The 10 Best Books of 2024
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I'm Gilbert Cruz, editor of the New York Times Book Review, and this is the Book Review Podcast. It's December, which means it's end-of-year list time, which means it's top 10 books of the year time, which means it's our top 10 books of the year podcast time. Joining me on this week's episode are two groups of editors from the Book Review to talk about the best fiction and nonfiction books of the year. Let's start with our fiction panel.

Here to talk about the novels that are on this year's top 10 books of 2024 list are Jumanah Khatib. Hello. Hi, Gilbert. Dave Kim. Hello. And our regular MJ Franklin. Hello. Hello. So the three of us are fresh, maybe not fresh, off the National Book Awards, which we all attended last night. How's everyone feeling today?

I was telling MJ and Dave loudly downstairs that the drink, the branded drink at the National Book Awards was called the plot twist. And it incited a lot of plot twists in my personal life last night. Really? Yes. Okay. Yeah. Tell us. I sent some emails at two in the morning. Why did you do that? Never a good idea. Never a good idea. Well, you know, something was unlocked. The power of literature moved me to write some of my own in Gmail. Yeah.

So I'm in a fine state to talk about contemporary fiction. How are you two feeling? Remember when we were going to record this at 10 a.m.? Yeah, Dave helpfully and rightfully said, Gilbert, that is sadistic. Please, let's change this. And we did. So thank you, Dave. Thank you, Gilbert. Let it never be said that I do not listen to my staff. Thank you. The words damage control come to mind.

And of course, MJ is the most brilliant of the four of us here because MJ had a hydration plan. I did. I went home. It was like 2 a.m. I'm sitting like in the dark playing video games for an extra hour in the night, but just drinking water. And I woke up this morning and I felt so okay. It even annoyed me. Yeah.

I was like this. I'm leaving right now. As in all things, MJ leads the way. I need to adopt that next time. The big winner last night at the National Book Awards, as expected by many,

was one of the books on our list. This was James by Percival Everett. It should probably be the first one that we talk about. And listeners, if you haven't already done so, please go find our book club episode from May in which MJ Shimana and Greg Coles talked about that book in depth. MJ, you hosted that episode. Tell us about the book. James is a

revisiting, a retelling, a recalibration, a homage to, I can keep listing off words. It is a reworking of Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn, this time told from Jim's perspective, or as he clarifies, James. It starts off with the beach, Huck runs away, James is about to be sold, and he also runs away. They team up and flee down the Mississippi coast.

However, Percival Everett infuses that with so much new energy

energy and new plot points. Number one, you realize that James is not illiterate and he's not the sidekick that he's portrayed as in Huck Finn. He's incredibly smart. You find that out from the first page. He's in on every single trick and joke that Huck is trying to pull on him. He is a philosopher. He is fighting for freedom. And he has his own harrowing adventures that takes him into kind of the heart of

American slavery and he sees the kind of the horrors of that system and he's trying to fight to free his family and he's trying to also this is a big point he's trying to tell his own story and figure out what that means what does it mean for James as a black man in a society where telling your own story or even writing is outlawed so it goes places it's funny it's dark and it's such a Percival Everett creation and it really one of the things that's so moving about that book is that

It restores so much dignity to this character. Jim was really two-dimensional. And I think one of the things that is so clear in this book is that Percival Everett's able to keep this

project of dignifying James, even in the most indignifying situations. There are times where he has to, he's in blackface and he's in these absurd situations that I think really could only come from Percival's mind and his sense of humor and his sense of power and justice too. It's a remarkable book. Yeah. I think there were like for me two

key, key departures, I think, from the Huck Finn, which otherwise it's fairly faithful to it just in terms of its rhythm and the picaresque structure, et cetera. But for me, one of the big things

themes that I think Everett dives into is race and language and the codes we have to signify identity. And I just found that whole thing fascinating. He really reverses this idea of code switching, which is when people have two different ways of speaking depending on who they're with. There's a public-facing one and a private-facing one. And this is flipped on its head because James and

his fellow enslaved people are talking in this very erudite language when they're

And when there are the presence of when there are white people around, they quickly switch to what they call their slave filter. And and it's supposed to make white people feel more comfortable about their supposed superiority and thus protects people from protects the enslaved from from getting hurt. It's a sort of mode of survival.

And it's not just like the language switching too. It's James dreams of Voltaire. He has like several fever dreams where he's in these...

like debates with philosophers, his mind is so rich in a way that we haven't been able to see before. And Percival Everett totally opens up. It starts to become a much sharper critique of Enlightenment philosophy and this idea that all human beings are equal. And I think it really sort of throws that idea on its head. And I found that part of it really fascinating as well. And yet he packs in all these ideas.

in a way that is, we throw around the word accessible a lot, and I don't love using that, but this is not heavy-handed. He's very effective at communicating this, and also in a way that's going to be legible to a lot of readers. People know Huck Finn, and frankly, I think the American reading public is primed right now to reconsider these sort of national narratives. And the way that Percival Everett pulls that off

actually raises even bigger questions and assertions about the centrality of Black lives, Black stories, Black narratives to American culture.

I was going to say something very similar, which is like, you were talking about enlightenment, Dave, and like code switching and all of these very heavy historical influences and weight. And yet the book is so lively. It is funny. There are plot twists, even from the opening line, which I have written down because I laugh at it every time. It's...

James is watching Huck and Tom Sawyer set up a prank. And this is the opening line of the book. It is, quote, those little bastards were hiding out there on the tall grass. You know immediately this is a different voice. It's knowing. It's exhausted. It's exasperated. And it's just, it's fun. Even as what James is dealing with is pretty horrifying.

Let's move on to a book that I read at the beginning of this year after our critic Dwight Garner gave it a rave review. This is You Dreamed of Empires by Alvaro Enrique, translated by Natasha Wimmer. I'll give you a brief description of what this book is about. It's 1519 in Tenochtitlan, which is now Mexico City. And Hernan Cortes has he's arrived there with his crew there to meet Moctezuma, who's the Aztec emperor.

And Moctezuma is a little out of it. He's tired. He's on too many mushrooms. His Aztec priests are just covered in blood. He's killing people left and right. Everyone smells like literal crap. And it is this sort of short, fleet, hallucinogenic look at these two cultures coming together, trying to engage in this weird diplomacy where maybe they all think that the other side is trying to murder them.

It's very weird. It's gross. And I loved it so much. And I know that several of you did as well. I'm one of them, perhaps to no one's surprise on the horn. Although I think our colleague Lauren probably put this best when she invoked Baz Luhrmann when we were first discussing this book. Because like the opening scene alone, they're at this point.

horrible meal. And I will never forget the description of how these priests stink. Like they're wearing human skin. Can I read the first paragraph? This is the first paragraph. So there's a Spanish captain who's sitting between two Aztec priests. And the first paragraph goes, draped like a cape around the shoulders of the former priest was a decaying blackened skin of a warrior, sacrificed who knows when, while the ladders met locked,

Neither cut nor washed since he'd taken orders at the temple were crusted with many moons of sacrificial blood. And also, let's take a minute to applaud the

Natasha Wimmer. I don't read Spanish. I don't know what the original paragraph would have read. But even just draped like a cape, there's so much musicality and intentionality. It's beautiful. And that's why these images stick with you. But it's hysterical, right? And these characters are memorable. I think we all love the idea of an emperor out of his mind on mushrooms. We've all met somebody like that at one point or another. And

And they're eating grasshopper tacos. It's delicious. Relieved they're not eating the contramar fish of current Mexico City. But he has such a command of the material. It's beautiful. He's talking about how each island in this empire has a specific function. There's the flower island and the trash island. And actually, in a lot of ways, I think that this book has the most shared DNA with James. They're doing a lot of the same thing.

It's counterfactual, but it's also not a kind of dutiful alternate history in which the Tenochka are portrayed as these hardworking, innocent people who are wholly slaughtered by the conquistadors. Or they're not like these valiant heroes that are protecting their homeland either. You don't get kind of cliche pictures. I think what you really get are just the absurdities of history.

early diplomacy and that fine line between a shared mutual understanding of cultures and total chaos and bloodshed. And it's very tenuous. It's tense. I think we've mentioned the gore, but it's really not all that bloody, actually. The gore actually happens around the margins. But I just loved how this feels like

just messy and sloppy and it doesn't feel like a battle or a kind of moral conflict between good and evil. It just feels like a mess and I just love that about it. And it's so vivid in that mess. Again, you were talking about how gross that even just that opening scene is. What I love about this is that it's a book that casts a spell and

It's almost in Technicolor. It's examining history, but it's making it vibrant and vivid to give us a new way of approaching it and understanding it. Even as it's violent, it's very playful, this book. And the images that stand out of someone getting lost in this world

huge labyrinth looking for horses, for instance. The book that it reminded me of, in addition to James, was we just talked about 100 Years of Solitude for the book club. And I feel like you can see Garcia Marquez's DNA all in this one. And again, it never feels dutiful. It never feels like he's writing and someone else's shadow. Instead, it feels like a growing of the tradition and the baton. For me, this was such an unexpected

book. It was so unlike anything I'd read this year, or actually in many years. It's so unique. In the conversations that we had about this book, one of our colleagues described it as a Geary Wrath of God meets Monty Python. Someone else said Wolf Hall meets Tristam Shandy. I think that the thing that those two things shared is a sense of grandeur and courtly intrigue with a sense of the absurdity.

I think Lauren, our colleague, called it a comedy of idiots. It is, as we've learned in history, this supposed to be this freighted moment. And the way that Enrique is putting it is just a bunch of idiots who don't know what they're doing, trying to figure out, like, are they going to kill our horses? Are we going to get out of here alive? What's going to happen? How do I make myself presentable? How do I cut my toenails with my knife? The book is very, very boring.

Bodily focused. And it's concentrated in such a short period of time as well. And so that's the other joy is it feels like you're diving into a pivot point and it's just bringing you very immersively into one critical juncture. Yeah, we should tell readers that it takes place entirely in a single day and it starts at lunch and it's it and that's it. Like all good days starts at lunch. Yeah.

But because there's a fair amount of drug usage in the book, it also feels as if time is telescoping in and out, even though it only takes place over the course of a day or so. I should say, if anybody shares my skepticism of drug sequences, it's like up there with people talking to me about their dreams. Who cares? This is actually expertly done. I usually hate reading about drug trips or like being in altered states. This nails it.

I believe this is a take you've given on this podcast before. Oh, God, I'm getting stale. No, it's okay. I'm just reaffirming my commitment. Yeah, that's, thank you. We'll be right back.

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Hi, this is Lori Leibovich, editor of Well at the New York Times.

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Let us move to something completely different, as different from this book as can possibly be, which is Good Material by Dolly Alderton. I think people think of the New York Times Book Review and they think of our top 10 books list that we put out every year. And they think it's serious and they think it's dutiful and they think that there's nothing on there that gives one pleasure or joy. I think Good Material is a book that falls into the pleasurable category.

Jumana, am I wrong in interpreting this book that way? I think the word that comes to mind for me, rather than pleasurable, is cathartic, although maybe there is some relief or pleasure in catharsis. It's a classic sort of breakup story. So we meet Andy, who's a comedian in his mid-30s, fresh out of a breakup. He spent three years, 10 months. I mean, he knows down to the day how long he was with his ex, Jen, and he is shattered.

And he's back living with his mom, who plies him with alcohol and cigarettes and encourages him to get over a broken heart that way. It's populated by a lot of really charming characters. Andy is the primary narrator for most of the book. And we see him really reflect on the relationship, what didn't work about it, what he didn't like about her.

And for anybody that's gone through any kind of breakup, these are going to be very familiar feelings. I actually listened to this when I was settling into a new apartment and the audiobook's fantastic. And it's genial. It's smart. The dialogue is sharp. It over delivers on what the gambit of the book is.

Dolly Alderton pulls off a kind of a triple axel at the end because we get a perspective change. We hear from Jen and we get to round out the side of the story and in a way that doesn't feel trite. Kind of reminded me of Lauren Groff's Fates and Furies, but like less demonic. I think these are both fundamentally like decent, good people.

And I think you're left with just the hard truth that like it's a miracle for anybody to get together. And it's a miracle that it lasts however long it lasts. And it's a miracle that you like move on and pick yourself up and keep going. Oh, my God. That's so wise. Thank you. I feel gray hairs coming in as I'm talking. MJ, you hosted a book club conversation about Comenteo earlier this year. What are your thoughts on this one? So for me...

I don't know if she said this on the podcast. We had a colleague who has said, and I think about it a lot. She says, I'm tired of books announcing themselves, right? I feel like we frequently gravitate toward the dazzling books, the books that take on these big historical, I mean, two of the books that we've mentioned before. I love those books, but there's something to be said about just a good book.

story you sink yourself into. I think that's what this is. For me, this book is one of the books that has unexpectedly stuck with me throughout the year. And

I have found that it is quietly very astute in how it captures modern relationships and modern breakups and the weird rituals we have in trying to get over that or not get over a breakup. Jumana, you were talking about the wisdom, the hard truths in this book and the breakup and the despair. And Gilbert, you mentioned this is a book that's pleasurable and full of joy. And I think that contradiction is only...

is only able to come to life and be true because of Dolly Allerton's touch. She is, it feels like reading just a fun rom-com. It hides its lessons in just a really fun, propulsive, entertaining story so that it's

It does feel cathartic, and it takes a little while for that to settle into you because you've just had such a fun time while reading along. Yeah, I would put this squarely in the rom-com genre, but at the same time, I think the best romantic comedy is...

transcend the genre by teaching us something about relationships and about love and the nature of romance. And I think this totally does. I think especially at the end, towards the latter half of the book, you really start to see a shift, this shift in tone and also a much more inward shift

introspective feeling to it. I think she really dives into this, the idea that there are these two competing impulses that are so strong. One is to look inside and focus on yourself and be alone. And then the other is to just attach yourself to someone and be loved. And those two things should cancel each other out. They should not exist at once. And yet that's the great paradox in

comedy, I guess, even of human life. And, and she really, she really unpacked that really well for me. And by the end of it, I felt that she's gone past the kind of rom-com label and in a great way. I want to transition to a book that also made me think about relationships, but in a completely different way. This is a book called All Fours by Miranda July. And

And I feel uncomfortable setting this book up. Do you want me to do it? Do you want me to? Yeah, I would love for you to do this. Okay, I'll intro this book. This was the book of the summer. This is a phenomenon, this book. This is the story of a woman in California. She's in her mid-40s. She's married. She has a child. And she's an interdisciplinary artist in a way that resembles Miranda July. It feels auto-fictional. She works across genre, visual, writing, and

And so she's just come into some money and she decides that what she wants to do is drive cross country from California to New York and spend her birthday in the Carlisle, which to me sounds fabulous, even though I don't drive. And she doesn't even make it like an hour outside of her house or her town. She stops in Monrovia, California. She's smitten with people.

this individual named Davy who works at the car rental agency. And before she knows it, she's rented a room at a local motel and has hired a designer to completely redo the suite with Tonka bean scented soap and like the most opulent, like things that should not exist in the universe of a motel. And this becomes the crucible for the narrator to think a lot more about

her own desires and her own space and privacy and how a lot of her identities, particularly as a wife, as a mother,

As an artist, as an individual, as somebody who still has a lot of will. I'm using that in a very kind of intentional, like if Carl Jung were on the call, he would say she's a willful woman, which is great. And the other thing is that she's part of this generation that's approaching menopause. And so she actually is ready.

wrangling a lot of internal hormonal changes and existential questions. Will I be invisible? What's going to happen to my desirability and my desire? Like the stuff that makes me who I am.

It's totally surprising. She crams a lot into this book. There's stuff about ancestors and family and trauma, real trauma. And it's a very relational book. The narrator is an individual. You see her in conversation with her best friend, with her spouse. You see her come alive in these relationships and these dynamics. And I was surprised. It's a real ride. It's a real ride.

One of my friends said it's like John Updike, but for women. I don't know what I think about that, but maybe the three men on this call could help me sort that out. Can we get a friend on the podcast? I have many questions about... Yeah, she's in social work school, so I trust her. MJ, why do you think there were so many group chats about this book this summer? This felt like a book you could not talk about.

talk about. I wrote this on a vacation and I'm with my partner and I could not put it down. And he's like, what are you reading? I'm like, nothing. Unless you read it, then we can talk about it. Until then, you don't need to know. Mind your business. Mind your business. Get a group chat. The book is...

So zany and weird and explicit. It feels naughty, even as it's earnest and searching. Are you saying naughty or naughty? Both. It was an intentional poor pronunciation. It's both naughty and notty because it's a very atypical affair situation.

But it's a very rich affair. And I want to point out that the structure is very atypical. I feel like you'd think of a typical rising action film

and then fall. And this almost feels like three short stories in my mind. You have the section where she is building out the room, the hotel room. You have the section of the affair. And then you have what happens when she comes back. And as she's dealing with Perry, Moon, and Paws. So I think the reason why there are group chats and group chat merch is that it felt like a book that just demanded to be discussed. And once you were discussing it, you were...

laughing out loud. You were saying, I haven't seen this talked about in a book before. It has that illicit thrill of reading good gossip or finding about good gossip. It's peeking into someone's strange, weird relationship. And you know, your point about the peaks and valleys of this narrative, there's a running gag that like the narrator and her best friend are staring at holes.

with horror at the sort of like hormonal, this precipitous drop that they can expect their hormones to go under. So this chart is sort of like, it's almost like the roadmap that they're the most afraid of. And it's, but that makes a lot of sense about what a ride this is. Also, somebody has, it might as well be me. This is an unbelievably sexually frank book.

Like, unbelievably sexually frank. I was waiting for the one woman on this podcast. Oh, I'm delighted to be here. Yep. Yep. Wouldn't put this on an audio book in the car with your mom. Absolutely not. Nope. Yeah. Just had to get that disclaimer. I think that's a...

Big part of why people have enjoyed talking about it. It's a pretty horny book in a way that you maybe see in other genres, but I feel like just in what we call literary fiction, you don't really see that often. I will never think about tampons the same way again. Absolutely. Thank you for the spoiler. No, no problem. Oh, I shouldn't say that. We don't know what's happening there. That's catharsis. Hey, yo.

I am reclaiming. I feel like John Updike right now. Dave, you were about to make a serious point. I actually think the John Updike point is kind of apt, actually. And it's hard not to think of... It's good, but it's also annoying that it's hard not to think of privilege while you read this book. And obviously, this is a person of means who can...

reject her mothering duties, her professional life. She has the sort of means to create this fantasy world for herself. And so I think that's going to be a bit of a hurdle for a lot of different readers. For a lot of readers, it was for me at least, it might start to be a little bit insufferable because of that.

But I think you see Miranda July saying, the author saying, okay, I know, but indulge me here for just a second. And when you do, I found this book strangely like moving and vulnerable and honest. And she just goes for it. What if you could do this? And what if you could do this?

create this little room and make a second life. We all have those moments where we imagine what our lives would be like if I went to with option B and she does it and she tries it and it's messy. It's not, it doesn't work out perfectly, but I did enjoy going down that rabbit hole with her. And to that effect, I think the uptake thing does hold, right? This is also

It's also very difficult to read up to like without thinking about male privilege and white privilege and all of that stuff as dutiful. That's the word of the day, as it may sound. But I think once you do go down that rabbit hole, it's really fascinating. It's a very funny book. It's a very horny book. It's a deep book in ways that I did not expect.

And even though there was all this discourse over the summer and into the fall about it, which might lead some to think maybe it's overrated, I do not feel like it is. I don't feel like it is. One thing, one area where I feel that this book really over-delivered is the portrayal of the narrator's child. So there's a scene where the narrator and her husband are really at loggerheads. He wants to host a brunch, right?

You can feel the rage on the page that they feel towards one another. And still the narrator makes a point to talk about how their child, Sam, is going around offering guests Altoids that they had bought with their own money. What an amazing detail. It's so rare to find kids in fiction that feel that three-dimensional. And I think she really nailed it. Altoid? Care for an Altoid? Come on, it's beautiful. God, I'm so sappy. Altoids make me sneeze.

Where do you put them? All right. Let's talk about our last book.

Sometimes because we have the wonderful opportunity to read months ahead of when a book comes out, people will talk at the end of a year about a book that's coming out next year. And they'll say already, I think this one is going to be in contention for our best of the year list. And I remember around this time last year, October, November, one of our editors in particular saying Martyr by Kaveh Akbar Shah.

It's going to be one that I'm going to nominate and that we're all going to talk about. And that editor was right. MJ, you did not have the chance to talk about Martyr on this podcast. You did so on another podcast. I will forgive you for that. Tell us about this book. So Martyr is the reckoning of a young Iranian American immigrant who

I think he's in his mid-20s. He is a recovering alcoholic and drug addict, and he's grieving. When he was a kid, his mother died in a tragic accident in Iran where the U.S. shot down a commercial passenger plane, killing about 300 people, his mother included. And ever since then, that death has really haunted him because he's trying to figure out, like, his mother was just...

a number in a news event. And what he wants to do is he wants to make sure that his life has meaning. So he wants to become a living martyr. At the same time, he's researching martyrs and he's a poet in the book. And he becomes, he learns about an artist who is dying. She finds out that she has terminal cancer and she decides to spend her last days in the Brooklyn Museum just answering questions. That's the setup. Yeah.

What you're really reading as you are going along is just following a young, messed up poet's journey in discovering himself, trying to connect with his family, trying to figure out what it means to create a life. I went to the New York launch of this book, and one of the things I think is a little clue about the tone of this book is

is actually on the cover. And the book is Martyr! And he spoke about how that exclamation point was so important because you see a book like Martyr! and you think it's going to be very self-serious. And there's just that hint of winkingness and playfulness with that exclamation point that it signals. And I think that carries what makes the voice so infectious. It carries the story and its playfulness.

It works in such a funny double way because with the exclamation point, it's almost a curse word. It's like murder. And there are moments in this book where you want to shake him. He's got a lot on his plate, admittedly, and make some decisions that from a healthy clinical distance, you think maybe are not the most healthy choices. And you do want to like shake him the way you would physically.

hapless best friend or whatever. But it's play. There's so much doubleness in this book. I don't know. I will say, I don't think this is a book if you were like a plot reader, but if you like language, you like voice, if you can plot and its mechanics and its lesser demons on the back burner, then this can be a very memorable reading experience. I'm not going to make a habit of being the sort of like resident person from the Fertile Crescent, but it's kind

It's kind of amazing to see such an Islamic book like this, right? From the title on down. And Fun Little Nuggets, Shams, his last name, that's the name of Rumi's Svengali, his tutor. It's beautiful. It's so thoughtful. It's cool. And I agree with you, MJ, that frankly, it's a reminder that American fiction is

There's so much more than just like Huck Finn, of course, is like quintessentially American canon, American material. But like where we are right now in America, we're a country of immigrants where people come with this amount of grief and trauma that you can't even imagine or these experiences that we don't talk about. I'm so happy and gratified to see this reflected in the cultural material that we have now. I think that's a real coup.

I'd love, in closing, to ask each of you to tell me about another book from this year that's on this list that maybe entertained you or moved you or made you think that you wish had gotten a little more attention. I loved Godwin by Joseph O'Neill. I thought that was, it's a novel about...

soccer, but it's not really about soccer. This is very much a Joseph O'Neill signature where his best known novel, Netherland, is a novel that's about cricket, but not at all about cricket. This is about sort of the business of soccer and the quest to find this perfect place

player in Benin. And it's a dual narrative because there's that story of a man who's trying desperately to find this wunderkind, this soccer prodigy, and this other story where he's also an employee in a technical writing collective. These are both topics that I have zero interest in, but I found fascinating.

Completely fascinating. And O'Neill, I think, delivers one of the most complex and interesting critiques of capitalism with both of these narratives that I've seen in a while in fiction. And the way he pulls it off is really quite something. I love Godwin. I mean, I wrote about Godwin and I wrote about Joe O'Neill. It's just amazing. It shouldn't work. And it does. It's beautiful and thoughtful. And you don't see how much...

I think of Joseph O'Neill as a really classic novelist where you don't see the seams, right? He's worked so hard to make it look effortless, and I know how hard he works. That's a real treat.

For me, I really love, I keep telling people about The Coin by Yasmin Zahir. This is a story about a Palestinian woman who emigrates to America and she becomes a teacher teaching underprivileged students in New York. She also is obsessed with cleaning and she has these very elaborate, very vividly rendered scenes of her scrubbing her body, trying to get clean, rubbing the skin

skin pendrils off of her body and her arms in the shower. She also gets involved in a Birkin reselling racket. This book goes in all of these strange places. The one thing that unifies them is that at every point you think to yourself, this character should not be doing any of these actions. She should not be in charge of children. She takes up this, she starts an affair with this man, a homeless man that she sees in her neighborhood and she recognizes him because she

She throws out her coat and then she recognizes him in the coat and he looks pretty sharp and he's always like he's like this mysterious figure that pops in and out and is a foil for her very rich but also pathetic boyfriend that she hates but also spends all this time with.

But this is another debut and similar to Martyr, you just get hooked by the voice. I keep saying it's Martyr, Kaveh Akbar meets Otessa Moshfag and it's very bodily, it's very cringe-inducing, but it's very sharp, it's very searching.

If you want cringe-inducing story that also deals with anti-capitalist theory, this is a book for you. What are you talking about? That's what I'm saying. That's why I was paused. Sign me up. All right. How do we all feel about this year in books?

Okay, my feeling about it can be best summed up about the fact that the book I want to talk about is Rejection by Tony Cholodomoudi. I did stump for this one, knowing that it was not... You feel dirty. You shouldn't read this after you read a book about somebody who obsessively cleans. You got to read that in reverse because you feel filthy reading this book. But it's good. Nobody writes like Tony. You just have to be prepared for some real...

edge Lord, dark of dark humanity stuff. All right. To recap our best fiction of the year as part of our top 10 books of 2024, we have James by Percival Everett, all fours by Miranda July. You dreamed of empires by Alvaro Enrique, good material by Dolly Alderton, and,

And Martyr by Kaveh Akbar. I think we did it, everyone. I feel great about this episode. I hope you do too, Jumana. Thank you, as always, for joining. Nodding enthusiastically. I can't wait to listen to this unironically. I loved it. Thank you for inviting me. Thank you, Dave and MJ, as always. Thank you for having me. A pleasure. We'll be right back. ♪

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Welcome back. This is the Book Review Podcast, and I'm Gilbert Cruz. I'm joined now by a group of editors who are here to talk about our best nonfiction books of the year. Nima Jiromi, first time on the podcast. Welcome, Nima. Thanks, Gilbert. Greg Coles, thank you for being here. Hi, Gilbert. And Emily Akin. Hi, Emily. Hello, Gilbert. So I'm going to start with a book that I think all of us

All four of us were big fans of The Wide, Wide Sea, Imperial Ambition, First Contact, and the Fateful Final Voyage of James Cook by Hampton Side. So I love books about seafaring adventure. I think last year, David Granz, the wager, filled that slot for me. Nathaniel Philbricks in the Heart of the Sea, stuff like that. This is a book about the third voyage of Captain James Cook, the British explorer who died

I think first mapped out large swaths of the Pacific Ocean for Europeans. He was sent on this journey to try to discover the Northwest Passage and then also to return a man who had been in London for a while to Tahiti, where he where he was born. Nima, we're going to start with you first. Why did you love this book?

I'm really interested in these books that kind of highlight the way that history is not a straight line, where everybody gets cooler and more with it as we go along through the centuries. I think what you see in this book is that this is the kind of dying embers of the Enlightenment. People are really dedicated in Britain and in Europe to the idea of humanism. They want to understand humanity.

how people in other cultures see themselves, see foreigners, and look at things from a new perspective. And this book is not a biography of James Cook. It's really only about the third voyage, which is this time where this kind of enlightenment project comes up against a lot of difficulties. I really like the way that he's describing James Cook as this

person who's trying to be a perfect scientist, and he wants to just observe without interacting. But unfortunately, these are human beings. They interacted a lot. The guy who we're talking about, his name is Mai. He's Tahitian. He actually hopped

on a boat coming back on the second voyage. There were multiple ships, and Cook didn't know he was coming. And then he shows up in England, and he becomes the toast of England. He sleeps with a lot of people. He wants to get guns so he can go back and fight a war against his enemies in the Pacific. And it's nice the way the book is structured because...

What we then see is the photo negative of that happening when the Europeans are in the Pacific. They sleep with a lot of people. They get in a lot of trouble. And James Cook ultimately stirs up a lot of violence. Emily, what were your expectations going into this book? And then how did you feel like maybe those expectations were thwarted a

a little bit? I appreciate that question because I admit to wariness. I'm not someone who ordinarily will pick up a narrative about exploration. And I knew Hampton Sides, a writer I admire, has written several books, including one about an Arctic expedition. And so the idea of reading about Captain Cook's third voyage, I have to admit, I wouldn't have picked up this book. But boy, am I glad I did. I was so taken with it. I was immersed in this world.

And Gilbert, I think it was what was truly unexpected was the kind of rich literary quality of this account. Yes, the boat becomes a microcosm, I think, of English Enlightenment culture and philosophy.

so the characters on the boat embody the different values of this society, of the astronomer, the surgeon, the carpenters, the naturalist, and down to the lowliest sailor. They all seem to be keeping these extraordinary journals. And Seitz is just a kind of symphony conductor was how I thought about it, creating this orchestra of voices, all of them really very literate. And it's just

It's a thrilling ride to see them go to sea and, as Nima said, bump up against the limitations and contradictions of that Enlightenment culture that sort of officially espouses egalitarianism and tolerance and restraint, but in fact, over the course of the voyage, is really challenged. And to me, the book—I hope we can talk a little bit more about this—is a kind of parable about cultural exchange and misunderstanding. Yeah.

Greg, are you a high seas adventure guy? I am such a sucker for the seafaring adventure tales. Like you, unlike Emily, if it has a ship in it, I will read it. And I have a particular interest in James Cook. I have for a long time. I think he is the first European who read

went around the world. He did it three times. He famously died on the third time. And Sides does such a good job at bringing him to life as a character. He says in the introduction to the book that he is not here to lionize or to demonize or to defend Cook, but just to describe him. So in a sense, he is bringing that same anthropological instinct that Cook himself tried to bring to his voyages.

There's a beautiful sentence in that same introduction. It's not only a novelistic literary book, but it's a beautifully written book. And the sentence that I'm going to quote is something along the lines of saying that his motives were inquisitive, not acquisitive, empirical, not imperial. And it's just such a concise.

concise statement of the way that Cook approached his voyages as a scientist, as an explorer. Sides does a really great job at explaining what made Cook succeed where others failed. He was fastidious as a scientist. He maintained his equipment really well. He was on top of the

current technology of the time and used it to help him. He basically tested out a new chronometer that allowed him... He was a brilliant navigator, right? And he had a great sense of what he was looking at. The charts that he made by eye and by hand...

matched to an uncanny degree satellite imagery from today. He was the first most accurate navigator and kind of chart maker. Yeah, there's a part later in the book, if I'm recalling correctly, where they are

Up near Alaska or the area between Alaska and Russia. And they are relying or they have maps that were made by somewhere else. And they discover that those maps suck. Completely fictionalized. Yeah. Absolutely. Maybe intentionally for the mapmaker's own glory or to throw other people off the scent. But they're completely useless. Yes. One of the things that's interesting about this book, and it's mentioned in that introduction very strongly, is...

The way in which Sides tries to balance our current understanding of the age of exploration, which people like Cook and others are seen as... Pillagers, conquerors, colonizers. Yeah, colonizers. He wasn't a colonizer, you know, but problematic colonizers. With the truth that he was a true explorer, a mapmaker, he had these sort of grand interests that maybe went beyond just trying to go somewhere and put a flag in it. Although that was part of it. One thing that was super interesting about him as...

the major representative of the age of exploration is that unlike other explorers, he left indigenous cultures alone as he found them. He took them at face value. He held very strong kind of European views, but he did not try to impose those views on the cultures where he was landing. And so this book is really fascinating, as Emily said, as a study of cultural exchange and culture clash. Yeah.

And a lot of it went wrong on this trip. He tried to do that. He was also, you have to follow the money a little bit. The King of England is sending him out on this trip for a reason, not just because he loves science so much. He sends out, I think he stocks the boat with English flora and fauna, hoping basically to terraform part of the Pacific Islands to make it easier to colonize.

And what you also find is one of the great mysteries of Cook is normally he would come back and everyone published journals. He would publish journals. We went and we stopped off in this island. They gave us coconuts, etc.,

This time, he had a lot of navigational notes, but he couldn't. As you pointed out, he died in Hawaii. And part of that was because it just became impossible to try and act like you were this floating eye moving around the Pacific. And people would come and they'd take stuff from the boats and

And Cook would sometimes overreact in the opinion of his own sailors and kill people and brutally beat them. Or at one point, this is the thing that really did him in. He took the king of Hawaii hostage.

In exchange for a theft. And you've put your finger on something that the English are trying to espouse these universal values of humanism and tolerance. But the idea of personal property was not an idea that had any stock in Hawaii or the other Polynesian islands. And people who would visit the boat, the indigenous population would often just pilfer things. And they didn't see it that way. So Captain Cook said,

complicated man. Let's move on to a situation that is quite complicated. And I think the next book we're going to talk about is obviously quite well-timed. This is Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here, The United States, Central America, and the Making of a Crisis by Jonathan Blitzer. Blitzer is a staff writer at The New Yorker. Somehow we always end up

with at least one book by staff writer from the New Yorker here. It's really frustrating. I'm getting annoyed at them for being so good. This is a very good book. And as I said, quite well-timed given how big a role

The debate over immigration at the southern border played in this year's presidential election. It's obviously been a defining issue since Donald Trump first ran for office. And I think as this book lays out superbly, it's been a defining political issue for half a century, if not longer. It focuses on the so-called Northern Triangle of Central America, Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador. And

Emily, tell us what this book does so well.

Yeah, what really struck me about this book is the sheer reportorial ambition. For my money, in that respect, this book wins the prize on our list. It is an incredibly labyrinthine Byzantine task to untangle decades of American foreign policy in the region and how it informed our treatment of immigrants on our southern border. But basically, Blitzer set himself this impossible task, which is to answer this question, how did we get here?

He looks at the southern border today and he goes back to the 1970s, 1980s in these three countries Gilbert mentions and

triangulating among them tells us how the paranoia about the infiltration of communism fueled our American policy in the region and allowed America to tolerate corrupt authoritarian regimes that in turn tortured and oppressed local populations that then began to migrate toward our borders.

He makes the point that until the 80s, the typical border crosser was a single Mexican man. And that totally changed, as we know today when we read article after article about the Darien Gap and families traversing hundreds of miles on foot through the desert and the mud.

So it's just an incredible feat of reporting. At one point, I'll just say, I started to make a list of all the different groups of people that he incorporates into the story. And it was like a crosshatch drawing. I could barely interpret it. He talks to migrants, coyotes. They're

There are deaf squads, peasants, students, soldiers, generals, politicians, border activists, church volunteers, policy advisors, diplomats, aid workers, detention staff. These are all really important parts of the story. So it's just an incredible undertaking. I was a little hesitant to start, I think I've said in the past, because we all have to read so many books. And am I going to read a 600 page book?

about the history of the immigration crisis when I just... The to-be-read pile is as high as it is. And as is often the case...

I was wrong. I was hooked. It's an odd thing to say about such a serious book, but I really was. Greg, did you feel the same way? I did. One big takeaway that I had from this book is how complicated the problem is. We tend to approach it now in a very simplistic binary, but by taking you through the history, you realize, first of all, how implicated the U.S. is in the crisis that it's facing.

first for its willingness to tolerate these regimes and its willingness to destabilize countries in the name of the Cold War without following up with a commitment to restabilizing them that might have prevented this kind of mass migration. He...

does just what you want a good journalist to do in terms of explaining where policies came from and what their effects were and then relating them to real life people both in those countries and in this country. He talks to the politicians. It's just...

an immense and meticulous work of reportage. Nima, did you feel the same way about this one as the rest of us did? I don't think I did. I think that what I liked the most was not the kind of on-the-ground granularity, but the scope. And the scope seemed thematic.

I think one of the things that Blitzer does, who I know from my time at The New Yorker, we overlapped in the fact-checking department, where he was an extremely dogged reporter, literally running out at any opportunity to report a piece.

is the way that he's able to show how short-sighted this was. Here is the U.S., this superpower after World War II, and even before World War II, decided that every part of the Americas is our responsibility, and we're going to shape the destiny of this entire set of continents. And

And so there were all these kind of hubristic interventions into these conflicts, not unlike what we saw in the Wide, Wide Sea. And they

basically destabilized, as Greg said, these countries and all of these people were driven out, understandably, by violence, by civil war to the stable, wealthy country to the north. And then they got there and were incredibly alienated and beset by more violence on all sides in the neighborhoods that they landed in. And many of them, in reaction, joined gangs, which they formed in the United States, and

And then U.S. policy decided that since they had been associated with criminals or committed crimes, they should be deported back to the countries where they came, where those gangs spread and became stronger and made the violence worse in those countries. And it sent more people back here. And it's just this kind of...

and less than almost hindsight's 20-20, but it seems like a very predictable cycle. And I think that John, across these hundreds of pages, really lays it out in the clearest way I've ever seen. Emily, one of the things that you most appreciated about this book was the human underpinning of it. Absolutely. And I don't want to scare readers. This isn't a white paperish read. This is a very elegantly wrought narrative, nonfiction.

And Blitzer is smart enough to know that we need human beings we follow through the thicket of policy reversals and decisions. And just figuring out what the policy is at any given time in this country for immigrants is well nigh impossible. And in fact, one of his characters, Eddie Anzora, is a young man born in El Salvador, but who has grown up in Los Angeles or San Francisco. Yeah.

and is deported back to El Salvador, despite really knowing very little about the country, because he only has a green card and he's taken in on minor drug possession charges. And this is what happens to him. And that allows us to see really into how the MS-13 gang, which he has associations with, is taking root in El Salvador and the kind of nonsensical repercussions, the irrational repercussions of U.S. foreign policy

Of all the characters, though, my favorite was one, Ramagosa, who is also a Salvadoran, who is really a saintly character. He begins the book and he is an aspiring doctor. He can't decide whether to be a priest or a doctor. He decides to become a doctor and he's tortured by the military in El Salvador, brutally tortured.

left almost to die, rescued at the last minute, and makes his way eventually to the United States where he also goes through a lot of brutal physical ordeals. But it devotes his life to helping other people like him. And Blitzer says at one point that they spoke every day for a year, and I believe it. This is the kind of tenacity Blitzer brings to the story. And it really pays off because you get the kind of granular narrative that

That makes the story vivid and immediate and not a bureaucratic kind of abstraction. We'll be right back. Who wants to talk about a giant biography? Our next book is Reagan, His Life and Legend by Max Boot. I didn't know that we needed another Ronald Reagan biography. There have been many, including a notoriously bizarre one called Dutch by Edmund Morris. Edmund Morris,

It's a great biography. He has written three great Teddy Roosevelt biographies. I love them all. But he was also Ronald Reagan's biographer, official biographer. He wrote this book and I think Reagan broke him and he ended up like inserting himself as a character into the biography and fictionalizing a bunch of stuff. Anyway, a lot of biographies coming to this one.

Again, when we're reading it, looking back at a different sort of Republican Party, a different sort of celebrity turned president who also used the phrase make America great again. He wasn't sure I was going to be along for the ride. But even though Reagan was sort of empty inside in some way, boy, he was interesting to read about. Nima, tell me about this one.

I want to say first, this is a really well wrought, thought out, written biography that is lives, whole lives are really hard. They break Aristotelian unity. You feel things can get really repetitious as you circle back again to our lives are very circular as they move forward. You don't feel that here. Reagan lived so many different lives.

He was a radio announcer for football games. He was a Hollywood actor. He ran the Actors Guild. He was a spokesperson for GE, a California governor, the president of the United States. And yet and all of that.

would make the way that he lays this all out would make for a good biography because Max Boot's a good writer. But it's also an object of fascination because Max Boot is this formerly still somewhat conservative columnist. He was and he was a centrist Republican who became a never Trumper. He was a foreign policy expert.

And he eventually is so alienated by Trump that he abandons the Republican Party and then conservatism altogether. He's still by no means a liberal in the way that we usually mean that in the United States. But Ronald Reagan was his hero. He moved as a child from Russia to the United States.

And he saw Reagan as this guy who embodied American values. And then he wrote this biography, which I think he spent about a decade researching and reporting. And it really feels like a situation of never meet your heroes because he's left with very few. He sort of dismantles Ronald Reagan's legacy. He says that he exacerbated the Cold War, made it last longer.

It might have ended earlier if he had been a little bit more canny. And he says that he that trickle down economics, widen inequality, which is a thing a lot of people say, but not usually centrist Republicans. And at the same time, he turns Reagan into a full bodied.

very human character who, when he gets shot in an assassination attempt in D.C. in 1981, is trying to make everyone feel better by telling jokes as he's lying there getting better. It's an amazing accomplishment.

Emily, how many Reagan biographies have you read? I have read none. I might have read Dutch back in the day, but I will say that is the question for readers. Readers are going to say, does this book need to exist? And I think you've answered that pretty well, Gilbert. Luke Cannon alone wrote five or six books about Reagan. He's been written about to death. You don't need to be...

interested in Reagan to really appreciate this book as I want to talk about it as a kind of exemplary biography, as a kind of work in that genre. To me, it has a masterly balance of storytelling and analysis of historical context and biographical detail. We get very granular details. We know how many dress shirts...

he had in his closet when he was governor, 27. We know what Nancy fed him to eat, which was basically nothing. She had a size two figure and she wanted him to stay trim. So mean. She was pretty mean. She gave him grapefruit for dessert. Exactly. That was a Christmas Eve dinner where he got a skinless chicken breast and some braised celery. And he thought, I'm not going to complain and I'll wait for dessert. But dessert was a

a boiled grapefruit. Boot just has a real sense of the kind of rhythm that a reader needs to how much policy to throw at you and then how to balance that with these kind of very detailed, fascinating biographical factoids.

And so that's what I wanted to say about the book. It's incredibly engrossing. He's a witty writer. He never loses an opportunity to point out ironies. For example, Reagan was born to a couple of New Deal Democrats in small town Illinois. His father actually was saved by the New Deal and worked for the New Deal. He went to a pretty liberal Christian college, a school that had

welcome to women and people of color long before other similar institutions did. And yet Reagan became someone who refused to support the Voting Rights Act, the Civil Rights Act, the Fair Housing Act.

He was an opportunist who went along with a kind of Southern racist strategy for political reasons. He seems in the end, yes, a deeply incurious person around whom history kind of flowed and ebbed. And that's a really a kind of fascinating situation for a biographer to find himself in. Greg, what do you remember about Ronald Reagan?

It's funny, Max Boot is almost exactly my age. I think he's a few years older than I am. We were both 10 when Reagan was elected.

And unlike Max Boot, I didn't lionize Reagan. When I was 10, I lionized probably Paddington the Bear and Aslan the actual lion. I remember the Reagan years as unfolding above my head. He was president until I went off to college. And so it was the atmosphere that I breathed in my childhood. But this book,

really cast a lot of light on things that I had not paid attention to when I was growing up. This biography...

really succeeds on a couple of different levels for me. One is on the level of straightforward. It's first and foremost a very thorough and satisfying biography of somebody who, as you pointed out, even though he lived most of his life in the public eye, was really an elusive character. It was hard to pin down. And Boot does a great job of that and at drawing out his inherent contradictions. But then, ultimately,

The other level that it works for me, what kind of elevates it for me, is Boot's own relationship to the material because he did lionize Reagan and there's this sort of re-examination. And it's electric with an implicit compare and contrast because he publicly broke with conservatism over the rise of Trumpism. There's this unspoken question. He speaks it at one point, did Reagan lead to Trump? But it's...

inherent more than otherwise in the book on where do they overlap, where do they differ, in what ways might Reagan have led to Trump. And it brings a real personal stake to the book that I thought was fascinating. I was just going to add that the compare and contrast with Trump is really fascinating. And I think Boot was smart to restrict that to the prologue and the epilogue of the book because there are parallels that are so suggestive, right? They're both

people who rose to the highest levels of politics in our country after being figures in the entertainment industry. They're both people who bungled a pandemic. For Reagan, it was AIDS. And for Trump, it was COVID. They both survived assassination attempts. They both are these telegenic, charismatic speakers, but who also incorporated falsehoods into what they say to the public.

Greg, our next book, I Heard Her Call My Name, a memoir of transition by Lucy Sant, is one that I believe you really took to. I did. I went into this one familiar with Sant's long career as a chronicler of kind of a gritty New York underground, and also as a smart commentator and critic of art photography. And I was aware that she had transitioned gender in her 60s during the COVID pandemic. But I

But I wasn't sure what to expect of her memoir about that change. I think that I anticipated a book that would cast light on the rather sudden recent visibility of trans issues in culture more generally and trans identity, which we as a society are obviously struggling to accommodate.

But this book is not that. To its ultimate credit, I think, it is, in fact, for great stretches, not even a trans memoir at all, per se. It's just a memoir of somebody who is trans. And so as a result, it is...

determinedly specific and individual. It never makes an attempt to diagnose or to draw sociological lessons. It just says, this is who I am. This is who I've always been. This is what it's been like for me to be that person. And it is often very frank and moving in laying that out. So, Greg, I think that the structure of the book is what you're referring to. It flips between past and present. We get

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And she talks about telling people in her life this, including her partner, her friends, and then everything that follows afterwards. And to me, it really was the sort of the counter narrative back and forth that gave it a sense of energy that it wouldn't have had if it would have just been... Snout to tail. Snout to tail. Yes, if it was just a young to old memoir. Soup to nuts. Soup to nuts. Emily. I think the structure is one of the things I admired most about this book.

At one point she says, who am I? Who am I? And she starts to, it's almost like she's rifling through her past to sort of incorporate it into her present. And she goes back and she finds that multiple truths can exist simultaneously. I mean, she says, I'm a twice married person. I'm a father of a son. I'm the writer of books.

under the name Luc Sante, and I'm not changing that, and I'm Lucy, this woman. And I found that very moving and beautiful. As Greg says, her journey, she makes it clear this is utterly unique and individual to her. And so that moving back and forth, especially because her transition is also, as she makes clear, two steps forward, one step back. As she goes out in public, she retreats. She takes a public step, letters to her community, her friends, and then she retracts

a letter and then tries again, which you totally can relate to. This is a huge event in her life. It's the biggest event in her life. And I wanted to say a couple of things about the downtown that she evokes, which is really atmospheric and wonderful. A period in New York when young people flitted in and out of apartments, changing the record, doing some drugs, going out and life moved around and life didn't stop at night.

A lot of those people she invokes by their first names, Jim and Nan and Daryl and Jean-Michel. And for other readers, some of you will recognize these characters as people who, like Lucy herself, went on to become well-known creative authors and artists. And it's fun. Some of them have written their own memoirs. Like Daryl, it's Daryl Pinckney who wrote a memoir just recently.

I think in the last couple of years. Yeah, a couple of years ago. Come back in September, really focused on his relationship with, or is it sort of apprenticeship to Elizabeth Hardwick, the literary critic who also appears in Lucy's memoir. And Lucy becoming herself as a writer. One of my favorite... In fact, she says at one point, I'm a writer before I am anything else. Even before gender, even before she's Belgian, she's American. There's a lot of transitions in this book, but it is...

first and foremost, the coming of age of a writer. It's a Kunstler romance, an artist's formation. Exactly. And one of the distinctive things is she's from this working class background. And somehow her prose, I don't want to say it's artless, but there's a kind of candor, a frankness to it.

That's very appealing. And there's one, she tells a story at one point, she had a summer job in college at a tool and dye factory. And she decided to read all seven volumes of Proust because she had to go onto the assembly line for 20 minutes at a time. But so she'd had time to kill. And she just read Proust to Scott Moncrief 20.

translation. And I just thought that kind of summed her up. She's someone who's very intellectual in her interests, but also incredibly down to earth. And there's a lack of pretension in her prose that's so delightful. At the same time, I feel like there is sort of a sense of emotion that sort of undergirds several of the moments, particularly as she's talking about her transition, this realization that

Imagine what my life could have been like if I had discovered this earlier. How much she presumes happier she would have been. She says, I regret my missing girlhood. I mean, there are five or six decades that she could have lived differently. Yeah, that was quite moving, even thinking about it now. Let's move on to our last book, which is Cold Crematorium, Reporting from the Land of Auschwitz by Yousef Debrezeni. Nima, tell us about this one.

I think it's not completely impossible, but it's also not every day that you get what feels to the world like a brand new Holocaust memoir. But in this case, it seems like the Cold War may have kept what is, I would call, a masterpiece, both of that literature and of literature in general.

The author was a poet and a journalist. He spoke Hungarian. He was born in 1905. And when he was middle-aged in 1944, he was deported to Auschwitz, and he eventually landed up in a hospital camp where he was more or less left to die. It's the reason that this book is

translated into English until earlier this year is because it was first published in 1950 in Tito's Yugoslavia, where he ended up living. And the

the Americans didn't like it because it ends with a kind of what to them was a sort of triumphant liberation of the camps by the Soviets and the Soviets didn't like it because it centered the Jewish people as the main victims of the Holocaust and which

It's hard to say. It's a shame. It's a shame all around. But what really was astounding about this book is that having someone who's a poet and a journalist approach this subject means that what you get is this kind of granular, almost anthropological description of the camps, but also

but also somebody who's worried about how he's representing this experience and the impossibility of representing this experience. He wants to immerse you in his own state of mind and the state of mind of the people around him, but at the same time, he knows that's an insane thing and an impossible thing to do. He lets his impressions unfold mostly as they happen,

And then undercuts them. At a certain point, he is completely reduced to thinking, I hate everybody. Everyone's out for themselves in this horrible place. There's no way I'm going to survive. And at the same time, you realize somewhere subtextually, people have been taking care of him, even when he's in his weakest state. And he gets as close to representing death as he can. And then he just stops and says, no, there's a wall here.

I more or less almost died and I don't know how to represent it to you. It's a beautiful book. I was curious a lot of the time reading it about its process of composition because the

He's freed in 1945 with the Allied, the Soviets coming in and publishes it in 1950. And it is so specific and so immediate, but you think he couldn't even have had a pencil during these conditions. And so he's just going back and reconstructing

All of this after the fact, but he is a journalist. And so I wondered, is he spending those five years reporting it out? Is he imagining it and bringing it to life that way? And there's not really a sense of that in the book. I found it a fascinating question lurking in the back of my mind while I was reading it.

Exactly. I think you've put your finger on something, Greg, that is both astonishing and at some level puzzling because you can't quite figure it out. The aesthetic qualities of this book, and it's weird maybe almost to talk about aesthetic qualities in a Holocaust memoir where testimony alone is a significant contribution and act. And this book is that, but it's very...

because he's able to give so much dialogue verbatim apparently as it happened and descriptions very precise as Nima points out almost like

little miniature Max Beckman portraits or Rembrandt sketches, just with a few strokes. There will be that lawyer from Paris who unrolls a cigarette, divides it in two, and hands half of it to our author. Cigarettes are big in this book. Cigarettes are big. You don't get any food, you're lucky to get a stub of a cigarette and they share it. And this is this incredible act of generosity. And it's described with a vividness that puts you right there. And so how does he do that?

And I think as a reader, I'm willing to just not know the answer to that question because it's just such it is such a remarkable testament and testimony. That was the discussion of the nonfiction books on our top 10 books of 2024 list. Just to recap, we talked about Cold Crematorium by Yousef Debrezeni.

I Heard Her Call My Name by Lucy Sant, Reagan by Max Boot, Everyone Who's Gone is Here by Jonathan Blitzer, and The Wide, Wide Sea by Hampton Sides. Before we leave, I want to ask all of you if there was a book that we talked about that we all loved and is not on this list, but we think is perhaps worthy of calling out here at the end. Yeah.

Yeah, a book that I think a lot of us read and were really impressed by was When the Clock Broke by John Gans. It's his first book. He's a young political writer. And this book is a fresh and striking account of the 1990s, a decade we usually associate with kind of placid consensus, the Clinton years, the end of history, and

The Berlin Wall has fallen. The evil empire has disintegrated. And what Gans does is turn that narrative on its head by showing us that, in fact, it was quite a turbulent time in the United States and that there were characters on the fringe, on the rightward fringe, people like Pat Buchanan and David Duke, who were written off...

by later historians for a while, but who in fact paved the way for some of the more outrageous politics that we've seen on the right recently.

For me, it's also the Gans book. It was the one that came that I regretted not being in our top nonfiction picks. It has some overlaps with Reagan and with everyone who's gone is here in terms of explaining this moment by looking to history. And it is interesting.

Just a work of great kind of stitching together of different sources. It's this great quilt that paints a picture in a way that if our listeners have read Rick Perlstein's Nixonland, for instance, it does that, but for the 90s. And I think one of the things that's nice about it is it's both a cultural history and a political history and shows how completely inseparable it is.

Those two things are he's talking about political speeches. He's talking about Republican strategy. He's talking about the

northeastern mob scene, but he's also using episodes of Saturday Night Live, talking about music and all these different kinds of things to paint a full picture of this moment where so many things were gestating that only now came out. Nima, you did it. This is your first time on the show. We get to get

I know, like a Gatorade bucket of books and dump it on your head. Thank you. Thank you for joining us at the end of the year to talk about the best books of the year. Thank you, Gilbert. Greg, thanks as always. Always a pleasure. Emily, you're wonderful. Thank you so much. Thank you. This was fun.

Those were my conversations with two groups of wonderful editors here at The Book Review about the best fiction and nonfiction books of the year. I'm Gilbert Cruz, editor of The New York Times Book Review. Thanks for listening.

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