Best Nonfiction, 2010!

Of course you all know where I stand: I have a very large, very roomy space in my heart reserved for nonfiction, so I've left Best Nonfiction of 2010 for last. This, too, was a crowded field - I read 97 works of military history alone this year, for instance. Books on every time period came to me, books on a host of historical figures major and very minor, books on trends, ideas, technology, science, nature, computers, business, gardening, and a dozen other things. And in all cases my criteria were unchanging - and stricter here than anywhere.

Nowhere is the insufficiency of mere Wiki-writing more evident and more merciless than in the writing of fact-based nonfiction, and these writers all seemed to know that; they went well beyond the staked borders of their topics and delivered of themselves as well, or delivered their subjects with much-needed clarity. I recommend all the wonderful books here in the 'Best of' section of our year-end roundup, but I recommend these particular books with just a sliver more enthusiasm than the rest.

10. Denys Wortman's New York - The great artists who did their work quickly, under deadline, to supply the exploding periodical market of the early 20th century have never been given their due. Retrospectives on big advertising names like J. C. Leyendecker have made moves in the right direction, but of the men working in quick pencil-strokes to capture the zeitgeist, the book-buying public has seen comparatively little. This magnificent volume honoring the enormously talented Denys Wortman would thus be a cause for joy even if Wortman's work weren't so great. Luckily, it is - in scene after scene, he perfectly captures a now entirely vanished world of stoops and water-towers and fire escapes and an endless array of people, and he limns it all with a gentle, knowing humor. The reproduction quality here allows every minute decision of Wortman's to be scrutinized and enjoyed, and that's all the more amazing since he seems never to have made a bad one.

9. Dickinson by Helen Vendler - It's a match made on Olympus: one of America's greatest 19th century poets, a crafter of dreamily jagged verse badly in need of explication, gets a whole book's worth of explication from one of the world's greatest poetry critics. It's signature Vendler work: she pours over the poems line by line, word by word, lavishing as much care and attention as the poet did herself (perhaps more? I've long had the impression that she found significances in Keats that he himself didn't see) and yielding a multi-faceted reading richer and more rewarding than any Dickinson has ever had. If I had my way, Vendler would live forever and do a volume like this on every major poet in the world's canon.

8. Ratification by Pauline Maier - In a book-market sludged to the eyeballs with sticky Founding Fathers pap, how refreshing it is to read this long, satisfying book about the state-by-state ratification of the Constitution, written (the book, not the Constitution! Our author isn't quite that old!) by our greatest authority on the American Revolution. Bracing complexity is everywhere on display in this invigorating book, Meier's best, and when you're done reading it, you're struck by how marvellously unlikely it is that the process worked at all. Many books have dealt with this subject, but none nearly so well as this one.

7. Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years by Diarmaid Macullough - As far as opuses go, they don't get much more magnum than this (included on a technicality because I read it this year!). Macullough tackles the whole incredible breadth of his subject with the gusto of a twenty-something graduate on his first book-contract trip to the Widener, and the result is a work of massive scholarship that's nonetheless immediately approachable an even occasionally lighthearted (not an easy feat when dealing with a religion as soul-crushing and bloody as this one). I've had the stomach to read only four comprehensive histories of Christianity in my life, and this one is the only one of its caliber in English and may well be the best one ever written in any language. Certainly the wit, the perspective, and the erudition expended here are worlds better than their subject deserves.

6. The Book in the Renaissance by Andrew Pettegee - The modern reading world, caught in the revolution of the digital marketplace, is closer to the world Pettegee so spiritedly excavates than any previous era. Then, as now, established formats of books were under assault from a variety of new technologies and viewpoints, and then, as now, the universe of the written word seemed to be expanding in all directions faster than readers could adapt. Pettegee shows that they of course ultimately did adapt (he fills his pages with lively descriptions of all the geniuses, hucksters, and misfits who did the adapting); in addition to this book being first-rate history, it's also quite accidentally (or is it an accident?) encouraging.

5. Cleopatra by Stacy Schiff - How much more clearly can the paramount importance of execution be demonstrated than in Schiff's fantastic biography of Cleopatra, a subject who's received, by a conservative estimate, one million previous biographies? The facts of the last Egyptian queen's life are well-trod - and yet Schiff makes it all feel new and fresh, almost solely through the sparkle and vigor of her prose. There's a thought-provoking re-evaluation on virtually every page of this book, and the whole of it is about as entertaining as ancient history gets.

4. Americans in Paris by Charles Glass - This book matches a great subject - the thousands of Americans who for one reason or another were trapped in Nazi-occupied Paris for the duration of the Second World War - with a really talented writer of nonfiction, and the result is an absorbing examination of what incredible daily pressure does to people, how it forces them to be sometimes completely different from their usual selves, or sometimes heavily concentrated versions of themselves. Again, many previous books have covered this subject - but none so thoroughly, or with such a good ear for yarns.

3. American Caesars by Nigel Hamilton - The simplest temptation with this book would have been to treat it only as a high-spirited hoot: a modern version of Suetionius' "Twelve Caesars," substituting postwar American presidents for Roman emperors but keeping most of Suetonius' angles and obsessions. And that level of entertainment is here in abundance (this is the most enjoyable book on American presidents you're ever likely to read), but Hamilton delivers more than that, a surprisingly more passionate, heartfelt book, very much including his mandarin assessment of George W. Bush.

2. Lost Dogs by Jim Gorant - Really, this is probably the only worthy book anybody could write about the whole story of unrepentant coward and asshole Michael Vick's dog-torturing ring - it's the story of the dogs who survived and thrived with loving families, and it's the story of those families, heroically patient and giving, who opened their homes and hearts in an effort to heal these dogs Vick had ordered tortured and fought. Reading this book isn't quite as satisfying as would be reading a morning news report of Vick's sudden and violent death, but it's the next best thing.

1. The Emperor of All Maladies by Siddhartha Mukherjee - In the celebrated tradition of Zinzner's Rats, Lice, and History, but at once grander in scope and more empathetic in tone, Mukherjee's 'biography' of cancer utilizes dozens of patient profiles and interviews to shape a full-scale portrait of this most personal and devastating of all families of illness. The author's dogged research and fieldwork is matched by the earnest grace of his prose. The combination creates a book of remarkable power and pathos, the single best work of nonfiction I read in 2010.

Second Chances in the Penny Press!

The cover story of last week's Sports Illustrated goes some way toward undoing the damage done by Sports Illustrated in 1987 when they ran their now-infamous cover showing a pit bull and bannered with "Beware of This Dog." I wrote them a nasty letter in response to that earlier cover (I was one of thousands who did), taking them to task for perpetuating the evil myth that some dogs - pit bulls in particular - are inherently dangerous, naturally prone to violence. I pointed out that, all other factors being equal, there's no more reason their readers should 'beware' of a pit bull than they should any dog big enough harm a human; the only reason a pit bull on the cover would resonate with their readers was because pit bulls are more often than other dogs warped by the bad handling of humans. The cover should have had a picture of one of those humans with a banner saying "Beware of This Asshole."

Of course, that was back in 1987, when that asshole didn't have a public, recognizable face. Now he does: Michael Vick, former Atlanta Falcons quarterback and convicted dog fighter, abuser, and murderer. In 2007, law enforcement officials broke up Bad News Kennels, a dog-fighting operation Vick had run for years on a property he owned in Virginia, and Vick was sent to jail - and also ordered to pay nearly a million dollars in what the presiding judge all but explicitly characterized as restitution. To say the least, the decision will be a crucial landmark in future prosecutions for cruelty to animals, and I recognize the good in that. The good in the fact that Vick himself will be free in three or four years to pursue a fourth-tier football career in Italy or Portugal ... well, I see less good in that. He confessed to personally beating, stabbing, dragging, and even electrocuting dogs whose only fault was that they weren't vicious enough - there should be no paychecks after that, no endorsement contracts, no freedom, no sunlight. I think it's generous just to let such a person keep living, when so many of his victims are dead.

So many, but not all - and that's the bright little miracle at the heart of this current SI article: 47 of the 51 dogs taken from Bad Newz were ultimately saved. Many animal welfare groups - including PETA - advocated that all the dogs be killed, not only to end their own suffering but to prevent them from hurting other dogs or humans. Back in 2007, I advocated that myself. The trauma done to these poor dogs was so deep and systematic (several of the animals were born into Vick's operation and knew no other life), I thought, that you could never know with complete certainty that someday one of your other pets or one of your children wouldn't trigger something - resulting in yet another headline-grabbing mauling or fatality, which would only further hurt the image of the breed in general. Short of adopting all of Vick's dogs myself and carefully restoring them, I said at the time, the only humane thing to do is put them all to death.

Turns out I was wrong, and good thing too: Hundreds of concerned, passionate, patient people came forward in the course of Vick's arrest and trial, volunteering their time and money in an attempt to save these dogs. Pit bull advocacy groups, animal welfare groups, dog-rehabilitation groups of all kinds offered their services, and as a result, this SI article was able to accompany its text with some of the most heart-glowingly wonderful photos the magazine has ever published. This story, written by Jim Gorant and titled "Happy New Year," is a testament not only to the hope of the humans involved but also to the incredible, dopey recuperative powers most dogs enjoy as a matter of course.



Not all the dogs recovered fully. About half of them were too emotionally damaged by what Vick and his asshole cronies did to them to ever regain emotional stability (the ones born into the operation very likely never had it in the first place) - these are in permanent foster care situations and rehab facilities where a trained staff can love and monitor them, safeguard them from all further trauma, and try to give them some measure of happiness for the rest of their lives.

But the half that recovered did so with a vivacity and thoroughness - with an innocence, really - that not only makes me smile but also, paradoxically, increases my desire to see Vick publicly racked, electrocuted, and then beaten to death. Pit bulls have an enormous generosity of spirit, even by the yardstick of dogs, who are a generous species to begin with; thinking about that spirit being chained and warped into mindless vicious aggression for the sport of spectators is blood-curdlingly infuriating. The canker is salved only by the happy endings that very generosity of spirit makes possible - other breeds (the more froward working dogs, for instance, and certainly the more, shall we say, idiosyncratic hounds) might not have bounced back so well, or at all - "goofy" is a word used by more than one of these dogs' new families. Goofy is a thing all dogs should get to be in their lives - and before Vick's arrest, when Bad Newz was a going concern, it was as far away from dogs there as Heaven is to a Unitarian.

So despite the tens of thousands of other dogs languishing in shelters all across the country, this particular issue of Sports Illustrated tells of happy tidings for one small group of dogs who had almost no hope. I was happy to read it, and that happiness was dimmed by only two things: first, like I said, you just know Michael Vick himself is going to land on his feet next year, or the year after that, and second, a point not mentioned in Gorant's upbeat article: Bad Newz was a strictly small-time operation. It was the dog-fighting equivalent of a mom-and-pop store. What the article doesn't mention - what most American pet-owners don't want to think about - is that there are Wal-Marts out there, operating in virtually every major city and hundreds of rural locations throughout the country. Agents for these operations regularly patrol suburban neighborhoods in innocuous-looking vans, snatching up strolling or sleeping pet dogs from their streets or yards. These hapless dogs, totally confused and miserable, are used as "bait dogs" for the fighting animals to practice on, or as warm-up events to get the basement betting crowd in the mood. And that betting brings in lots of money - dog-fighting is big business in America and around the world.



Still, Vick was convicted and heavily fined, despite his celebrity (and despite noxious attempts by his lawyers to portray dog-fighting as some sort of "cultural" legacy - a tactic that just flat-out appalled me, since it was attempted in a Virginia courthouse and concerned a good-looking well-built young black man who, a hundred and fifty years ago, would himself have been part of a not-all-that-different "cultural" legacy), and the stigma of what he did is likely to stick with him forever, and many of the dogs his tortures would otherwise have condemned are now clowning around and sleeping and face-slurping in the middle of loving families.

So it's a small miracle, and that will have to be enough for now.