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Books give us pleasure, of course, but they also help us frame what's happening all around us at any given moment. Instead of compiling a "best of" list, we asked Esquire writers and editors to select the five books published this year that, if you were to read them all, would give you a much fuller picture of what humans were dealing with in 2014. Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption by Bryan Stevenson There is nobody in America who is doing more of God's work with less acclaim than Bryan Stevenson, the head of the Equal Justice Initiative in Alabama, and a lawyer who has taken it upon himself to try to create some semblance of justice in a system that is near collapse; a system that will likely collapse, as it always does, on poor and anonymous defendants who can't afford the justice that is their right simply by virtue of being American. A product of the poor side of Delaware, whose grandfather was shot to death, Stevenson found his cal...

Photo: Emily Kate Roemer/Studio D Tantalizing Topic John McQuaid's Tasty: The Art and Science of What We Eat (Scribner) mixes science, literature, history, and anecdote in the service of his stellar inquiry into the inner workings of taste, also called flavor, which McQuaid finds to be the most underappreciated of the senses. Flavor, he asserts, is a "secret world lying just under the surface of everyday experience, waiting to be cracked open." Debatable Propositions I Think You're Totally Wrong: A Quarrel (Knopf), by best-selling author David Shields ( Reality Hunger ) and a former student of his, current stay-at-home dad Caleb Powell, ingeniously captures their feisty debate about Art and Life. During a retreat at a cabin in Washington's Cascade Range, the two longtime pals disagree on marriage, religion, sex, politics, happiness, film—and everything else—with passion, insight, and panache. As The Fur Flies In his story collection Hall o...

There is perhaps no greater luxury than to be enveloped in natural beauty, to feel the strength of the forest and the purity of the sky, to hear the sound of a running river. And if you’re seeking rejuvenation, there is perhaps no greater need. In the heart of Swedish Lapland, there is a place created for just this purpose. Treehotel stands 46 miles outside the Arctic Circle, where the northern lights flash overhead in winter and the midnight sun shines bright in summer. Here you are invited to laze on a rock while listening to the powerful Lule River; to swim, raft, bicycle, snowshoe, ski, take a sauna or an outdoor bath in a Hikki hot tub, fly-fish, dogsled, try a moose safari or “ice dining”: eating by candlelight in a warm tepee on a frozen lake. The resort is pristine, renewing, a spa without a spa. The property is often so quiet that guests can hear themselves breathe. The hotel was inspired by a 2008 documentary called The Tree Lover , by Swedish director Jonas Sel...

It’s Stockholm Fashion Week—and the sight of pretty young things flitting through the city’s tree-lined streets offers a fresh reminder of the shrewd sartorial sense and all-around impossibly good genes of the Swedish people. Which got us thinking: For a country of less than 10 million people, they’ve certainly supplied their fair share of beauty icons. Long before Linda, Christy, and Naomi demanded thousands to get out of bed, after all, Lisa Fonssagrives’s cool, Nordic allure captured the imagination of photographers like Richard Avedon and Irving Penn—landing her on countless covers of Vogue and Vanity Fair throughout the thirties, forties, and fifties and earning her the unofficial title of the world’s first supermodel along the way. Fellini muse Anita Ekberg’s voluptuous cascade of platinum waves was as hypnotizing as her zaftig curves as she waded through the Trevi Fountain in 1960’s La Dolce Vita. And who could forget Sweden’s answer to the Swinging California beac...