AYESHA RASCOE, HOST:
Not in the mood for fiction these days? Well, how about some well-written facts? Luckily, for you, NPR's Books We Love has some choice nonfiction reads as suggested by some of our staff.
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DIAA HADID, BYLINE: My name is Diaa Hadid, and I'm an international correspondent for NPR. I'm based in Mumbai, where I cover South Asia. I want to recommend a page-turner of a book about the world's largest democracy - India. It involves an unrepentant Nazi, a movement to purify Hinduism, a dusty book on a forgotten bookshelf in Delhi. There's a Muslim man obsessively fighting for justice, tilting at well-worn windmills. A tech evangelist who creates a database of every Indian citizen. But why?
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HADID: This book, "New India: The Unmaking Of The World's Largest Democracy" by Rahul Bhatia should be a heavy lift, but it's not.
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HADID: Bhatia deftly weaves together deeply reported characters to create this intriguing read with India as the main character and democracy as its victim.
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SELENA SIMMONS-DUFFIN, BYLINE: Hi, my name is Selena Simmons-Duffin. I work at the Science Desk as a health policy correspondent.
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SIMMONS-DUFFIN: The book I'm recommending is "Unshrinking: How To Face Fatphobia." It was written by a philosophy professor named Kate Manne. This book is just so good. It starts with this anecdote about a woman who was overweight and had health issues and was basically told by every doctor she saw to just lose weight and her problems would be solved. And they missed that she had a really serious illness. This book - it's personal. It's compelling. It's well-argued. It's just so good. And I ended up handing it out to my mom and to my friends, and I couldn't stop talking about it and thinking about it. So I really, really recommend it. I just think it's such an excellent read and really made me a better reporter, as well as just helped me think through these issues that come up in everyday life all the time.
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TINBETE ERMYAS, BYLINE: Hi. My name's Tinbete Ermyas, an editor at All Things Considered. And my book pick is the essay collection "We're Alone" by Edwidge Danticat.
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ERMYAS: The title is a nod to both the isolation that life can make us feel but also the intimacy between reader and writer. It's a duality that governs so much of what Danticat confronts in these pages. Topics like displacement, gun violence and political tumult, things that can end you or make you anew. Part of my job as a writer is to wrestle with mortality, she writes. And yet Danticat's observations feel more like a guide to living, a testament to what writers can offer in difficult times.
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FRANK LANGFITT, BYLINE: My name's Frank Langfitt, and I'm NPR's roving national correspondent. Before this, I spent many years reporting for NPR from China, the U.K., and Europe and East Africa. And that's why my book this year is "New Cold Wars: China's Rise, Russia's Invasion, And America's Struggle To Defend The West." It's by David Sanger of The New York Times.
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LANGFITT: You'd remember at the end of the Cold War, the U.S. was unchallenged, and many people thought it might stay that way for a while. But Sanger shows how the U.S. misjudged China. The good example is in the 2010s, Washington was slow to react to China building islands in the South China Sea.
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LANGFITT: Washington also, as Sanger points out, failed to recognize that Putin was so focused on taking back territory after the breakup of the Soviet Union. And this all, of course, culminates with the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. And now, as Sanger points out, China and Russia and other countries are working more closely against this U.S.-backed post-Cold War order. And that's going to be the very tricky and challenging environment the Trump administration is going to have to navigate after it takes office in January.
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TOM HUIZENGA, BYLINE: Hey, there. Tom Huizenga here from NPR Music.
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HUIZENGA: One of my favorite books this year is about a composer. It's titled "Between Two Sounds: Arvo Part's Journey To His Musical Language."
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HUIZENGA: Now, classical music biographies normally do not take the form of graphic novels, but the author and illustrator Joonas Sildre, like his protagonist, isn't afraid to bend the rules.
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HUIZENGA: The book is colorfully drawn in just black and white and tan, and it tells the story of the embattled Estonian composer Arvo Part - about his youthful fascination with radio and how he later runs afoul of Soviet culture ministers and how he self-imposes an 8-yearlong writer's block. Afterwards, he emerges triumphant with a brand-new timeless sound. The book ends in 1980, right at the cusp of Part's stardom and his exile in Austria.
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HUIZENGA: "Between Two Sounds" is moving and it's delightful. It's also clever, using a pop culture format to break through classical music barriers to tell the tale of a beloved living composer.
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RASCOE: Those recommendations, again, were "Between Two Sounds," "New Cold Wars," "We're Alone," "Unshrinking," and "The New India: The Unmaking Of The World's Largest Democracy." Want more books to get into your reading queue? Head on over to npr.org/bestbooks for the full list of Books We Love.
(SOUNDBITE OF ANGELE DUBEAU AND LA PIETA PERFORMANCE OF PART'S "SPIEGEL IM SPIEGEL") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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