettable memoir from a stunning new talent about the inexorable pull of home and family, set in a shotgun house in New Orleans East. A book of great ambition, Sarah M. Broom’s memoir…
WOMEN ROWING NORTH
Mary Pipher
From Mary Pipher, the New York Times bestselling author of Reviving Ophelia, Women Rowing North is a guide to wisdom, authenticity, and bliss for women as they age. Women growing older contend with ageism, misogyny, and loss. Yet as Mary Pipher shows, most older women are deeply happy and filled…
CASTE
Isabel Wilkerson
The Pulitzer Prize–winning, bestselling author of The Warmth of Other Suns examines the unspoken caste system that has shaped America and shows how our lives today are still defined by a hierarchy of human divisions. “As we go about our daily lives, caste is the wordless usher in a darkened theater, flashlight…
STAMPED
Jason Reynolds
A timely, crucial, and empowering exploration of racism–and antiracism–in America. This is NOT a history book. This is a book about the here and now. A book to help us better understand why we are where we are. A book about race. The construct of race has always…
THE WOMAN THEY COULD NOT SILENCE
Kate Moore
From the New York Times, USA Today, and Wall Street Journal bestselling author of The Radium Girls comes another dark and dramatic but ultimately uplifting tale of a forgotten woman whose inspirational journey sparked lasting change for women's rights and exposed injustices that still resonate today. 1860: As the clash…
HIDDEN VALLEY ROAD
Robert Kolker
The heartrending story of a midcentury American family with twelve children, six of them diagnosed with schizophrenia, that became science’s great hope in the quest to understand the disease. Don and Mimi Galvin seemed to be living the American dream. After World War II, Don’s work with the Air Force…
EDUCATED
Tara Westover
One of the most acclaimed books of our time: an unforgettable memoir about a young woman who, kept out of school, leaves her survivalist family and goes on to earn a PhD from Cambridge University Born to survivalists in the mountains of Idaho, Tara Westover was seventeen the first time she…
THE RADIUM GIRLS
Kate Moore
The incredible true story of the women who fought America’s undark danger. The Curies’ newly discovered element of radium makes gleaming headlines across the nation as the fresh face of beauty, and wonder drug of the medical community. From body lotion to tonic water, the popular new element shines bright…
REAL ESTATE
Deborah Levy
Real Estate is the third and final installment in three-time Booker Prize nominated Deborah Levy's Living Autobiography series: an exhilarating, thought-provoking and boldly intimate meditation on home and the specters that haunt it in our patriarchal society. “Three bicycles. Seven ghosts. A crumbling apartment block on the hill. Fame. Tenderness.…
ME AND WHITE SUPREMACY
Layla F. Saad
The New York Times and USA Today bestseller! This eye-opening book challenges you to do the essential work of unpacking your biases, and helps white people take action and dismantle the privilege within themselves so that you can stop (often unconsciously) inflicting damage on people of color, and in turn,…