Darwin’s mistakes and the gruesome acts of murderers. These are the best non-fiction books of the moment

British zoologist Lucy Cook traveled the world, collected and compiled fascinating knowledge about animal behavior Bitch. Along the way she unmasks and punctures sexist prejudices and binary ideas about gender, in short, Darwin’s mistakes. Because the distinction between men and women is anything but natural, as the scientists she speaks also confirm. The book delves into the genderless continuum of nature with an open mind and full of humor.

De Geus, 448 pages.

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The red pieces is an atypical true crime book and a highlight within the genre. When Jane Mixer, the aunt of American writer Maggie Nelson, was brutally murdered in 1969, the author had not yet been born. But the lawsuit takes decades to come to fruition. A serial killer is pointed at for a long time until new evidence emerges. Nelson writes about the lawsuit, the open wound and the grieving process. The red pieces talks in ‘pieces’ about both her personal life and the lawsuit. It is more than a graphic description of violence and trauma, but the account of the impact of the murder on Nelson and her family.

Atlas Contact, 224 pages.

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The posthumously collected essays by British writer Hilary Mantel provide a colorful insight into her writing life. Being a writer collects a range of topics: from the stress surrounding literary prizes, to the eternal procrastination of writers, to historical fiction in all its facets. Thanks to Mantel’s sharp pen, the essays are imbued with passion and idiosyncrasy.

Meridian publishers, 180 pages.

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Thanks to the film of the same name, Robert Oppenheimer no longer needs an introduction, but perhaps a lengthy biography. The scientist had a particularly complex character, a broad field of interests and a richly filled life, which made writing down his life story no easy task. Historian Martin J. Sherwin started writing as early as 1979 and the book was only completed in 2005 thanks to biographer Kai Bird. They received a Pulitzer Prize for it. Twenty years later, the life story of the father of the atomic bomb, but also the story about the tense attitude between science and politics, is more relevant than ever. And now also translated into Dutch.

Meulenhoff, 736 pages.

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Babi Jar, named after the ravine near the Ukrainian capital Kiev, is a devastating eyewitness account. When the Nazis occupied Kiev in 1941, Anatoli Kuznetsov was a curious, reckless boy of twelve. He gives in with that childish look Babi Jar the gruesome history of his city: the raids, the looting, the persecution of Jews… Kuznetsov wrote down brutality and horror that is barely digestible, but deserves to be read.

The Busy Bee, 440 pages.

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Irish journalist Mark O’Connell delved into the world of the infamous murderer Malcolm Macarthur and wrote a compelling portrait of a criminal with a cult following. When the rich man’s son runs out of money, he robs a bank, but things go terribly wrong when he kills two people in cold blood. A trail of violence is a profound search for the brutal truth hidden behind Macarthur’s fabrications.

Thomas Rap, 320 pages.

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Reading someone else’s diary is an intimate, somewhat awkward reading adventure. The Dutch writer and essayist Cyrille Offermans offers us his soul in A rope above the abyss, a collection of his “journals”. On almost 600 pages, the occasional cliché is almost unavoidable, but Offermans’ meandering pen more than makes up for that.

De Arbeiderspers, 592 pages.

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Journalist Mark Schaevers wrote an exciting biography about Hugo Claus. She shows an artistic figure who constructed his own myth, so that legend could precede him, to make him visible as a writer. With great precision, patience, journalistic investigative skills and source criticism, Schaevers pieced together archives and testimonies. The result is a fairly detailed, quite complete and with critical distance written chronological story that begins with the date on which he is said to have been conceived: the French national holiday.

The Busy Bee, 975 pages.

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The diary that artist Derek Jarman wrote in the English coastal town of Dungeness, where he spent a lot of time in the last years of his life, has been translated. While he still fills the first months of his diary with an almost encyclopedic knowledge of flowers and plants and peppered with memories of his childhood, Modern nature also a reflection of the times and a beautiful representation of what a garden can mean when death comes knocking.

Das Mag, 480 pages.

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How can a venerable conservative party like the UK willingly place itself at the whims of an incompetent clown like Boris Johnson? The eccentric Rory Stewart wrote an at times blood-curdling eyewitness account about it. By the way, it is not an anti-political book, because you get the feeling that Stewart is a good guy who has good intentions for the governance of his country, his fellow citizens and the world. “Politics were changing quickly,” Stewart notes several times. There is no better book to really understand what happens then.

Prometheus, 448 pages.

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