The 5 Most Important Books of 2014
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 calling in the 1980s when he was defending Walter McMillian, an African-American lumberman from Alabama who had been condemned to death for the murder of a white woman. McMillian's case was a textbook example of what happens to black people who get caught up in a system that values closure over justice, and verdicts over truth, and is just as weighted in favor of money as all parts of our political commonwealth, except its stakes are far more mortal. McMillian's story—he eventually was exonerated—is as central to Stevenson's book as it has been to his career. But Stevenson is fighting that same fight in a much larger arena now. He is taking on the incompetence, inequities, and the simple, confounded clumsiness of an overworked system that grinds up too many people and delivers far too little of what it's supposed to deliver, both to the people caught up in it, and to the country that takes such unwarranted pride in it. Stevenson, for a while anyway, justifies that pride. If the system can produce people like him, it can be both just and merciful. —Charles P. Pierce
The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. by Adelle Waldman
The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. is not the kind of book you can give your heart to. It's mean. Its main character is not likable even to himself. Very little happens. Nathaniel P. dates women, awkwardly, and talks his way into a six-figure book deal. That's pretty much it. "Nathaniel Piven was a product of postfeminist, 1980s childhood and politically correct, 1990s college education. He had learned all about male privilege. Moreover, he was in possession of a functional and frankly rather clamorous conscience," Adelle Waldman writes. He treats women rudely, if not badly. And he has no goals outside of mere social victories. He's a negligible, bland person. And yet there's no question that this book has stayed with me more than any other this year. Nathaniel P. is unforgettable as a literary creation, but the thing is, I keep running into him in real life. Over and over again. I cannot escape him. Granted, he is not named Nathaniel P. Sometimes he's called Alexander M. or Marcus S. or Winston M. or Ben L., but they are all the same guy—clever, educated, amoral, and totally obsessed with the absolute minutiae of their own lives. The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. is 2014. Its shock of recognition is only muted by the discomfort it brings with it. —Stephen Marche
Hand to Mouth: Living in Bootstrap America by Linda Tirado
Why do poor people do things that seem so self-destructive? This was the question posted in an online forum last year which Linda Tirado sat down to answer after a grueling day at work. She fired off an impassioned, impromptu essay: "Why I Make Terrible Decisions, or, poverty thoughts." What happened next? The essay went viral. It was picked up by the Huffington Post, the Nation, Forbes, and generated thousands of e-mails—and it was the genesis of this eye-opening book, which boasts a foreword by veteran muckraker and Nickel and Dimed author Barbara Ehrenreich. In Hand to Mouth, Tirado addresses head-on the criticisms that the working poor frequently must deflect about the choices they make, like smoking, eating unhealthy food, and having children they can't afford. "Poor people talk about these things," Tirado writes, "but no one's listening to us. We don't usually get a chance to explain our own logic." That is, until now. —Camille Perri
Will Not Attend: Lively Stories of Detachment and Isolation by Adam Resnick
It's also important to laugh, and this was far and away the funniest book of the year. No one else came close. Resnick is a former Letterman writer, co-created Get a Life with Chris Elliott, and wrote and directed the cult classic Cabin Boy. The best essays—you can read one here—in this bitterly funny collection deal with the torments young Resnick endured at the hands of his brothers. Witness: "On this particular morning, [my mother] was set off by what I'd intended as a simple rhetorical question: 'Aw, who ate all the Frosted Flakes?' Suddenly the house shook. 'I don't know and I don't care!' she thundered. 'I'm not buying that crap anymore!'... The situation deteriorated when my brother Mike walked in rubbing his belly, cereal bowl in hand, and announced, 'My oh my, ain't dem Frosted Flakes like shugah.' The standard donnybrook ensued—shouting and brawling and rolling around on the floor as chairs toppled and frightened pets ran for their lives. Mike, who was bigger and a few years older, always had me pinned before I could execute my fantasy move: Burying a steak knife in his heart." —Joe Keohane
We Are Not Ourselves by Matthew Thomas
Many writers have taken aim at the uneasy intersection of self and stuff in America, at the way a nation's promise can feel like a judgment when you don't live up to it; the way it can distract you from the life you're actually living. Few, if any, have done it as well as Matthew Thomas in his exceptional first novel, We Are Not Ourselves, . It doesn't pile on, doesn't hector; rather, with profound compassion and understanding and at times majesty, it painstakingly lays out the three seemingly unexceptional lives as they're lived, in the end summoning the only truly universal verity governing life in America: You can be anything you want, but in the end you'll always be yourself. —Joe Keohane
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 calling in the 1980s when he was defending Walter McMillian, an African-American lumberman from Alabama who had been condemned to death for the murder of a white woman. McMillian's case was a textbook example of what happens to black people who get caught up in a system that values closure over justice, and verdicts over truth, and is just as weighted in favor of money as all parts of our political commonwealth, except its stakes are far more mortal. McMillian's story—he eventually was exonerated—is as central to Stevenson's book as it has been to his career. But Stevenson is fighting that same fight in a much larger arena now. He is taking on the incompetence, inequities, and the simple, confounded clumsiness of an overworked system that grinds up too many people and delivers far too little of what it's supposed to deliver, both to the people caught up in it, and to the country that takes such unwarranted pride in it. Stevenson, for a while anyway, justifies that pride. If the system can produce people like him, it can be both just and merciful. —Charles P. Pierce
The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. by Adelle Waldman
The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. is not the kind of book you can give your heart to. It's mean. Its main character is not likable even to himself. Very little happens. Nathaniel P. dates women, awkwardly, and talks his way into a six-figure book deal. That's pretty much it. "Nathaniel Piven was a product of postfeminist, 1980s childhood and politically correct, 1990s college education. He had learned all about male privilege. Moreover, he was in possession of a functional and frankly rather clamorous conscience," Adelle Waldman writes. He treats women rudely, if not badly. And he has no goals outside of mere social victories. He's a negligible, bland person. And yet there's no question that this book has stayed with me more than any other this year. Nathaniel P. is unforgettable as a literary creation, but the thing is, I keep running into him in real life. Over and over again. I cannot escape him. Granted, he is not named Nathaniel P. Sometimes he's called Alexander M. or Marcus S. or Winston M. or Ben L., but they are all the same guy—clever, educated, amoral, and totally obsessed with the absolute minutiae of their own lives. The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. is 2014. Its shock of recognition is only muted by the discomfort it brings with it. —Stephen Marche
Hand to Mouth: Living in Bootstrap America by Linda Tirado
Why do poor people do things that seem so self-destructive? This was the question posted in an online forum last year which Linda Tirado sat down to answer after a grueling day at work. She fired off an impassioned, impromptu essay: "Why I Make Terrible Decisions, or, poverty thoughts." What happened next? The essay went viral. It was picked up by the Huffington Post, the Nation, Forbes, and generated thousands of e-mails—and it was the genesis of this eye-opening book, which boasts a foreword by veteran muckraker and Nickel and Dimed author Barbara Ehrenreich. In Hand to Mouth, Tirado addresses head-on the criticisms that the working poor frequently must deflect about the choices they make, like smoking, eating unhealthy food, and having children they can't afford. "Poor people talk about these things," Tirado writes, "but no one's listening to us. We don't usually get a chance to explain our own logic." That is, until now. —Camille Perri
Will Not Attend: Lively Stories of Detachment and Isolation by Adam Resnick
It's also important to laugh, and this was far and away the funniest book of the year. No one else came close. Resnick is a former Letterman writer, co-created Get a Life with Chris Elliott, and wrote and directed the cult classic Cabin Boy. The best essays—you can read one here—in this bitterly funny collection deal with the torments young Resnick endured at the hands of his brothers. Witness: "On this particular morning, [my mother] was set off by what I'd intended as a simple rhetorical question: 'Aw, who ate all the Frosted Flakes?' Suddenly the house shook. 'I don't know and I don't care!' she thundered. 'I'm not buying that crap anymore!'... The situation deteriorated when my brother Mike walked in rubbing his belly, cereal bowl in hand, and announced, 'My oh my, ain't dem Frosted Flakes like shugah.' The standard donnybrook ensued—shouting and brawling and rolling around on the floor as chairs toppled and frightened pets ran for their lives. Mike, who was bigger and a few years older, always had me pinned before I could execute my fantasy move: Burying a steak knife in his heart." —Joe Keohane
We Are Not Ourselves by Matthew Thomas
Many writers have taken aim at the uneasy intersection of self and stuff in America, at the way a nation's promise can feel like a judgment when you don't live up to it; the way it can distract you from the life you're actually living. Few, if any, have done it as well as Matthew Thomas in his exceptional first novel, We Are Not Ourselves, . It doesn't pile on, doesn't hector; rather, with profound compassion and understanding and at times majesty, it painstakingly lays out the three seemingly unexceptional lives as they're lived, in the end summoning the only truly universal verity governing life in America: You can be anything you want, but in the end you'll always be yourself. —Joe Keohane
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