Bari Weiss of the Wall Street Journal talks about what topped the journal's list for best books of 2015 in NY1’s The Book Reader.

We review hundreds of books a year. Those that make the list are, in our estimation, truly special and not to be missed.

Paul Beatty’s novel “The Sellout” is one of them. The book is a biting, audacious satire of the most sensitive issue in American culture: race.

The novel’s unnamed narrator lives in Dickens, an “agrarian ghetto” on the southern outskirts of Los Angeles that is literally being erased from the city’s maps to drive up real-estate values in nearby neighborhoods. The community leaders are doing nothing about it, instead publishing revised versions of black literary classics—"Uncle Tom’s Cabin" becomes "Uncle Tom’s Condo." You get the picture.

The narrator reacts by reestablishing the most horrific aspects of American racism. Already a watermelon and marijuana farmer, he acquires a slave and convinces the neighborhood to segregate its business and schools. He ends up at the Supreme Court.

As our fiction reviewer, Sam Sacks, put in in his review of this “confrontational, scintillating” satire:  “Like someone shouting fire in a crowded theater, Mr. Beatty has whispered racism in a post-racial world.”

Scintilliating is certainly a word that describes one of the best nonfiction books of the year, “We Believe the Children: A Moral Panic in the 1980s” by Richard Beck. The book focuses on the infamous McMartin Preschool case in Manhattan Beach, California, in which those that ran the school were accused of heinous, incomprehensible sexual crimes.

That were entirely fabricated didn’t much matter. The school closed and dozens of copycat cases appeared across the country. How did this happen and why? Who fueled this panic? Read the book.

The author argues that the repercussions of this wave of hysteria are all around us, especially when it comes to parenting. It has, Mr. Beck writes, “drastically altered people’s views on the wisdom of every allowing children to go unsupervised.”

Read the full list in this weekend's Journal. 

To read about these books, and other picks, including “Book of Numbers” by Josh Cohen, and “Elon Musk” by Ashley Vance, click here.