January’s Best Reviewed Nonfiction

Simon Shuster’s The Showman, Adam Shatz’s The Rebel’s Clinic, and Francesca Peacock’s Pure Wit all feature among this month’s best reviewed nonfiction titles.

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1. The Showman: Inside the Invasion That Shook the World and Made a Leader of Volodymyr Zelensky by Simon Shuster
(William Morrow & Company)

7 Rave • 2 Positive

“Shuster paints with great sympathy a complex picture of Mr. Zelensky and his transformation … Like many writers on a tight deadline, Mr. Shuster crafted a longer book than he otherwise might have. But The Showmansurpasses all similar efforts to date and is set to be the standard by which all other works on Mr. Zelensky and Ukraine’s wartime politics will be judged.”

–Bojan Pancevski (The Wall Street Journal)

2. The Rebel’s Clinic: The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon by Adam Shatz
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

6 Rave • 3 Positive
Read an excerpt from The Rebel’s Clinic here

“A biography of Fanon is also of necessity a biography of his legend, which sometimes deviates considerably from his person. His support for the Algerian struggle was unwavering, and he is often remembered as a militant who once lauded anti-colonial violence as ‘cleansing force.’ But as the critic and essayist Adam Shatz demonstrates in his nimble and engrossing new book, The Rebel’s Clinic, Fanon was never as one-dimensionally bellicose as he is often taken to be, not only by his enemies but by his allies and hagiographers … As Shatz shows in this exemplary work of public intellectualism, in which he does not sugarcoat or simplify, the ingenious doctor and impassioned activist was every bit as much a victim of empire as the patients he worked to heal.”

–Becca Rothfeld (The Washington Post)

3. The Last Fire Season: A Personal and Pyronatural History by Manjula Martin
(Pantheon)

6 Rave • 2 Positive • 1 Mixed
Read an excerpt from The Last Fire Season here

“Powerful … Grounded…surprising … She braids together strands of various histories—a personal one, along with the larger story of humans and fire—all set against the background of the summer and fall of 2020, when both the pandemic and wildfires were raging … The range of this book coaxes us to confront our own failures of imagination.”

–Jennifer Szalai (The New York Times)

4. The Age of Deer: Trouble and Kinship with Our Wild Neighbors by Erika Howsare
(Catapult)

5 Rave • 2 Positive
Read Erika Howsare on finding inspiration in headlines, here

“Through carefully wrought prose and evocative imagery, Howsare depicts how deer and human populations have both relied on and butted up against one another for eons … A thorough, eye-opening invitation to ponder our own relationships with the natural world, practically and reverently.”

–Becky Libourel Diamond (BookPage)

5. Pure Wit: The Revolutionary Life of Margaret Cavendish by Francesca Peacock
(Pegasus Books)

3 Rave • 4 Positive • 2 Mixed
Read an essay by Francesca Peacock here

“Philosopher, poet, sci-fi author and scandalous celebrity, Margaret Cavendish was a woman out of time. This blazing biography does her proud … Peacock’s artful prose makes this a delightful read and Cavendish, as both intellectual and celebrity, is the perfect subject. More than anything the book reminded me of last year’s Super-Infinite, Katherine Rundell’s much-lauded biography of the poet John Donne. But it’s not all scandal and study. The most moving chapter addresses how Cavendish writes about God, who had ‘frustrated his designs by making me barren’ … This is a fond biography, and rightly so. It’s about time that someone takes up the cause of Cavendish, too often maligned for her eccentricities and aristocratic links.”

–Daniel Brooks (The Telegraph)