The Worst Books of 2022: Nonfiction
/The Worst Books of 2022: Nonfiction
On January 6, 2020 then-US President Donald Trump organized, incited, and wanted to lead in person an armed insurrection to throw out a US election, overthrow the country’s democracy, execute his Vice President, and install himself in power illegally, presumably for the remainder of his life. His coup attempt failed, and as the full realization of what happened spread and deepened among the various feckless fascist remorae who’d spent the previous few years with their suckers firmly puckered to Trump, they each had to decide how they would respond to the lock-certain condemnation of history. Not one single architect of the insurrection offered any apologies to the country. Instead, they started podcasts, congregated with actual Nazis, and, in the most infamous cases, dedicated themselves to succeeding in their next insurrection. And since many of these creatures decided to spend 2021 writing books, 2022 was full of the noxious results – hence their prevalence on this list, although they certainly had company among the year’s crappy books. These were the worst of them:
10 Breaking History by Jared Kushner (HarperLuxe) – Donald Trump’s creepy son-in-law spent every minute of his time in Trump’s administration working industriously behind the scenes (and behind the backs of the Pentagon and the State Department) in order to enrich himself by making venal cash-and-carry deals with some of the worst international actors in the world. But this book, brow-beaten out of some cringing underling for peanuts, is the carnival-mirror distortion of that looting spree.
9 The Great Reset: Global Elites and the Permanent Lockdown by Marc Morano (Regnery Publishing), The Great Reset: Joe Biden and the Rise of Twenty-First Century Fascism by Glenn Beck & Justin Haskins (Forefront Books) – Despite this year’s public mental breakdown of Kanye West, one of the keys to the rise and mainstreaming of the 21st century version of the 20th century’s fascism has been crafting an elaborate system of euphemisms for the anti-Semitism that’s so essential to the creed. Hence “The Great Reset” (usually accompanied by some kind of allusion to George Soros) that forms the basis of some of the year’s worst books.
8 Leadership: Six Studies in World Strategy by Henry Kissinger (Penguin Press) – Another aspect of the early 21st century’s disastrous embrace of authoritarianism has been the efforts of writers to falsely contextualize that authoritarianism. And when it comes to whitewashing the brutality of national abuse, who has more experience than seemingly-immortal ghoul Henry Kissinger? In this latest production of his, he mixes profiles of a couple of monsters with profiles of ordinary people solely, solely in order to launder the reputations of the monsters.
7 All The White Friends I Couldn’t Keep: Hope – and Hard Pills to Swallow – about Fighting for Black Lives by Andre Henry (Convergent Books) – The author’s nonplussed astonishment over the fact that so many of his white friends don’t actually like it when he calls them racists, coupled with his entirely unquestioned presumption that because they’re white, they obviously are racists, is such an on-the-nose depiction of the year’s socially acceptable Twitter-bigotry that Henry’s book is almost comical.
6 Don’t Burn This Country: Surviving and Thriving in Our Woke Dystopia by Dave Rubin (Sentinel) – The sheer towering irony of Dave Rubin, a gay man who’s embraced a living by calling himself a “classical liberal” while shilling for the very fascist social forces that would disenfranchise, incarcerate, and execute him immediately if they gained governmental control, writing a book about how “the woke agenda,” the very thing that makes his career and family life possible, is the real threat to freedom in the United States virtually guarantees a spot on this list.
5 Taking Back Trump’s America: Why We Lost the White House and How We’ll Win It Back by Peter Navarro (Bombardier Books) – Given the fact – broadcast to a national TV audience – that indicted Trump lackey Peter Navarro’s “how we’ll win it back” is a plan combining systematic fraud and the threat of violence, the first word of “Taking Back Trump’s America” gains a new gloss of malevolence.
4 Here’s the Deal by Kellyanne Conway (Threshold Editions) – In many ways the worst of Trump’s lackeys, Kellyanne Conway here presents an entire book (again, flogged out of a brow-beaten underling in the wee small hours) of “alternative facts” in which she managed a super-successful populist presidential campaign and then served in a super-successful populist presidential administration as one of its best and brightest. Ten people read the book; I wish I hadn’t been one of them.
3 How to Prevent the Next Pandemic by Bill Gates (Knopf) – It would be nice if the ongoing utterly appalling spectacle of Elon Musk’s bungling management of Twitter finally put to rest the idea that 99.9999% of humanity somehow have anything to learn from the small group of the world’s billionaires, but this new know-nothing book by idiotic billionaire Bill Gates proves that glorious moment has yet to arrive.
2 The Bomber Mafia: A Dream, a Temptation, and the Longest Night of the Second World War by Malcolm Gladwell (Back Bay Books) – Gradually, in the course of this seemingly normal Malcolm Gladwell production (over-egged, under-sourced, ridiculously pompous), an entirely darker and more dangerous subtext emerges, a protracted apologia for violence and state-sponsored terrorism. Gladwell has made a long career of writing ridiculous meme-hungry wads of fluff. But this is his first genuinely dangerous book.
1 How to Read Now by Elaine Castillo (Viking) – Like a braying, bigoted dolt, apparently.