Whether you want to read poignant memoirs or personal stories, take in the basics of economics or philosophy or Daoism, or learn more about the Middle Ages or the Middle East, graphic nonfiction (a.k.a. nonfiction comics) is a great way to go. Often dismissed as being for kids, the reality is that words and pictures, when combined, are a great way for any human being to better understand the world around them. Below we've collected together all the times a book of graphic nonfiction has been recommended by an expert on Five Books, as well as including some of our own favourites.
If you're interested in learning more about how comics work and why they should be taken seriously as a way of conveying information, Scott McCloud's book Understanding Comics is a great place to start. He also goes back in time to show how historically important comics have been for conveying information—for example through the Codex Nuttall and the Bayeux Tapestry.
“It’s a wonderful look both biographically and artistically and scientifically at Marie and Pierre Curie, although Pierre dies about halfway through the book because he was run over by a horse carriage and killed. It talks at length about Marie Curie’s affair, after Pierre’s death, with Pierre’s student Paul Langevin and the impact that had. You can imagine in the early 20th century it wasn’t easy. The book really does blend the scientific and the personal very, very beautifully…It’s graphic nonfiction.” Read more...
Heretics! The Wondrous (and Dangerous) Beginnings of Modern Philosophy
by Ben Nadler (illustrator) & Steven Nadler
In Heretics! Steven Nadler, an American philosopher who is one of the leading experts on the early modern period (we interviewed him about the best books on Spinoza), teams up with his son Ben Nadler, an illustrator, to bring us a brilliant account of 17th century natural philosophy (a.k.a. the Scientific Revolution). It's an incredibly challenging topic, partly because these scientists and philosophers were partly wrong and partly right, and their world view so different from ours. The stakes were also very, very high, and the book starts with someone being burnt at the stake.
“It’s a hard thing to read for me because many of my family perished in the Holocaust. I read it when it came out. There was Maus I and Maus II. It left a real big impression. There’s notes that resonate with my grandparents, who were German, and what they had to go through. They had to flee and were caught up in the Second World War and were immigrants. It’s a hard read, a tough story to tell.” Read more...
“It’s part of the Introducing… series that presents various topics in graphic form, a bit like a comic book. What I liked about this one is that it takes a very complex issue and shows that you do not need to be a great philosopher, or have a very deep understanding of the science, to understand why it’s a complex issue and what the fundamental questions we’re dealing with are…Despite being highly approachable, this book is a serious piece of work that gives a great overview of past and current thinking about consciousness, especially from the philosophical perspective.” Read more...
Consciousness for Beginners: the best book
David Carmel, Psychologist
“This is by Yoram Bauman, who is perhaps better known as the stand-up economist. He sprang to fame because of this lecture – you can see it on YouTube – which was a stand-up comedy routine, based on a parody of one of the most famous economics textbooks, Greg Mankiw’s Principles of Economics. Bauman has a PhD in economics, so he knows a lot of economics, and there’s actually quite a lot of wisdom woven into the comedy routine, but he just lays into economics. Then he decided that the next thing he wanted to do was write this cartoon introduction to economics. And, just to be clear, this is a textbook. It’s not a comic book with some economic messages, it’s a textbook in the form of a cartoon. But it’s quite sophisticated and it’s very nicely done. So far the only edition to be out is the microeconomics version, but the macroeconomics is coming soon. For anybody who is genuinely interested in economics, who really wants to learn the jargon, or anyone who is starting out studying an economics course, this is just a brilliant source. It really is rigorous, but it’s also a lot of fun to read.” Read more...
The best books on Unexpected Economics
Tim Harford, Economist
The Middle Ages: A Graphic History
by Eleanor Janega & Neil Max Emmanuel (illustrator)
The Middle Ages: A Graphic History is by Eleanor Janega, a medieval historian who teaches at a number of London universities and blogs at going-medieval.com and Neil Emmanuel, an illustrator who also worked on Time Team, Britain’s longest-running historical TV show. It's a lovely breeze through a millennium of history, focusing mainly on Europe and the Near East (according to the book, the medieval period in China ended in 960, which means China became 'modern' about 600 years before Europe did). It's a lot of fun and you learn a lot in a couple of hours.
The Way of Nature (The Illustrated Library of Chinese Classics)
by Zhuangzi (aka Chuang Tzu), C. C. Tsai (illustrator) and Brian Bruya (translator)
“Now you have more and more Westerners who are interested in this kind of philosophy and doing philosophy globally. But there is a sense in which Zhuangzi is profound, but also funny and light-hearted. There are a lot of really silly moments, almost. And I think that this version of Zhuangzi—and I have three different versions—is the only one that really captures this playfulness, helps to remind you, when you’re reading it, that, ‘Okay, this is a serious philosophical text, but it’s also a silly and playful philosophical text.’ I think that this format does that very well.” Read more...
“The story starts with a lecture by Bertrand Russell. You have Russell standing there on the podium and he starts his lecture by saying, ‘Okay we’re now in this situation, should we fight against the Nazis? Yes, or no?’ It’s 1939, and there is this whole thing in the UK, should they or shouldn’t they? Should they be trying to keep the peace with the Nazis? And that didn’t go very well, it didn’t last very long. Russell was a pacifist and the audience knew that. And he says, ‘Well, before we do that we have to think about the rules of thoughts, to make such a decision.’ And then you go back in the past, and you see Russell and the people around him.” Read more...
Naturalist: A Graphic Adaptation
by C.M.Butzer, Edward O. Wilson & Jim Ottaviani
This book is a wonderful graphic adaptation of biologist EO Wilson's memoirs. It's touching and enlightening and leaves you feeling excited about the natural world. It's also interesting for the light it sheds on what makes someone a great scientist. Wilson, born in 1929, won two Pulitzer Prizes for nonfiction for his books, one in 1979 for On Human Nature, and one in 1991 for The Ants, co-authored with German biologist Bert Hölldobler. EO Wilson's books—he wrote many—have also been frequently recommended on Five Books.
“This is an amazing, graphic and emotional book. Sacco writes about the massacres carried out by the Israeli army in the Gaza Strip in 1956. He completed the book in 2003 so it resonates with the present. It’s really about memory: how it can fool you and change things. He sifts through the memories of the witnesses he meets in Gaza to get to the truth of the two atrocities – one in Rafah, the other in Khan Younis.” Read more...
Raja Shehadeh, Lawyer
“‘Fun Home’ is short for the funeral home Alison’s dad ran when she was a child. It’s a book that blew me away and continues to blow me away every time I read it – and I must have read it five or six times by now: probably the best book I’ve read in the past ten years in any genre or form. It’s an incredibly crafted book in which the chapters are not chronological but thematic, and each chapter is keyed to a book that her father loved. So it’s not a book about what happened to her father, a closeted gay man who committed suicide a few months after Alison herself came out when she was 19. It’s about looking through a family archive to try and get a sense of her father’s particularity.” Read more...
Hillary Chute, Literary Scholar
“One of the things that Persepolis does really adeptly is show, over time, all the problems that Iran’s had politically. Especially in the West, we have a tendency to say, ‘It got really bad in Iran after the Islamic Revolution. That’s when things became difficult.’ But she’s able to say, ‘My family had a lot of problems with the Shah and that was also bad.’ It shows the complexity of history, that you’re dealing with different issues over time. You can have various forms of repression, but also various forms of communal joy, a real deep connection to your culture and love of that. But there are always going to be some things that are outside of your control. She shows that brilliantly.” Read more...
“This series has been a cultural and a publishing phenomenon in France and I think now it is starting to be in the US too…It’s similar in some ways—and radically different in others—to Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi. Both are a view of conflict in the Middle East. Persepolis is about the Iran-Iraq war, the Islamic Revolution, and a right-wing, Islamic viewpoint, which The Arab of the Future also deals with, in part. Both have a child at the centre of the story. The child anchors the narrative, and we see events unfolding in a chronological, linear way from the point of view of the child. That was something that Persepolis established as a really compelling form. The Arab of the Future has echoes of that.” Read more...
Hillary Chute, Literary Scholar
“This book shows how political the personal is, if it makes any sense to invert that idiom. It balances attention to the world historical stage with attention to what is happening within this family.” Read more...
Hillary Chute, Literary Scholar
6th June 1944: Overlord
by Master Kit & Serge Saint-Michel
6th June 1944: Overlord is a great graphic narrative about D-Day and the landings on the Normandy beaches. It opens in April 1944 with the run-up and preparation for Operation Overlord and goes right through to the liberation of Paris on August 25th, 1944. It shows you what was going on on the different beaches (Utah, Omaha, Gold, Juno, Sword and Pointe du Hoc), and follows different stories. There are maps and nice details, like the German commanders delaying and losing vital hours because they didn’t want to wake up Hitler, who was a notorious late riser.
As the cover advertises (in our edition) it’s ‘the entire history of the D-Day landings in just 82 pages.’
When Stars Are Scattered
by Omar Mohamed and Victoria Jamieson, narrated by Faysal Ahmed (and full cast)
“It’s inspired by a refugee from Somalia, Omar Mohamed, who is one of the co-authors. It’s roughly the story of him growing up in a refugee camp in Kenya and trying to get to safety in America. It’s about spending so many years there, waiting.” Read more...
“Hey, Kiddo was a National Book Award finalist as a graphic memoir, recognising the literary power of Krosoczka’s personal story of his mother’s heroin addiction and childhood with alcoholic grandparents. It’s told from the point of view of Krosoczka at age 17, and teens forge an immediate connection with the author’s description of how his artistic talent helped him survive his upbringing.” Read more...
“It’s based on Miyamoto Musashi, who was a very well-known swordsman in the Edo period. The beautiful thing is that Stan Sakai, who wrote it, his family were Japanese immigrants to America. It was his way of connecting to their culture, to tell stories that don’t get told in America. One way of doing it is to throw an anthropomorphic animal at it, so that people are willing to listen. It’s a brilliant move, because if he had just gone, ‘Here we go, I’m doing Edo period samurai’ you would have had a lot less uptake. There is something about using animals that brings people in.” Read more...
Queer: A Graphic History
by Meg-John Barker and Jules Scheele (illustrator)
“Queer: A Graphic History is incredible. It does a great job of breaking down a complex narrative and showing what you can do with pictures. This book is how I got the idea to do my own. I was walking along a canal in Oxford with friends talking about how great it was, and how it’s a really effective format for explaining ideas like this, and my husband said, ‘why don’t you do one?’ I thought, ‘that’s a great question. Why don’t I?’ So this is the graphic history that got me to do a graphic history very directly.” Read more...
“It’s like enriched uranium in comic form—non-radioactive, good stuff, full of energy. I read it when it came out, I was at art school. It really did shape the way that I went forward and thought about sequential imagery. I still use it to this day, when teaching storyboarding. It’s about telling stories, all that stuff. It also gives you some comic theory, all distilled into one little book that you can just read, and then feel like, ‘I’ve got a PhD in understanding comics.’” Read more...
Best Graphic Histories, recommended by Eleanor Janega & Neil Emmanuel
Graphic histories can offer complex and layered insights into the past and are underused as a medium, argue historian Eleanor Janega and illustrator Neil Emmanuel, authors of The Middle Ages: A Graphic History. Here, they recommend five graphic histories that show the power of comics not only for telling moving stories but also transmitting difficult concepts.
