The Best Books of 2021, Chosen by Mosaic Authors (Part II)

To mark the close of 2021, we asked several of our writers to name the best three books they’ve read this year, and briefly to explain their choices. We have encouraged them to pick two recent books, and one older one. The first five of their answers appeared yesterday; the remaining four appear below in alphabetical order. (Unless otherwise noted, all books were published in 2021. Classic books are listed by their original publication dates.)

Tamara Berens

H.W. Brands, The Zealot and the Emancipator: John Brown, Abraham Lincoln, and the Struggle for American Freedom (Doubelday, 2020, 464 pp., $30). I began reading this book as part of a quest over this last year to subsume myself in everything Abraham Lincoln—buying biographies and commentaries, studying his speeches, and going down endless rabbit holes about his Jewish friend Abraham Jonas. My goal was to make sense of, and perhaps also to escape, what felt to me like the crumbling of the American civic framework in 2021—particularly around issues of race and identity.