May’s Best Reviewed Nonfiction

Ron Chernow’s Mark Twain, Robert Macfarlane’s Is a River Alive?, and Yiyun Li’s Things in Nature Merely Grow all feature among May’s best reviewed books.

Brought to you by Book Marks, Lit Hub’s home for book reviews.

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1. Mark Twain by Ron Chernow
(Penguin)

16 Rave • 1 Positive • 2 Mixed • 1 Pan

“Chernow here documents Twain’s failings, as well as his triumphs, in exhaustive fashion … More than simply a book about America’s seminal writer, this is a long and winding story about the quintessential American—clothes and buttons, mind and heart, warts and all.”

–Kevin Duchschere (The Star Tribune)

2. Is a River Alive? by Robert Macfarlane
(W. W. Norton & Company)

10 Rave • 4 Positive • 1 Mixed
Read an essay by Robert Macfarlane here

“Perhaps the most moving and beautiful part of his book comes in the interludes between visits to faraway rivers in which Macfarlane tells the history of a small spring near his home … If we’re lucky, we do not have to go far to find a stream or river to sit by. The revelations in this passionate book will make that quiet, common experience even more life-giving.”

–Pamela Miller (The Star Tribune)

3. Things in Nature Merely Grow by Yiyun Li
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

9 Rave • 6 Positive

“Li’s style, honed over decades, has never been more distilled. Appropriately for a book that purports to stenograph only her thoughts, she writes in a simple, pared-back language … Elicits many difficult feelings. I had to put it down at several places before I found myself able to return to it. Yet Li’s brutal lucidity—her refusal to burnish her thoughts and sentiments to a high sheen—is its own form of ethical commitment.”

–Rhoda Feng (The Boston Globe)

4. Wild Thing: A Life of Paul Gauguin by Sue Prideaux
(W. W. Norton & Company)

7 Rave • 3 Positive

“Drawing as it does on both of these discoveries, Sue Prideaux’s new biography has real bite … The author does a superb job of re-examining the ways in which Gauguin ‘smashed the established Western canon’ … Gauguin’s artistic and sexual primitivism was, as Prideaux’s edgy and engrossing book shows, always both radical and deeply traditional.”

–Elizabeth Lowry (Times Literary Supplement)

5. Melting Point: Family, Memory, and the Search for a Promised Land by Rachel Cockerell
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

7 Rave • 2 Positive • 1 Mixed

“Jigsaw puzzle of a family history … She channels grand speeches and on-the-ground reporting, she favors outrageous voices, and she resists hierarchy … The beauty of the method is that authority remains plural and the tensions and alliances among the voices are visible at every step along the way. There is an ethics to Cockerell’s decision to withhold her own opinion … Evocative power … The result is a book that sings with narrative energy.”

–Alice Kaplan (The New York Review of Books)