Wow, this is tough. I'll have to think about it and come back.
#1 - Strangely, last night I was thinking about
The Discoverers and its companion, The Inventors (maybe that's the wrong title - it doesn't touchstone) but couldn't remember the author. I never read either one, but was intrigued by both. I haven't heard of either one of them in years - how odd that you should mention this today as one of your favorites. I'll have to try to track them down.
#8 jim53 I wonder if the touchstone is wrong for The Turning Point, since it comes up as fiction.
#9 sjmccreary What a coincidence! Hope you find
The Discoverers and enjoy it. I read one other of Daniel J. Boorstin's books, and it was good, but not as good.
#10 Good catch, CD1am, I wasn't paying attention when it created the links. I've changed it to the proper one, by Fritjof Capra. Thanks!
the Tipping Point by Malcom Gladwell
Any of the
Michael Holroyd biographies
All Eric Newby travel books
that's what springs to mind in the middle of the night, having been woken simultaneously by drunk guys in the street and the cat coughing!
Ten good ones:
A Gentle Madness, Nicholas Basbanes- People even crazier about books than I am.
The Origin of Wealth,
Eric Beinhocker- Economics gets an overhaul.
Parasite Rex, Carl Zimmer- Amazing strategies employed by parasites.
The Lucifer Principle, Howard Bloom- Rock band manager writes about science.
The Looming Tower,
Lawrence Wright- Events leading up to 9/11.
Radical Evolution,
Joel Garreau- Speculations on humanity's future.
Mobs, Messiahs, and Markets,
William Bonner and
Lila Rajiva- Funniest book ever on how to be skeptical of people who are sure they know how the world should be run.
Under the Banner of Heaven, Jon Krakuer- Fascinating look at the nature of faith and belief in an American religion, Mormonism.
The Making of the Atomic Bomb,
Richard Rhodes- Title says it all.
The World Without Us,
Alan Weisman- What might happen on Earth if all the humans disappeared.
Great question!
I would say some of my favorites are
Freakonomics,
The Tipping Point, The Holy Bible, and any memoir that makes me laugh...like
Trespassers Will Be Baptized.
I am currently reading an awesome biography on John Dillinger (which, for some reason, doesn't show up with a touchstone)
Yes, great question. Some of my favorites:
The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, by William Shirer
The Proud Tower, by Barbara Tuchman
Godel, Escher and Bach: The Eternal Golden Braid, by Douglas Hofstadter
The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt, by
Edmund MorrisEnduring Grace, by Carol Flinders
Team of Rivals, by Doris Kearns Goodwin
The Omnivore's Dilemma, by Michael Pollan
Nickel and Dimed, by Barbara Ehrenreich
Good to see so many old favorites on these lists -- and to hear there's good reason I've been keeping
The Discoverers around all these years, even if I haven't gotten to it yet ...
Some gems that haven't been mentioned yet:
The Song of the Dodo by David Quammen
One Art, the collected letters of Elizabeth Bishop
Other Powers by Barbara Goldsmith, a biography of the amazing Victoria Woodhull.
People who like
The Powers That Be might want to check out
The Paper by Richard Kluger, about the New York Herald Tribune. It's out of print, but available pretty cheap from amazon sellers or alibris. Or, if you're lucky, your local library.
Oh! Can't believe I forgot the Nicholas Basbanes books!
Anything written by Barbara Tuchman. She is both accurate & interesting. Theodore White, Jared Diamond, Sebastian Junger, Richard Rhodes, Oliver Sachs Gretel Ehrlich, there are many non-fiction writers whose works reads as smoothly as fiction.
A couple people have mentioned
A Gentle Madness, and that sounds like a very interesting book. But the title also reminded me of another book I really liked:
The Professor and the Madman.
Message edited by its author, Jul 27, 2008, 10:32pm.
#30 - Hessler is one of my favorite comtemporary writers. I read his
River Town:Two Years on the Yangtze some years ago and ever since have kept an eye out for his writing. I believe he has only recently moved back to the US from China, but thru the past few years his work about the ordinary lives and the rapid modernization of the Chinese were often in the "New Yorker." I believe they are available on line in the NYer archives - if you are interested in more of what he has done. Some great stuff.
I thought of another series of nonfiction books I've enjoyed. I haven't read all of them but I've read several of the yearly collections.
The Best American Science Writing and its rival The Best American Science and Nature Writing. I think they started in 2000. Both feature a guest editor for the year and some years there are a couple of pieces that appear in both. They are a collection of magazine length articles that appeared in print that year from a variety of sources. I always learn something from the them or am made to think about a subject in a different light. They're nice to have around because they don't need to be read in one sitting.
Beyond Civilization does sound interesting. My beloved local library doesn't have it, so now I am on a quest!
Hmm,
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek has to be near the top of the list for books I found wretchedly unreadable. And I tried, I really did. A dear friend gave it to me, thinking it was wonderful, and he kept asking what I thought of it, so I kept trying to slog through it, but reading even a single page made me want to fling it across the room. Matter of personal taste I suppose. I love nature as much as anyone, but I want to get out and experience it for myself, not put up with someone blathering on endlessly about it.
Definitely
In Cold Blood and
Kon Tiki, two from my youth that I remember as being terrific, engrossing and well-written. Is
The Moveable Feast considered nonfiction? If so, that's another favorite, as is Calvin Trillins'
Alice Let's Eat. Also
Team of Rivals,
Devil in the White City, and
Caesar, life of a Colossus, all read in the last couple of years. Oh, and
Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, another from my youth.
Ghost Map, which I also read recently, is another winner.
ETA
Stiff by Mary Roach, which I read last year and forgot to include on my list of favorites, though it was. Thanks to cgm707 at Msg. 61 for the reminder!
Message edited by its author, Sep 16, 2008, 12:50am.
Interesting. I read
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek after a 10 day long hiking trip in the Smoky Mountains with a group of friends. I had experienced a lot of solitude immediately prior to picking it up -- maybe that's what made it special...the timing. Anyway, I thought it was fantastic.
The Electric Universe by David Bodanis
London: the Biography sounds like a really interesting book. A couple months ago, when reading the mystery
Full dark House, I learned that prior to WWII, London had been the largest city in the world. I hadn't been aware of that. With all the fiction I read that is set in and around London, past and present, I definitely have to read this book.
Miracle in the Andes by Nando Parada, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote,The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls and I'm sure there are others...but those come to mind first.
karenmarie, if you liked
Longitude you may like Dava Sobel's other book:
Galileo's Daughter. She was a cloistered nun, and her letters to her father survived. Ms. Sobel uses them to construct a biography of Galileo. I loved it so much that I then read
Longitude.
Message edited by its author, Aug 23, 2008, 7:50am.
Memoirs of Glueckel of Hameln by Gluckel (1987).
ISBN: 0805205721
Publication: Schocken (1987), Paperback, 336 pages
or The Life of Gluckel of Hameln, 1646-1724, Written By Herself by Gluckel, Translated from the Original Yiddish and Edited By Beth-Zion Abrahams Segal (1963).
This is the amazing story of a Jewish businesswoman in Germany. You don't have to be a Jewish feminist to enjoy it (like Levy's rye bread)!.
#53 LynnB - it's sitting on my shelf L44 (Library, 4th bookshelf, 4th row) just waiting to be read. Unfortunately, I have soooo many books to read that it may take a while for me to get to it!
Thanks for reminding me about it, - I have been on an historical fiction binge and it might just fit in perfectly.
I loved
Longitude. A gem of a book. Did you like it?
karenmarie, I did like
Longitude. Dava Sobel can really bring stories like that to life.
I've enjoyed so many non-fiction books since the mid-1970s that it is difficult to list just a few, but here goes:
The Best and the Brightest by David Halberstam
American Slavery, American Freedom by Edmond S. Morgan
The Shape of European History by William H. McNeill
The Modern World System by Immanuel Wallerstein
Plagues and Peoples by Wm. H. McNeill
Germany and the Emigration by Mack Walker
The Lives of a Cell by Lewis Thomas
With Malice Toward None by Stephen B. Oates
All God's Dangers by Theodore Rosengarten
The Culture of Narcissism by Christopher Lasch
At the Edge of History by William Erwin Thompson
Fin-de-Siecle Vienna by Carl Schorske
The Feminization of American Culture by Ann Douglas
Goodbye Darkness by William Manchester
The American Monomyth by Robert Jewett and John Shelton Lawrence
No Place of Grace by T. J. Jackson Lears
The Germans by Gordon Craig
The Rising Sun by John Toland
Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman
Wisconsin Death Trip by Michael Lesy
Albion's Seed by David Hackett Fischer
All That is Solid Melts into Air by Marshall Berman
Celia: a Slave by Melton Alonza McLaurin
Twentieth Century Culture by Norman Cantor
Reinhold Niebuhr by Richard Wightman Fox
The Last Farmer by Howard Kohn
The Age of Extremes by Eric Hobsbawm
Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond
The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien
The Modern Mind by Peter Watson
Past Forgetting by Kay Summersby Morgan
Jesse James by T. J. Styles
Truman by David McCullough
Colossus by Niall Ferguson
The Coast of Dreams by Kevin Starr
The Courtier and the Heretic by Matthew Stewart
Postwar by Tony Judt
The Age of American Unreason by Susan Jacoby
Deutcher's trilogy on Trotsky:
Prophet Armed,
Prophet Unarmed,
Prophet Outcast. A compelling read about the Russian Revolution.
Guns, Germs and Steel Everybody ought to read this one, which basically describes the geographical basis of the cultural head start that led to Eurasian domination of the world.
The End of History and the Last Man Fukuyama develops a theory that Capitalism and Democracy are becoming ubiquitous because of certain characteristics inherent in the human soul. Much of his analysis derives from Hegel. Fukuyama is wrong, profoundly so, but his ideas are rich.
The Making of the Atomic Bomb Explains how it happened, and gives a real feeling for the personalities and motivation of many of the key participants.
1491 What the new world was like before Columbus.
Autobiography of Malcolm XThe Birth of the Modern: World Society 1815-1830 by Paul M. Johnson
1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus
Archaic Revival: Speculations on Psychedelic Mushrooms, the Amazon, Virtual Reality, UFOs, Evolution, Shamanism, the Rebirth of the Goddess, and the End of History
Acid Dreams: Complete Social History of LSD-The CIA, the 60s and Beyond
Capote by Gerald Clark
God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything
A Gradual Awakening by Stephen Levine
In the Absence of the Sacred: Failure of Technology & the Survival of the Indian Nations by Jerry Mander
Last Lion, The - Winston Churchill - Vol. 1: Visions of Glory 1874-1932
Last Lion, The - Winston Churchill - Vol. 2: Alone 1932-1940 both by William Manchester
Mary, Queen of Scots by Antonia Fraser
Memories, Dreams & Reflections by Carl Jung
A Mind of Its Own: A Cultural History of the Penis by David Friedman
Ordinary People as Monks and Mystics by Marsha Sinetar
Oscar Wilde by Richard Ellman
Practice of the Wild by Gary Snyder
The Prophet by Khalil Gibran
The Re-enchantment of Everyday Life by Thomas Moore
Stiff: The Curious Life of Human Cadavers - Mary Roach
Why is Sex Fun: The Evolution of Human Sexuality
Wow,
The Gulag Archipelago. I used to own that book. I thought it was one of those books that everybody bought when it first came out, but nobody read. I have to admit, I didn't.
And you are actually listing it as a favorite read. Again, wow.
CD1am,
Yes.
My favorite books are ones that make me think. Or move me. And that most certainly fits that bill.
One of the things that fascinates me is how in our day and age, with books like this available, how anyone can be an apologist for Communism? It truly leaves me gob smacked.
So, it is in the same vein that I would put "Schindler's List" on my all time list of favorite movies. Not a feel good movie, but one that I think every person should see. And I think the "The Gulag Archipelago" should be read.
By the way, I am looking to read the other two volumes if I ever find them.
Bill Masom
My top five:
A Walk in the Woods - Bill Bryson
Sex Lives of Cannibals - Troost
Alive - Piers Paul Read
The World Without Us - Alan Weisman
Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas- Hunter S. Thompson
Message edited by its author, Oct 24, 2008, 1:20pm.
I work for CPS so I read a lot of books about neglect, children, etc. and two of my recent favorites are The Boy Who was Raised As a Dog, and Walk on Water: Inside an Elite Pediatric Surgical Unit. The first book, by Bruce Perry, tells stories of how neglect and abuse shaped children developmentally, and the second, by Michael Ruhlman, gives an intimate inside view of cardiac surgery on newborns.
This message has been deleted by its author.
Probably Paul Theroux's Sunrise with Seamonsters - it hit a nerve in the 1980s for me. Plus good travelogues such as those that come from Polish writer Ryszard Kapuscinski and Irish writer Dervla Murphy - both are great travellers and social observers.
The Art of Burning Bridges by Geoffrey Wolff. OHara was perhaps the best writer of short stories America ever had. His stories, I think, give the truest, richest picture of American life at midcentury. Wolff did him justice.
London Perceived is the most understanding, vivid portrait I've ever read of a city and its people.
the Oxford Book of Literary Anecdotes and its newer successor are interesting as much for the interlocking lives as for the usual intriguing chaff of bookish talk. Someone you meet young in one anecdote is forever popping up later on in the background, older and wiser. A great source of material for my own book.
With Chatwin by Susannah Clapp. A riveting, ironic, surprising look at a varied and surprising life. (Clapp's book was another great source of material for A Book of Ages. Cheers to Ms. Clapp who enjoyed and endured Chatwin and brought all these stories home.)
I tend to read fiction, and lately YA, but these I would recommend:
Dewey: The Small-Town Library Cat Who Touched the World by Vicky Myron
The Girl in the Green Sweater: A Life in Holocaust's Shadow by Krystyna Chiger
Small Miracles of the Holocaust: Extraordinary Coincidences of Faith, Hope, and Survival by Yitta Halberstam
The Faith Club: A Muslim, A Christian, A Jew-Three Women Search for Understanding
Three Cups of Tea by Greg Mortenson
Free For All: Oddballs, Geeks, and Gangstas in the Public Library by Don Borchert
The books which remain stuck in one's mind after many years seem to be:
THE MAN WHO MISTOOK HIS WIFE FOR A HAT: and Other Clinical Tales by
Oliver Sacks which describes the almost unbelievable ways in which brain malfunctions can express themselves in otherwise healthy and sane individuals. It is almost a horror story.
THE LAST STEP: the American Ascent of K2 by
Rick Ridgeway describes the first American expedition to reach the top of the world's second highest mountain. The climb of K2 makes climbing Everest look like a tough Hike. It is probably the toughest 8,000+ meter climb in the world, and very few people have achieved it.
ENDURANCE: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage by Alfred Lansing is the story of an Antarctic Expedition which became a struggle for survival on the frozen sea. It is all but unbelievable that everyone survived.
THE FORGOTTEN SOLDIER by
Guy Sajer is the story of a young man from Alsace drafted into the German Army to fight in Russia.
COMING INTO THE COUNTRY by John McPhee is the story of a remote town in Alaska near the Yukon Territory and the people who chose to live there. The title refers to the expression used by them, as in; "When did you 'come into the country'?".
THE WINTER SOLDIERS by
Richard M. Ketchum is the story of the the American War for Independence told better than I have heard it anywhere else. The title refers to the sentence in Tom Paine's 'THE AMERICAN CRISIS' ; "The Summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of his country.... Tyranny, like Hell, is not easily conquered...". This was written after the American Army was defeated at the Battle of New York and lost 80% of the soldiers, 150 cannon, 12,000 artillery rounds, 6,000 muskets & 400,000 rifle loads, plus all tents and camp equipment, the worst defeat of the war.
Few people know that the Prime Minister of Great Britain during World War II,
Winston S. Churchill would have been known as a great, and popular, Historian even if he had not been the 'Last Lion', roaring defiance at Adolf Hitler. Two of his works come to mind: MARLBORO, His Life and Times and
THE SECOND WORLD WAR. Both are well written and enjoyable.
DAY OF TRINITY by
Lansing Lamont is the story of the development of the first Atomic Bomb.
The best memoirs written by an American President are considered to be those of President Grant. It is the inside story of how the Civil War was won on the battlefield.
One of the best of the multi-volume works about the War for Southern Independence is
THE CIVIL WAR BY Shelby Foote.
Another work which appeals to me is
ONE DAY AT KITTY HAWK by
John E. Walsh, in which two bicycle mechanics to devise something which the finest scientific and engineering minds in the world had failed to achieve; the Airfoil, which permits Lift to greatly exceed Drag in aircraft wings and propellers.
Parallel Lives by Phyllis Rose is a nice series of profiles of Victorian literary marriages -- the happiest, naturally, being the highly uncoventional nonmarriage of George Eliot.
#84 I'll have to add Parallell Lives to my list to be read.
Speak, Memory, by
Nabokov. (Original, and much better title,
Conclusive Evidence.)
Nabokov is the master of language, and of insight. The pacing is impeccable, and each chapter takes us to extraordinary and unexpected places.
I never wanted it to end.
Message edited by its author, May 10, 2009, 3:18pm.
Can anyone comment on Orlando Figges? I" ve been dying to read Natasha's Dances for a while now.
the devil in the white city by erik larson.
i like my non fiction to be as entertaining as fiction.
freakonomics also very entertaining.
I actually liked the movie Jarhead more than I liked the book.. though the book was engrossing. I felt that the movie was heir apparent to Apocalypse Now
I've recently finished Chasing the Flame: One Man's Fight to Save the World by
Samantha Power. What an amazing book: a great writer and a fascinating subject.
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