I just finished reading James W. Loewen’s Lies Across America; What Our Historic Sites Get Wrong, and I loved it. It’s well-written, well-researched, and amusing.
I can’t wait to visit some of the places he talks about, just so I can say, “But I know what really happened!” Now, if only he’d write one about Canada…
I have his other book, Lies My Teacher Told Me on hold from the library. I hope it comes in soon.
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I was wondering how long it would be before “lorum ipsum dolor” turned up in a sig. I was even considering it myself. Drat.
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Thanks for the recommendation, I was jsut wondering what I might read next…
I mentioned it in another post (or two), but it was so good it bears repeating: best nf book I’ve read all year was “We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families” by Philip Gourevitch. It’s about the genocide in Rwanda, but it’s much more readable than the subject matter would indicate. It was one of the few books to actually make me cry. Everyone should read this, even if you’re not interested in politics or history.
Read “Lies My Teacher Told Me” - it was cool. Haven’t read the new one yet.
The best nonfiction book I’ve read all year is Beginning ATL 3 COM Programming, by Richard Grimes et al. (published by Wrox). There are just SOOOOOOO many gaps in the ATL documentation supplied by Microsoft that a book like this is indispensable.
I’d go with two utterly different books:
“Bobos in Paradise” by David Brooks, a hilarious but dead-on analysis of how modern America has managed to combine laissez-faire, cold-blooded capitalism with the fluffier values of the counterculture.
“Flags of Our Fathers” by James Bradley- a superb account of the battle of Iwo Jima, written by the son of one of the famed flag-raisers.
Debra J. Dickerson An American Story
The best illustration of why it’s not easy to succeed if you’re born into a poor family. Even if you do everything right (and she did - she never committed a crime, took drugs, became an alcoholic or became a single mother, and she always got top grades), it’s still a struggle to succeed if you’re born poor. No one gives you a break.
Between Silk and Cyanide by Leo Marks.
If you are interested in codes, cryptography, WWII, genius, or any subset thereof, I think you’ll love this book.
Marks himself was a self-taught code-maker/breaker who, at the advanced age of 23, became Britain’s top code maker in 1943, at the height of the Second World War. This book testifies that, in addition to his many other talents (poetry, playwright, codes, …), Marks is also one fine author.
I’ve read a bunch of great non-fiction this year. Here are some of the best:
Gig, edited by John Bowe - a series of short essays about people and their jobs. Some TMI (thank you, Mr. porno-hound UPS guy), but mostly fascinating.
Careless Love: The Unmaking of Elvis Presley, by Peter Guralnick - the second half of Guralnick’s biography of Elvis.
Isaac’s Storm, by Erik Larson - an account of the 1900 hurricane that devastated Galveston, Texas. The book focuses on the man who could have predicted the storm.
The Emperors of Chocolate, by Joel Glenn Brenner - a detailed history of the Mars and Hershey chocolate companies with lots of dirty secrets.
I agree. This book rocked.
I’ve written this before but it bears repeating. James Loewen is a talented writer and he presents an interesting viewpoint, but when reading his work keep in mind that he’s attempting to promote an ideological point of view. So read him with the same skeptical mind you’d use to read Rush Limbaugh or P.J. O’Rourke. One-sided propaganda can be well-written, entertaining, and even informative, but always remember that you should judge an non-fiction author both by what he says and what he doesn’t say.
Orchid thief: strange, entrancing stuff that fiction couldn’t match. It shames Hiassen et al; plant lore (tulips more valuable than gold, but don’t tell Coldy); renegade Seminoles; dingbat smugglers–it’s a purely wonderful trip for the mind. Almost made me want to slog through a swamp just to see an empheral white orchid.
Life and death of a Druid prince: human sacrifice preserved in the tannins of a peat bog; accessible–and moving–scholarship of the culture, history and humanity behind an ancient act of voluntary sacrifice.
It’s my party: exploration of conservatism, uneasy allegiance to the Republican party and reasons for belief. Much drier than O’Rourke, but…illuminating.
Can’t choose; these aren’t the best, just the most recently read.
Nonfiction rocks!
Veb
We Wish to Inform You That Tommorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families- Philip Gourevitch
(see woodstock)
From Dawn to Decadence 500 Years of Western Cultural History- Jacques Barzun
Intelligent, opinionated. Comprehensive but entertaining.
Quitting the Narobi Trio- Jim Knipfel
I guess this counts as non-fiction, 'cept for the hallucinations. The lighter side of psychotic breaks. (If anybody’s read his Slackjaw column…?)
The Battle for God- Karen Armstrong
All her book are great (see her previous History of God). An intelligent explaination of Why There Are Fundumentalists.
In a Sunburned Country, Bill Bryson. It’s not really possible to report on an entire country in 250 pages, but Bryson does a great job, particularly if you have some knowledge of the country beforehand. I’d be interested to hear what some real Aussies thought of it. This is the only book of his I have read, but I will now read more. He is funny!
The Leap, Tom Ashbrook. A well established 40 yr old reporter for the Boston Globe dumps it all for a ride on the .com rollercoaster. A good reporting of the realities of that world. Unlike, say, The New New Thing, which sucked.
Blue Fairways, a Route 1 Golf Odyssey, Charles Slack. For public course golfers, especially those on the Eastern Seaboard. Probably not of interest to anyone else.
“The back nine plunges into the jungle with the suddenness of a Disney ride, into a lush, dark, secretive world of mangrove swamps and ponds curving tantalizingly like lost lagoons. Moving from the ninth to the tenth holes is like putting down a volume of P.G. Wodehouse and picking up Heart of Darkness, all in one morning.”
Good stuff.
In a Sunburned Country by Bill Bryson; What comes across along with the humor is the love he has for Australia. Being Bill Bryson he is drawn to the eccentricities.
The best biography of the year is Careless Love by Peter Guralnek. I have been a fan of his since Lost Highways, and he does his usual excellent job.
My third choice is “The Rez” by Ian Frazer , which is about life on an Indian Reservation.
Keith
I finally got around to reading The Search for the Giant Squid by Richard Ellis. It was quite fascinating and a pretty good read, too.
Thanks Nemo. I’ve seen a few references on the board to Lies and it seems to be uncritically accepted as Truth. I read bits of it and thought: left-wing agitprop.
[digging toe in the sand and casually wondering if anyone has read that new biography of Anna Held . . . ]
[ul]
[li]Galileo’s Daughter: A Memoir of Science, Faith and Love, Dava Sobel[/li][li]Isaac’s Storm: A Man, a Time, and the Deadliest Hurricane in History, Erik Larson[/li][li]The Beak of the Finch: A Story of Evolution in Our Time, Jonathnan Weiner[/li][li]The Origins of Virtue: Human Instinct and the Evolution of Cooperation, Matt Ridley[/li][li]Phantoms in the Brain: Probing the Mysteries of the Human Mind, V.S. Ramachandran and Sandra Blakeslee[/li][li]At the Water’s Edge: Fish With Fingers, Whales With Legs, and How Life Came Ashore but Then Went Back to Sea, Carl Zimmer[/li][li]A Fish Caught in Time: The Search for the Coelacanth, Samantha Weinberg[/li][li]The Black Ship, Dudley Pope (an account of the 1797 mutiny aboard the HMS Hermione)[/li][li]A Clearing in the Distance: Frederick Law Olmsted and American in the Nineteenth Century, Witold Rybczynski[/li][li]The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference, Malcolm Gladwell[/li][li]The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary, Simon Winchester[/li][/ul]
Honorable mention to: Jonathan Weiner’s Time, Love, Memory: A Great Biologist and His Quest for the Origins of Behavior and Matt Ridley’s Genome: The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters.
Yeah, yeah, we’ve ALL read ANNA HELD AND THE BIRTH OF ZIEGFELD’S BROADWAY by Eve Golden, University Press of Kentucky, $27.50 at your local bookshop and if it isn’t beat your fists against the posts until they stock multiple copies, and we all agree that it is by FAR the finest work of non-fiction published in this or any other calendar year.
That said, I also kinda liked the following:
DO WHAT THOU WILT: A LIFE OF ALEISTER CROWLEY by Lawrence Suter (St. Martin’s)
CAN’T YOU HEAR ME CALLIN’: THE LIFE OF BILL MONROE, FATHER OF BLUEGRASS by Richard D. Smith (Little, Brown)
DISASTER AT THE POLE: THE TRAGEDY OF THE AIRSHIP ITALIA AND THE 1928 NOBILE EXPEDITION TO THE NORTH POLE by Wilbur Cross (Lyons Press)
And John Thorne’s new book of essays about food and cooking, POT ON THE FIRE (North Point)
[feeling only slightly mollified and wiping away tears of chagrin]
Well, OK . . . Now that MY book has been acknowledged . . . I also thought the new Oscar Wilde bio, “A Certain Genius,” by Barbara Belford, was excellent. It’s well-researched, well-balanced and very readable, DESPITE what that stick-up-her-ass bitch said about it in the NY Times.