Virtual Clearcut, by Brian Fawcett, is a good read. Fawcett writes about his hometown of Prince George, B.C. and how it’s changed through all of the logging activity over the past fifty or sixty years. Fawcett is far from anti-logging, but he laments the fact that billions of logging dollars have flown through PG, but not much of it has managed to stick. The book actually recounts Fawcett’s three or four return visits to PG to see how the town changes and how the massive Bowron clearcut is healing or not healing.
I second both of these.
I also highly recommend Endurance, by Alfred Lansing, about Shakleton’s last Antarctic expedition. A truly stunning tale of survival.
The Sack of Panama, by Peter Earle. A highly readable look at one of the most successful pirates in the Caribbean. I haven’t read this new edition, but the previous one was great.
[QUOTE=KneadToKnow]
Oh, I forgot to mention all of Chuck Klosterman’s books:[ul][li]Fargo Rock City[/li][li]Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs[/li][li]Killing Yourself to Live[/li][li]Chuck Klosterman IV[/ul][/li][/QUOTE]
Chuck Klosterman is my personal Christ…
If you liked Kurlansky’s Salt, try
Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History
Other nonfiction I’ve read in the past few years (that you haven’t mentioned):
The Great Arc: The Dramatic Story of How India was Mapped and Everest was Named by John Keay:
The Great Mortality: an Intimnate History of the Black Death by John Kelly
Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded by Simon Winchester, the guy who wrote The Professor and the Madmabn. It could do with more on the actual day, rather than background, though.
I second:
- “The Devil in the White City”. Fascinating read. I enjoyed it much more than I thought I would
- “Endurance” by Lansing about Shackleton’s epic adventure
- “Under the Bannder of Heaven” by Krakauer. Very educational read.
I’ll add:
- “Longitude” by Dava Sobel. Amazing story about solving an age old problem.
- “The Blind Watchmaker” by Richards Dawkins. Filled in all the gaps about my understanding of evolution.
February House by Sherill Tippins. Imagine a season of “The Real World: Brooklyn(1940)” starring W.H. Auden, Benjamin Britten, Peter Pears, George Davis, Carson McCullers, and Gypsy Rose Lee.
Then also check out Bad Land: An American Romance by Jonathan Raban. Those two plus Egan’s The Worst Hard Time (already recommended) are like the trilogy of small-town life on the Montana plains.
Non-fiction is my favorite type of reading material, and I’ve already read many that have been mentioned, but several I haven’t, so I’m getting great ideas for future reading. Thanks for this thread.
A fantastic example of one of those books about a subject/person you never thought you’d be the slightest bit interested in but that turns out to be fascinating and moving is “An Owl On Every Post” (Amazon link) by Sanora Babb (Obit link). I just discovered Babb’s writings and fell in love. This particular book is her memoir of growing up on an eastern Colorado broomcorn farm (yeah, specifically raising corn that they made brooms from). Sounds boring as hell perhaps, but it’s not at all. Babb is a wonderful writer who brings the trials and joys and wonders and hardships of dryland farming/living in the early 1900’s to vivid life*.
Babb took her own experiences and later wrote a novel about the dust bowl and California migrant workers called “Whose Names Are Unknown” which, while started before John Steinbeck’s “The Grapes of Wrath,” was due to be published after, but then got put on a shelf for 65 years because Wrath was such a sensation that the publisher decided not to publish another book on the same subject (which, if this happened nowadays, no one would care). I highly recommed both Babb books, but would suggest finding and reading Owl before Names, because so many of the fictional events in Names were inspired by Babb’s real experiences. So far those are the only two Babb books I’ve read, but I plan to look for others.
Women and girls, and anyone who’s lived on a farm, will probably love Babb’s memoirs (I wish I’d read it as an adolescent girl, who grew up on a farm) but anyone who likes reading about times and places and events that they otherwise might not have any exposure to, would, I think, enjoy it.
Read the obit linked above too. Babb lived an fascinating life! Someone ought to make a movie about her.
- I know there have been other books with similar themes but I’ve never read any (such as Laura Ingalls Wilder’s books) so I can’t compare to those.
That is just wrong on so many levels.
Not the least of which is that if he’s Christ, I’m kind of my library system’s St. Paul.
Especially as I used to work with him (not closely). He’s not even my own personal Chuck Klosterman.
“The Buffalo Creek Disaster”, by Gerald Stern. Fascinating account of lawsuit against the coal company responsible for a flood that killed 125 people in West Virginia back in the 1970s. Imagine “A Civil Action”, only with a lawyer who isn’t a jerk, and that’s “Buffalo Creek”.
“Gang Leader For A Day”, by Sudhir Venkatesh. Sociology grad student spent years hanging out with the leader of a Chicago drug gang in order to study the “underground” economy of urban housing projects.
“The Great Game”, by Peter Hopkirk. Excellent, readable history of English and Russian colonialism in Central Asia.
I really enjoyed The Pillars of Hercules and 3 cups of tea (other than that i have been reading a lot of fiction so that’s about all my nonfiction recs)
For a little light summer reading, I highly recommend From Dawn to Decadence. A cultural history of the last 500 years. Published when the author was about 92, he had lived through about 1/5 of the period he was writing about.