The books that are changing how readers, critics, and scholars think

"The Ideas Index" uses readers' ratings, reviewers' assessments and scholars' citations to find the most influential nonfiction books published since 2020.

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Under The Radar

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Best of 2022

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Search for the Genuine, The: Nonfiction, 1970-2015

Jim Harrison

Top of the Pile 90/99

How to Be Perfect: The Correct Answer to Every Moral Question

Michael Schur

Top of the Pile 77/99

Magnificent Rebels: The First Romantics and the Invention of the Self

Andrea Wulf

Top of the Pile 82/99

Free Speech: A History from Socrates to Social Media

Jacob Mchangama

Top of the Pile 83/99

The Manuscripts Club: The People Behind a Thousand Years of Medieval Manuscripts

Christopher de Hamel

Top of the Pile 80/99

The Method: How the Twentieth Century Learned to Act

Isaac Butler

Top of the Pile 83/99

Blood in the Garden: The Flagrant History of the 1990s New York Knicks

Chris Herring

Top of the Pile 84/99

My Seven Black Fathers: A Young Activist's Memoir of Race, Family, and the Mentors Who Made Him Whole

Will Jawando

Top of the Pile 90/99

Black Snow: Curtis LeMay, the Firebombing of Tokyo, and the Road to the Atomic Bomb

James M. Scott

Top of the Pile 90/99

DJ Screw: A Life in Slow Revolution (American Music Series)

Lance Scott Walker

Top of the Pile 88/99

Prisoners of the Castle: An Epic Story of Survival and Escape from Colditz, the Nazis' Fortress Prison

Ben Macintyre

Top of the Pile 80/99

Hello, Molly!: A Memoir

Molly Shannon; Sean Wilsey

Top of the Pile 84/99

The Ship Beneath the Ice: The Discovery of Shackleton's Endurance―The Inside Story of How the Endurance Was Found and a Tale of Survival Against the Odds in the Most Hostile Sea on Earth

Mensun Bound

Top of the Pile 78/99

The Movement Made Us: A Father, a Son, and the Legacy of a Freedom Ride

David J. Dennis Jr.

Top of the Pile 84/99

Sounds Wild and Broken: Sonic Marvels, Evolution's Creativity, and the Crisis of Sensory Extinction

David George Haskell

Top of the Pile 77/99

Best of 2020

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Mediocre: The Dangerous Legacy of White Male America

Ijeoma Oluo

Top of the Pile 93/99

The Plague Year: America in the Time of Covid

Lawrence Wright

Top of the Pile 80/99

The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Cartoonist

Adrian Tomine

Top of the Pile 80/99

Before and After the Book Deal: A Writer's Guide to Finishing, Publishing, Promoting, and Surviving Your First Book

Courtney Maum

Top of the Pile 78/99

Pastoral Song: A Farmer's Journey

James Rebanks

Top of the Pile 94/99

The International Brigades: Fascism, Freedom and the Spanish Civil War

Giles Tremlett

Top of the Pile 82/99

Gathering Blossoms Under Fire: The Journals of Alice Walker, 1965–2000

Alice Walker; Valerie Boyd

Top of the Pile 78/99

Diary of a Young Naturalist

Dara McAnulty

Top of the Pile 85/99

Separated: Inside an American Tragedy

Jacob Soboroff

Top of the Pile 79/99

A Question of Freedom: The Families Who Challenged Slavery from the Nation's Founding to the Civil War

William G. Thomas

Top of the Pile 85/99

Intimations

Zadie Smith

Top of the Pile 78/99

Fight of the Century: Writers Reflect on 100 Years of Landmark ACLU Cases

Michael Chabon; Ayelet Waldman; Ann Patchett; Brit Bennett; Steven Okazaki; David Handler; Geraldine Brooks; Yaa Gyasi; Sergio de la Pava; Dave Eggers; Timothy Egan; Li Yiyun; Meg Wolitzer; Héctor Tobar; Aleksandar Hemon; Elizabeth Strout; Rabih Alameddine; Moriel Rothman-Zecher; Jonathan Lethem; Salman Rushdie; Lauren Groff; Jennifer Egan; Scott Turow; Morgan Parker; Victor LaValle; Michael Cunningham; Neil Gaiman; Jesmyn Ward; George Saunders; Marlon James; William Finnegan; Anthony Doerr; C.J. Anders; Brenda J. Child; Andrew Sean Greer; Louise Erdrich; Adrian Nicole LeBlanc; David Cole; Viet Thanh Nguyen; Jacqueline Woodson

Top of the Pile 81/99

After the Last Border: Two Families and the Story of Refuge in America

Jessica Goudeau

Top of the Pile 85/99

The Best of Me

David Sedaris

Top of the Pile 86/99

Overground Railroad: The Green Book and the Roots of Black Travel in America

Candacy A. Taylor

Top of the Pile 75/99