Nonfiction Top 40 of 2024

The best nonfiction books published last year according to seven AIs.

These are the very best nonfiction books published last year in the English language, according to a diverse panel of AIs (Gemini, Claude, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Le Chat, Grok, and DeepSeek). You can find the method behind the list here.

Why 2024? Because I wanted to test the AIs, and it was too early to make a list for 2025.

For paid subscribers, I offer a complete download with the rankings per AI, plus a spreadsheet with all 244 books, including the titles that were rejected. See below.

1. The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness - Jonathan Haidt

2. The Achilles Trap: Saddam Hussein, the C.I.A., and the Origins of America's Invasion of Iraq - Steve Coll

3. Nuclear War: A Scenario - Annie Jacobsen

4. Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here: The United States, Central America, and the Making of a Crisis - Jonathan Blitzer

5. The Rebel's Clinic: The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon - Adam Shatz

6. Challenger: A True Story of Heroism and Disaster on the Edge of Space - Adam Higginbotham

7. Soldiers and Kings: Survival and Hope in the World of Human Smuggling - Jason De León

8. When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s - John Ganz

9. We Are Free to Change the World: Hannah Arendt's Lessons in Love and Disobedience - Lyndsey Stonebridge

10. Growth: A History and a Reckoning - Daniel Susskind

11. The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth - Zoë Schlanger

12. Becoming Earth: How Our Planet Came to Life - Ferris Jabr

13. Autocracy, Inc.: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World - Anne Applebaum

14. The Holocaust: An Unfinished History - Dan Stone

15. The Message - Ta-Nehisi Coates

16. The Edge of Sentience: Risk and Precaution in Humans, Other Animals, and Al - Jonathan Birch

17. The Burning Earth: An Environmental History of the Last - Sunil Amrith

18. The Hidden Globe: How Wealth Hacks the World - Atossa Araxia Abrahamian

19. How Economics Explains the World: A Short History of Humanity: A Brief and Powerful Economic History wit - Andrew Leigh

20. The Wide Wide Sea: Imperial Ambition, First Contact and the Fateful Final Voyage of Captain James Cook - Hampton Sides

21. Reagan: His Life and Legend - Max Boot

22. Living on Earth: Forests, Corals, Consciousness, and the Making of the World - Peter Godfrey-Smith

23. Everything is Predictable: How Bayesian Statistics Explain Our World - Tom Chivers

24. The Black Utopians: Searching for Paradise and the Promised Land in America - Aaron Robertson, Alex Zamalin

25. Our Enemies Will Vanish: The Russian Invasion and Ukraine's War of Independence - Yaroslav Trofimov

26. America Last: The Right's Century-Long Romance With Foreign Dictators - Jacob Heilbrunn

27. The Great Wave: The Era of Radical Disruption and the Rise of the Outsider - Michiko Kakutani

28. Not the End of the World: How We Can Be the First Generation to Build a Sustainable Planet - Hannah Ritchie

29. Black Pill: How I Witnessed the Darkest Corners of the Internet Come to Life, Poison Society, and Capture A - Elle Reeve

30. Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture - Kyle Chayka

31. Making it in America: The Almost Impossible Quest to Manufacture in the U.S.A. - Rachel Slade

32. Private Revolutions: Four Women Face China's New Social Order - Yuan Yang

33. Lucky Loser: How Donald Trump Squandered His Father's Fortune and Created the Illusion of Success - Russ Buettner, Susanne Craig

34. Shock Values: Prices and Inflation in American Democracy - Carola Binder

35. Our Kindred Creatures: How Americans Came to Feel the Way They Do About Animals - Bill Wasik, Monica Murphy

36. The Return of Great Powers: Russia, China, and the Next World War - Jim Sciutto

37. Native Nations: A Millennium in North America - Kathleen DuVal

38. Why We Die: The New Science of Aging and the Quest for Immortality - Venki Ramakrishnan

39. Combee: Harriet Tubman, the Combahee River Raid, and Black Freedom During the Civil War - Edda L. Fields-Black

40. Quantum Drama: From the Bohr-Einstein Debate to the Riddle of Entanglement - Jim Baggott, John L. Heilbron

Enjoy reading!

Jurgen

For paid subscribers, I offer a complete download with the rankings per AI, plus a spreadsheet with all 244 books, including the titles that were rejected. ⬇️