Two of my favorite books of all time are Born to Run by Christopher McDougall and the Lost City of Z by David Grann.
One part that I really loved was how the authors literally took part in the story. I love that mix of part memoir, part fact finding. It really sucks me in.
I just finished Empire of Pain, and while by Patrick Radden Keefe. There’s not much “memoir” there, but by the end it becomes apparent that the author went deep and maybe even too deep. I love that.
Any other suggestions?
by SweetPickleRelish
6 Comments
I wanted to suggest Born to Run, but that’s out xD.
However, you might like The Omnivore’s Dilemma because the guy prepares a meal by growing / foraging / hunting all of the ingredients.
Any books written in second person. It’s rare. A good example is the broken Earth trilogy but I’m not sure you want to read a whole three books just to make sense of it. But basically the person who is telling the story is not the protagonist, but they are there to help the protagonist in The end, if they want it.
They’re a lot more lighthearted than the books you’re referencing, but any book by AJ Jacobs is going to be part journalism and part memoir. He’s a big name in “experiential journalism” wherein he immerses himself in whatever he’s reporting on. In *The Year of Living Biblically*, he decides to live by biblical law for one year and it goes about as well as you’d expect. He picks the important (and do-able) laws he thinks he should follow every single day, and then cycles through practicing the more impractical/ridiculous laws one at a time. There’s a great segment where he informs his wife he’s observing the custom of viewing menstuating women as “unclean” and she’s appropriately frustrated and vengeful.
*Fatal Vision* by Joe McGinniss. He is a journalist who wrote about Jeffrey MacDonald, a Special Forces officer accused of killing his wife and children. McGinniss embedded himself in MacDonald’s defense team, befriended him, and came to realize he thought MacDonald was guilty. He kept this from MacDonald and refused to let him see the manuscript until it was published. MacDonald sued McGinniss from prison and the case dragged on for years.
I also highly recommend Joan Didion’s excellent reportage on this case, titled *The Journalist and the Murderer.*
Not a book yet that I know of, but a docu film that contains parts of Keith Reinhard’s manuscript. Film is called “Dark Side of the Mountain.”
You should check it out, topically this might be exactly what you’re looking for, just maybe not the format, lol. Interesting/haunting story none the less.
*Zodiac* by Robert Graysmith.