100 Best-ish Nonfiction Titles: Nonfiction Novels and Politics
14 November 2011
I know, you're starting to be just as sick of Time magazine's list of the 100 Best Nonfiction titles as I am, aren't you? I'm also getting sick of my lists. Lists get old, I find, which is part of why I can never quite believe how much people seem to like lists for everything. Evidently you need to be a more organized person than I am. Or, perhaps, all things in moderation, and this has been just too many lists.
But, we have started. And because I never finish anything, I feel that we need to finish this. But that doesn't mean I can't cheat. Take today's categories: Nonfiction Novels and Politics. Christ. Can you think of more boring categories? I can't. And what does "nonfiction novel" mean, anyway? Yet another category I disagree with. So today I'll tell you Time's picks, but I'm not listing my own. If I can think of any Politics titles that didn't make me puke, I will add them to an Investigative Writing list I still plan to do.
In the meantime, please do discuss the below, or suggest any title picks of your own in these categories!
NONFICTION NOVELS
The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Tom Wolfe
The Executioner's Song, Norman Mailer (This one should be True Crime, guys, it just SHOULD)
In Cold Blood, Truman Capote (Again: TRUE CRIME. Just call it a genre already, for the love of God.)
Out of Africa, Isak Dinesen
POLITICS
All the President's Men, Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward
The Clash of Civilizations, Samuel P. Huntington
The Conscience of a Conservative, Barry Goldwater
God and Man at Yale, William F. Buckley, Jr.
Homage to Catalonia, George Orwell
The Making of the President 1960, Theodore H. White
The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt
The Paranoid Style in American Politics, Richard Hofstadter
What it Takes, Richard Ben Cramer