Yes, another year has passed. It has been a year marked by strangeness and friction, disasters both natural and manmade, general tumult, and nonstop chatter about AI. But also, many nonfiction books were published in 2024. A number of them were even quite excellent, in my humble opinion. It is to those among the past year’s nonfiction offerings that I’d call favorites that we now turn.
The Animal is Chemical by Hadara Bar-Nadav
A collection of poems feverishly skirring through dark to darker themes, from chronic illness to miscarriage to endemic pharmaceutical dependency to Nazi medical experimentation, what drew me initially to this slim yet weighty book was the image on its cover. A dog, sharp-eared like a Doberman, shadowed into shape from a murk of electroshocked monochrome. The dog’s mouth is crowded with too many teeth, too sharp, too long, between which eeling masses of froth coil out like ectoplasm. I’ve been haunted by this spectral dog, and by these poems, too. Pain and terror seethes through them glittering as if locked under ice, held sterile but unsleeping.
A Great Disorder: National Myths and the Battle for America by Richard Slotkin
Richard Slotkin has been probing the American mythos in search of explanations for this country’s various predicaments for over 50 years, and has wrung many a must-read tome from his labors. In his latest effort, the cultural historian turns again to what he calls America’s “foundational myths,” this time to account for the dysfunction and division that characterizes our present moment of “culture wars” political impasse. Too often, we’re barely aware of the assumptions and ready-made narratives that give shape to our actions, affiliations, and affinities; we believe we’re responding to reality as it is, when in fact we are engaged in the reenactment of a myth. Slotkin dredges the myths we’re working from up into the light and dissects them, granting us the chance to decide for ourselves whether these are the stories we’d truly desire to live by, if we knew what we were doing.
The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth by Zoe Schlanger
Apparently, humans are uneasy with the notion that plants might be conscious, intelligent, sentient beings. Our species has long preferred to keep these qualities to ourselves, as the precious indices of our singular humanity. I’ve never been afflicted by this need to set myself and my pink and sulcate primate brain on a pedestal, personally; when I stand amidst cedars and oaks in the forest, I know acutely that I am among superiors. But per usual, alas, I find myself in the minority. Zoe Schlanger’s ebullient, vibrant breeze through the science of plant intelligence should do much to correct any shortsighted claims to a human monopoly on cleverness, however. Charming, informative, and perspective-shifting, this is pop science writing at its finest.
Honorable Mentions
