Some of the Best Nonfiction Books

Extra post for the Long And Short Reviews blog challenge...

I don't think there is a true answer to the question "What's the best nonfiction book you've read?" 

Well, of course, there is: The Bible.

"The Bible doesn't count. Anyway it's not a book, it's a library. If you're going to count the Bible, which book in the Bible?" some people have been known to retort.

Then I say, "The General Epistle of St. James," because it's a relatively simple, understandable, short book with no battles or murders in it and with a sense of humor. James didn't indulge in pious waffling; he told people exactly what Christians ought to do more and less of. I appreciate that. Many people, especially those who want to do things James did not approve, hate the Book of James, so the emotional temperature in the room tends to drop noticeably if the conversation takes this turn.

But I understand what they mean, of course. By "book" they mean a book with no claims to special inspiration or spiritual authority, an ordinary book written by an ordinary person. Usually people don't ask this question if they have had a nonfiction book published, themselves. Usually they're hoping you'll pick the same favorite they would.

The trouble is, I've read hundreds of good nonfiction books, whereas some of these people have only really read one that they liked, out of a grand total of, say, eleven required reading books they actually scanned with extreme prejudice, eighty-nine other required reading books of which they read someone else's "notes" or review, three supermarket paperbacks they recognized as rip-offs, and this one book they liked. Possibly because it was a Reverend Doctor Feelgood sort of book with a vague Christian-ish atmosphere that made them feel virtuous for buying it and a lot of flattering verbiage that made them feel good about reading it. 

I have to say: "The best in which category? The best knitting book ever was probably Knitting Without Tears. The best cookbook, in my opinion, was Mary McDougall's original McDougall Recipes; the others are also good but readers have been paying for a lot of reprints and pictures to make coffee-table cookbooks it'd be a shame to use in an actual kitchen. The best field guides in all categories are probably Peterson's. The best book for today, which happens to be National 'Weeds' Day, is Euell Gibbons' Stalking the Wild Asparagus..."

Come to think, one of the nonfiction books I've used and enjoyed longest also happens to be Stalking the Wild Asparagus. I liked it in grade four and I like it still.

There were a few substantial nonfiction books I was able to like, in some childish way, even before that. I can clearly remember that some nonfiction books I was supposed to have "read," as a child, I didn't like or understand or appreciate until I was older, like Silent Spring. I liked Helen Keller's Story of My Life because she wrote it before she was much older than I was when I read it, in grade three. I think I was still in grade two when I was able to laugh out loud at some of the jokes in Jean Kerr's Please Don't Eat the Daisies. I remember understanding and liking just a few of Herbert W. Armstrong's short books and articles, but not most of them, in grade one. 

I don't remember understanding or liking any of the things I was dared to read out loud, as a pre-school-aged child prodigy, reading the words without even trying to figure out what they meant; they were words adults used. The first of those things I remember anything about, actually, was one of the last I read, when I was seven or eight and reading it didn't seem such a prodigious feat any more--something in The Lancet about hemoglobin in blood, but who had discovered what about it I had no idea then and have none now.

I think most early-reading "child prodigies" are, as I was, ordinary children whose eyes happen to mature early. Precocious development of any kind probably involves a slight excess of estrogen in the body. If the imbalance in favor of estrogen continues or becomes more pronounced, its overall effect on the child may do more harm than good. So, yes, although there's no correlation between talent for language skills and sterility, and there's only a slight correlation between sterility and various diseases that shorten people's lives, there is some connection among those three things for some people. There've been other early readers in my family, and most of them had a good long time to enjoy their talents. There have also been several early readers, not in my family or all clustered in any other family of which I've heard or read, whose hyperestrogenemia was caused by disease conditions. It certainly was not a matter of being "smarter" than the relatives who developed other talents first. Most early readers are reasonably intelligent but early reading and intelligence are two separate things.

And I would say, while I'm here, to the parents and teachers of other early readers: Let these children read grown-up books that interest them, unless the books would be too embarrassing for you. (The more clever children are about noticing adults' discomfort with observations like "No butter on my toast, please. I noticed a little steatorrhea this morning" or questions like "If pretending to be younger is a sin, and any sin a person has not repented of is unpardonable, does that mean Uncle Joe is gong to the Bad Place for dyeing his hair?", the more likely they are to exploit the "But she's such a little child, she can't possibly know how bad that sounded" reaction when they say these things in public. That's what you get for making the little beast turn off the TV show and go to bed. I was a child prodigy and I remember it well.) But don't brag about what they read as evidence of their intelligence, because a child's fascination with a book often means the child is still trying to figure out what it means. Don't push the child to read more serious or "impressive" books, either. When I was entertaining adults by reading Newsweek or Prevention or The Journal of the American Medical Association aloud, the books I was actually reading and appreciating were as challenging as--this was the precise cut-off point--Sarah's Idea by Doris Gates, but not Charlotte's Web by E.B. White. I read Charlotte's Web aloud at three and then reread it, as an almost completely new book, at eight. It was more fun when I was eight. Let children enjoy looking into the Bible and picturing coats ornamented with "a bell and a pomegranate, a bell and a pomegranate," which was an image I enjoyed at ages five and six, without expecting them to read the whole thing or understand its main themes. 

"Well, there you go on one of your tangents, but what is the best nonfiction book you've read?" 

"For what purpose? 

At the moment I'm reading Jin Lan McCann's Powered by Wellesley, about being a Chinese student at a big-name college in the United States. It's quite interesting and I look forward to posting the review of it. That's not to say that it's "better" for me or for anyone else than some other book is. I suspect that, the more good books people have read, the more they insist that there is no "best." Or, if there is a "best" nonfiction book, it's the Bible. (Or the Koran.)

I'm posting this after several other bloggers have answered the question in order to do a survey...Some bloggers were able to pick a book, though I'm sure that, in some cases, they must have been adding some clarification to the question like "the best nonfiction book I've read this year, so far." Makes an interesting list of books to watch for and read, anyway...

Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow. Very timely. I distrust it on sight, because Christians have left the topic of prison reform to the Extreme Left and the Extreme Left can be depended upon to add some bad ideas to Charles Colson's good ones. But if prison reform is not done in the right way, or even the Right way, it will undoubtedly have to be done in the Left way, which will once again have many unintended and unwelcome consequences, just like desegregation.

Isaac Asimov, Beginnings. I disagree with him on many things but he was a very good writer. (And sincere in his beliefs. Others of that vintage dreamed of globalism while being revulsed by Stalin's and Mao's Marxism. Asimov headed up an organization for people who thought separating globalism from Stalin's Marxism was possible.)

Juliet Barker, The Brontes. The three shy little girls who wrote books so much better than so many of the adults they read, and their other siblings.

Susan Cain, Quiet. Yes, indeed...one of the books my generation and the ones immediately after it most need to read!

Anne Frank, Diary of a Young Girl. This one also came at the head of a long list. Somehow I don't like the way people seem to overreact to...yes, when teenagers are forcibly isolated from chattering with one another, exposed only to the company of older people, forced to seek mental stimulation in serious books and current events, and when someone who feels responsible for educating them so far as possible sits down with them and helps them revise their diaries into memoirs of historical events, you can expect any randomly chosen teenager to write a serious, insightful reflection on growing up in interesting times. Anne Frank was by no means the only teenager who's demonstrated that. People act as if she was a freak. She wasn't. It is normal for teenagers to have more intelligence than most of them seem to be using at any given time. 

Euell Gibbons, Stalking the Wild Asparagus. Let's let that stand as my pick for the day. 

Roger Hall, You're Stepping on My Cloak and Dagger. I'd never heard of it but the blogger who picked it makes a good case for it.

Stephen King, On Writing. Well, he ought to know. 

Jon Krakauer, Under the Banner of Heaven. About the Latter-Day Saints, what can I say? I've known some very nice ones--saintly ones, even--but the LDS were criminalized, early in their history, for a few heretical views. Criminalize a religion and it will attract criminals. And the Mormons have had more than their share of those.

Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death. This was at the top of the short list of someone else who was old enough to have a long list, and disciplined enough to narrow it down to a short list. I happen to have read and loved it too.

Helga Warren, The Enchanted Suitcase. History through a suitcase of souvenirs.