Akhil Vaani | Best 12 non fiction books of the year 2022

Selecting the best non fiction books of any particular year out of the enormous literature produced by the virtue of human ingenuity is a tedious task. **The Invisible Kingdom, Author: Meghan O’Rourke ** “The Invisible Kingdom- Reimagining Chronic Illness” by Yale Review editor Meghan O’Rourke’s heart wrenching and thoroughly researched exploration of the pain and confusion that many of us suffering from often incurable, and often “invisible”chronic illnesses go through in our quest to have our critical health issues taken seriously by the medical establishment—and, often, the world at large. Nicholas Lehmann, says in his review of the book in the New York Times “An opportunity for readers to see Piketty bring his larger argument about the origins of inequality and his program for fighting it into high relief.” Strangers to Ourselves: Unsettled Minds and the Stories That Make Us, Author: Rachel Aviv Rachel Aviv, the staff writer of The New Yorker in 1988 aged six was hospitalised for “failure to eat,” becoming America’s youngest hospitalised patient of anorexia. The book opens with Aviv being hospitalised at age six for anorexia — with stories of other tough cases, including a Brahman woman diagnosed with schizophrenia, a nephrologist who ran a successful dialysis business until he was institutionalised with depression and an incarcerated mother vying for her children’s forgiveness after recovering from psychosis As her review Rhoda Feng writes about the power narratives of Rachel: “in withholding judgement and letting her subjects speak for themselves, Aviv grants them the dignity that society has so often denied.” “Indubitably, in her seminal work Rachel offers a ground-breaking exploration of mental illness and the mind, through a series of portraits that illuminate the connections between identity and diagnosis” Aviv’s subject is what we talk about when we talk about mental illness—and the mystery of our hard-wired personal identity and poses the fundamental questions about how we understand ourselves in periods of crisis and distress Atlas of the Heart: Mapping Meaningful Connection and the Language of Human Experience, Author: Brené Brown In the book “Atlas of the Heart,” author and researcher Brené Brown takes us on the journey along a road not travelled so far by mapping the human heart itself by exploring eighty-seven of the emotions and experiences that make truly meaningful life for us humans. “Ed Yong dives into the vast variety of animal senses with a seemingly endless supply of awe-inspiring facts and by describing other creatures’ senses enlarges our awe of William Blake’s ‘immense world of delight’” Chemical Khichdi, Author: Aparna Piramal Raje “Chemical Khichdi- How I Hacked My Mental Illness” by Oxford and Harvard Business School educated writer, author, columnist and educator ‘Aparna Piramal Raje’, a scion of the illustrious business family “Piramal’s”, is to my informed mind, is indubitably, the most authentic memoir of lived experiences of Mental Illness, ever written by a person of the Indian origin and of the genre of the best of the class of such books ever published globally.