The Washington Post has an important place in American history, not only as a newspaper of record for the country’s national politics, but also because of the role it has played in shaping those politics. In the early 1970s, in the best-known episode in the newspaper’s history, reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein led the American press’ investigation into what became known as the Watergate scandal. These reports were highly influential to the resignation of President Richard Nixon in 1974. The newspaper has also won a total of 47 Pulitzer Prizes in its 140 year history, including six separate Pulitzers awarded in 2008, the second-highest number ever awarded to a single newspaper in one year.
The Washington Post also cares about books. A lot. Their book review sections are robust, informed, and insightful. They also feature “Chapter One” an online page that allows readers to access the first chapters of selected new books (all of which are also reviewed in The Washington Post).
So when The Washington Post puts out their list of the “10 Best Books of 2017“, it’s worth paying some attention. This list is a fantastic mix of non-fiction and fiction, of contemporary politics and historical fiction, of current events and fantastical worlds. So we wanted to bring some selections of that list to you, in the hopes that it may help you choose some books for your end-of-the-year reading…or your beginning-of-the-new-year reading. And stay tuned for our own “Best of” lists, coming to the Free For All soon!
To see all the selections from The Washington Post, check out their Books Reviews page!
I Can’t Breathe: A Killing on Bay Street: On July 17, 2014, a forty-three-year-old black man named Eric Garner died on a Staten Island sidewalk after a police officer put him in what has been described as an illegal chokehold during an arrest for selling bootleg cigarettes. The final moments of Garner’s life were captured on video and seen by millions. His agonized last words, “I can’t breathe,” became a rallying cry for the nascent Black Lives Matter protest movement. A grand jury ultimately declined to indict the officer who wrestled Garner to the pavement. Matt Taibbi’s deeply reported retelling of these events liberates Eric Garner from the abstractions of newspaper accounts and lets us see the man in full—with all his flaws and contradictions intact. His insight extends to the other people in this story, highlighting not only the story of an individual, isolated incident, but placing it within the context of the American judicial system and culture in a way that is deeply enlightening and emotionally wrenching. According to The Washington Post: This gut-wrenching account of the death and life of Eric Garner is a deep dive into every aspect of the case, including its legal impact, which is minimal, and its cultural and political ones, which have been profound.
Saints for All Occasions: Nora and Theresa Flynn are twenty-one and seventeen when they leave their small village in Ireland and journey to America. Nora is the responsible sister; she’s shy and serious and engaged to a man she isn’t sure that she loves. Theresa is gregarious; she is thrilled by their new life in Boston and besotted with the fashionable dresses and dance halls on Dudley Street. But when Theresa ends up pregnant, Nora is forced to come up with a plan—a decision with repercussions they are both far too young to understand. Fifty years later, Nora is the matriarch of a big Catholic family with four grown children, while Theresa is a cloistered nun, living in an abbey in rural Vermont. But when an unexpected death brings these sisters together for the first time in years, forcing them to reckon with the choices they made so long ago. J. Courtney Sullivan manages something remarkable in this book–condensing a lifetime of memories into the space of a few days, and creating a book that is at once a familiar story of family and a wholly unique study of two deeply complex women. The Washington Post has this to say: In a style that never commits a flutter of extravagance, Sullivan draws us into the lives of the Raffertys and, in the rare miracle of fiction, makes us care about them as if they were our own family.
The Future is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia: We celebrated the arrival of Masha Gessen’s book, and now it’s being hailed by The WaPo, and plenty of other national outlets. In this stunning and chilling work, Gessen follows the lives of four people born at what promised to be the dawn of democracy in what was once the Soviet Union. Each of them came of age with unprecedented expectations, some as the children and grandchildren of the very architects of the new Russia, each with newfound aspirations of their own—as entrepreneurs, activists, thinkers, and writers, sexual and social beings. Gessen then charts their paths against the machinations of the regime that would crush them all, and against the war it waged on understanding itself, which ensured the unobstructed reemergence of a regime that looks far too much like the old Soviet order, within the context of a frightening new world. The Washington Post adored this book, noting. This is a sweeping intellectual history of Russia over the past four decades, told through a Tolstoyan gallery of characters. It makes a convincing if depressing case that Homo Sovieticus, the unique species created a century ago with the Bolshevik Revolution, did not die out along with the Soviet Union. What makes the book so worthwhile are its keen observations about Russia from the point of view of those experiencing its heavy-handed state.
Less: Here’s another book we featured when it first made it way onto our shelves (clearly, we have excellent taste, dear readers). Who says you can’t run away from your problems? In Andrew Sean Greer’s world, Arthur Less is a failed novelist about to turn fifty. A wedding invitation arrives in the mail, announcing that his boyfriend of the past nine years is engaged to someone else. He knows he can’t accept, as it would be far too awkward, but he can’t say no and risk looking bitter. So instead, he decides to accept all of the other invitations on his desk, and sets off on what will be the adventure of a lifetime. A scintillating satire of the American abroad, a thought-provoking tale about growing up and growing old, and, ultimately, a love story, this is a all-around winner of a book that The Washington Post loved, saying: Too often, our standards of literary greatness exclude comic novels — which is usually fine because there are so few great comic novels. But you should make more room for Less…Greer is brilliantly funny about the awkwardness that awaits a traveling writer of less repute….This is the comedy of disappointment distilled to a sweet elixir.
Check the rest of The Washington Post’s Best Books of 2017 here!