Hi all,
I am looking for your favorite nonfiction books- any length, any genre. As I get older, I have a harder and harder time caring about fiction books because I keep thinking that the story really doesn't matter to me if it is all just made up. Then any interest vanishes and I don't finish the book.
I am open to pretty much anything rooted in reality. I really enjoy stuff like narrative nonfiction, but some hard factual stuff that really changes how you think is also very welcome.
A few favorites off the top of my head-
Into Thin Air
The Hot Zone
Shadow Divers
The Sea Hunters
The Lost City of the Monkey God
Inside 9/11
A Night to Remember
Dead Mountain
Fast Food Nation
The Big Fat Surprise
Tons of true crime- And The Sea Will Tell, The Devil in the White City, Jack the Ripper stuff, etc.
Caesar's Messiah
Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, etc.
by ichuck1984
11 Comments
Red Notice by Bill Browder
American Kingpin by Nick Bilton
The Disappearing Spoon by Sam Kean
In a Sunburned Country by Bill Bryson
Here’s Looking at Euclid by Alex Bellos
The Code Book by Simon Singh
A memoir – Educated by Tara Westover
Nonfiction – Under the Banner of Heaven by John Krakauer
Both of these have to do with the fundamentalist Mormon community. Educated is about the author growing up in that world, and how everything changes for her once she gets an education at BYU. Under the Banner of Heaven centers around a true crime incident, but also goes back to the beginning of Mormonism and begs the question if the roots of the culture that led to the crime were there from the beginning of the religious movement.
The Hidden Life of Trees by Peter Wohlleben. Made me look at nature in new, unexpected ways.
– *Cobalt Red: How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives* by Siddhartha Kara
– *The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of the Great Migration* by Isabel Wilkerson
– *Waiting to Be Arrested at Night: A Uyghur Poet’s Memoir of China’s Genocide* by Tahir Hamut Izgil
– *Slaves for Peanuts: A Story of Conquest, Liberation, and a Crop That Changed History* by Jori Lewis
– *How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States* by Daniel Immerwahr
– *The Feather Thief: Beauty, Obsession, and the Natural History Heist of the Century* by Kirk Wallace Johnson
– *The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks* by Rebecca Skloot
– *Congo Stories: Battling Five Centuries of Exploitation and Greed* by John Prendergast and Fidel Bafilemba
– *The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu* by Joshua Hammer
– *Eager: The Surprising, Secret Lives of Beavers and Why They Matter* by Ben Goldfarb
– *What is a Girl Worth? My Story of Breaking the Silence and Exposing the Truth about Larry Nasser and USA Gymnastics* by Rachael Denhollander
– *Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption* by Bryan Stevenson
– *Promises I Can Keep: Why Poor Women Put Motherhood Before Marriage* by Kathryn J. Edin
– *Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language* by Gretchen McCullough
– *Vanishing Voices: The Extinction of the World’s Languages* by Daniel Nettle and Suzanne Romaine
– *Passwords to Paradise: How Languages Have Re-invented World Religions* by Nicholas Ostler
Okay this list is longer than I meant but I really did enjoy (or was challenged by) these books!
*Caravaggio: A Life Sacred and Profane* by Andrew Graham-Dixon
*The Forger’s Spell: A True Story of Vermeer, Nazis, and the Greatest Art Hoax of the Twentieth Century* by Edward Dolnick
*Hitler’s Last Hostages: Looted Art and the Soul of the Third Reich* by Mary Lane
*Faster: How a Jewish Driver, an American Heiress, and a Legendary Car Beat Hitler’s Best* by Neal Bascomb
*The Dancing Plague: The Strange, True Story of an Extraordinary Illness* by John Waller
*Last of the Blue and Gray: Old Men, Stolen Glory, and the Mystery That Outlived the Civil War* by Richard A. Serrano
*Cosa Nostra: A History of the Sicilian Mafia* by John Dickie
*Weavers, Scribes, and Kings: A New History of the Ancient Near East* by Amanda H. Podany
*Introducing the Ancient Greeks: From Bronze Age Seafarers to Navigators of the Western Mind* by Edith Hall
*Carthage Must Be Destroyed: The Rise and Fall of an Ancient Civilization* by Richard Miles
*The Story of Egypt: The Civilization that Shaped the World* by Joann Fletcher
*SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome* by Mary Beard
*Unsinkable: The Full Story of the RMS Titanic
Book by Daniel Allen Butler*
*Isaac’s Storm: A Man, a Time, and the Deadliest Hurricane in History* by Erik Larson
*King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa* by Adam Hochschild
*The Bible Unearthed: Archaeology’s New Vision of Ancient Israel and the Origin of Its Sacred Texts* by Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman
Ghettoside by Jill Leovy
10 Steps to Nanette by Hannah Gadsby
I’ve read a lot of nonfiction and this is my list of the top 10 nonfiction books I’ve read. All of them were gripping and some were really educational:
*The Lost* by Daniel Mendelsohn
*Into Thin Air* by Jon Krakauer
*Into the Wild* by Jon Krakauer
*The Making of the Atomic Bomb* by Richard Rhodes
*The Tiger* by John Vaillant
*Just Mercy* by Bryan Stevenson
*Seabiscuit* by Laura Hillenbrand
*A Bright Shining Lie* by Neal Sheehan
*The Omnivore’s Dilemma* by Michael Pollan
*Slaves in the Family* by Edward Ball
I’ve read books by David Grann and Patrick Radden Keefe but neither of these authors quite clicked for me. I also loved *My Struggle: Book 1* by Karl Ove Knausgard, but it’s classified as a novel and it’s not clear how much is autobiographical, how much involved merely changing names of family members so as not to offend them, and how much is made up.
*The Jakarta method* by Vincent Bevins
*Africa is not a country* by Dipo FaloyinÂ
Red Notice by Bill Browder
The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt
The Young Stalin by Simon Montefiore
Gulag by Anne Applebaum
Red Famine by Anne Applebaum
One I really enjoyed was Three Castles Burning by Donal Fallon, it’s a look at Dublin and its history through different time periods on different streets throughout the city