August’s Best Reviewed Nonfiction

Lit Hub, using Book Marks review data, has named five titles as August's best-reviewed works of nonfiction. Leading the list is Claire Stapleton's Don't Be Evil, an account of her twelve years at Google and her turn from eager corporate striver into an activist who helped organize the 2018 Google walkout. Second is Kimon de Greef's The Ego Trip, a report on the Sonoran Desert toad and its psychoactive secretion, running from centuries of hardship endured by the Seri people and the growth of commercial toad milking in territory held by drug gangs, to quarrels between rival gurus and the race to turn 5-MeO-DMT into a pharmaceutical. Third is The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State by the Pulitzer-winning historian Jill Lepore, which one reviewer calls essential for anyone trying to understand a world growing steadily more digital, more online, more corporate and more out of control. Fourth is Ashley Kahn's Days of Miracle and Wonder, which revisits the making of Paul Simon's Graceland with all its triumphs and difficulties. The list closes with Dave Zirin's The People's Historian, a biography of Howard Zinn that a reviewer describes as the portrait of a historian who reshaped how Americans understand their own capacity for change.

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