20 Best Fall Nonfiction Books To Read In 2022

Fall is perhaps our busiest season for books, with publishers delivering a slew of eye-catching titles across all genres. As the days get shorter and a chill creeps into the air, Oprah Daily curates this fall’s best nonfiction, a whirlwind tour from Pakistani kitchens to Mexican deserts to Hollywood red carpets.

No awards cycle would be complete without celebrity film memoirs. Oscar winner Paul Newman (1925-2008) worked for years on a deeply in-depth narrative, compiling transcripts with his family, friends and foes, now united in a portrait of the actor as a flawed man . Jemele Hill was fired from her job at ESPN when she called President Trump a ‘white supremacist’; the Atlantic journalist and commentator sets the record straight. American history is a daunting work in progress, guiding us toward a more perfect union; new books by Kerri K. Greenidge and Stacy Schiff flip the scripts on our nation’s most cherished myths and characters. With the approach of the mid-term elections, current affairs animate much of our discourse; scholars and activists such as Dahlia Lithwick and Brandi Collins-Dexter expand and enhance our understanding of burning issues, such as the imperiled future of abortion rights and the crucial role of grassroots activists. Our Covid pandemic has also revealed the myriad ways our world has changed, seemingly overnight; two of our most eminent science writers, David Quammen and Siddhartha Mukherjee, add their voices to the urgent debates still raging around the world as we all grapple with a protean microbe and the shameful inequities that plague medicine.