The days may be getting shorter, but if you’re a nonfiction nerd your to-be-read list is about to get a lot longer. Publishers tend to save their heaviest hitters for the autumn and this year is no exception. Among the highlights: a stranger-than-fiction Cold War thriller, deep dives into the world of hip-hop, memoirs from Francis Fukuyama and Sylvester Stallone, and a kaleidoscope of perspectives on artificial intelligence.
September
politics
All the Wrong Moves
by Anthony Scaramucci
Scaramucci, who served a brief and tumultuous tenure as Trump’s White House communications director in 2017, argues that three major policy decisions — a 2000 trade deal with China, the bank bailout of 2008 and the tax cuts during the Iraq war — exacerbated inequality and led to the rise of populism in the United States.
Biography
Bad Boy for Life
by Cheyenne Roundtree
Roundtree, an investigative entertainment reporter known for her dogged coverage of Sean Combs for “Rolling Stone,” scrutinizes the producer’s meteoric rise, and the allegations of abuse and sexual violence stifled by his celebrity, in a book that is part music industry exposé and part hip-hop history.
Investigation
Basic Pistol
by Harel Shapira
An ethnographer attends a well-known firearms school in rural Texas. What sounds like the setup to an All-American joke is instead the premise of Shapira’s sobering account of how, rather than emphasizing safety, such courses instill a culture of fear in gun owners.
Sports
The W
by Tamryn Spruill
The Women’s National Basketball Association, which launched in 1996, is America’s longest-running professional women’s sports league. Spruill covers how it survived early days of low attendance and financial constraints, while also chronicling the league’s stars, from Sheryl Swoopes and the Houston Comets to the arrival of Caitlin Clark.
Memoir
In the Realm of the Last Man
by Francis Fukuyama
Fukuyama, the author of “The End of History and the Last Man” blends the personal and the political in this memoir spanning five transformative decades.
investigation
Man in the Mirror
by Anand Giridharadas
In 2023, Daniel Penny, an ex-Marine, killed Jordan Neely with a chokehold on a New York City subway car, setting off a cultural firestorm. In examining the fallout, from Penny’s court case to all the lives affected by the tragic incident, the journalist and political pundit Giridharadas offers a broader story about America today.
Business
Money to Burn
by William D. Cohan
Cohan, the author of several books about Wall Street, offers an insider’s account of how Apollo Leon Black and Global Management emerged from the ashes of the junk bond crisis in the 1980s to become darlings — and, eventually, villains — of Wall Street.
history
Redwood
by Ben Macintyre
The latest from the author of “The Siege” has everything you could want in a Cold War thriller: a defected KGB agent with a dark secret, revolutionary turmoil egged on by the Kremlin, and the threat of nuclear Armageddon. As an added bonus, it all really happened.
Memoir
Roll the Calls
by Ari Emanuel
Emanuel, a Hollywood super agent who represents celebrities including Billie Eilish and Oprah Winfrey, divulges the stories behind famous signings, breakups and what it took to build what would become one of the industry’s most powerful entertainment conglomerates.
Memoir
The Steps
by Sylvester Stallone
The Hollywood heavyweight reflects on his early career — especially the eight years between his move to New York City and “Rocky” winning best picture at the 1977 Academy Awards.
Memoir
This Cursed Beautiful Land
by Evan Gershkovich
Gershkovich, the Wall Street Journal correspondent who was imprisoned by Russia in 2023 on fabricated espionage charges, was released after nearly 500 days and a complex, multicountry prisoner swap. Even during that harrowing time, his reporter’s eye remained as sharp as ever.
Science
The Vanishing Family
by Robert Kolker
After Barb, the youngest of nine in suburban Pennsylvania, noticed bizarre behaviors spreading from her mother to her siblings as they each approached middle age, she learned they carried a genetic mutation that caused a rare form of dementia. What follows promises to be a thrilling, wrenching race to find a cure.
October
technology
The AGI Chronicles
by Kevin Roose
Roose, a technology columnist at The Times, interviewed over 150 insiders at OpenAI, Anthropic and Google DeepMind for this look into the race to reach the next frontier of artificial intelligence: a system that can outdo humans at nearly anything.
History
The Best Kind of American
by Kim Ghattas
The 1984 assassination of Malcolm Kerr, the outspoken president of the American University of Beirut, is the central thread of Ghattas’s account charting how U.S. foreign policy fueled the conflict in the Middle East for decades.
Politics
Blockers
by Michael Lewis
Lewis, the author of “The Big Short,” follows a small cast of civil servants — a tax official, a scientist, a security guard and others — who frustrated the Trump administration’s worst impulses as they are wiped out by the Department of Government Efficiency.
Biography
Cormac McCarthy
by Tracy Daugherty
Daugherty, the author of biographies of Larry McMurtry and Joan Didion, traces McCarthy’s life from his youth in Knoxville, Tennessee, covering his early commercial struggles, his various relationships and the MacArthur “genius” grant that transformed his career.
Memoir
Death of an Ordinary Man
by Sarah Perry
Perry, an English novelist, chronicles the final days of her father-in-law, David, who died of esophageal cancer in 2022, in this memoir offering poignant observations on David’s character and broader reflections on mortality.
Biography
Frank Capra: A Life
by Sam Wasson
Drawing on the Sicilian American director’s archives and personal writings, Wasson’s biography delves into the creative triumphs and moral failures of the man behind “It’s a Wonderful Life.”
Investigation
The Glass Box
by Calum Marsh
An investigative journalist sets his sights on CrossFit, the billion-dollar fitness phenomenon, and the rise and fall of its controversial founder.
memoir
One Helluva Ride
by Michael Douglas
Douglas, a Hollywood mainstay, breaks down 12 of his most iconic films, and opens up about the chaos — think: difficult childhood, broken marriage, addiction, cancer — that was unfolding behind the scenes.
History
The Rush
by Nathaniel Philbrick
The California gold rush is an origin story of modern America: a tale of dizzying wealth accumulation, private-sector impositions on democracy and xenophobia weaponized by opportunists. Philbrick’s account suggests how this pivotal period in U.S. history edged a still-new nation closer to civil war.
November
History
Aristocracy, American Style
by Nancy Isenberg
America has never truly been a meritocracy, according to Isenberg’s historical polemic, which shows how the elite, be they the industrialists of the Gilded Age or the nepo babies of today’s Hollywood, have kept a firm hold on influence and power in the country.
politics
Department of Fate
by Rachel Maddow
Just one week after the midterm elections comes Maddow’s cleareyed history of “America’s most consequential institution”: the Department of Justice. In it, she tracks the department’s many heroics and misdeeds to create a road map for navigating our current political reality.
Memoir
Look at Me
by Dustin Hoffman
One of Hollywood’s most storied leading men pulls back the curtain on a lifetime spent inhabiting other characters, revealing the creative, driven and deeply empathetic man behind the likes of Benjamin Braddock and Raymond Babbitt.
history
The Telephone
by James Gleick
From Alexander Graham Bell to Steve Jobs — with many detours along the way — Gleick offers an exhaustive history of the little rectangle in your pocket that reshaped the modern world.
art
Totem
by Jo Baring
This art historian’s survey of sculpture is really more of a 40,000-year history of mankind, drawing a through line from prehistoric ivory carvings to contemporary pop art as she explores humans’ inherent drive to create.
Technology
What Should My Children Do?
by Daniel Susskind
Susskind, a business professor and the author of “Growth,” offers readers frank, evidence-based advice about mindful parenting in the age of A.I.
Memoir
December
To Grieve Is to Carry Another Time
by Matthew Salesses
Salesses’s memoir, about the life-shattering effects of his wife’s untimely death, is expansive in its view of grief. Yes, grief is an expression of love, but it is also a lens through which he explores identity, belonging and storytelling.
Memoir
Your Pain Is My Joy
by Suge Knight
Knight, the Death Row Records founder and titan of ’90s gangster rap, spills the unvarnished details of his rise from Compton, his beef with Diddy, the drive-by that killed 2Pac and more.
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