2020 in books: non-fiction

All other things being equal, this was an excellent year of reading. I read more books this year than I have in any other year since I started keeping track—so many books, in fact, and so many good books, that I’ve split my usual end of the year “best of” post into multiple chunks to keep it manageable. Today, let me present my favorite non-fiction reads of 2020. I’ll tell you a little more about what else I have planned at the end.

As usual, keep in mind that these are my favorites, which I have defined previously as “those books I most enjoyed, benefited from, or stopped to think about, with plenty of overlap in those three categories.” I had a hard time narrowing it even to the ones you see in this post. You can see a list of everything I read in 2020 at my Goodreads challenge here.

Top ten non-fiction reads of 2020

First, my nine favorites, presented in no particular order. My favorite read of the year enjoys its own subsection further below. Suffice it to say that I’d recommend any of these:

The Making of Europe, by Christopher Dawson—In this classic study of the Early Middle Ages, Dawson argues that far from being a radical break with the classical past or a “dark age” that set Europe back, the period from the collapse of the Western Roman Empire to the 11th century was crucial to the emergence of a unified Western civilization, a civilization that synthesized the seemingly disparate elements of Greco-Roman antiquity, the king-led warrior culture of the Germanic tribes that had destroyed Rome, and, as both solvent and glue, Christianity. While The Making of Europe was originally published in 1932 and is therefore dated in some regards, the overall argument Dawson presents holds up well—as do the good writing and magisterial overview of the period.

Hitler’s Death: The Case Against Conspiracy, by Luke Daly-Groves—I mentioned this book in a special post commemorating the 75th anniversary of Hitler’s suicide back in April. This is a very good recent book that takes Hitler survival conspiracies seriously enough to subject their many varying claims to disciplined historical analysis. They don’t hold up well. Daly-Groves does an excellent job building upon and updating the work of Hugh Trevor-Roper, whose Last Days of Hitler is in my “honorable mentions” below, and presenting a case sympathetic to those intrigued by the rumors of Hitler’s survival but uncompromising in its intellectual rigor. It’s also terrifically readable—an excellent introduction to this material and this kind of historical detective work.

The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity, by Douglas Murray—This book illustrates the danger of the perfect epigraph. The GK Chesterton quotation that opens journalist Douglas Murray’s meditation on the controversies and cancel culture surrounding issues of race, feminism, homosexuality, and the transgender movement says everything: “The special mark of the modern world is not that it is sceptical, but that it is dogmatic without knowing it.” (And, in the first of many instances of Murray’s wry British humor, he follows this up with the chorus of Nicki Minaj’s “Anaconda,” which enjoins the listener to “look at her butt” no less than six times. From the sublime to the ridiculous indeed.) In all of the four areas Murray concentrates on, vocal minorities of activists have, in the last few decades—or even much more recently than that, in the case of the final issue—committed not only to believing in new, untested, highly theoretical ideologies of “social justice” but also to enforcing those programs, reshaping reality to align with their ideologies, and cowing all opponents into submission. We are living with the results, and—as he makes clear in a new foreword added to more recent post-summer-of-2020 printings of the book—what he describes here isn’t over yet. I don’t agree with all of his premises or all of his conclusions, but Murray examines these issues carefully and with uncompromising intellectual honesty, and that makes it well worth reading.

Labels, by Evelyn Waugh—I’ve read almost all of Waugh’s fiction in the last couple years but had as yet read none of his travel writing. I decided to fix that this summer. Labels, Waugh’s first travel book, is a record of his journey along the coasts of the Mediterranean—from the Riviera to Egypt, Crete, Istanbul, Greece, Italy, Spain, and more—in early 1929. Three things make Labels a great read. First, Waugh’s humor, which had me laughing out loud more than once. Second, Waugh’s absolute refusal to be impressed with the things that usually impress tourists, which offers many opportunities for acerbic commentary on tourism and makes his appreciation of a handful of things all the more meaningful. And third, the poignancy of knowing what would happen to the world in the fall of 1929, which not only made trips like this impossible for many people, but surely closed many of the hotels, restaurants, casinos, and other local establishments not long after Waugh had passed through to record them for us. Check this out if you want a wry and beautifully written window into a lost world. More detailed Goodreads review here.

Those Terrible Middle Ages! Debunking the Myths, by Régine Pernoud—No period of our own history gets dumped on or dismissed as often or as readily as the Middle Ages. French archivist and historian Regine Pérnoud’s little book Those Terrible Middle Ages! offers a spirited counterattack, not only debunking the most common misinterpretations or outright lies about the Middle Ages (e.g. medieval people believed women didn’t have souls, or engaged in witchhunts, or had no understanding of science or art) but also offering positive examples of medieval life and culture as critiques of the supposedly more advanced and sophisticated modern world. Her writing is engaging, fun, and animated by a concern for the truth about the past that is sadly as lacking today as it was in Pernoud’s 1970s.

Breaking Bread with the Dead, by Alan Jacobs—Jacobs’s wonderfully titled book is a plea for narrowminded modern people to broaden their “temporal bandwidth,” to reach out to and learn from past people rather than dismissing, ignoring, or—as we’ve seen a lot this year—condemning them. Jacobs argues that doing so is a remedy to the anxiety and distemper of our times. It’s excellent—a short, readable, and well-argued little book. I intend to reread it soon.

Philip and Alexander: Kings and Conquerors, by Adrian Goldsworthy—One of my favorite historians for years, with this dual biography Adrian Goldsworthy looks beyond the Roman world to ancient Greece. Goldsworthy argues persuasively that the career of Alexander the Great was made possible by his father Philip, and so to study the former requires understanding the latter. It’s an excellent look not only at two charismatic, aggressive, and driven men but at their entire world and the world their strivings created. Goldsworthy writes lucidly, making complex subjects like Greek city life, domestic arrangements, political alliances, and especially military campaigns from the operational level to the battlefield understandable and even exciting. He also shows admirable restraint and circumspection when it comes to the many controversial topics surrounding this period and these men—for instance, the fates of various rivals or members of Alexander’s family, Alexander’s or his mother’s involvement in Philip’s assassination, the exact cause of Alexander’s death, or, perhaps most famously in our sex-obsessed times, Alexander’s purported bisexuality. Goldsworthy refuses to argue dogmatically for conclusions where the evidence is garbled, contradictory, or simply nonexistent, explaining the possibilities but always making it clear what can and, most critically, cannot be known. This is a balanced, readable, and engaging book and I’ve already eagerly recommended it to friends and students.

From Bauhaus to Our House, by Tom Wolfe—Discovering a remaindered copy of Wolfe’s final book (see below) at a discount bookstore got me on a Wolfe kick for the first time since college. This was the best of the batch of short, barbed journalistic works I read. A spirited attack on modern architecture, From Bauhaus to Our House chronicles the way ideology took over the architectural profession, its crown of victory being the cityscapes of ugly, unsustainable glass boxes which we now enjoy in every crowded and inhuman urban environment in the world. This is Wolfe at his finest, writing with infectious energy and withering irony. I read this shortly after rewatching—and blogging about—the late Sir Roger Scruton’s documentary Why Beauty Matters and the two, different as they are in tone, dovetail nicely. Short Goodreads review here.

Digging Deeper: How Archaeology Works, by Eric H Cline—Eric Cline is a biblical archaeologist who has done field work all over the Near East and published a number of books, including the excellent 1177 BC: The Year Civilization Collapsed, which I mentioned here earlier this month. A modestly sized handbook, Digging Deeper collects sections from Cline’s longer book Three Stones Make a Wall and expands upon them, answering the questions most commonly asked of archaeologists. Cline’s writing is engaging and winsome, and he makes the hard, complicated, and very, very slow work of archaeology comprehensible. I highly recommend this if you have any interest in archaeology at all. Short Goodreads review here.

Honorable mentions

Before I get to my favorite read of the year, let me mention a few other books. I read so much good stuff this year that the above “best of” list proved very hard to narrow down. This handful of honorable mentions or runners up began as a list of three, then expanded to five, and finally ten. I present these in alphabetical order, as they were all good and I don’t want to imply any kind of ranking beyond that of “honorable mention”:

Becoming CS Lewis: A Biography of Young Jack Lewis (1898-1918), by Harry Lee Poe—A well-researched look at the years of CS Lewis’s life most commonly neglected by biographers, his childhood and adolescence. Goodreads review here.

Cannae: Rome’s Greatest Defeat, by Adrian Goldsworthy—Excellent short account of one of the most famous and consequential battles of the ancient world. Short Goodreads review here.

Conquered: Why the Army of Tennessee Failed, by Larry J Daniel—Part campaign history, part examination of leadership, part topical and sociological analysis, this is a very good history of the Confederate Army of Tennessee from its beginnings to its destruction. I found the chapters on logistics, food, medicine and surgery, and the soldiering life particularly good. More detailed Goodreads review here.

Creativity: A Short and Cheerful Guide, by John Cleese—A fun little gift book by my favorite Python. Cleese seeks to find a place for both head and heart in the creative process and offers a number of helpful tips, all of which is buoyed by his fun, lighthearted approach.

Dead Mountain, by Donnie Eichar—A really intriguing and briskly written examination of a bizarre unsolved mystery from Khrushchev-era Russia: the disappearance of a team of hikers in the Urals, their frozen bodies eventually being discovered in strange circumstances. Fascinating. Much more detailed Goodreads review here.

The Gestapo: The Myth and Reality of Hitler’s Secret Police, by Frank McDonough—A good short history of the rise, organization, and functioning of Nazi Germany’s secret police. McDonough cuts through the legendary image of the all-powerful, all-knowing Gestapo to the reality—understaffed, spread too thin, originally made up of more or less disinterested beat cops but gradually taken over by younger political fanatics, and heavily reliant on tipoffs from narcs who, more often than not, gave them bad leads. An informative and carefully researched read.

John: An Evil King? by Nicholas Vincent—A great entry in the Penguin Monarchs series. Nicholas Vincent’s 100-page capsule biography of the worst King of England wears its deep research lightly and conveys not only the particulars of John’s life but the political and cultural landscape in which he lived and reigned. It’s excellent. Gooodreads review here.

The Kingdom of Speech, by Tom Wolfe—Wolfe’s final book, a waspish attack on the Darwinism through speech, a uniquely human phenomenon that has never been adequately accounted for by Darwinian theory. This and From Bauhaus to Our House above are the books that made me realize that what Wolfe most relished was to deflate the pretentions of cliques—in this case, the 19th century clique of aristocratic Darwinists and the 20th and 21st century clique of Chomskyites, both of whom have worked from their titled sinecures to destroy or coopt the work of field researchers.

The Last Days of Hitler, by Hugh Trevor-Roper—A historic examination of a historic event. Trevor-Roper was an Oxford historian who worked for British intelligence during World War II. Immediately after the end of the war with Germany, Trevor-Roper was assigned to ascertain what, precisely, had happened to Hitler. The first edition of this book was the result. The edition I read was the seventh, and includes several forewords and introductions from across the fifty years following Trevor-Roper’s investigation in which he updates the information he had originally collected. The result is a great piece of historical detective work and an inside look at how an historian acquires, assesses, and weaves evidence into a coherent narrative. Worth your while. Longish Goodreads review here.

Myth and Meaning in Jordan Peterson: A Christian Perspective, Ron Dart, Ed.—A good set of essays responding to different aspects of Jordan Peterson’s thought and teaching from a variety of angles and perspectives. Worth your while if you’ve been looking for a thoughtful and religiously orthodox engagement with this latter day virtuous pagan.

Favorite of the year

I’m going to cheat a bit now, and recommend my two favorites of the year, making this top ten a top eleven. Consider it a bonus.

Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World, by Tom Holland

One of the best books I read in grad school was David Bentley Hart’s badly titled Atheist Delusions, in which Hart argued that, “[w]e live in a world transformed by an ancient revolution—social, intellectual, metaphysical, moral, spiritual—the immensity of which we often only barely grasp,” and that this revolution is “perhaps the only true revolution in the history of the West.” That revolution is Christianity, which remade the Western world from top to bottom.

Tom Holland’s vaguely titled Dominion is built upon the same thesis—indeed, Atheist Delusions is cited in the bibliography—but where Hart’s book is dense, tightly argued in sometimes highly technical language, and narrowly focused on the early centuries of that transformation, not moving much beyond late antiquity in its coverage, Holland’s is dynamic, epic in scope, and ranges from the origins of Hebrew religion to the present day. It is also, as is typical for Holland, engaging from beginning to end and utterly readable. I have often recommended Atheist Delusions, but Dominion possesses a sweep and accessibility that make it a valuable successor to that book.

Beginning with Judaism and the emergence of Christianity, Holland follows this new faith as it slowly transforms and reshaps the world in which it arrived. He capably contrasts Christianity with the Greco-Roman paganisms we think we know (they’re about a lot more than mythology) and shows how radical a departure Jesus’s message was. Christianity made slavery impossible and made elites accountable to more than their own lusts. It raised doubts about war and gave a new meaning to heroism, elevating the humble and weak and casting down the mighty. Along the way he offers striking and vividly written vignettes of major events and personalities from over two thousand years of Western history, ranging from kings and emperors to martyrs, poets, monks and nuns, philosophers and scientists, and ordinary people.

Holland argues that Christianity laid the groundwork for life as we know it today. Even non-Christians—and Holland is not a Christian—who are concerned with “justice” and “equality” root their notions of those concepts in Christian teaching, which offers the only successful means of making those concepts coherent. Without Christianity, there is no notion of human equality of any kind, much less that espoused by the UN Declaration of Human Rights or modern day Woke activists.

What the moderns don’t understand, Holland shows, is that we abandon Christianity at our own peril. Because of the high ideals of its teaching, Christianity comes with built-in tensions—between equality and poverty and maintaining some kind of order, for instance—that require constant reform and rejiggering. Strip out the Christianity and these tensions dissipate, leaving us with something veering toward brutality in one direction or the other, a point one of the characters profiled by Holland late in the book, Friedrich Nietzsche, understood better than anyone since.

I don’t agree with all of Holland’s conclusions, and I think he sometimes overstates the importance of particular parts of these tensions—especially where the primitive and voluntary socialism of the early Church is concerned—but the book is a brilliant tour of select currents in the Christian tradition and is well worth reading. It’s also beautifully written and structured, using a nesting series of threes and sevens (three parts, each with seven chapters, each with three subsections) to give a Christian shape even to the organization of the book, and with the vignettes and profiles leading from one to another in a series of setups and callbacks that give intimacy to the sweep of his narrative.

It’s an accomplishment, and I hope to reread it soon.

Land of Hope: An Invitation to the Great American Story, by Wilfred M McClay

This is the best one-volume history of the United States I’ve read in some time. McClay’s Land of Hope offers a balanced and carefully crafted history that moderates the worst tendencies of a lot of other such recent histories—jingoistic, uncritical admiration for everything America has ever done on the right, self-loathing denunciation and scolding on the left. Striking that balance is especially important nowadays, as the two sides I just mentioned have both sought to make history a weapon, simplifying and exaggerating—if not outright making stuff up—in order to have politically helpful narratives to which they can appeal.

McClay begins with pre-history and an in medias res leap into late medieval Europe, arguing that the histories of America and Europe, especially in the early going, are inextricably intertwined. From there he follows European exploration and the establishment and growth of the various British colonies, and does a good job exploring the diversity of who came to these colonies and why—aristocratic Anglican adventures and planters (Virginia and Carolina), religious autocrats seeking to remake the world (Massachusetts), persecuted religious minorities (the Quakers and Catholics of Pennsylvania and Maryland), and humanitarians (Georgia). These first chapters are especially strong, as are McClay’s carefully balanced examination and explanation of the crisis born with Independence from Britain, the political, cultural, economic differences embedded in these quite different but now united colonies that would grow and bloom and bear fruit as the Civil War.

Land of Hope continues right up to the present—that is, the present of 2019, when the book was published. One wonders what the last three pages or so of this book would look like if McClay could update it for this year. But in addition to the measured, balanced approach he takes throughout, McClay also takes pains to explain that the closer we get to the present, the harder it is to maintain or even to have a proper perspective on events. Everything is too recent.

This is perhaps why the last chapter or two are the weakest of the book. Putting together a survey of all of American history is difficult, and so one has to be selective. Mostly I think McClay selects well, though in the first half I wish the many Indian Wars, which varied immensely in scale and ferocity but played out over decades and consumed a great deal of the United States’ resources and imagination, to say nothing of blood, got more time than they do. But in the last few chapters the history becomes almost entirely political and economic, focusing on who won elections and what policies they tried to enact. This is hard not to do (speaking from classroom experience), but a history of the recent past that moves from stagflation to Donald Trump without mentioning the sexual revolution, Roe v. Wade, or the radical transformations that have been worked on American culture and society is going to be incomplete.

But again, that’s a niggle. Ideally, Land of Hope will be a starting point—it is an “invitation” after all. A properly curious reader or student will not stop with this book, and its warm, engaging style, careful structure, and evenhanded treatment of even the most controversial moments in American history make it an excellent introduction indeed. McClay ends the book with a brief meditation on what a rightly ordered American patriotism—a patriotism that takes account of America’s flaws as well as its ideals—should look like, a good sendoff for a very good book. The highest praise I can give this book is that I wish I could teach from it.

For more, and for a sample of McClay’s excellent writing, see my blog post about McClay’s use of narrative, an approach I wholeheartedly endorse, here.

I’d recommend both of these for sweeping, elegantly written accounts of important ideas and events, and to help make sense of where we are now—which is the whole reason we study the past in the first place.

Classics

These are great books from the ancient and medieval worlds that don’t feel like standard “non-fiction” to me, but which I want to acknowledge as part of what made this year’s reading good. There’s a reason these have stuck around—they’re all great.

• The Life of St Francis, by St Bonaventure, trans. Ewert H Cousins

• How to Run a Country, by Cicero, trans. Philip Freeman. Short Goodreads review here. Election day blog post about this here.

• The Secret History, by Procopius, trans. GA Williamson

• Strategikon, by Maurice, trans. George T Dennis. Short Goodreads review here.

• Two Lives of Charlemagne, by Einhard and Notker the Stammerer, trans. Lewis Thorpe. Goodreads review here.

• The Ecclesiastical History of the English People, by Bede, trans. Goodreads review here. A semi-humorous blog post inspired by a story Bede tells in his history here.

• On the Ruin of Britain, by Gildas, trans. John Allen Giles.

• How to Grow Old, by Cicero, trans. Philip Freeman. See rereads below.

• How to Think About God, by Cicero, trans. Philip Freeman. Goodreads review here.

Many of these medieval texts I revisited—or read in their entirety for the first time—for a podcast series I’m involved in. Looking forward to telling you more about that in the future.

Rereads

Per CS Lewis, “I can’t imagine a man really enjoying a book and reading it only once.” This is a habit I’ve been trying intentionally to develop more in the last couple of years, and this year, in addition to favorite novels, I revisited a lot of old non-fiction favorites. I say revisited because several of these were audiobooks, which feels like cheating to me. I’ve marked the books I listened to—via Hoopla, a wonderful service—with an asterisk.

• How to Grow Old, by Cicero, trans. Philip Freeman. One of my favorites by Cicero. Full review on my blog here.

• The Forgotten Soldier, by Guy Sajer.* Short Goodreads review here.

• Saint Francis of Assisi, by GK Chesterton*

• Saint Thomas Aquinas: The Dumb Ox, by GK Chesterton.* Short Goodreads review here.

• Eugenics and Other Evils, by GK Chesterton.* Goodreads review here.

• On Becoming a Novelist, by John Gardner. Short Goodreads review here.

• The Defendant, by GK Chesterton. Short Goodreads review here.

Conclusion

If you’ve made it this far, thanks for reading, and I hope you’ve found at least one book here that sparked your interest and that you’ll seek out in 2021. Coming up in the next couple of days I’ll go through my favorite fiction of 2020, as well as, for a special post, all the books by the late Roger Scruton I read over the last twelve months, an act of piety on my part for a great mind gone too soon.

Thanks again, and happy New Year!