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‘New York Times’ Reveals Its Best Books of 2021

BY Michael Schaub • Nov. 29, 2021

The New York Times Book Review unveiled its list of the 10 best books of the year , with titles by Honorée Fannone Jeffers, Patricia Lockwood, and Clint Smith among those making the cut.

Jeffers was honored for her debut novel, The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois , which was a finalist for this year’s Kirkus Prize and longlisted for the National Book Award.

Lockwood made the list for her Booker Prize-finalist No One Is Talking About This , while Imbolo Mbue was honored for her novel How Beautiful We Were . The other two works of fiction selected by the Times were Intimacies by Katie Kitamura and the genre-defying When We Cease To Understand the World by Benjamín Labatut, translated by Adrian Nathan West. Kitamura’s novel made the National Book Award fiction longlist, while Labatut’s book was on the prize’s translated literature shortlist.

Smith’s How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning With the History of Slavery Across America , also longlisted for the National Book Award,was one of the nonfiction books to make the Times list, along with Annette Gordon-Reed’s On Juneteenth .

Other nonfiction books on the list included Andrea Elliott’s Invisible Child: Poverty, Survival and Hope in an American City and Tove Ditlevsen’s memoir cycle,  The Copenhagen Trilogy: Childhood; Youth; Dependency , translated by Tiina Nunnally and Michael Favala Goldman.

Rounding out the list was Heather Clark’s Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath . The biography, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Critics Circle Award, was published in 2020; when asked on Twitter why it was named one of the Times’ notable books of 2021, Times Book Review editor Pamela Paul explained , “We used to make the cut after the Holiday issue and carry the titles over [to the] following year. Moving forward, it’s the full calendar year.”

Michael Schaub is a Texas-based journalist and regular contributor to NPR.

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The New York Times Book Review: 125 Years of Literary History

Edited by tina jordan with noor qasim. clarkson potter, $50 (368p) isbn 978-0-593-23461-7.

Reviewed on: 09/08/2021

Genre: Nonfiction

Hardcover - 443 pages - 978-0-8129-2858-7

Hardcover - 385 pages - 978-0-8129-1880-9

Hardcover - 463 pages - 978-1-57912-801-2

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• Currently reading: Book review: surveying the four decades since Aids
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Book review: surveying the four decades since Aids

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Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.

Eighteen months after the first official report of an unusual pneumonia among previously healthy homosexual men in California, a White House reporter asked President Ronald Reagan’s spokesman for his reaction. By that time, the epidemic had affected 600 people. But the response combined ignorance with callous indifference.

“What’s Aids?” said Larry Speakes. “I don’t have it. Do you?” It triggered laughter at the press conference. It took another five years before Reagan, himself, would publicly mention the late stage condition of what, by then, had long been identified as infection by HIV.

In the four decades since, and despite a cumulative global death toll of more than 40mn people (six times more than from Covid-19), there has been remarkable progress in tackling one of the most burdensome communicable diseases of modern times. A vaccine and a cure are still lacking but effective prevention , diagnosis and treatment have sharply reduced the burden.

As Dispatches from the AIDS Pandemic — written by officers of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — recalls, political leadership was key. The book begins with Reagan’s inaction and ends with other anti-heroes, including Thabo Mbeki, South Africa’s president, whose embracing of denialists of the causes of Aids may have resulted in more than 330,000 avoidable deaths.

By contrast, the authors also single out more courageous political leaders including George W Bush, who championed the US President’s Emergency Plan for Aids Relief. It sharply accelerated funding for, and focus on, prevention and treatment in Africa.

While the laborious scientific and medical breakthroughs dominate in the writers’ descriptions, they also highlight the role of human leadership more generally. C Everett Koop, Reagan’s surgeon general, for example, spoke out on prevention despite fierce criticism from the White House and beyond. Jonathan Mann, the doctor and campaigner, took on officials at the World Health Organization who were jealous of his autonomy and approach. Others battled for control of funding and decision-making among national and international organisations (on which more detail would have been welcome).

The authors also highlight CDC officials and other expatriates in Africa and Asia, who at times ceded authority to local experts in ways that ensured programmes advanced, despite difficult circumstances. They also stress the essential role of Aids campaigners and communities affected by the disease.

The book provides a useful summary of the advances and controversies over the decades: the spats over which scientists first identified HIV as the cause of Aids; its origins in Africa; the differential impact of its multiple variants; the misunderstandings around the supposedly first infected “Patient 0” in the US (in fact Patient O, for “outside” California); initial resistance to circumcision for prevention; and cautious British versus more aggressive US clinical approaches to prescribing the initial monotherapies.

It highlights tensions including battles in the mid-1990s over screening for HIV, with resistance from the blood collection industry, as well as from “no test is best” activists, who argued diagnosis when no treatment was available would harm patients emotionally and threaten their human rights.

Those who have followed HIV closely over the years may learn little from this book. But the authors’ insider perspective provides useful detail and is a reminder of many lessons that still need to be learnt in tackling disease.

Countries including Russia refuse evidence-based prevention policies such as clean needle exchange for intravenous drug users, for instance. Others in Africa have imposed anti-gay measures, adding to stigma. For all the progress on HIV, the prejudice and cynicism it generates still requires an antidote.

Dispatches from the Aids Pandemic by Kevin M De Cock, Harold W Jaffe and James W Curran. Edited by Robin Moseley, OUP, £22.99

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The New York Times Book Review: 125 Years of Literary History Hardcover – November 2, 2021

• Print length 368 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Clarkson Potter
• Publication date November 2, 2021
• Dimensions 8.82 x 1.56 x 10.3 inches
• ISBN-10 0593234618
• ISBN-13 978-0593234617
• See all details

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• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Clarkson Potter (November 2, 2021)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 368 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0593234618
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0593234617
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 3.75 pounds
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 8.82 x 1.56 x 10.3 inches
• #39 in History of Books
• #146 in Literary History & Criticism Reference
• #313 in General Books & Reading

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Book review: ‘we’re alone’ by haitian american writer edwidge danticat weaves personal and political.

Haitian American writer Edwidge Danticat explores family, homeland and her literary heroes in “We’re Alone,” a new volume of essays that include personal narratives of her early years as child immigrant in Brooklyn to reportage of recent events like the assassination of a president back in her native county.

In the essay collection, the author of the celebrated memoir “Brother, I’m Dying,” and novels like “Breath, Eyes, Memory” and “Claire of the Sea Light,” moves from her native Port-au-Prince to the New York of her childhood and finally to the adopted hometown of Miami, where she lives as an adult with a family of her own.

In one essay in the slim volume, Danticat contemplates her family, describing the consequences of one uncle being gripped by dementia, his memory erased, his past suddenly vanished.

“An entire segment of our family history, of which he was the sole caretaker, was no longer available to us. Or to himself,” Danticat recalled.

Yet, she wrote, “family is not only made up of your living relatives. It is elders long buried and generations yet unborn, with stories as bridges and potential portals. Family is whoever is left when everyone else is gone.”

Another essay pays homage to distinguished writers of color she admires, including James Baldwin and Colombian Gabriel García Márquez.

On the plane to Grenada for a tourism conference, Danticat considers the work of Black feminist Audre Lorde, reading the essay Lorde wrote about the island just weeks after the 1983 U.S. invasion of her parents’ homeland.

Danticat fondly remembers the time she spent with friend and mentor American novelist Toni Morrison, including their participation in a conference in Paris.

And she reflects on the earthquakes and hurricanes that have rocked her native Haiti and other Caribbean countries in recent decades, following centuries of colonization.

“’We are a people,’ is what we have been saying for generations to colonizers, invaders and imperialists hellbent on destroying us. And now, more than ever, Mother Nature, too.”

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• Tomsk in January
• Tomsk in February
• Tomsk in March
• Tomsk in April
• Tomsk in May
• Tomsk in June
• Tomsk in July
• Tomsk in August
• Tomsk in September
• Tomsk in October
• Tomsk in November
• Tomsk in December

Looking for day-by-day itineraries in Tomsk?

Get inspired for your trip to Tomsk with our curated itineraries that are jam-packed with popular attractions everyday! Check them out here:

• 1-Day Tomsk Itinerary
• 2-Day Tomsk Itinerary
• 3-Day Tomsk Itinerary
• 4-Day Tomsk Itinerary

Best attractions in nearby cities

• Top things to do and attractions in Barnaul
• Top things to do and attractions in Kemerovo
• Top things to do and attractions in Novokuznetsk

Best restaurants in nearby cities

• Where to eat: the best restaurants in Barnaul
• Where to eat: the best restaurants in Kemerovo
• Where to eat: the best restaurants in Novokuznetsk
• Where to eat: the best restaurants in Belokurikha

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Book Review

What makes the far right tick.

In “Stolen Pride,” Arlie Russell Hochschild explores the emotional lives of Americans who vote for Donald Trump.

  By Doug Bock Clark

Sex, Drugs, Raves and Heartbreak

In a new memoir, the journalist Emily Witt delivers a coolly precise chronicle of Brooklyn’s underground party scene and her romance with a fellow partygoer.

  By Jennifer Szalai

Liane Moriarty Has Sold 20 Million Books. She Would Rather Not Talk About It.

The author of “Big Little Lies” and several other best-sellers has a new novel, “Here One Moment.” Promoting it — doing any publicity — remains a challenge, she said.

  By Elizabeth Harris

Did Ronald Reagan Pave the Way for Donald Trump?

In his new biography, Max Boot reckons with the president who was once his hero and another who led him away from the Republican Party.

  By Jennifer Burns

In Liane Moriarty’s Bustling New Novel, Fate Takes Flight

There are stakes on the plane in “Here One Moment,” the latest from the Australian fiction powerhouse.

  By Leah Greenblatt

The Book That Prepared This Veteran Editor for a Literary Life

A 1966 novel captures a publishing world full of chronic malcontents, strategic lunches and ideas that mattered.

  By Gerald Howard

In These Four Enticing Novels, Escape Takes Many Forms

A medieval heist, a Halifax murder, a Dutch wartime winter and a daring 1939 journey to Shanghai provide egress for any taste.

  By Alida Becker

His Poems Are a Joy to Hear, Even When Their Meanings Aren’t Clear

In his latest collection, Paul Muldoon continues his longtime trick of marshaling obscure references into fluent, fun and rollicking lyrics.

  By Jeff Gordinier

Pulling Back the Silicon Curtain

Yuval Noah Harari’s study of human communication may be anything but brief, but if you can make it to the second half, you’ll be both entertained and scared.

  By Dennis Duncan

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Books of The Times

The Endless Drama, and Tedium, of a Medical Mystery

Garth Greenwell takes on pain and illness in his new novel, “Small Rain.”

  By Dwight Garner

In ‘Lovely One,’ Ketanji Brown Jackson Credits the Mentors Who Lifted Her Up

The Supreme Court justice’s memoir is deeply personal and full of hope, and highlights a fairy-tale marriage to her college boyfriend.

  By Alexandra Jacobs

A Smart, Sinuous Espionage Thriller Brimming With Heat

Already longlisted for the Booker Prize, Rachel Kushner’s “Creation Lake” — set in rural France — stars a ruthless American secret agent.

An Impressive Monument to Christopher Isherwood, Man of Letters (and Lovers)

Though it downplays unflattering details, Katherine Bucknell’s big biography hails the 20th-century writer as an early advocate for the “chosen family.”

Brooklyn? Bah. Manhattan? Meh. A New Book Calls the Bronx the City’s Best Borough.

Ian Frazier’s history roams far and wide, on foot and in the archives, celebrating (if not romanticizing) a perennially “in between” part of New York.

Debt Was Supposed to Cure Poverty and Help Pay for College. What Went Wrong?

Three new books examine debt’s fraught politics and history.

By Zeke Faux

This Novel Has Fewer Periods Than This Headline. It’s 400 Pages Long.

Laszlo Krasznahorkai’s single-sentence tale unearths the catastrophe lurking inside the mundane.

By Garth Risk Hallberg

Ketanji Brown Jackson Looks Forward to Reading Fiction Again

The Supreme Court justice has been drawn to American history and books about the “challenges and triumphs” of raising a neurodiverse child. She shares that and more in a memoir, “Lovely One.”

By Dennis Duncan

By Elizabeth Harris

An Unlikely Pair’s Difficult Pilgrimage From Rural Alabama to the White House

In Jamie Quatro’s Southern Gothic novel “Two-Step Devil,” a dying “Prophet” and a former sex-trafficking victim make the same journey for two very different reasons.

By Melissa Broder

By Leah Greenblatt

In ‘Still Life,’ a Trans Woman’s Homecoming Is Shaped by Grief

In Katherine Packert Burke’s debut novel, a woman is haunted by change while grappling with the death of a friend.

By Angela Lashbrook

Wander Lonely, Never Die and Other Things a Cloud Might Do

Whether as metaphors, decorations or (literal) forces of nature, clouds are everywhere in poetry.

By Elisa Gabbert

Do You Know These Sports Books That Became Movies?

Try this short quiz about screen adaptations and the source material that inspired them.

By J. D. Biersdorfer

THE 15 BEST Things to Do in Tomsk

Things to Do in Tomsk

Explore popular experiences, top attractions in tomsk.

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