Booked Up: the 25 Best Books of 2020

Baseless: My Search for Secrets in the Ruins of the Freedom of Information Act
Nicholson Baker
(Penguin Press)

The Jakarta Method: Washington’s Anticommunist Crusade and the Mass Murder Program that Shaped Our World
Vincent Bevins
(Public Affairs Books)

Fallout: The Hiroshima Cover-up and the Reporter Who Revealed It to the World
Lesley M.M. Blume
(Simon & Schuster)

One Two Three Four: the Beatles in Time
Craig Brown
(Fourth Estate)

Tacky’s Revolt: the Story of an Atlantic Slave War
Vincent Brown
(Belknap Press)

War in the Age of Trump
Patrick Cockburn
(Verso)

The Green New Deal and Beyond
Stan Cox
(City Lights)

Set the Night on Fire: LA in the Sixties
Mike Davis and Jon Wiener
(Verso)

Desert Notebooks: a Roadmap for the End of Time
Ben Ehrenreich
(CounterPoint)

The Return of Nature: Socialism and Ecology
John Bellamy Foster
(Monthly Review Press)

Fathoms: the World in the Whale
Rebecca Giggs
(Simon & Schuster)

Ornette Coleman: the Territory and the Adventure
Maria Golia
(Reaction Books)

Human Shields: A History of People in the Line of Fire
Neve Gordon and Nicola Perugini
(University of California)

We Still Here: Pandemic, Policing, Protest & Possibility
Marc Lamont Hill
(Haymarket)

The Future Earth: A Radical Vision for What’s Possible in the Age of Warming
Eric Holthaus
(HarperOne)

The Dawning of the Apocalypse: The Roots of Slavery, White Supremacy, Settler Colonialism, and Capitalism in the Long Sixteenth Century
Gerald Horne
(Monthly Review Press)

Sinews of War and Trade: Shipping and Capitalism in the Arabian Peninsula
Laleh Khalili
(Verso)

Who Killed Berta Caceres?: Dams, Death Squads, and an Indigenous Defender’s Battle for the Planet
Nina Lakhani
(Verso)

Perilous Bounty: the Looming Collapse of American Farming and How We Can Prevent It
Tom Philpott
(Bloomsbury)

Oak Flat: a Fight for Sacred Land in the American West
Lauren Redniss
(Random House)

Chasing the Light: Writing Directing and Surviving Platoon, Midnight Express, Scarface,  Salvador and the Movie Game
Oliver Stone
(Houghton Mifflin)

Dead Epidemiologists: On the Origins of COVID
Rob Wallace
(Monthly Review Press)

The Big Goodbye: Chinatown and the Last Days of Hollywood
Sam Wesson
(Macmillan)

What We Don’t Talk About When We Talk About #MeToo
JoAnn Wypijewski
(Verso)

Hellfire From Paradise Ranch: On the Frontlines of Drone Warfare
Joshua Zulaika
(University of California Press)

 

Jeffrey St. Clair is editor of CounterPunch. His most recent book is An Orgy of Thieves: Neoliberalism and Its Discontents (with Alexander Cockburn). He can be reached at: sitka@comcast.net or on Twitter @JeffreyStClair3