The Best Books I Read in 2024
Peter J. Neumann
Earlier this year, the New York Times released its 100 best books of the 21st Century, and I discovered I’d only read 12. A visit to the Harvard Book Store’s overflow sale helped fill some gaps, though most of the acquisitions remain unread on my already overflowing shelf. As always, I appreciate all recommendations!
The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory, Tim Alberta (2023). As a journalist raised in the evangelical movement and the son of a pastor, Tim Alberta is uniquely positioned to report on how evangelicals came to embrace Trumpism. Along the way he interviews a parade of characters, cloaked in Christian nationalism but often in pursuit of money and political power.
Outlive, Peter Attia (2023). I tend to shy away from advice bestsellers but am glad I made an exception for Outlive. Peter Attia, a physician and researcher, sometimes goes deep on the science underlying longevity, but with a skeptical and engaging manner as he relates his own journey of discovery. We can all increase our healthy life span by decades, he argues, mostly by focusing on matters the medical establishment has long neglected: appropriate exercise, nutrition, and sleep.
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, Michael Chabon (2000). It is 1939 and Sammy Clayman is a teenager in Brooklyn, an only child who lives with his mother in a small apartment. Unexpectedly, his cousin Joseph Kavalier, who has barely escaped Nazi-occupied Prague, moves in. Sammy schemes and Joe draws and the two devise a new comic strip crusader, “The Escapist,” who fights tyranny worldwide. This is a sweeping, imaginative novel of New York City in the 1940s, its European refugees, the Golden Age of comics, the curious place of superheroes in American life, and the mostly Jewish immigrants who created them.
Winter’s End, Lewis Cohen (2024). A professor of psychiatry at Tufts University School of Medicine, Lewis Cohen has written a compassionate and clear-minded book about dying with dignity. Winter’s End traces the real-life experiences of Dan Winter, who, several years after receiving a diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease while in his late fifties, decides to end his life. Like Amy Bloom’s In Love, which chronicled her own husband’s similar passage, Winter’s End explores with great humanity the ethical and practical questions around assisted suicide for the terminally ill.
King: A Life. Jonathan Eig (2023). After writing superb biographies of Lou Gehrig and Muhammad Ali, Eig has surpassed himself with this elegant Pulitzer Prize-winning portrait of Martin Luther King. Deeply researched and leveraging newly released FDA files, Eig humanizes King as a man of deep faith and everyday flaws. King emerges as a gifted political strategist, a leader of exceptional courage, and a family man.
How Big Projects Get Done, Bent Flyvbjerg and Dan Gardner (2023). Most projects, from Boston’s Big Dig to your own home renovation, become delayed and exceed budgets. The authors of this fascinating book explain that the regular culprits are poor planning and faulty projections. Managers are vulnerable to cognitive biases, particularly the “planning fallacy,” which describes people’s tendencies to imagine best case scenarios while failing to anticipate how real life will interfere. The remedy is “thinking slow and acting fast,” meaning more detailed planning and risk management, and carefully working backwards from the final vision.
Leadership, Doris Kearns Goodwin (2018). Portraits of Lincoln, Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt, and Lyndon Johnson by the master historian and storyteller are comfort food for perilous times. They are also reminders of the importance of personality and statecraft, and that history is not predetermined, but rests on the instincts and judgments of our leaders.
Rough Sleepers, Tracy Kidder (2023). If you exit the Green Line at Boylston Street Station early enough and walk east, you will see ragged men and a few women queuing at St. Francis House for the 6:30 am opening. These are some of Boston’s “rough sleepers,” the unhoused population beset by life’s misfortunes. Tracy Kidder tells their stories as he travels the city with Jim O’Connell, the saintly physician who has devoted his life to caring for them.
The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store, James McBride (2023). James McBride’s latest novel begins in 1972, when an excavation in the small town of Pottstown, PA unearths a skeleton at the bottom of a well. Beside it rests a mezuzah, the encased scroll of Hebrew verses from the Torah, that Jews affix to their doorposts. The story shifts to the 1920s and 30s, following Moshe and Chona Ludlow, owners of a grocery store in the town’s Chicken Hill section. It is a neighborhood where Jews and Black people coexist with their own secrets and suspicions, and its residents mix uneasily with those of the town’s other neighborhoods. Clues to the mystery of the skeleton and mezuzah unfold over decades through the interwoven life stories of memorable characters.
North Woods, Daniel Mason (2023). A yellow house in the thickets of Western Massachusetts anchors this dazzling novel, which follows the dwelling’s inhabitants over several centuries. Seasons change; decades pass. A young couple flees a Puritan village, a farmer tends his apple orchard, the house acquires a new wing, two spinster sisters feud, a reporter investigates a murder, a blight descends upon the majestic chestnut trees, and a graduate student settles in. There are exquisite close-ups of mushrooms, beetles, woodland flowers, catamounts, poets, painters, and ghosts.
The Best Minds, Jonathan Rosen (2023). Jonathan Rosen’s childhood best friend, Michael Laudor, has a prodigious mind and limitless future until, in his early twenties, he starts hearing voices and careens into a mystifying and terrifying mental state. Rosen’s bond with Laudor propels this true story of friendship and murder, but the book is also a meditation on the mentally ill and how we have chosen to care (and not care) for them. In page after page, the author’s writing chops are on display, especially in spot depictions of a certain slice of New York City suburbia in the 1960s and 70s, with its cultural touchstones and the ambitions and anxieties of post-Holocaust generations.
Just Kids, Patti Smith (2010). It is the late 1960s and you can still get a cheap room at the Chelsea Hotel on 23rd Street in gritty lower Manhattan, where in the lobby you will encounter musicians and poets and assorted lost souls. It is only one of many stops in Patti Smith’s honest and sublime coming of age memoir about her youthful struggles to become an artist, and her relationship with an equally youthful and struggling Robert Mapplethorpe.
Burn Book, Kara Swisher (2024). I listen when I can to Kara Swisher’s podcast with Scott Galloway for its smart takes on media, politics, and technology. A former Wall Street Journal reporter, Swisher is perceptive and self-aware and knows everyone in these industries. Burn Book is a memoir of sorts, but also a vehicle for her to rail against big tech and its titans (Musk, Murdoch, Zuckerberg) -- though she has nicer things to say about some (Jobs).
Other books I enjoyed.
American Moonshot, Douglas Brinkley (2019)
Klara and the Sun, Kazuo Ishiguro (2021)
Pineapple Street, Jenny Jackson (2023)
Pathogenesis: A History of the World in Eight Plagues, Jonathan Kennedy (2023)
The Nineties, Chuck Klosterman (2023)
The Demon of Unrest, Erik Larson (2024)
Big Game: the NFL in Dangerous Times, Mark Leibovich (2018)
Dopesick, Beth Macy (2018)
The Power Law, Sebastian Mallaby (2022)
Wolf Hall, Hilary Mantel (2009)
Destiny of the Republic, Candice Millard (2011)
The Identity Trap, Yascha Mounk (2023)
The Times, Adam Nagourney (2023)
Breath, James Nestor (2020)
The Art of Gathering, Priya Parker (2018)
The Leftovers, Tom Perrotta (2011)
Who We Are and How We Got Here, David Reich (2018).
Project Hail Mary, Andy Weir (2021)
And in case you missed them, here are my best book lists from 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022 and 2023.
