The World in Books: 52 Works of Great Short Nonfiction by Kenneth C. Davis
Reviewed by Christina Barber
The Background:
In the wake of an American election that recalls 1930s Europe as its closest analogue, replete with its destabilised economy, increasingly shocking human rights abuses, isolationism, expansionist ideology, and utter disregard for its justice system, I would like to propose Kenneth C. Davis’s The World in Books: 52 Works of Great Short Nonfiction not as a solution to the world’s problems but as a personal balm of sorts to help us as individuals in finding our way through unstable times. But first, before digging into which nonfiction works you should read according to Davis, I propose some statistics about general literacy rates in the USA and Canada to help frame why reading nonfiction is important and why Davis’s mission to get people to read more nonfiction is critical.
With our own elections on the way, it is worth considering how our literacy rates impact our country and our democracy. A CBC post for The Cost of Living from 2021 details how “low literacy affects making informed democratic decisions.” They reference Statistics Canada showing that “Forty-nine percent of the Canadian population does not hit a level of literacy that can “disregard irrelevant or inappropriate content” to accurately answer questions about something they have read.” This revelation is troubling in a time where disinformation and foreign interference are increasingly present online.1
What are the literacy rates south of the border? And where does Canada stand?
The National Literacy Institute in the United States reported the literacy rates of Americans for 2024, stating that 71% of Americans were literate, with 21% being illiterate and with 54% having a literacy rate below the Grade 6 level.2 In Canada, the stats are better, but still of concern. According to ABC Life Literacy Canada, using OECD 2013 statistics, 48% of Canadians read below a high school level, and 17% function at the lowest level (“where they may, for example, be unable to read the dosage instructions on a medicine bottle”).3 There is also a disparity between provinces and territories. The 2022 OECD results show British Columbia scoring at the top as compared to countries like Finland, Japan, and Sweden, the top three countries across all three metrics (Literacy, Numeracy, Adaptive Problem Solving), and PEI, Newfoundland and Labrador, and New Brunswick, falling closer to the OECD average. Notably, the United States scored under the OECD average in all three categories, but within the average range for Literacy and Adaptive Problem Solving, and below the average for Numeracy.4
This does not appear to be a failure of the education system, as the CBC points out “… literacy is not like riding a bike. While Canadians tend to leave the high school level with these skills, it takes practice to retain them…”5 My take away from this little statistical side trip is that we need to be reading more, and more nonfiction in particular.
The Review:
In a post-pandemic world, author Kenneth C. Davis takes the time to explore how the act of reading has changed for him and why nonfiction is necessary to understand our world. In his introduction to The World in Books: 52 Works of Great Short Nonfiction, Davis paints a rather grim picture of some of the greater challenges facing Americans and their relationship to literature and to ideas. He describes the war on literature that is taking place under the guise of morality, where, “The country has been swept by a partisan-driven wave of book banning, censorship, and yes, in some places, threats of book burning.” Of great concern are the acts of the traditionally sacred literary spaces dedicated to dissemination and preservation of literature, the “(s)chool and public libraries,” which “are being purged of certain books, sometimes following a single complaint, usually about books regarding sexuality, gender, the Holocaust, and/or racism—many by writers of color.” According to The Guardian, more than 10,000 books were banned in the United States in 2023-2024.6
“Davis reports that he is frightened by the purge of ideas and looks to find a way to combat the waves of ignorance sweeping his country.”
Davis reports that he is frightened by the purge of ideas and looks to find a way to combat the waves of ignorance sweeping his country. The problem is that this isn’t the only problem he has identified, because there is also the realisation that our technology consumption and reliance upon screens and a digital culture have had profound impacts on our ability to focus and on our ability to read more generally. Davis highlights the therapeutic value of reading, Bibliotherapy, as the way to combat this phenomenon. With the goal of helping readers access more non-fiction and more ideas, more often, from historical and contemporary texts, Davis has put forth a collection that proposes one short non-fiction text per week for fifty-two weeks. He says about his collection that, “Together, these fifty-two entries comprise a rich intellectual adventure, while also underscoring what has always been for me an article of faith: books matter.”
In his introduction, Davis explains his rationale for compiling a list of non-fiction books that will rally American citizens (and the world) to arm themselves with ideas. He references how the United States countered the actions of Nazi Germany’s war on books, “…in 1943… the Council on Books in Wartime, millions of Armed Services Editions were printed and distributed for free to Americans at war… the program introduced men and women in uniform to a wide selection of stories and ideas from a broad array of writers… the Armed Services Editions were published under a simple motto: “Books Are Weapons in the War of Ideas.” It feels as though we are at a turning point where we need to embrace this mission anew, in the USA, and around the world.
Davis’s criteria for his list matches his desire that readers be able to complete the selection in about a week. Therefore, the length of his chosen works are generally under 200 pages. He considers consequence, timeliness, literary value, and accessibility as well, looking to suggest books that readers will find rewarding, current, and which will resonate with them. “As I culled the possibilities, I became convinced that books that address our present world deserve greater attention. I moved from the general goal of presenting a wide range of thought and experience to exploring works that speak specifically to the crises we now confront. We live in a time when religious intolerance and fundamentalism, racism, sexism, authoritarianism, and the cloud of climate catastrophe dominate our lives. Increasingly, I turned to books that speak to these issues.”
The World in Books: 52 Works of Great Short Nonfiction is organised chronologically, starting with The Epic of Gilgamesh (2000 BCE) and ending with Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future (2021). Each work is presented with an emblematic quote, the opening words of the work, a summary, a brief biography of the author, the author’s rationale for why you should read it, and finishes with a further reading list. The format works well, effectively laying out background information and the author’s thoughts, and provides a good companion to the actual works presented.
Davis’s list includes a wide variety of writers from ancient philosophers like Aristotle, Sappho, and Sun Tzu; selections from religious texts, including the Bhagavad Gita, the Bible, the Quran, and the Tao Te Ching; notable writers from the Common Era, including Thomas More, Niccolò Machiavelli, Voltaire, and Thomas Paine.
The writers and texts he has chosen from the 19th century to present day, include the likes of Frederic Douglass, Karl Marx, Virginia Woolf, George Orwell, Rachel Carson, Albert Camus, Viktor E. Frankl, Joan Didion, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Toni Morrison, Christopher Hitchens, and Timothy Snyder.
I don’t envy Davis’s task in narrowing down his list of authors to only 52 voices from across a period of more than four thousand years. How does one effectively account for different perspectives across time periods? Davis recognises the limitations of this endeavour and offers a further list of 52 more works “that make us think,” in an appendix. While Davis’s presentation of African American voices from the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries is robust, and that given the general constrictions of a list of 52 works, the perspectives of East and West are also fairly represented. There was one voice that I had hoped to hear coming out of a book that is still, for all of its efforts to present a worldview, well-situated within the American reality, the perspective of Native Americans and Indigenous Peoples. To this end, I have compiled my own list of important Indigenous works that generally fit within Davis’s own criteria, though which may be longer than the 200-page goal.
Here are my suggestions for non-fiction reads from an Indigenous perspective (CA = Canadian):
Peace and Good Order - Harold R. Johnson 🇨🇦
Braiding Sweetgrass - Robin Wall Kimmerer
The Inconvenient Indian - Thomas King 🇨🇦
All Our Relations - Tanya Talaga 🇨🇦
From the Ashes - Jesse Thistle 🇨🇦
For the author, “… this project goes beyond the notion of throwing out titles to impress the guests at a cocktail party or answering that Jeopardy stumper. We stand at a moment in history that requires informed, questioning, thinking people.” … “Educating ourselves is the fundamental and central solution to averting such a catastrophe. By posing questions, expanding our knowledge base, and thinking for ourselves we can actually challenge those who would erase facts and science with propaganda and misinformation.” Simply put, if we value democracy and our social institutions, then we need to read more nonfiction. And if you’re looking for a good place to start, then The World in Books: 52 Works of Great Short Nonfiction has some great recommendations for you.
About the Author
Kenneth C. Davis has lived a life in books. He is the New York Times bestselling author of America's Hidden History and Don't Know Much About History, which gave rise to his series of books and audiobooks on a range of subjects, including mythology, the Bible, geography, and the Civil War. His most recent work is Great Short Books: A Year of Reading--Briefly. Davis's work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and Smithsonian magazine, among other publications. He has appeared on national television and radio shows, including CBS This Morning, Today, and NPR. He lives in the West Village of New York City with his wife, Joann Davis.
About the Reviewer
Christina Barber is a writer, dramaturge, artist, and educator based in Vancouver. Her poetry has appeared in The Whimsical Poet and contributed to the Vancouver City Poems Project.
Book Details
Publisher : Scribner (Oct. 8 2024)
Language : English
Hardcover : 464 pages
ISBN-10 : 1668015595
ISBN-13 : 978-1668015599
https://www.cbc.ca/radio/costofliving/let-s-get-digital-from-bitcoin-to-stocktok-plus-what-low-literacy-means-for-canada-s-economy-1.5873703/nearly-half-of-adult-canadians-struggle-with-literacy-and-that-s-bad-for-the-economy-1.5873757
https://www.thenationalliteracyinstitute.com/post/literacy-statistics-2024-2025-where-we-are-now
https://abclifeliteracy.ca/literacy/
https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/daily-quotidien/241210/g-a001-eng.htm
https://www.cbc.ca/radio/costofliving/let-s-get-digital-from-bitcoin-to-stocktok-plus-what-low-literacy-means-for-canada-s-economy-1.5873703/nearly-half-of-adult-canadians-struggle-with-literacy-and-that-s-bad-for-the-economy-1.5873757
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/sep/23/pen-book-bans