SALON

Thursday, Dec 14, 2006 12:00 PM UTC

Best nonfiction of 2006

Forget the political treatises. This year, the nonfiction books that captivated us most told stories: Of food, of family, of secrets.

By and

Topics: Salon Book Awards, Laura Miller, Books,

Best nonfiction of 2006

Political books — from Frank Rich’s media critique,“The Greatest Story Ever Sold,” to Lawrence Wright’s 9/11 investigation, “The Looming Tower” — stole much of the spotlight on nonfiction this year. But the books that captivated us most in 2006 told stories: of family, of food, of a double life. We promise they’ll entertain you — and surprise you, too.

“Sweet and Low: A Family Story” by Rich Cohen

Cohen’s maternal grandfather, a former short-order cook, invented the sugar packet and Sweet ‘n’ Low, the artificial sweetener that made him a millionaire. Cohen’s mother was disinherited by her own mother, and his Uncle “Marvelous” Marvin, who took over the company, got into trouble with the FBI — a little thing they call tax evasion and criminal conspiracy. Then there’s Aunt Gladys, who hasn’t stepped out of the family home in Midwood, Queens since the Nixon administration, yet still manages to pull all the strings. With this book, Cohen aims to nail down what really happened in his clan’s highly mythologized saga. His digressions on the history of, say, Brooklyn or sugar or the Walburg banking dynasty, might strike some as padding, but he describes it all with an economical, pugnacious wit that never falters. The heart of the book, though, is a long, complicated and darkly funny family feud encompassing intrigues, sabotage and widely divergent stories about what really happened and when, and of course, who it can all be blamed on.

Read an interview with the author and an excerpt | Read a review | Buy this book

“The Family that Couldn’t Sleep: A Medical Mystery” by D.T. Max

A tiny protein that works in mysterious ways is the villain at the center of this elegantly spun tale of the quest to find out what elusive agent lies behind Mad Cow disease, scrapie and the brain disorder that has caused the descendants of one16th-century Venetian doctor to die of terminal sleeplessness. The story glides effortlessly from a canalside palazzo to Scottish sheep farms to the depths of the New Guinean jungles, where the members of a cannibal tribe succumbed to a plague called “the “laughing death.” Spotlight-hogging doctors battle, backstab and misbehave but eventually the culprits — christened “prions” by one media-savvy researcher — are identified. And, man, are they scary: unkillable by most conventional antibiotic and antiviral tactics — mostly because they aren’t even alive to begin with. Max writes so lucidly you hardly notice how much you’re learning, and the book’s suspenseful narrative never flags. This is science writing at its best.

Read an interview with the author and an excerpt | Buy this book

“The Lost: A Search for Six of the Six Million” by Daniel Mendelsohn

When Daniel Mendelsohn was a boy, he would walk into family gatherings and find that the mere sight of him would move his older relatives to tears. “Oh, he looks just like Shmiel!,” they would cry, in Yiddish. All Mendelsohn knew of Shmiel was that he, the oldest brother of his grandfather, had been killed, along with this wife and four daughters, by Nazis during the war. That crumb of information was tantalizing enough to inspire long-lasting curiosity  and, as its subtitle makes plain — “The Lost” is Mendelsohn’s attempt to find out who these relatives were, and what exactly happened to them. After traveling thousands of miles, visiting the Ukraine, Israel and any place else where someone might have known someone else who knew his uncle, Mendelsohn discovers that the truth of what happened to his relatives was quite a bit more complicated — and surprising — than anyone had known. The story is gripping, but along the way “The Lost” reveals itself to be so much more than a Holocaust family memoir: it’s also a page-turning mystery, a lesson on how history is written and a work of religious scholarship. This is a book that you start and think: I have never read a book like this one before.

Read an interview with the author | Read an excerpt | Buy this book

“James Tiptree Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon” by Julie Phillips

Alice Sheldon had many selves. As a child in the 1920s, she went on safari through Africa with her socialite parents. She could fly planes and shoot guns. During World War II, she worked for military intelligence and after it, for the CIA. She was a clinical psychologist, and published a short story in the New Yorker. But her most daring and successful adventure in self-creation was posing for several years as a man, the innovative science fiction writer James Tiptree, Jr., who carried on many intense correspondences with such authors as Ursula K. Le Guin and Phillip K. Dick, until her real name and gender were discovered by tenacious fans. Everyone who knew “Tiptree” was flabbergasted to learn “he” was really a woman, but whether anyone really knew Sheldon — even her husband of decades, with whom she died in a suicide pact — is the question Julie Phillips pursues in this astute, sensitive and always fascinating biography. The life was remarkable, and so is the telling of it.

Read an interview with the author and an excerpt | Read a review | Buy this book

“The Omnivore’s Dilemma” by Michael Pollan

If most food writing seems like an covert form of narcissism, Pollan explodes the genre out of its navel-gazing constraints and offers a rare, expansive view of what and how we eat. Inexhaustibly inventive and imaginative, Pollan jazzes up what could have been a dreary jeremiad about the “industrial food chain” by inviting us to view the modern American diet as the triumph of a formerly obscure South American grass that has manipulated humanity into making it one of the most successful plants on earth: King Corn — it’s in nearly every processed food. He highlights an obscure scientist without whose great invention — the synthesis of nitrogen fertilizer — billions of people could not have been born (or at least, not have been fed), and he explains just how much oil goes into “making” one conventionally raised steer (about a barrel). There’s an observation to blow your mind on nearly every page of “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” — the sections on “industrial organic” farming and an entirely foraged meal are also revelatory — about this most basic of human needs.

Read an interview with the author | Read an excerpt | Buy this book

Laura Miller

Laura Miller is a senior writer for Salon. She is the author of "The Magician's Book: A Skeptic's Adventures in Narnia" and has a Web site, magiciansbook.com. More Laura Miller.

Hillary Frey is the Books editor at Salon. More Hillary Frey.

Next Article

Related Stories

More Related Stories

Featured Slide Shows

The week in 10 pics

close X
  • Share on Twitter
  • Share on Facebook
  • Thumbnails
  • Fullscreen
  • 1 of 11
  • A missing poster hangs on a tree outside the Cleveland home of Amanda Berry Wednesday. Berry and two other women, Michelle Knight and Gina DeJesus, made a daring escape this week after being held captive for more than a decade.
    Credit: AP/Tony Dejak

  • Elvis Rafael Rodriguez and Emir Yasser Yeje offer their best impression of  Eric B. & Rakim. On Thursday, New York prosecutors identified the pair as members of an international gang that robbed $45 million in a matter of hours by hacking into a database of prepaid debit cards and draining ATM machines around the world.
    Credit: AP

  • New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie walks to a podium during the groundbreaking ceremony for the Technology Enhanced Accelerated Learning Center at Essex County Newark Tech in Newark, N.J., Tuesday. Christie made less flattering headlines this week after undergoing a secret stomach surgery to curb his weight.
    Credit: AP/Julio Cortez

  • Workers stand outside the Tung Hai Sweater Ltd. factory in Dhaka, Bangladesh, Thursday after a fire broke out in its 11-story building. Eight people were killed in the blaze.
    Credit: AP/Ismail Ferdous

  • Workers rescue a woman trapped for 17 days in the rubble of a garment factory building in Saver, Bangladesh, Friday. The building's collapse was the worst industrial disaster in the country's history, killing more than 1,000 people.
    Credit: AP

  • Former South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford gives his victory speech Tuesday in Mt. Pleasant, S.C., after winning back his old congressional seat in the state's first district.
    Credit: AP/Rainier Ehrhardt

  • Jodi Arias reacts in Maricopa Country Superior Court Wednesday after being found guilty of first-degree murder in the gruesome killing of her one-time boyfriend, Travis Alexander. Arias has subsequently said she wants the death penalty, claiming she'd "prefer to die sooner than later."
    Credit: AP/The Arizona Republic/Rob Schumacher

  • Ariel Castro stands for his mug shot Thursday at the Cuyahoga County Corrections Center, where he is being held on $8 million bail. The former bus driver is accused of imprisoning three young women and beating them repeatedly over a period of 10 years.
    Credit: AP/Cuyahoga County

  • Charles Ramsey addresses the media Monday after helping rescue three women held captive in Cleveland for more than a decade. Ramsey's hero portraiture has been complicated by revelations of his own domestic violence record.
    Credit: AP/The Plain Dealer/Scott Shaw

  • Michael B. Donley, Secretary of the Air Force, testifies during a Senate Appropriations Defense Subcommittee hearing on Capitol Hill Wednesday. The military branch was rocked this week after its chief sexual assault prevention officer was charged with sexual battery.
    Credit: AP/Carolyn Kaster

  • Recent Slide Shows

  • Share on Twitter
  • Share on Facebook
  • Thumbnails
  • Fullscreen
  • 1 of 11

Related Videos

Comments

 5 Comments

Comment Preview

Your name will appear as username

You may use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href=""> <b> <em> <strong> <i> <blockquote>

follow salon

Most Read

Popular on Reddit

links from salon.com

From Around the Web

Presented by Scribol
listener_new_rect The Listener: So long, Sookie Stackhouse

Recommendations