Paperback Nonfiction
🥇 01
THE BODY KEEPS THE SCORE
🖋️ Bessel van der Kolk
🏢 Penguin
How trauma affects the body and mind, and innovative treatments for recovery.
🥈 02
ON TYRANNY
🖋️ Timothy Snyder
🏢 Crown
Twenty lessons from the 20th century about the course of tyranny.
🥉 03
GREENLIGHTS
🖋️ Matthew McConaughey
🏢 Crown
The Academy Award-winning actor shares snippets from the diaries he kept over 35 years.
04
THE BACKYARD BIRD CHRONICLES
🖋️ Amy Tan
🏢 Knopf
Essays and drawings by the author of “The Joy Luck Club” and “The Bonesetter's Daughter,” which depict a search for peace through birding.
05
BRAIDING SWEETGRASS
🖋️ Robin Wall Kimmerer
🏢 Milkweed Editions
A botanist and member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation espouses having an understanding and appreciation of plants and animals.
06
YOUR BRAIN ON ART
🖋️ Susan Magsamen and Ivy Ross
🏢 Random House
A look at how our brains and bodies transform when we participate in the arts.
07
EDUCATED
🖋️ Tara Westover
🏢 Random House
The daughter of survivalists, who is kept out of school, educates herself enough to leave home for university.
08
EMPIRE OF THE SUMMER MOON
🖋️ S.C. Gwynne
🏢 Scribner
The story of Quanah Parker, the last chief of the Comanches.
09
THINKING, FAST AND SLOW
🖋️ Daniel Kahneman
🏢 Farrar, Straus and Giroux
When we can and cannot trust our intuitions in making business and personal decisions.
10
HILLBILLY ELEGY
🖋️ JD Vance
🏢 Harper
The vice president, in a memoir written shortly after graduating from Yale Law School, looks at the struggles of the white working class through the story of his own childhood.
11
THE GLASS CASTLE
🖋️ Jeannette Walls
🏢 Scribner
The author recalls how she and her siblings were constantly moved from one bleak place to another.
12
JUST MERCY
🖋️ Bryan Stevenson
🏢 One World
A civil rights lawyer and MacArthur grant recipient’s memoir of his decades of work to free innocent people condemned to death.
13
THE ART THIEF
🖋️ Michael Finkel
🏢 Vintage
The author of “The Stranger in the Woods” tells the story of Stéphane Breitwieser, who stole art more than 200 times for the sake of admiring it.
14
GRIT
🖋️ Angela Duckworth
🏢 Scribner
The MacArthur Fellow argues that passion and perseverance are more important than innate talent in creating success.
15
GHOSTS OF HONOLULU
🖋️ Mark Harmon and Leon Carroll Jr
🏢 Harper Select
The story of a Japanese American naval intelligence agent, a Japanese spy and events in Hawaii before the start of World War II.