Nonfiction books reviewed here in 2021

The Admirals: Nimitz, Halsey, Leahy, and King—The Five-Star Admirals Who Won the War at Sea by Walter R. Borneman—The four men who led the US Navy in WWII

The Mission: A True Story by David W. Brown—Mission to Europa to find extraterrestrial life

The Fall of Japan: The Final Weeks of World War II in the Pacific by William Craig—The ugly background to Japan’s unconditional surrender

The Catcher Was a Spy: The Mysterious Life of Moe Berg by Nicholas Dawidoff—An absorbing biography of Moe Berg, baseball player and WWII spy

The Nazi Menace: Hitler, Churchill, Roosevelt, Stalin, and the Road to War by Benjamin Carter Hett—How the Western democracies stumbled into war with Nazi Germany

Barracoon: The Story of the Last “Black Cargo” by Zora Neale Hurston—The last living former slave tells his story

How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States by Daniel Immerwahr—A supremely entertaining history of American empire

The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race by Walter Isaacson—CRISPR technology may change the world as we know it

Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future by Elizabeth Kolbert—In the Anthropocene, the chickens come home to roost

The Princess Spy: The True Story of World War II Spy Aline Griffith, Countess of Romanones by Larry Loftis—The American fashion model who spied for the Allies in World War II

Four Lost Cities: A Secret History of the Urban Age by Annalee Newitz—Join archaeologists at work around the world

The Guarded Gate: Bigotry, Eugenics, and the Law That Kept Generations of Jews, Italians, and Other European Immigrants Out of America by Daniel Okrent—The racist movement that stopped immigration a century ago

Last Boat Out of Shanghai: The Epic Story of the Chinese Who Fled Mao’s Revolution by Helen Zia—Four young Chinese experience WWII and Revolution