Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity by Katherine Boo. Recommended at Book Diary.
Letters from a Skeptic: A Son Wrestles with his Father’s Questions about Christianity by Dr. Gregory A. Boyd and Edward K. Boyd.
The Secret Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert by Rosaria Champagne Butterfield.
Wisdom and Innocence: A Life of G.K. Chesterton by Joseph Pearce.
Death by Living: Life Is Meant to Be Spent by N.D. Wilson.
The Girl in the Picture by Denise Chong, featured at Semicolon.
C.S. Lewis: A Life by Alister McGrath.
Saving a Life: How We Found Courage When Death Rescued our Son by Charles and Janet Morris.
Beautiful Nate: A Memoir of a Family’s Love, a Life Lost, and Heaven’s Promises by Dennis Mansfield.
Two biographies (Chesterton and Lewis), two autobiographies/conversion stories (Denise Chong and Rosaria Champagne Butterfield), two memoirs of the loss of a son (the last two on the list), a couple of inspirational apologetics titles (Boyd and Wilson), exposes of Scientology and of poverty in Mumbai, a narrative history of the assassination and death of President James Garfield, and a memoir of Rod Dreher’s encounter with death and community in small-town Louisiana: those were my favorite nonfiction reads this year. I recommend any or all of them, if you’re at all interested in the subject matter. Ms. Butterfield’s conversion story and Mr. Wright’s book about the history and inner workings of the Scientology movement were particularly thought-provoking.