The New York Times published its list of “100 Notable Books of 2020” Friday, and Washington made a solid showing. While a number of the titles chronicle the lives of DC power players, several others were written by authors connected to the District. Here’s a sampling of the Washington-centric books recognized by the Times to add to your winter reading list:
Black Wave: Saudi Arabia, Iran, and the Forty-Year Rivalry That Unraveled Culture, Religion, and Collective Memory in the Middle East by Kim Ghattas
Burning Down the House: Newt Gingrich, the Fall of a Speaker, and the Rise of the New Republican Party by Julian E. Zelizer
Caste: The Origins of our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson (She’s a Howard University alum)
Exercise of Power: American Failures, Successes, and a New Path Forward in the Post-Cold War World by Robert M. Gates
The Inevitability of Tragedy: Henry Kissinger and His World by Barry Gewen
The Man Who Ran Washington: The Life and Times of James A. Baker III by Peter Baker and Susan Glasser
Memorial Drive: A Memoir by Natasha Trethewey (She lived in DC while U.S. poet laureate)
A Promised Land by Barack Obama
The Quiet Americans: Four CIA Spies at the Dawn of the Cold War — a Tragedy in Three Acts by Scott Anderson
Reaganland: America’s Right Turn, 1976-1980 by Rick Perlstein
The Sirens of Mars: Searching for Life on Another World by Sarah Stewart Johnson (She’s a professor at Georgetown)
Soul Full of Coal Dust: A Fight for Breath and Justice in Appalachia by Chris Hamby
Wagnerism: Art and Politics in the Shadow of Music by Alex Ross (He’s an alum of St. Albans)
Who Gets in and Why: A Year Inside College Admissions by Jeffrey Selingo (He’s a DC-based journalist)
Daniella Byck joined Washingtonian in 2022. She was previously with Outside Magazine and lives in Northeast DC.
