10 non-fiction books from 2021 that explain the world — and unpack America's obsession with 'freedom'

If you've been reading The New Yorker for the past decade, you've been reading Louis Menand.

His day job is teaching English at Harvard, but every few months he'll publish an essay on some aspect of intellectual history. It turns out he was slowly writing this history of the first 20 years of Cold War culture, when America displaced Europe as the center of western intellectual life and when, he argues, pop culture really mattered.

John Cage, Jackson Pollock, Allen Ginsberg, James Baldwin, and many others were giant figures who reaffirmed and challenged America's role as the defender of freedom in the west. A near decade in the making, it just happened to land in a year when countless other great writers were contemplating just what freedom means, anyway.

Another New Yorker writer's book a near-decade in the making, Evan Osnos's "Wildland" is focused on contemporary, even unfinished events.

He spent much of the early 2000s as a foreign correspondent in China, gathering anecdotes for his excellent stranger-in-a-strange-land profile, "Age of Ambition." But then he came home, and as the stories in "Wildland" make clear, he found himself struggling to recognize what he found.

He especially struggled with how Americans' belief in their own freedoms is increasingly threatening the wellbeing of their fellow citizens. The book includes a close-up look at Sen. Joe Manchin, a figure who represents his thesis: that America's cult of individualism is spiraling out of control, producing a true wild land.

"Freedom isn't free" was a memorable catch phrase from the early years of the war on terror. It expressed a mindset that freedoms had to be sacrificed in the name of safety.

All those sacrifices are painstakingly catalogued in this book by Spencer Ackerman, a dogged national security reporter who has covered the beat for most of the past 20 years.

"Reign of Terror" is another 2021 book that was the result of a decade or more of work, and it's the book Ackerman has really been writing all along, a dark and harrowing look at an American culture totally transformed by its response to 9/11.

"Freedom is only for white people," is how to sum up the argument of "White Freedom."

It's a sign of how far the discourse on racial economic inequality has come that the overwhelming evidence within is almost unsurprising. What's unsettling is its suggestion that a core belief system of freedom from the past is still with us: That the people with less freedom throughout American history have supported the ability of more privileged people to have it.

Wherever you stand on issues like Black Lives Matter or critical race theory, author Tyler Edward Stovall argues that everyone deserves the same kind of freedom that was only available to white men for most of American history. So why don't they have it yet?

Stovall, a Fordham professor of History and dean of its Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, died earlier this week.

What if every human being has just always wanted to be free? That's the question animating this lengthy, exhilarating, controversial book.

It argues, at times implausibly, that everything you learned in school is wrong, that the traditional arc of human progress itself just wasn't straightforward. The coauthors, David Graeber and David Wengrow, cite a wealth of recent archeological and sociological evidence to argue that agriculture didn't lead directly to urbanism and modern nation-states, and that history hasn't been a linear path toward more human freedom.

What if people enjoyed greater freedom thousands of years ago and we've gone wrong since then? What if everything you know about freedom is based on the wrong assumptions? It's worth considering.

Graeber, a professor of Anthropology at the London School of Economics and a figure associated a decade ago with the Occupy Wall Street movement, died in late 2020.

A scathing revisionist history of the American Revolution,"American Republics" illustrates just how unlikely it was that the United States came together at all.

Echoing Colin Woodard's "American Nations," which argued that there is no one American identity, but rather a near-dozen tribal identities, Alan Taylor brings back to life the essentially separate entities that founded the US, with different cultures and incentives and economic priorities.

There was no guarantee it would work out, even decades after the revolution, he argues, suggesting that there's no guarantee it will work out almost 300 years later.

They don't make 'em like they used to.

Mike Nichols was a character out of a Louis Menand essay, a man who only could have lived in the increasingly distant 20th century. A Jewish immigrant from wartorn Europe, he reinvented himself into the quintessential New Yorker, a cocaine-sniffing, hard-drinking visionary who threw great parties, co-invented improv comedy, directed the biggest shows on Broadway, and flew to LA to film groundbreaking movies like "The Graduate."

He was the man who had Meryl Streep on speed dial, the one who gave notes on how to turn "The Odd Couple" into a hit, and we won't see his like again. Harris, whose husband Tony Kushner worked closely with Nichols, gives you a front-row seat to a lost New York and a lost era of renaissance men.

If Stan Lee, the self-professed guiding light of Marvel Comics, were alive, he would hate this book by comics journalist Abraham Riesman.

It's such a dark portrait of him that one of the most damning voices is his own brother, Larry Lieber, who is left after decades of contributions to iconic characters such as Spider-Man with no fortune to show for it, living in a tiny one-bedroom apartment in Manhattan, cursing the name of his sibling and employer.

It strongly argues that Lee was not the creative genius behind Marvel, although it doesn't account for why the great Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko did their best work with Lee and didn't come close to it afterward.

It's essential reading for anyone who's ever enjoyed a Marvel comic or movie and wonders what mind it came from, or didn't.

Lionel Messi left Barcelona FC this year. The greatest soccer player of at least his generation was raised from age 13 to play for the greatest club of the 21st century, so how could it go so wrong?

Simon Kuper must not have believed his luck.

The great soccer journalist-turned-economics columnist had spent years plugged into Barcelona, starting as a front-row seat to the best-run club in Europe, only to watch as it turned into the one of the worst.

At its heart it's a sports book, but in true Kuper fashion it's an anthropological analysis with a particular Dutch influence, as the soccer club traces its glory years back to the influence of Johann Cryuff, a great from the Netherlands whose deeply unpleasant personal manner Kuper recounts in an enthralling chapter with the message, "don't meet your heroes."

What you won't find is any interview with Messi, who Kuper notes has never said anything of interest to any journalist.

Adam Tooze makes data talk.

His epic on the financial crisis, "Crashed," read something like a version of "The Power Broker" whose main character is the Federal Reserve instead of Robert Moses.

That makes this followup a thrill for anyone interested in the mechanics of how the economy was reinvented in 2020. The Columbia professor comes to a decidedly left-wing conclusion: The financial system of the last 40 years has been exposed as unfit and it's time for something new.

It made me wish that Tooze was helping someone in government come up with that new thing instead of dissecting it.