Year-End Lists

Esquire: The Best Nonfiction Books of 2022

[see also The 25 Best Books of 2024 • The 20 Best Books of 2023 • The Best Books of 2022 • The 50 Best Books of 2021 • The Best Books of the 2010s • The Best Nonfiction Books of 2019]

1. The Extraordinary Life of an Ordinary Man

   A Memoir
   Paul Newman
2. Bad Sex
   Nona Willis Aronowitz
3. The High Sierra

   A Love Story
   Kim Stanley Robinson
4. My Pinup
   Hilton Als
5. Dirtbag, Massachusetts

   A Confessional
   Isaac Fitzgerald
6. Dickens and Prince
   Nick Hornby
7. Because Our Fathers Lied

   A Memoir of Truth and Family, from Vietnam to Today
   Craig McNamara
8. Raising Lazarus

   Hope, Justice, and the Future of America's Overdose Crisis
   Beth Macy
9. Fight Like Hell

   The Untold History of American Labor
   Kim Kelly
10. Phasers on Stun!

    How the Making (and Remaking) of Star Trek Changed the World
    Ryan Britt
11. Year of the Tiger

    An Activist's Life
    Alice Wong
12. Fen, Bog and Swamp

    A Short History of Peatland Destruction and Its Role in the Climate Crisis
    Annie Proulx
13. Butts

    A Backstory
    Heather Radke
14. Novelist as a Vocation
    Haruki Murakami
15. How You Get Famous

    Ten Years of Drag Madness in Brooklyn
    Nicole Pasulka
16. The Last Resort

    A Chronicle of Paradise, Profit, and Peril at the Beach
    Sarah Stodola
17. Hollywood Ending

    Harvey Weinstein and the Culture of Silence
    Ken Auletta
18. The Last Days of Roger Federer

    And Other Endings
    Geoff Dyer
19. The Gotti Wars

    Taking Down America's Most Notorious Mobster
    John Gleeson
20. Dress Code

    Unlocking Fashion from the New Look to Millennial Pink
    Véronique Hyland
21. How Civil Wars Start

    And How to Stop Them
    Barbara F. Walter
22. Lost & Found

    A Memoir
    Kathryn Schulz
23. You Don't Know Us Negroes and Other Essays
    Zora Neale Hurston
24. Sweat

    A History of Exercise
    Bill Hayes
25. Admissions

    A Memoir of Surviving Boarding School
    Kendra James
26. South to America

    A Journey Below the Mason Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation
    Imani Perry
27. The Nineties
    Chuck Klosterman
28. Foreverland

    On the Divine Tedium of Marriage
    Heather Havrilesky
29. True Story

    What Reality TV Says about Us
    Danielle J. Lindemann
30. Scoundrel

    How a Convicted Murderer Persuaded the Women Who Loved Him, the Conservative Establishment, and the Courts to Set Him Free
    Sarah Weinman
31. The Invisible Kingdom

    Reimagining Chronic Illness
    Meghan O’Rourke
32. Trust the Plan

    The Rise of QAnon and the Conspiracy That Reshaped the World
    Will Sommer
33. Overdue

    Reckoning with the Public Library
    Amanda Oliver
34. How to Take Over the World

    Practical Schemes and Scientific Solutions for the Aspiring Supervillain
    Ryan North
35. Ancestor Trouble

    A Reckoning and a Reconciliation
    Maud Newton