New York Times - Best Books of 2009 - Non-Fiction

The twin energies of scientific curiosity and poetic invention pulsate through this study of “the second scientific revolution.”

A memoir by The Times’s former restaurant critic, who writes of food, family, friendship and being fat.

This detailed biography follows John Cheever’s path step by stumbling step, disclosing the addictive urges and bawling self-pity to which he subjected himself and those in his household.

In Queenan’s account of his life, the belligerent priests, the poverty, the girls and the music all pale beside the rages of his drunken, violently abusive father

Cullen’s nuanced account anatomizes the massacre, showing how readily truth was obscured by myth.

This copious, lively history treats the game, and the qualities it demands, as characteristically American.

An absorbing, well-researched and highly political biography of a transformative figure in modern photojournalism.

In his careful yet provocative contemplation of religious history, Wright sees continuous positive moral change over time but denies the specialness of any individual faith

A Cambridge classics professor leads a fine tour, turning up surprises around every corner

Witty, obsessed and almost inhumanly brave, O’Connor was peculiar, her work even more so. But Gooch strives to make it all quite normal

Not dwelling on Barthelme’s dark soul or his uneven work, Daugherty has created a convincing narrative from a life that was engaged, passionate and maybe even fulfilled.

A senior counsel to the 9/11 Commission assails the Bush administration’s depiction of the event as so much public relations flimflam

An uplifting account of how Special Forces soldiers joined with mounted local militias to beat back the Taliban in 2001

Despite the deep seriousness of the topics here — motherhood, disintegrating marriage, alcoholism, depression, God — nothing can keep Karr from being funny.

Pakula’s often absorbing biography presents Madame Chiang as far more complicated, awful and brilliant than we had imagined.

In its moments of real ambivalence, this loving and funny filial memoir of Bill and Pat Buckley is surprisingly strong drink

Grann follows the trail of the English adventurer/explorer Percy Fawcett, who disappeared in 1925

An admiring biography of the Supreme Court justice as a reformer and legal innovator

In his unnerving portrait of Oelwein, Iowa, Reding depicts a catastrophe of Chernobylish dimensions, precipitated by the loss of jobs and the rise of methamphetamines

Evans was a large part of the era of British newspapers he describes, when journalists were literate buccaneers

A powerful work that offers an impassioned challenge to the social meaning of disasters

Sklenicka’s biography is invaluable as a chronicle of Carver’s growth as a writer, particularly in its account of his difficult, ultimately poisonous relationship with the editor Gordon Lish

An encomium to manual skills, by a political philosophy Ph.D. who can rebuild VW engines

A superbly textured, compassionate biography

This riveting final volume to Evans’s magisterial trilogy illuminates the endless human capacity for evil and self-justification

The Brazilian writer was born to remorse, shaken by trauma and imbued with a deep sense of alienation

This suspenseful nonfiction account of what happened to a Syrian-American man and his family after Hurricane Katrina is a powerful indictment of Bush-era policies

Mallon’s fine meditation on the art of letter-writing embraces old friends — Flaubert, Freud, the Mitfords — and plenty of unknowns as well