Readable Nonfiction

[rollhead]

I read mostly nonfiction, but I have a hard time finding readable stuff, especially in history and biography.

Much of what passes for "award winning" nonfiction, it seems, tries to be "definitive" rather than working to be engaging, interesting and readable.

Do people have any real "page turners" in the non-fiction category?

On my short list of books to read is Jonathan Harr's book about the missing Caravaggio, which I understand is a riveting book.

[Tom Storer]

Maybe you're already familiar with it, but Taylor Branch's trilogy that documents the Civil Rights movement from 1954 through 1968 is wonderfully written. He manages to take an immense amount of history and context and weave the multiple threads together without the reader losing focus. I find them to be real page-turners as well as excellent contemporary history.

The trilogy, published by Simon & Schuster, is collectively called "America in the King Years" and the three volumes are:

- Parting the Waters (1954-63)
- Pillars of Fire (1963-65)
- At Canaan's Edge (1965-68)

[Pete C]

Good literary nonfiction is one of my favorite "genres". I don't have time right now for a list, but off the top of my head, anything by Jonathan Spence in the history department, as well as Kapusczinski's The Emperor,

[frank m]

For a book about the American revolution which is considerably different and eminently readable try "Rebels and Redcoats" by some author I forget and can't find the book at the moment. For Roman history, (somewhat suspect historically by historians who can't stand anyone having a good time) try Suetonius. Some parts had me rotflmao, And for a monumental book about the Roman, try Gibbon. Quite readable, glowing prose, and very funny indeed. For more modern stuff, anything by David McCullough (sp?)

[rollhead]

Thanks, all.

I've mentioned this book several times before, but thought I would do it again:

[Gentle Giant]

There are Lincoln biographies featuring more original scholarship, but Stephen B. Oates can write rings around any of them. (Disclaimer: I took two courses with Oates at UMass, but he is a brilliant writer.)

[Gentle Giant]

I love recommending this (if you loved the TV series, it's a no-brainer):

[rollhead]

Yea... I am interested in that one. David Simon does "The Wire" HBO series and he is a former cop-beat reporter for the Baltimore Sun.

I use to cover cops, myself, and my dad was a homicide detective for 16 years, so I am sure I would love that book.

[rollhead]

I might start with this Jonathan Spence book.

[rollhead]

Originally Posted by Tom Storer

Maybe you're already familiar with it, but Taylor Branch's trilogy that documents the Civil Rights movement from 1954 through 1968 is wonderfully written. He manages to take an immense amount of history and context and weave the multiple threads together without the reader losing focus. I find them to be real page-turners as well as excellent contemporary history.

The trilogy, published by Simon & Schuster, is collectively called "America in the King Years" and the three volumes are:

- Parting the Waters (1954-63)
- Pillars of Fire (1963-65)
- At Canaan's Edge (1965-68)

I do have Parting the Waters sitting on my shelf. I need to get it down and dust it off. Thanks for the nudge.

[blawless]

Maybe not history or biography in the sense you mean, but the work of John McPhee has elements of both and for me is always totally compelling and mind-blowing, whether he's writing about North American geology or the origins or the orange in Florida or U.S. transport systems. He has a brain like a swarm of locusts, totally devouring everything in his path, item by item, seemingly dismantling things at an almost microscopic level. And then you step back to take in the big view and go, "Whoa! How did he do that?" Too late, as soon as you say that he's already a thousand miles ahead of you again. Jerk.

[hornplayer]

I'm liking "Jefferson's Pillow" by Roger Wilkins.

[Monte Smith]

I really enjoyed Paul Berman's Power and the Idealists from last year. It looks at the generation of 1968 in the European Left, concentrating on former German foreign minister Joschka Fischer, Franco-German activist Daniel Cohn-Bendit, and the French founder of Medicins sans frontiers, Dr. Bernard Kouchner. It's an interesting story as young idealists acquire power and confront some of the contradictions and flaws of their ideologies and begin to be shaped by realities they might not have imagined when they were on the streets throwing petrol bombs and the like. The emergence of the idea of humanitarian intervention (bombs for a cause) is the relevent big idea here.

[Scott Dolan]

9/11 Commission Report.

[Scott Dolan]

Friedmans The World Is Flat if you're looking for something lite.

[blawless]

9/11 Commission Report.

I was in grad school and gave up an afternoon of porn site browsing the day the Starr report came out. It was released online simultaneously by a lot of news organizations, although most of the sites were overwhelmed by bored and horny layabouts like myself and you really had to search for a link that worked. But a great payoff, kind of the 90s as a whole.

[Brian Olewnick]

I'd second McPhee but I bet rollie's already read a bunch.

I recently finished Vollmann's massive (even in abridged form) "Rising Up and Rising Down". The last third, consisting of first-hand reporting from Thailand, Bosnia, Jamaica, etc. was excellent. The rest, meh.

[Surfer]

Ive always been fascinated by conspiracy theorists ever since reading Crying Of Lot 49 way back when.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/092...books&n=283155

[rollhead]

Originally Posted by Brian Olewnick

I'd second McPhee but I bet rollie's already read a bunch.

I recently finished Vollmann's massive (even in abridged form) "Rising Up and Rising Down". The last third, consisting of first-hand reporting from Thailand, Bosnia, Jamaica, etc. was excellent. The rest, meh.

I went on a McPhee kick years ago, reading "Levels of the Game," "A Sense of Where You Are," and one or two others.

I got bogged down in his great geology tomes, but I know I need to return to him at some point.

Anyone have any "must read" McPhee that he has done in the past 20 years or so?

I did buy his latest, Founding Fish, a book on Shad. But I haven't read it yet. Perhaps because I went through Mark Kurlansky's book on Cod a couple of years ago. Not quite ready for another whole book on one species of fish.

[Douglas]

If you have any interest in Russia during the twentieth century I'd strongly recommend Catherine Merridale's Night of Stone.

[blawless]

Anyone have any "must read" McPhee that he has done in the past 20 years or so?

You're probably hep to this, but he's got an excellent ongoing series in the New Yorker right now on transportation systems (two articles so far on trucking, one on coal trains, one on UPS shipping) that I'm sure will be a book pretty soon.

[rollhead]

I've seen a couple of them. They look great.

Another guy who reminds me of McPhee is William Langewiesche, who writes for The Atlantic. I read his article about how India has taken on the breakdown of big ships. It was fascinating how they do it.

There was a piece on the story on NPR today:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/s...toryId=5220820

And he has included it in a larger book, "The Outlaw Sea."

[blawless]

Hey, I heard that too, and I read The Outlaw Sea last year. Pretty good, but ultimately putdownable--it seemed to whirlpool into repetition after a while. He's been on a millennial roll, it seems like, with some big pieces in the Atlantic over the past couple of years on the excavation and forensics at the WTC site (over three issues, I think, then turned into a book) and what it's like in the Green Zone.

[rollhead]

Originally Posted by blawless

Hey, I heard that too, and I read The Outlaw Sea last year. Pretty good, but ultimately putdownable--it seemed to whirlpool into repetition after a while. He's been on a millennial roll, it seems like, with some big pieces in the Atlantic over the past couple of years on the excavation and forensics at the WTC site (over three issues, I think, then turned into a book) and what it's like in the Green Zone.

I think that's why I haven't bought the book already, thinking that The Outlaw Sea would be just a steroid-pumped up version of his excellent Atlantic piece.

[Joe Milazzo]

http://tinyurl.com/a5hjc


http://tinyurl.com/7rwef


http://tinyurl.com/9c4cq

[rollhead]

Wallace Stegner is one of my all-time favorite writers. Thanks for the recommendation.

Hey, Joe, by the way -- in your adventures around Dallas have you ever run into a guitar player named Milo Deering?

http://www.milodeeringmusic.com/index02.html

I grew up with him in Little Rock, AR.

[Paul B]

You're probably hep to this, but he's got an excellent ongoing series in the New Yorker right now on transportation systems (two articles so far on trucking, one on coal trains, one on UPS shipping) that I'm sure will be a book pretty soon.

Yes, McPhee's new book is due out later this year.

I never tire of him. I've probably read about three-quarters of his 28-odd books. To me, he is the master of the genre. Rollhead, "The Founding Fish" is well worth your time. As with all McPhee, it's not the subject so much as how he deals with it.

Langewiesche is also fantastic, though he's an entirely different writer. "Outlaw Sea" was a great read, the kind of book you just can't put down. His stories for the Atlantic are as good as it gets these days.

Bye-ya

[Gary Sisco]

I read mainly nonfiction because there aren't many fiction writers that impress me all that much, not necessarily because of their skills but more often because of the subject matter, which is too often too personalized for my tastes. Tiny little focusses on tiny little lives, too often. It bores me.

But hell, there's plenty of great, readable and even stylish nonfiction out there.

Try McPherson's *Battle Cry of Freedom,* for one.

And you might not believe it but Grant's memoirs are wonderful reading, and even more amazing when you remember that he churned it out in weeks while dying because broke and didn't want to leave his family penniless. It's the only presidential memoir that's been continuously in print since publication (and there's a good reason why, talk about unreadable nonfiction, well, non imaginary fiction anyway), even though no one wanted to print it at the time. Mark Twain got it into print, and it's been in print ever since.

[Dr Dave]

McPhee is the shit. "The John McPhee Reader" is not a bad place for the uninitiated to begin.

James Gleick is good, too. "Chaos" is an excellent introduction to fractal geometry and other cool stuff.

Michael Lewis is good. Not all his stuff stands the test of time--"The New New Thing" seems almost comically dated now--but he does good research and has a clear, unobtrusive style.

[Pedantic Wretch]

Few historians are as concise, comprehensive and readable as Hobsbawm:

However, avoid the above book if you're likely to be offended by remarks such as 'the anti-liberalism of the Nazis had the positive side that it did not commit them to an a priori belief in the free market'. A sardonic account of the century from a disillusioned old man who lived through most of it, concluding a quartet of books of which the first three were Age of Revolution (1962), Age of Capital (1975), and Age of Empire (1987). Widely regarded as one of Britain's best historians, even by the establishment press, who are prepared to overlook his communist sympathies. Still going at the age of 88.