As someone who only recently has been getting into non-fiction books (from literary/historical fiction), what books would you recommend? Thanks in advance for replies.

I'm not really a non-fiction kinda guy myself, but I'll take this chance to recommend a great collection of essays by David Foster Wallace called A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again. I won't even insult the book by trying to give you a description. If you're at all interested, I'd suggest heading over to Amazon and looking at some reviews there. You may also want to think about taking part in the May reading of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers. That book is mostly non-fiction.

Thanks for the heads up but I think for the moment I need to concentrate on my real life discussion group reading list lol. I will check out Amazon - the title kinda tells me it's a David Sedaris kind of book - funny recollections/memoirs...

Economics in One Lesson by Henry Hazlitt
For a New Liberty by Murray Rothbard
The Market For Liberty by Morris and Linda Tannehill

Three of the best pro-freedom books I have ever read.

Pale blue Dot by Carl Sagan

Anything by John McPhee
"The Reawakening" by Primo Levi
"Cadillac Desert" Reiser
"Silent Spring" Rachel Carson
"The End of Nature" Bill McKibben
"Surely You're Joking Mr. Feynman" and "What do you care what other people think" by Richard Feynman(funny)
Anything by Douglas Whynott(out of print?, try bibliofind.com)
"The Mole People" Jennifer Toth

-skipper

The Hot Zone was a pretty good book and pretty scary for non-fiction.

"The Color of Water", don't remember the author. Great book about a family being raised by their jewish mother in a black neighborhood (they had a black father).

"Driving Mr. Albert", a true story about driving across the country with this weird old doctor who performed the autopsy on Einstein and kept the brain, which they drove cross country with.

If you are into music at all (and even if you are not), then check out Stanley Booth's True Adventures of the Rolling Stones. No exagerration: it is one of the best-written books I have ever read. He writes like Faulkner. It took him 15 years to write it.

If you are into memoirs/true crime, then check out James Ellroy's excellent My Dark Places.

Also, for Vietnam try Michael Herr's Dispatches.

Collossus of Moroussi (sp?) by Henry Miller.

A travelogue of his adventures through Greece. Makes for great summer reading.

Guns Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond looks at the reasons why history unfolded the way it did. Highly recommended.

The Red Queen by Matt Ridley examines what has been learned about the process of sexual reproduction and natural selection and, intriguingly, how those forces have shaped us.

"Shot In The Heart" by Mikal Gilmore

Mikal is brother to Gary Gilmore, one of the first men executed when the death penalty was reinstated. He examines the tragic, abusive history of his family, but never attempts to make excuses for the terrible things his brother did. He is simply looking for answers and a bit of peace. Beautifully written, it is my favorite book. I give copies as gifts a few times a year, and everyone has loved it as much as I do. I cannot recommend it highly enough...though I warn you that the whole thing is prettty devastating.

jim

Two nonfiction books that deserve mention:

Friday Night Lights by H.G. Bissinger. The author lived for two years with two high school football teams in the Odessa, Texas, area. A phenomenal and entertaining look into the highs and lows of high school football and its rabid, sometimes overly obsessive fans.

Dispatches by Michael Herr, a chaotic, frightening drift through the jungles of Vietnam. If you want to know what the war was really like, pick up this one.

It really depends on what subjects interest you, given the VAST number of books written on a VAST number of subjects. Being a science person myself, I'd suggest people like Stephen Jay Gould, Niles Eldredge, and Richard Dawkins. Also worth reading is Losing Faith in Faith by Dan Barker http://www.ffrf.org/books/lfif.html

I almost hesitate to call it non-fiction, but Tom Wolfe's The Right Stuff is worth a read. (Heck, pick up some of his other works, too.) Wolfe manages to make myth out of history, although, granted, the birth of the US space program is pretty mythic stuff.

England's Dreaming by Jon Savage, an entertaining and interesting look at what spawned British punk.

The Stranger Beside Me by Anne Rule. Almost too coincidental that the well-known true crime writer was friends with a charming fellow named Ted Bundy. Gripping account of his life and crimes, and how Rule slowly came to suspect the truth.

Geez, how could I forget these other true crime classics? Wambaugh's The Onion Field is heartbreaking. The incident is tragic enough, but the terrible waste of the lives of all four men involved is the real tragedy. A painful and harrowing read. Capote's In Cold Blood depicts a horrid crime, what led up to it, and the consequences. This one lets you draw your own conclusions and they aren't easy, black and white ones either.

[Edited by corsairp47 on 05-01-01 at 12:46 AM]

Were my house afire - heaven forfend - the book I would rescue is really a two volume set. It is a collection of "The Adams-Jefferson Letters: The Complete Complete Correspondence Between Thomas Jefferson and Abigail and John Adams," edited by Lester J. Cappon. Published for The Institute of Early American History and Culture at Williamsburg, Virginia by the University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill.1959

In the beginning, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson became friends as they fought to achieve the goal of separation from England. The friendship deepened and included joining in family activities; it was John and Abigail who brought Jefferson's very young daughter across the Atlantic and cared for her until she was delivered safely into her father's arms. As the years went by politics and other chicanery divided them and by the time they retired and left the public arena, each considered the other an enemy with no hope of ever reconciling,. However, friends such as Dr. Benjamin Rush and Edward Cole urged them for several years to once again take up their ancient friendship. When they finally did, they wrote of their changing expectations of the country, They wrote of the little things in their lives as well as large matters regarding the state of the country, the aches and pains of old age, how each spent his day, what they read. They also wrote about us - yes - us - 200 yrs into the future - how they launched the ship of state and hoped it was still sailing, and hoped we were taking care of it..

holy 23 year old bump!

And it only took you 5 months to find it! Someone's been trolling the Book Forum?

Lol, I popped in here and it was only 1/4 of the way down the page, and I noticed I had replied to it but had no recollection of doing so. So I opened it expecting to see some of my recent non-fiction books read. Not ones I read 25 years ago!

Maybe I'll post some more once 2026 rolls around.

If stingo is still looking for something to read, I’ve recently started reading David Grann’s books.

The Wager was my favorite. It was a non-fiction story written almost as a novel. A very easy read and an interesting subject.

The Lost City of Z was also a fascinating read.

I was expecting The Devil & Sherlock Holmes to be strictly about Sherlock Holmes but ended up being a series an articles Grann had written on several subjects. Some were interesting, some were not.

I haven’t read Killers of the Flower Moon yet but it’s in my To-Read pile.

Time for some rereads then! You've probably forgotten stuff since then.

I'll recommend my new favorite non-fiction book now, No Self No Problem by Chris Niebauer. It's about the intersection of modern neuropsychology and Buddhist principles. It's fascinating from a scientific perspective, and if you're into mindfulness, meditation and such - I personally found it to be inspirational. It's an easy, short read, too.

Recent non-fiction recommendations:

The Emerald Mile -- this is a fascinating weaving of three different stories together, with the Grand Canyon being the main theme. Awesome book.

Educated -- this one reads like a novel to me, I was hooked from the very beginning and couldn't put it down.

Am adding these to my list of possible future purchases. I don't read enough non-fiction, so it's nice to get some recommendations now and then.