Ok, here’s some from my list of great non-fiction/histories.
The Guns of August by Barbara Tuchman
All the President’s Men by Woodward and Bernstein
A Bright Shining Lie by Neil Sheehan
The Price of Power: Kissinger in the Nixon Whitehouse by Seymour Hersch
A Bridge Too Far by Cornelius Ryan
Overlord: D-Day and the Battle for Normandy 1944 by Max Hastings
Assassination Vacation by Sarah Vowell
*The Collapse: The Accidental Opening of the Berlin Wall * by Mary Elise Sarotte
The River of Doubt is an amazing read. -
An Unnecessary Woman.
Digression:
The customer service department of the publisher I used to work for kept a list of the strangest requests they received. Several callers asked for The Merger of Roger Ackroyd or The Murder of Dan Ackroyd. My favorite, though, was a customer who was looking for Lame as a Rob. Say it aloud.
For a fun, easy history/comedy mix, How to Fight Presidents: Defending Yourself Against the Badasses Who Ran This Country offers the same style of information-as-entertainment found in some Cracked.com articles.
Good call. I assume from the OP that you’re already familiar with Bill Bryson, but make sure you don’t miss At Home, or The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid, which, though accurately billed as memoir, is also of historical interest as a look at middle America in the 1950s.
Good call.
A couple by China Mieville that I just finished and loved the hell out of…
The City and the City - A detective gumshoe novel set in an alterna-future eastern Europe with strange sci-fi stuff going on
Kraken - A fun tongue-in-cheek London romp where doomsday cults vie for their own respective armageddons.
For everyone’s suggestions, thank you. I’ll take a closer examination of them after work.
I am not only familiar with Bill Bryson’s works, I already own all of them save for A Dictionary of Troublesome Words. I used to own Made in America, but it fell apart while I was re-reading it. I even have his slim African notes thing that he did for charity. My copy of At Home is autographed by him.
Not sure why I didn’t pick up “Troublesome Words” when I had the chance. I have a slight superstition against owning all an author’s works. Like it will make them die or something. I don’t really believe that, but I’m just weird that way.
I’d also like to add that I like anything centered around food history and descriptions as well.
Anyway, some more recommendations in return for your help:
Homer’s Odyssey by Gwen Cooper. I don’t read many animal tales, but this one about a blind cat is excellent.
End of Watch; Chicago Police Killed between 1853 and 2006 by Chicago alderman Ed Burke and somebody named Gorman. Holy crap, this book is up on Ebay for 64.95!
And a copy is lying next to my papasan where my cats can sit on it. It’s a engrossing read for anyone into Chicago history, but it is slipshod in typos. Somebody didn’t proofread very well. Still, one of my favorites, and especially relevant today, what with the Ferguson Effect and all.
Just thought of another: My Father’s Gun: One Family, Three Badges, One Hundred Years in the NYPD by Brian McDonald. Basically the history of the NYPD through the eyes of one family of cops.
I recently finished The Nix by Nathan Hill. I think it may be my favorite book ever. It’s just completely delightful, and sorta historical. I can’t imagine anyone not loving it.
Some non-fiction I’ve read somewhat recently and loved:
Delusions of Gender: How Our Minds, Society, and Neurosexism Create Difference, by Cordelia Fine. Witty and smart exploration of how little studies of neuroscience really show gender differences.
How Jesus Became God: The Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher from Galilee, by Bart Ehrman. If you like biblical history. I’m an atheist, so my interest is purely historical.
You’re Stepping on My Cloak and Dagger, by Roger Hall. Recommended to me here on the dope. This is a brisk, funny story about a man becoming a spy during WWII.
The Canon: A Whirligig Tour of the Beautiful Basics of Science, by Natalie Angier. Very funny primer on the physical sciences.
Game Change: Obama and the Clintons, McCain and Palin, and the Race of a Lifetime, which seems almost naive now but is a great read.
Really good novels:
The House of Mirth, by Edith Wharton. You’ve probably read it, but I hadn’t until very recently. Outstanding.
Sailing to Sarantium and Lord of Emperors, by Guy Gavriel Kay. Ostensibly fantasy, but they are essentially historical fiction about the Byzantine empire’s Justinian and his empress Theodora. Very highly recommended.
Brat Farrar, by Josephine Tey. Lighter than the previous two, but I think it’s stellar.
A friend of a friend of mine wrote The Tao of Bill Murray: Real-Life Stories of Joy, Enlightenment, and Party Crashing. I haven’t read it yet, but your mention of pop culture brought it to mind and I feel like Bill Murray is in the news so much right now.
Precious Bane by Mary Webb. It’s a masterpiece of first person voice. Plot is patchy in parts, but Prue is so wonderfully told that you don’t care.
Just bumping up my own thread to get more book recommendations.
Here’s another one of mine in return:
Some We Love, Some We Hate, Some We Eat: Why It’s so Difficult to Think Straight about Animals by Hal Herzog. This one really made me ponder animals differently than I usually do.
The Sot-Weed Factor by John Barth. Someone here, I want to say RealityChuck, has strongly recommended it in other threads. I read it recently and it’s great. It’s about the first Poet Laureate of Maryland and his traveling adventures in the late 1600’s. Very funny and very well written.
I would also just say that I have found Goodreads to be really good at suggesting books based on what you like.
You might want to check out Good to Eat: Riddles of Food and Culture by Marvin Harris.
Ok, you’ll see a magic word in this description, and I know what you’re gonna do, but please don’t hate me.
A book I love is called Visibility. It’s a murder/mystery set in 1940s London and it surrounds a police detective trying to solve a series of murders related to the discovery of DNA. It involves everything from pea-soup fog and Watson and Crick, to detectives and…um…just a slight bit of nazis. But like…very little of those.
Seriously, it’s a cool historic fiction book.
Nazis appear to be the Kale Chips of pop culture right now.
I should have mentioned that if you like Barbara Hambly’s work, be sure to check out the Benjamin January mysteries, set in pre-Civil War New Orleans. She’s amazing at capturing atmosphere.
A very British-flavoured suggestion here – maybe not to your taste, OP (and you express a distaste for kids’ books – but I feel that this one is for “kids of all ages”); and I don’t know how easy it would be to come by in America. Anyway, a discovery of mine a few months ago; by Kate Saunders, half a dozen novels by whom I have read and loved.
Novel by her, recommended by me here: Five Children on the Western Front. Published 2014, “for a reason”. It derives from E. Nesbit’s IMO delectable stories written a little over a century ago – Five Children and It, and others – about the eponymous five children and their discovery of an ancient “sand fairy” or Psammead; a grouchy and irascible supernatural being which can, however, work feats of magic for the benefit of others.
Kate Saunders, realising that the time-setting of Nesbit’s books meant that the older boys in the group of children concerned, would be of prime age to fight in World War I – follows that circumstance where it leads; plus involving, once more, the Psammead. A mix of finely recreating Nesbit’s style; plus much, delightfully, of the author’s own. A newspaper review of the work, says it well: “A simply brilliant book…beautifully crafted, funny, heart-breaking.”
If you like historical fiction, I strongly recommend the Aubrey-Maturin novels by Patrick O’Brian. They start with Master and Commander, and I can’t believe I’m the first to mention them.
If you like history, my favorite book is A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century by Barbara Tuchman. She explores the 14th century through the fascinating and well-documented life of an aristocrat named Enguerrand de Coucy.
Thanks - that’s good to know.
Aztec by Gary Jennings - A sprawling, epic novel of the Aztec Empire in its last decades, told by a peasant with a talent for languages who rises to become a diplomat for Montezuma just as the Spaniards arrive. Lots of fighting, sex, intrigue, human sacrifice, sex, diplomacy, trade, exploring, sex, more fighting, etc.
Founding Brothers by Joseph Ellis - A fascinating, well-written collection of essays about the Framers in their relationships with each other, as friends, allies, frenemies and enemies. Ellis earned his Pulitzer with this.
Alexander Hamilton and Washington: A Life by Ron Chernow - Excellent bios of two greats of the early republic.
I could go on, but I’ll stop there for now.