I know this has been asked before but I'm hoping for some recommendations on interesting non-fiction books. I'm not specifically interested in any one topic, just something that is really fascinating and perhaps makes you learn something or see the world in a different way.
I'm currently reading Everything is Tuberculosis by John Green and am loving. I also really enjoyed Why Fish Don't Exist by Lulu Miller and Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea by Barbara Demick.
Others I've read recently:
Braiding Sweetgrass – liked this one but felt like I was already intimately familiar with the subject matter
Into Thin Air – this was not for me. The story was interesting but the feminist in me had a hard time identifying with the author's perspective
by Dry_Luck_9228
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*The Jakarta method* by Vincent Bevins
*The capital order* by Clara Mattei
*What is antiracism and why it means anticapitalism* by Arun Kundnani
*Red star over the third world* by Vijay Prashad
All four are history books.
*The Alchemy of Air* by Thomas Hager is a fascinating account of the invention of synthetic fertilizer. It doesn’t sound fascinating, but most people alive today owe their existence to this process!
The Book of Eels by Patrik Svenson (about eels)
The Emperor of All Maladies by Siddhartha Mukherjee (about the history of cancer treatment)
Valley of Forgetting by Jennie Erin Smith (about a cohort of early-onset Alzheimer’s families in Colombia and the research group working with them)
If you are enjoying John Green, I suggest you read The Anthropocene Reviewed by him. I loved it so much. I am currently reading the Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks and enjoying it so far.
Invisible women by Caroline Criado Perez
I feel like everyone should read it at least once.
The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down by Anne Fadiman
Progress and Poverty by Henry George
How to Change Your Mind – Michael Pollan: a history/cultural history/trip experience/scientific analysis/medical exploration of psychedelics
The Shock Doctrine – Naomi Klein: how governments and corporations exploit disasters to push through privatisation and deregulation in order to monopolise territory and erode rights.
Humankind – Rutger Bregman: an analysis and dissection of humanity’s inherent kindness that debunks many of the ingrained notions we have of how selfish people can be.
Fire Weather – John Vaillant: explores how wildfires are becoming more dangerous and more prevalent in a warming climate, with particular attention to the wildfire that devastated Fort McMurray in Canada in 2016.
Invisible Women – Caroline Criado Perez: an infodump on the myriad ways that society (medicine, design, city planning, health and safety and more) is built around men and often excludes the needs and vulnerabilities of women.
Spillover – David Quammen: an exploration of how zoonotic viruses (ones which spread from animals to humans and can cause pandemics) operate.
The Earth Transformed – Peter Frankopan: how climate affected world history, including its influence on empires, revolutions, disasters and plagues.
The Dawn of Everything – David Graeber & David Wengrow: an exploration of the various ways prehistoric and tribal societies self-organised, and how those configurations of society influenced and contrast with how we live now.
In Order to Live: A North Korean Girl’s Path to Freedom by Yeonmi Park
I really liked The Psychopath Test by Jon Ronson.
*The Complete Maus* – Spiegelman
*The Deep Dark* by Gregg Olsen, about a fire in a mine in Idaho.
*The Spirit Catches You And You Fall Down* by Ann Fadiman. It’s about the cultural conflict between the parents of a Hmong child with epilepsy and her American doctors.
Oh man – Just finished I cold Blood. Was incredible. Probably the most hooked on a nonfiction book ever.
One that I’ve never seen mentioned here but I though was fascinating was “Covered With Night” by Nicole Eustace. It is about two brothers who murdered an Iroquois hunter in 1722 and how the tribe and the colonists reconciled with one another and navigated their vastly different laws and customs. I loved it.
I don’t read a bunch of nonfiction, but I’ve enjoyed several of David Grann’s works. The Wager and Killers of the Flower Moon were both incredibly well written.
a few that really stuck with me and changed how I look at things: *Say Nothing* by Patrick Radden Keefe is incredibly gripping and somehow manages to be both a page-turner and deeply thoughtful about history, memory, and violence.
*The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down* by Anne Fadiman is amazing if you like books that sit at the intersection of culture, medicine, and ethics, it genuinely reshaped how I think about communication and care.
*The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks* is another one that teaches you a lot while also being very human and unsettling in the right way.
If you liked *Nothing to Envy*, you might also like *Behind the Beautiful Forevers* by Katherine Boo, which follows real lives with a novel-like feel and a lot of empathy.
And for something more quietly mind-expanding, *Being Mortal* by Atul Gawande made me think differently about medicine, aging, and what we actually mean by quality of life.
The Tiger: A True Story of Vengeance and Survival by John Vaillant
Say Nothing by Patrick Radden Keefe. He basically solves an unsolved murder from the troubles period in Northern Ireland. It’s an engrossing, wild book.
The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind by Julian Jaynes
r/JulianJaynes has some links if you’re into that
The Spider Network. It’s financial crimes using LIBOR, and it’s written like a crime thriller because the author directly interviewed the subject at the heart of the crime for weeks and has the level of detail that makes it feel alive. It’s such a weirdly compelling book for such a random topic.
Your Inner Fish for the best intro to evolutionary biology around.
Midnight at Chernobyl is the best telling of the Chernobyl disaster you’ll find.
Say Nothing is the story of a disappearance during The Troubles that reads like a thriller.
Interested in the origins of World War I, and thus of our modern world?
Barbara Tuchman wrote the old classic on the subject: *The Guns of August*. New York: Macmillan, 1962.
T. G. Otte wrote a new classic: *The July Crisis: The World’s Descent into War, Summer 1914.* Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014.
Both are extremely well written, but in a very different style. The first is high literature and genius. The second is clever, but more straight and reporting like.
For my money, Tuchman has the most magisterial opening of any non-fiction book ever:
“So gorgeous was the spectacle on the May morning of 1910 when nine kings rode in the funeral of Edward VII of England that the crowd, waiting in hushed and black-clad awe, could not keep back gasps of admiration. In scarlet and blue and green and purple, three by three the sovereigns rode through the palace gates, with plumed helmets, gold braid, crimson sashes, and jeweled orders flashing in the sun. After them came five heirs apparent, forty more imperial or royal highnesses, seven queens–four dowager and three regnant–and a scattering of special ambassadors from uncrowned countries. Together they represented seventy nations in the greatest assemblage of royalty and rank ever gathered in one place and, of its kind, the last. The muffled tongue of Big Ben tolled nine by the clock as the cortege left the palace, but on history’s clock it was sunset, and the sun of the old world was setting in a dying blaze of splendor never to be seen again.”
caitlin Doughty’s books
Smoke Gets In Your Eyes
and Other Lessons from the Crematory
From Here to Eternity
Traveling the World to Find the Good Death
Will My Cat Eat My Eyeballs?
And Other Questions About Dead Bodies
The Poisoners Handbook by Blum,
Being Wrong Adventures in the Margin of Error,
Zoobiquity by Natterson Horowitz,
Because Internet by McCulloch,
River of Doubt by Millard
Entangled Life by Merlin Sheldrake made me feel like I was staring into the bucket of truth. It’s an almost overwhelming volume of really fascinating information.
Cattle Kingdom: The Hidden History of the Cowboy West by Christopher Knowlton. It’s the most interesting nonfiction I’ve read so far that looks at how the cattle industry shaped the West and was an important part of the development of the United States after the Civil War.
Give you enjoyed a book about Tuberculosis, you might enjoy “Rabid” by Bill Wasik. It’s all about rabies, and I found it astoundingly interesting.
Endurance
Man’s Search for Meaning
Under the Banner of Heaven
Memoir, I’m Glad my Mom Died
Memoir, Crying in HMart
The Radium girls
All the tea in China. How the English sent a spy into China to steal the technology of tea, and why they used a Scotsman.
Columbine — Dave Cullen