The 20 Best Nonfiction Books of All Time You Need to Check Out

Today, we will be looking at the 20 best nonfictions books of all time. So, keep reading to find out what they are and what we thought of this list!

Growing up, I didn’t read much nonfiction books. I was enthralled with books about cowboys and adventure novels. But over the years, I have come to appreciate them a lot more and the research that is done to write those books.

Like most people, the first nonfiction book I read was in school called The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank. That is a powerful book that everyone should read and I am glad it is required reading. It shouldn’t surprise you that it is considered the best nonfiction book of all time.

The list was curated by The Greatest Books website and uses a “specialized algorithm” to determine the rankings. Take that how you will because I don’t think an algorithm will be any better than humans in determining what the best book are. You can see the full list below!

The Best Nonfiction Books of All Time 

• The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank
• Essays by Michel de Montaigne
• In Cold Blood by Truman Capote
• Silent Spring by Rachel Carson
• Walden by Henry David Thoreau
• The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir
• The Interpretation of Dreams by Sigmund Freud
• If This Is A Man by Primo Levi
• A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf
• The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli
• Confessions by Augustine
• On the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin
• The Autobiography of Malcolm X by Alex Haley
• Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels
• The Life of Samuel Johnson by James Boswell
• Democracy in America by Alexis de Tocqueville
• The Republic by Plato
• Out of Africa by Isak Dinesen
• The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
• The Double Helix by James D. Watson

Conclusion

The list is good and I do like many of the selections. The ones I haven’t read, I don’t have the greatest interest in reading. A lot of these books are very old and are important. But their relevance has come and gone. Still, I’m sure many people will enjoy them. Happy reading!

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