The Best Selling Non-Fiction Books of the 2010s
Or…a guide to biography, popular history, and politics
In my last story, I looked at the best selling fiction books of the 2010s. This time I look at non-fiction books.
As before, I use the number of weeks spent at number 1 on the New York Times best seller list as a proxy for sales. There are limitations with this approach, but I think it gives a pretty good survey of US non-fiction best sellers.
For a bit of added frisson (and additional reading time to boost my Medium income), I’ll count down the top 10, before revealing the top 20.
8.= A four-way tie
Four books each spent eleven weeks at number 1. Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson is the authorized biography, written with Jobs’s full co-operation. Shit My Dad Says by Justin Halpern started as a twitter feed for Halpern to diarise his father’s words. After accruing a few million followers, Halpern hired a literary agent and landed a book deal. Things That Matter is another title that didn’t start life as a book. It is a collection of essays by Charles Krauthammer, written over thirty years and…
