November’s Best Reviewed Nonfiction

Robert Darnton’s The Revolutionary Temper, Barbra Streisand’s My Name is Barbra, and Paul Caruana Galizia’s A Death in Malta all feature among this month’s best reviewed nonfiction titles.

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

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1. The Revolutionary Temper: Paris, 1748-1798 by Robert Darnton
(W. W. Norton & Company)

8 Rave • 2 Positive

“By the end of this exhilarating book, Darnton has done so much more than provide an account of France during the dying decades of the monarchy. Ever since his breakthrough book of essays, The Great Cat Massacre, in 1984 he has concentrated on combining the forward thrust of narrative, or ‘event,’ history with due concern for the deep structures of the past. Historically, these two distinct methodologies have positioned themselves sternly in opposition to one another, but here Darnton proves that it is possible to have the best of both worlds. The result is deep, rich and enthralling, and gets us as near as we probably ever can be to that elusive thing, the collective consciousness.”

–Kathryn Hughes (The Guardian)

2. My Name is Barbra by Barbra Streisand
(Viking)

7 Rave • 5 Positive • 1 Mixed • 1 Pan

“A 970-page victory lap … Details may be familiar to fans, but for the most part they ring out more resoundingly in Streisand’s chatty, ellipses-strewn telling. She may possess megawatt fame …but between these covers she’s just Bubbe Barbra at a kitchen table … Future editions, then, might excise some of the long block quotes of praise from her peers … There’s something exuberant and glorious, though, about Streisand’s photo dump of self-portraits and party pics. Indeed about this whole dragged-out banquet of a book. You might not have the appetite to linger for the whole thing, but you’ll find something worth a nosh.”

–Alexandra Jacobs (The New York Times)

3. A Death in Malta: An Assassination and a Family’s Quest for Justice by Paul Caruana Galizia
(Riverhead)

7 Rave • 3 Positive

“Paul Caruana Galizia is a superb storyteller. His book reads at times like a thriller, at times like a detective story, and at times like the work of an investigative journalist uncovering webs of corruption, with levels of detail that will be most interesting to those who understand Malta, its systems and flaws. His mother emerges as no saint either. She was clearly not the easiest of women to live with. Highly determined people rarely are … This is Daphne Caruana Galizia’s legacy. Her son’s book is a moving testament to the life and work of an extraordinary woman and the country-changing power of journalism.”

–Christina Patterson (The Sunday Times)

=4. Gator Country: Deception, Danger, and Alligators in the Everglades by Rebecca Renner
(Flatiron Books)

6 Rave • 3 Positive
Read an excerpt from Gator Country here

“Every species, and every person who fights for its continued existence, deserves a book like this—a book that explores the complexity of the nexus between humans and animals and the exploitation of the wild, and considers the ambiguities of our fractured relationship to nature, morality and history.”

–Lydia Millet (The New York Times Book Review)

=4. Chasing Bright Medusas: A Life of Willa Cather by Benjamin Taylor
(Viking)

6 Rave • 3 Positive
Read an excerpt from Chasing Bright Madness here

“Should appeal to anyone—novice or expert—ready to explore Cather’s life and work in the company of a critic so alert to the shimmering subtlety of her style and the hard years of effort that went into crystallizing it … With great feeling and deeply informed perception, Taylor helps us readers realize anew the sustained effort it took for Cather to meet ‘the rest of herself,’ in her novels and her life.”

–Maureen Corrigan (The Washington Post)