We are almost at the halfway point of 2013, and list-loving Amazon is out with its 2013’s Best Books of the Year So Far, including 10 history and 10 general nonfiction titles.
History
1. The Guns at Last Light: The War in Western Europe, 1944-45 (Liberation Trilogy) (Henry Holt) by Rick Atkinson.
2. The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) by George Packer.
3. The Boys in the Boat: Nine Americans and their Epic Quest for Gold at the 1936 Berlin Olympics (Viking Adult) by Daniel James Brown.
4. The Astronaut Wives Club: A True Story (Grand Central) by Lily Koppel.
5. Frozen in Time: An Epic Story of Survival and a Modern Quest for Lost Heroes of World War II (Harper) by Mitchell Zuckoff.
6. Revolutionary Summer: The Birth of American Independence (Knopf) by Joseph J. Ellis.
7. Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield (Nation Books) by Jeremy Scahill.
8. Daily Rituals: How Artists Work (Knopf) by Mason Currey.
9. The Girls of Atomic City: The Untold Story of the Women Who Helped Win World War II (Touchstone) by Denise Kiernan.
10. The Summer of Beer and Whiskey: How Brewers, Barkeeps, Rowdies, Immigrants and a Wild Pennant Fight Made Baseball America’s Game (PublicAffairs) by Edward Achorn.
Nonfiction
1. Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal (W.W. Norton) by Mary Roach.
2. The Autistic Brain: Thinking Across the Spectrum (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) by Temple Grandin and Richard Panek.
3. Detroit: An American Autopsy (Penguin Press) by Charles LeDuff.
4. The Emerald Mile: The Epic Story of the Fastest Ride in History Through the Grand Canyon (Scribner) by Kevin Fedarko.
5. Scatter, Adapt and Remember: How Humans Will Survive a Mass Extinction (Doubleday) by Annalee Newitz.
6. Overbooked: The Exploding Business of Travel and Tourism (Simon & Schuster) by Elizabeth Becker.
7. Exploding the Phone: The Untold Story of the Teenagers and Outlaws Who Hacked Ma Bell (Grove Press) by Phil Lapsley and Steve Wozniak.
8. Between Man and Beast: An Unlikely Explorer, the Evolution Debates, and the African Adventure that Took the Victorian World by Storm (Doubleday) by Monte Reel.
9. Ship It Holla Ballas!: How a Bunch of 19-Year-Old College Dropouts Used the Internet to Become Poker’s Loudest, Craziest, Richest Crew (St. Martin’s Press) by Jonathan Grotenstein and Storms Reback.
10. Smuggler Nation: How Illicit Trade Made America (Oxford University Press) by Peter Andreas.
Amazon’s lists of Best Books of the Year So Far in Fiction, Humor, and other categories are available here.
