book time

[lirazel]

Apparently for the first time in my life I'm interested in reading non-fiction. I've always been more a novel-type person and haven't really been drawn to reading a lot of full-length books in the non-fiction genre. But I guess because I'm not in school anymore, I've been wanting to lately.

So I was wondering if any of you have any recs for me, non-fiction books that you really love and/or think I'd enjoy.

I'm not really into memoirs as a genre and no self-help type-things, but I love anything involving history or culture, especially works that explore specific or obsucre moments in history or cultural movements. As a general rule, I also prefer works that don't have a lot to do with contemporary American life. I mean, I live that life; I like to learn about lives that are really different than mine. I'm less interested in biographies of specific people than I am in works about larger groups, events, etc., but if you have an especially awesome one in mind, feel free to let me know.

Anyone?

Comments

[evewithanapple.livejournal.com]

Triangle: The Fire That Changed America by David von Drehle. Pack a box of tissues, you'll need it.

[penny-lane-42.livejournal.com]

Oh, man. That's going to tear my up. I seriously cried at the NPR reporting back at the last anniversary.

[upupa-epops.livejournal.com]

I'm madly in love with Roland Auguet's "Caligula". It's an experimantal biography; the author sort of proves that what we know about antiquity is in fact very fragile, because we could just as well figure out an alternative interpretation of historical sources, and he gives Caligula as an example. So you won't find a traditional Bloody, Scary and Obscene story, but an attempt to show that this story might actually be false. Doesn't have to, but might, and we have absolutely no way to know.

Oh, and just in case you'd like a movie, I totally recommend Simon Schama's "Power of Art" (10 documentaries about famous painters, I've only seen 2 of them so far, but they were glorious).

[penny-lane-42.livejournal.com]

That sounds crazy-cool. And I looove documentaries and art, so that movie series sounds up my alley, too. Thank you!

[petzipellepingo.livejournal.com]

Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee by Dee Brown, it will enrage you and make you cry.

Signing Their Lives Away : the Fame and Misfortune of the Men Who Signed the Declaration of Independence by Joseph D'Agnese, most of us have no idea not only who signed it but what happened to them.

Suburban Safari : a Year On the Lawn by Hannah Holmes. What exactly is going on in your own backyard.

[penny-lane-42.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I've cried lots over tears over Dee Brown. Powerful book.

I'm a big fan of 1776! the musical, so I imagine I'd love a book about those guys. Thanks for the recs!

[ceciliaj.livejournal.com]

OOOH OOOH! Emma Perez's The Decolonial Imaginary: Writing Chicanas Into History is amaaaazing, although a bit dated at this point. Lots of fascinating stuff about women's history.

[penny-lane-42.livejournal.com]

Yup, that sounds like something I'd love. Thank you!

[beer-good-foamy.livejournal.com]

How about Azar Nafisi's Reading Lolita In Tehran? Nafisi was a literature professor at the University of Tehran who was fired for, essentially, trying to teach literature. So she tried to set up a private (illegal) book club for women instead. Utterly fascinating both in its view of Iranian society, and for putting Western "classics" in an entirely different context.

[flake-sake.livejournal.com]

oh, I just read that a few months ago. It's brilliant!

[diebirchen.livejournal.com]

In Patagonia is one of the best books I've read, by Chatwin, I believe. Also David McCullough's biography, Truman, is enjoyable and informative. For an autobiography, Benjamin Franklin's is amazing and well-written.

[penny-lane-42.livejournal.com]

Sounds great! Thank you!

[shipperx.livejournal.com]

"River of Doubt"
http://www.amazon.com/River-Doubt-Theodore-Roosevelts-Darkest/dp/0385507968

Also:
"Into thin Air" by Jon Krakauer
http://www.amazon.com/Into-Thin-Air-Personal-Disaster/dp/0385492081

[penny-lane-42.livejournal.com]

Awesome! Thank you!

[lutamira]

It can be hard for me to judge whether a history book that I liked has broader appeal, but here are a few of my favorites from the past year:

Women on the Margins: Three Seventeenth Century Lives, by Natalie Zemon Davis. Zemon Davis is a well-known name in women's history. This book reads more like a novel and less like a history text.

The Web of Empire by Alison Games. Dense and scholarly, but with lots of individual stories brought to life, this book is all about cosmopolitan adventurers in the sixteenth century.

The Great Divergence by Kenneth Pomeranz is an absolute classic, and makes a case for why the West isn't really that special - a good and deeply scholarly corrective to all that Western exceptionalism (read: latent racism) that keeps cropping up in the public conversation.

Seeing Like A State by James Scott. One of those books that fundamentally alters the way you understand the world. :)

[penny-lane-42.livejournal.com]

All of those sound amazing. I have pretty esoteric tastes, too, so it doesn't surprise me that those appeal to me. :D thanks!

[blackfrancine.livejournal.com]

Have you ever read Playing in the Dark by Toni Morrison? It's about writing African American/Black characters. It's been a long time since I read it, but I remember liking it. It's a short, easy read, too. Which is nice.

Yoga for People Who Can't Be Bothered to Do It by Geoff Dyer is a nice, light but introspective read--it's a travelogue.

A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again by David Foster Wallace is probably my favorite thing by him. Essays. Funny, smart. DFW.

For a heavier read--Frantz Fanon's Black Skin White Masks is one of the first serious critical works I ever read--it's an analysis of colonized Africans who were educated in Europe and returned home to Africa in the WWII- and immediately post-WWII-era.

Also, I love Greil Marcos's Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century. I don't know if it's your kind of thing, though: It's an analysis of rock music in the 1970s--especially looking at the punk movement and how when punk rock became popular, it is essentially the moment that Postmodernity began. That's the claim anyway.

All the other nonfiction I've read recently is mostly related to the American food supply (Fast Food Nation, My Year in Meats, In Defense of Food)... and they are all fantastic reads--but definitely centered on contemporary culture.

I'm about to start reading Changing My Mind by Zadie Smith. Essays about writing and literature and... stuff. I don't really know because I haven't actually read it. But I love Zadie Smith and everything I've read about this collection has been really positive.

God. I'm so annoying. I'm sorry. I just wanted to edit this to also recommend Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond (I think that's the author's name). It's about how certain cultures (Western European cultures) came to dominate the globe, and why other cultures (South American, African, North American, South Asian, etc) didn't. It's a really fair and common sense examination of the origins of inequality in the modern world.

[penny-lane-42.livejournal.com]

Have you ever read Playing in the Dark by Toni Morrison?

I haven't! Love her fiction, though; I wasn't aware she had written any non-fiction.

don't know if it's your kind of thing, though: It's an analysis of rock music in the 1970s--

I'm actually totally into 60's and 70's counterculture even though I have no interest in actually living like that, so yeah, sounds like my thing!

You are the opposite of annoying. You are excellent. And you can't include too many!

I've seen the documentary series about Guns, Germs, and Steel but haven't read the book yet.

[gabrielleabelle.livejournal.com]

You can always check out my Goodreads

I massively rec Typecasting: On the Arts and Sciences of Human Inequality by Elizabeth and Stuart Ewen.

[penny-lane-42.livejournal.com]

That sounds AMAZING.

[flake-sake.livejournal.com]

we are iran by nasrin alavi. It's a book about the Iranian blogosphere before the crackdown.

[penny-lane-42.livejournal.com]

Oooh! That sounds cool! Thanks!

[molly_may]

Have you read any of Sarah Vowell's books? She sets a very dry, often witty, tone in her books, but she's a solid historian and a great storyteller. I especially liked Assassination Vacation, which looks at three presidential assassinations and the effects they had on the country.

I also recommend When Everything Changed: The Amazing Journey of American Women from 1960 to the Present by Gail Collins. I particularly enjoyed reading the chapters on the experiences of African-American women in both the civil rights and the women's movement.

[rebcake.livejournal.com]

"Assassination Vacation" would definitely appeal to a lot of people on my f-list! *has signed copy*

[uwsannajane.livejournal.com]

Anne Fadiman's The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down is one of the best books I've ever read, fiction or nonfiction. It's a story of the Hmong diaspora in America, about a sick child and the clash between traditional and contemporary cultures. Just amazing. Also wrenching.

(This is one I love so much that I keep extra copies around to lend out.)

[gingerwall.livejournal.com]

I read this for an anthropology class and loved it!

[anythingbutgrey.livejournal.com]

my go-to nonfiction rec book is love thy neighbor by peter maass, which is about the bosnian war? i made my mother's book club read it actually and they loved it. and it made [Bad username or site: http://sweet-iolanthe @ livejournal.com] cry on the train once. perfect book.

[penny-lane-42.livejournal.com]

I know so little about the Bosnian War, so I will definitely want to check that out. Thanks!

[muneca-brava.livejournal.com]

Looking at these comments, you have enough for a year or so already :P But still: I recently read and enjoyed Bright Young People by DJ Taylor, about the group of young, mostly rich party-goers in 1920s London, with Evelyn Waugh and (some of) the Mitfords. Has to be your thing, of course, and it is mine, so I loved it very much.

[penny-lane-42.livejournal.com]

I've seen Bright Young Things and I loved it even as the people in it frustrated me, so it sounds like fun!

[pennydrdful.livejournal.com]

Ooh, ooh! I recommend:

The Worst Hard Time by Timothy Egan - This is a great book about what life was like during the Dust Bowl, some of the causes behind the massive dust storms, and their effect on every day life. This was extremely educational to me.

Nothing to Envy by Barbara Demick - An incredibly insightful read on the living conditions and average lifestyle of North Koreans. Through research combined with numerous interviews of NK refugees, Demick is able to partially pull back the curtain that shrouds that cut off country.

[penny-lane-42.livejournal.com]

Excellent! Thanks so much!

[deird1]

Singled Out. Because a huge number of British men died in World War One, and suddenly all these women who'd always expected to grow up and get married couldn't. This is a book about what they did instead.

:)

[penny-lane-42.livejournal.com]

Ooooh! Sounds great! Thank you!

[ozmissage.livejournal.com]

If you like classic Hollywood, Pictures at a Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood is wonderful. I also love The Murrow Boys, it made me go into journalism...on the flip side, it gave me unrealistic expectations about journalism.

An American Insurrection: The Battle of Oxford Mississippi is pretty amazing too. Oh, and I'll second the Sarah Vowell rec above. That lady makes history so fascinating. David Sedaris is a brilliant essayist also, but he's more of a general interest/humorist kind of fellow.

[penny-lane-42.livejournal.com]

Love classic Hollywood! And I have all of these ~feelings~ about Oxford, MS (owing both to my Faulkner feelings and my visits there), so I'll definitely want to check that out. Thank you!

[pocochina.livejournal.com]

The best non-fiction book I've read recently is The Wisdom of Whores by Elizabeth Pisani. She's a journalist/public health policy expert - I am the biggest geek ever, this just in - who's done a huge amount of work with HIV/AIDS in Asia. She's wonderful at explaining all the policy and epidemiological issues for lay people in this nonjudgmental, accessible, and often morbidly funny, language. There's a little bit of trollish sleight-of-hand here and there, but I kind of respect it, because she explains how and why she does that in an early chapter, so it's easy to read with an informed eye. She did a fantastic TED talk which touched on a lot of her main points; I highly recommend checking it out regardless of if the book sounds like your thing.

I also really recommend The Girls Who Went Away by Ann Fessler, about forced adoption in the pre-Roe twentieth century. It's heartbreaking, but it does a beautiful job contextualizing all the political, historical, and personally emotional factors.

I know I've read others recently and I can't pull them off the top of my head right now, but those are the two I really can't recommend enough.

[evewithanapple.livejournal.com]

Seconding The Girls Who Went Away! Fantastic book.

[silverusagi]

I don't read a lot of non-fiction, either. But right now I'm reading Inside the Victorian Home by Judith Flanders. It's not about specific people or huge cultural events, but daily life for the middle/upper middle class in Victorian England.

[penny-lane-42.livejournal.com]

Interesting! I do love me some Victoriana--it's all so contradictory.

[demonbrat-98.livejournal.com]

If you still want to read about disasters after you finish Triangle (excellent book!), read The Circus Fire: A True Story of an American Tragedy by Stewart O'Nan. It's about the Hartford, CT Circus Fire which happened in July 1944. The most chilling line goes something to the effect of "Survivors spoke of hearing the screams of burning and dying animals; but no animals died."

Also excellent is "The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks" by Rebecca Skloot. It's about the woman whose cells are still being used today in scientific research and how they were obtained and the ethical implications thereof.

Couple of other quick recs:

This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War by Drew Gilpen Faust - how the Civil War changed death rituals and practices

Battlefield Angels: Saving Lives Under Enemy Fire from Valley Forge to to Afghanistan by Scott McGaugh - history of the military medic

[penny-lane-42.livejournal.com]

I have been meaning to read The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, and the rest of them sound very cool! Thank you!

[gingerwall.livejournal.com]

Prepare for some super-excited, book-loving word-vomit (but with fewer dashes than you might expect from that lead-in):

My three favorite non-fiction books of all time (in the order that I read them, not by favoriteness). All of these books I went out and bought AFTER I had already read someone else's copy.

1. The Ends of the Earth: From Togo to Turkmenistan, from Iran to Cambodia, a Journey to the Frontiers of Anarchy (http://www.amazon.com/Ends-Earth-Turkmenistan-Cambodia-Frontiers/dp/0679751238) by Robert D. Kaplan. I had to read this in my freshman high school geography class - pretty much the best class assignment I've ever had. It's so full of fascinating world history and and amazing story-telling of "modern" life across the developing world. (I put modern in quotes because it was written in the late 90's.)

From Amazon: "This book is not your average travel memoir. It is an introspective analysis of the social and political conditions of developing countries from West Africa to Thailand. Typical travelogues can be titillating, but because the authors actually know so little about the cultures that they are visiting for a short time, readers learn more about the authors themselves than about the countries being described. However, this book is quite different in that respect--Kaplan obviously knows this region well, having worked as a journalist in the region for years."

2. And the Band Played On (Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic) by Randy Shilts. Basically, the story of the emergence of AIDS, a complex narrative that seamlessly weaves together the perspectives of the patients, gay community leaders, mainstream politicians, and scientists. If you have any amount of interest in gay politics or public health, this is a must read. You have no idea how much you don't know about how AIDS started, biologically, socially, and politically. Also the HBO movie version (Ian McKellan! Lily Tomlin! Alan Alda! B.D. Wong! Steve Martin! Richard Gere!) is pretty fabulous, despite the early 90's picture quality and soundtrack.

3. Crazy for God: How I Grew Up as One of the Elect, Helped Found the Religious Right, and Lived to Take All (or Almost All) of It Back (http://www.amazon.com/Crazy-God-Helped-Religious-Almost/dp/0786718919) I know you say you don't like memoirs, but you should make an exception for this one. I actually bought three copies of this book, so I could loan them out to other people while it was between printings. The story of growing up as basically Jerry Falwall's kid (but in Europe) is laugh-out-loud hilarious and interesting as a story itself, so the fact that he explains how he basically accidentally started the Culture War is just an amazing and insightful bonus. If you want to understand the abortion fight in America today, you need to read this.

(Edited for me sucking at writing)

[gingerwall.livejournal.com]

I should add that the main reason why I love Crazy for God is because he manages to criticize the politicization of religion (or religionization of politics) without being a jerk, and from a compassionate perspective that is full of insight. Anybody can be a liberal, atheist asshole (e.g., the late Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins), but I found it really refreshing to get the perspective of someone who is deeply religious and spiritual talk about the movement in a way that was critical yet still very humanizing.

[rebcake.livejournal.com]

I'm currently reading "The Female Brain" by Louann Brizendine, M.D. which is very informative.

"Night Witches" by Bruce Myles tells the story of Russia's women pilots during WWII. Riveting.

Joe Sacco's graphic journalism (like graphic novels, only he's a war correspondent) will blow your mind. Try "Palestine" or "Safe Area Gorazde".

Tom Wolfe seems to have fallen out of fashion, but I think "Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test" is great. So is "Kandy-Kolored Tangerine Flake Streamline Baby" though it is short form where "Electric" is long form.

[pennydrdful.livejournal.com]

Ooh, I loved "Safe Area: Gorazde". I might have to check out Night Witches! Sounds right up my alley.

[green-maia.livejournal.com]

A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare: 1599 by James Shapiro.

The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures by Anne Fadiman.

The Ghost Map: The Story of London's Most Terrifying Epidemic--and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World by Steven Johnson

Brilliant: The Evolution of Artificial Light by Jane Brox

[penny-lane-42.livejournal.com]

Those sound fantastic. Thank you so much!

[evewithanapple.livejournal.com]

Moar recs! (I might make some future comments, since I'm currently at school and my books are at home):

"The Good Women of China" by Xinran. Another tearjerker (I started bawling while I was reading it on the train) an account of womens' lives in Communist China. It's pretty short too, so a quick read.

"Built of Books: How Reading Defined The Life of Oscar Wilde" by THomas Wright. THIS one is pure fun. It's a survey of the books Oscar Wilde read, his reading habits in general (apparently he'd tear off page corners and pop them in his mouth) and just the life of a Victorian bibliophile.

"The Affair of the Poisons" by Anne Somerset- it covers a witch/poisoning panic that took place in the court of Louis XIV. It can get kind of confusing trying to follow everyone's names and roles, but fortunately there's a guide at the front of the book. And it's a fascinating story.

"My Guantanomo Diary" by Mavish Khan: exactly what it sounds like. This woman worked as an attorney for prisoners in Guantanomo, and the book is about the individuals she met and the stories they told her.

"The Grand Inquisitor's Manual" by Jonathan Kirsch: FASCINATING overview of various inquisitions throughout history, with emphasis on their resemblance to modern events. *coughWaronTerrorcough*

"Elizabeth's Women" by Tracey Borman- instead of focusing on the men in Elizabeth I's life, the author went in the opposite direction and focused on the women. It's not perfect (slutshaming Katherine Howard, REALLY?) but it's so cool to finally see the other side.

[penny-lane-42.livejournal.com]

Yay! These sound cool, too! Thank you!