Recommend me some good non-fiction

I’va almost finished reading Timothy Snyder’s Bloodlands. (Note to self - avoid living in Belarus). Which is excellent by the way, if a little emotionally draining. So I’m looking around for my next non-fiction purchase.

My parameters:

I’m a pretty catholic reader, so most topics are fair game, I lean towards history and the like but don’t limit myself to that.

However I’m a bit picky about writing style, if I’m going to shell out for a book it’s got to be written well.

I dislike glib superficial gee-whiz types (Malcolm Gladwell I’m looking at you) and self-help pap so don’t try and get me to read The Secret and books of that ilk.

Oh and I don’t read celebrity (auto) biographies so don’t bother telling me to read Paris Hilton’s My Life or whatever.

I like to think I’m fairly well-read so chances are if it’s a well-known standard text I’ve already got it or read it. So more recently published recommendations or unjustly ignored classics are requested.

Please recommend a good, non-fiction work that you’ve read with a brief description of its topic and why you think its worth reading. Bare lists of titles will probably be ignored.

Have you considered Freakonomics or SuperFreakonomics by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner?

Each book is a collection of articles discussing topics that we might have a passing knowledge of, but not understand the mechanics of the situation - sometimes with emperical trials to back up the discourse. Levitt lays out the groundwork, and Dubner brings in the writing.

For example, one article examines why many gang members still live at home with their parents. The Amazon.com review notes how the gang hierarchy is similar to the corporate structure of McDonalds, where the only people making reasonable money are the few at the very top. The plebes underneath are making crap, and thus can’t afford their own places. Add to this they have a good chance of getting shot, beat up, stabbed, or arrested in the execution of their daily duties and it makes for a pretty poor career choice.

Another chapter compares the basic operation of real estate agents to the KKK; both groups can only thrive when there exists an inequity of information. In the case of the real estate agents, they have access to hidden data on homes and properties that is not available to the potential buyer. The Klan’s fear tactics only work when they can keep their identities secret and rely on your not knowing who among us may be a Klansman.

On one season of the TV show Beauty and the Geek, which paired attractive young women with homely geeks in a Big Brother-style reality competition, one of the girls’ tasks was to conduct a face-to-face interview with Stephen Dubner about having worked with Steven Levitt on the first book.

It was funny to see that only one of the girls had actually read part of the book and was able to engage Dubner in an intelligent conversation. All the other girls failed miserably at that trial.

And if you liked those, I’ll recommend “Brandwashed” by Martin Lindstrom which delves into why we buy what we buy. It’s a really fascinating read.

And “Gang Leader for a Day: A Rogue Sociologist Takes to the Streets” by
Sudhir Venkatesh which goes into more depth about his time that was touched upon in Freakonomics.

A pretty obscure one that I really enjoyed is called The Water in Between

It’s about a Canadian doctor stuck on the prairies who is dumped by his fiance (maybe long-term girlfriend). Adrift, he decides to chuck it all and sail from Vancouver to Tahiti. Also, he’s never sailed a boat before.

It’s a mix of personal reflection on where his life has taken him and the learning process of long ocean sailing. I loved it.

I’m a bit of a sucker for sailing stories, so I’ll also recomend A Voyage For Madmen which is pretty popular. It’s about an annual solo around-the-world sailing race and some of the colourful characters who raced in it. It takes a number of surprising twists and is truly gripping.

Mark Kurlansky. I’d start with Salt and Cod.

You must read Lost in Shangri-La if you have any interest at all in the subject. It’s the story of a military airplane that crashed in New Guinea in 1945 and what happened to the survivors. Great book, good writing, and the author has a kickass website with actual footage of the subject of the story. One of my best reads this year.

I’m almost done reading Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight: An African Childhood. It’s about a white girl’s experiences growing up mostly in Rhodesia/Zimbabwe in the '70s and '80s. I like it, but you might like it better than I do if you’re not as squeamish, because it can be pretty gross (descriptions of hunting, unhygienic conditions, stuff like that).

Slightly lighter fare: Mary Roach’s books. They’re informative and lightly humorous. She’s written four books:

Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers. I enjoyed this one. A few bits are squicky if you’ve got a sensitive stomach.
Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife. I haven’t read this one.
Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex. I’ve mostly only scanned through this one, but enjoyed the bits I read.
Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void. Haven’t read this one either.

Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America by Barbara Ehrenreich is another good one. It’s about how low-wage jobs really can’t support people, and she proves it by actually getting one. It’s perhaps not a completely fair view of it (according to wikipedia there’s been two books written in response), but I think it’s worth reading.

I know you said no autobiographies, but Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain was written before he was a celebrity and is mostly more about working in a restaurant than Mr. Bourdain. He’s also rather harsh on his young self. If you like cynical and snarky people you’ll enjoy it.

This is Your Brain on Music, by Daniel J Levitin and The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher, by Kate Summerscale.

For a heavier but amazing read: Godel, Escher, Bach, by Douglas R Hofstadter.

Beat me to it. Great read.

Seconding Mary Roach, and a couple more to throw in:

The Murder of the Century: The Gilded Age Crime That Scandalized a City & Sparked the Tabloid Wars by Paul Collins. It’s a well-researched recounting of a murder investigation and trial in New York in 1897. But also, it’s about how competing newspaper publishers Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst tried to outdo one another in their coverage and influenced the investigation itself. This is where “yellow journalism” began.

In the same city, just a couple of decades later, there’s The Poisoner’s Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York. An interesting analysis of a long list of poisons, each of which rose and fell in popularity as a murder weapon (or instrument of accidental death) during Prohibition. There’s also a lot of information about the office of the New York Medical Examiner and what it took to keep it operational and on the cutting edge of forensic science.

Thanks for the responses so far, here’s my replies:

I’m familiar with Dubner and Levitt’s blog and have skimmed through *Freakonomics *. I liked it but it verged a little on the gee-whiz Gladwell type for my tastes. Haven’t seen Superfreakonomics though…

Brandwashed sounds interesting, I recall reading a few things on the same topic a while ago but can’t remember their names.

I remember Venkatesh’s blog series on watching the Wire with gangmembers a while back, it was entertaining, I might check out his book.

I went through a bit of a sailing story jag back in my youth. I think I’d enjoy The Water in Between from your description. It’s now on my list.

I’ve got both of those, I also enjoyed his Basque History of the World but didn’t like 1968 at all. Have you read his book on NYC and oysters? Is it any good?

This sounds great, it’s going onto my list. I met a few PNGers at university, great guys but absolutely crazy once they’d had a few beers. I can only imagine what their grandparents were like back in the day…

I went to primary school with a couple of kids from Rhodesia (many of them emigrated to NZ after Mugabe took over). I’ve also met a really interesting black guy called Henry who was in the Rhodesian army. His stories made my toes curl… Actually I’d be interested to read a good general history of the Bush War. Henry still believes that they had ZANLA-ZIPRA on the run and could have won the war
if outside opinion hadn’t forced the Rhodesian politicians into a settlement.

I’ve heard Roach interviewed on the radio, her books sound interesting. I might start with Stiff

I remember Ehrenreich’s book when it came out, never read it though. How does it compare with Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London?

I saw an episode of the series based on Kitchen Confidential it was dreck IMHO. Unless the book is significantly better I doubt I’d bother. I’ve enjoyed the episodes of Bourdain’s food tourism show though.

I’ve read Godel,Escher,Bach and enjoyed it. What are the first two about?

These both sound interesting. Which murder is the murder of the century? I thought from your desciption it would be the murder ofStanford White, but that wasn’t until 1906. I enjoyed Caleb Carr’s The Alienist so I think I’d enjoy reading about that time and place.

The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher: “In June of 1860 three-year-old Saville Kent was found at the bottom of an outdoor privy with his throat slit. T he crime horrified all England and led to a national obsession with detection, ironically destroying, in the process, the career of perhaps the greatest detective in the land.”

I thought it very interesting, though the organization didn’t feel particularly organic.
This is Your Brain on Music: “In this groundbreaking union of art and science, rocker-turned-neuroscientist Daniel J. Levitin explores the connection between music—its performance, its composition, how we listen to it, why we enjoy it—and the human brain. Drawing on the latest research and on musical examples ranging from Mozart to Duke Ellington to Van Halen, Levitin reveals:
• How composers produce some of the most pleasurable effects of listening to music by exploiting the way our brains make sense of the world
• Why we are so emotionally attached to the music we listened to as teenagers, whether it was Fleetwood Mac, U2, or Dr. Dre
• That practice, rather than talent, is the driving force behind musical expertise
• How those insidious little jingles (called earworms) get stuck in our heads”

Not as strong as it could have been, but I read it over a fairly long period and I think that hurt it.

Some recent reads of mine:

Atkinson’s first two books (third pending) of his WWII in Europe trilogy. Well-researched, and well written as well.

1491 and 1493: somewhat speculative but thoroughly researched books on pre-Columbus and post-Columbus Americas.

Raft of The Medusa: the account not only of the ship’s grounding and subsequent survival, but of the huge impact upon the French monarchy and the life of the French painter Gericault.

Undaunted Courage: the exploration journey of Lewis & Clark

Here are some non-fiction titles I’ve particularly enjoyed recently:

Terrible Lizard: The First Dinosaur Hunters and the Birth of a New Science, by Deborah Cadbury. Story of two of the main guys who were finding and identifying fossils in the UK in the 19th century. Interesting look at the scientific and academic communities of the day. I would say the writing is good but not great; however the story itself really carries it.

Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare? Okay, I like it when James Shapiro does pop Shakespeare, although he might be a little on the glib side for you based on how you describe your taste. His angle here isn’t so much on the various people put forward as the “real” Shakespeare, but on what social and literary issues seem to drive the need for people to believe in Shakespeare conspiracies.

**
Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America** by John M. Barry. I didn’t know anything about this topic, and found it fascinating. A lot of public policy implications.

Both of these sound good, particularly Levitin’s. It’s now on my list.

I haven’t read Orwell’s book. Nickel and Dimed was a campus-wide reading thing one semester, and very appropriate for all the starving students. It’s a fairly light read.

It’s probably better than the tv series. From what I’m reading on wikipedia that had nothing to do with Mr. Bourdain. I picked up the book based on liking him on No Reservations - I like snarky people.

Both of them are a little older, so if you can probably find them second hand, if that helps at all (I know I’m more likely to pick up a book I might not like if I don’t have to pay much for it).

The Big Oyster is good, but not as good as Salt.

I also recommend Peter Ackroyd’s London: The Biography.

Oh, I also loved The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher, and one aspect I found interesting was that as a reader of classic English mystery novels, seeing how this one very public, very high-profile case established so many conventions in mystery literature. This was the source for how writers then started approaching such crimes in fiction.