Hello! I’m looking for some nonfiction books that read sorta like fiction. Just something super informational but not dry
I’ve really enjoyed recently
– radium girls by Katherine Moore
– hot zone by Richard Preston
– killers of the flower moon by David gran
– raw dog by Jamie loftus
Topics I enjoy / am interested in
– weird medicine (especially regarding ethics, and epidemics)
– natural disasters
– history (especially politics / economics from about 1920s onward)
by yowhatisuppeeps
7 Comments
You’re going to love:
The Tiger (John Vaillant), about a Siberian tiger in the 90s hunting people in Russia’s Far East.
The Indifferent Stars Above (Daniel James Brown), about the Donner party.
Say Nothing (John Radden Keefe) about the IRA in Northern Ireland.
Second the recommendation of Say Nothing by John Keefe, would also recommend Empire of Pain by same author.
I’ll second Say Nothing. I don’t read nonfiction much but that might be my favorite non fiction book I’ve read.
Also, I love The Right Stuff by Tom Wolfe. But that may not be for everyone, I love 20th century space stuff. Not sure if I would call it fast paced but it’s great and Wolfe’s writing style is super entertaining.
Those are also some of my favourite books and favourite topics! (Except I don’t know Raw Dog – should probably check it out?)
My top recommendations in this area:
– Nuclear War: A Scenario by Annie Jacobsen
– The Indifferent Stars Above (seconding from another poster!)
– The Ghost Map by Steven Johnson (about finding the origins of cholera)
– The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot (very medical ethics)
– Five Days at Memorial by Sheri Fink (medical ethics AND natural disasters – gut-wrenching Hurricane Katrina non-fic)
Everything is Tuberculosis by John Green
Get Well Soon by Jennifer Wright
The Jakarta Method by Vincent Bevins
And, as I mentioned in another comment, Fire Weather by John Valliant
Not on your preferred topics list, but if you liked Raw Dog, you may also enjoy America, The Beautiful? by Blythe Roberson
Plastic Fantastic, by Eugenie Samuel Reich. It is about a conman physicist, Jan Hendrik Schön, who faked the discovery of transistors and superconductors made from plastic. It is just 270ish pages and keeps good pacing throughout, and not only documents the incidents that happened, but also talks about what leads someone to fake research like that and how sometimes even the best scientists can be misled
The Fossil Hunter, by Shelley Emling, about the woman Mary Anning who discovered the first dinosaur fossils at the age of 12, and spent her whole life finding more, but never getting the credit for it, even though her discoveries led on to huge breakthroughs and were the primary attack on the biblical age of Earth. 250ish pages long