THE PANOPTICON REVIEW PRESENTS TWENTY OUTSTANDING BOOKS OF 2014

Please Note: The following list of books is not organized according to any personal hierarchy of the relative value of each individual book. Rather it is a list that seriously considers ALL of the books listed here to be of equal intellectual and cultural value and interest, albeit for different reasons. The bottomline on this list is that each one of these books is extraordinary and invaluable in their own right and represents some of the very best writing published in the United States in 2014.

--Kofi Natambu, Editor

The Half Has Never Been Told:  Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism
by Edward E. Baptist
Basic Books
2014

The Counter-Revolution of 1776:  Slave Resistance And the Origins of the United States of America
by Gerald Horne
New York University Press
2014
 

The Other Blacklist:  The African American Literary and Cultural Left of the 1950s
by Mary Helen Washington
Columbia University Press
2014

Just Mercy:  A Story Of Justice and Redemption
by Bryan Stevenson
Spiegel & Grau
2014

The Divide:  American Injustice In the Age of the Wealth Gap
by Matt Taibbi
Spiegel & Grau
2014

This Changes Everything:  Capitalism vs. The Climate
by Naomi Klein
Simon and Schuster
2014

Malcolm X At Oxford Union:  Racial Politics In A Global Era
by Saladin Ambar
Oxford University Press
2014

Stokely:  A Life
by Peniel E. Joseph
Basic Civitas Books
2014

Black Prophetic Fire:  In Dialogue with and Edited by Christa Buschendorf
by Cornel West
Beacon Press
2014

Masters Of Mankind:  Essays and Reviews,  1969-2013
by Noam Chomsky
Haymarket Books
2014

This Nonviolent Stuff’ll Get You Killed:  How Guns Made the Civil Rights Movement Possible
by Charles E. Cobb, Jr.
Basic Books
2014
 

A Fighting Chance
by Elizabeth Warren
Metropolitan Books  (Henry Holt and Company)
2014
 

SOS--Calling All Black People:  A Black Arts Movement Reader
Edited by John H. Bracey, Jr., Sonia Sanchez, and James Smethurst
University of Massachusetts Press
2014
 

Louis Armstrong:  Master of Modernism
by Thomas Brothers
W.W, Norton and Company
2014

Herbie Hancock:  Possibilities
by Herbie Hancock  (with Lisa Dickey)
Viking
2014
 

The Universal Tone:  Bringing My Story To Light
by Carlos Santana   (with Ashley Kahn and Hal Miller) 
Little, Brown, and Company
2014
 

Becoming Richard Pryor
by Scott Saul
Harper
2014
 

Brando’s Smile:  His Life, Thought, and Work
by Susan L. Mizruchi
W.W. Norton and Company
2014
 

Gil Scott-Heron:  Pieces Of A Man
by Marcus Baram
St. Martin’s Press
2014
 
Citizen:  An American Lyric
by Claudia Rankine
Greywolf Press
2014


HONORABLE MENTIONS:

Death Of A King:  The Real Story of Dr. Martin Luther King's Final Year

by Tavis Smiley

Little, Brown and Company

2014 
 
Brothers Be, Yo Like George, Ain’t That Funkin’ Kinda Hard On You?:  A Memoir
by George Clinton
Atria Books
2014 
 
The Invisible Bridge:  The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan
by Rick Pearlstein
Simon and Schuster
2014

Redemption Songs:  Suing For Freedom Before Dred Scott
by Lea Vandevelde
Oxford University Press
2014

The Night Malcolm X Spoke at Oxford Union:  A Transatlantic Story of Antiracist Protest
by Stephen Tuck
University of California Press
2014

Losing Our Way:  An Intimate Portrait of a Troubled America
by Bob Herbert
Doubleday
2014