Random Non-Fiction Best Bets
Discover a curated list of the best random non-fiction books for your next great read. Explore top picks in fiction and betting genres to find your perfect match today!
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Isaac's Storm
by Erik Larson
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The riveting true story of the Galveston hurricane of 1900, still the deadliest natural disaster in American history—from the acclaimed author of The Devil in the White City “A gripping account ... fascinating to its core, and all the more compelling for being true.” —The New York Times Book Review September 8, 1900, began innocently in the seaside town of Galveston, Texas. Even Isaac Cline, resident meteorologist for the U.S. Weather Bureau failed to grasp the true meaning of the strange deep-sea swells and peculiar winds that greeted the city that morning. Mere hours later, Galveston found itself submerged in a monster hurricane that completely destroyed the town and killed over six thousand people—and Isaac Cline found himself the victim of a devastating personal tragedy. Using Cline's own telegrams, letters, and reports, the testimony of scores of survivors, and our latest understanding of the science of hurricanes, Erik Larson builds a chronicle of one man's heroic struggle and fatal miscalculation in the face of a storm of unimaginable magnitude.
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Ship of Gold in the Deep Blue Sea
by Gary Kinder
Chronicles the final voyage of the SS Central America, as it sank off the Carolina coast in 1857, and explains the recent technology used to recover the ship and the twenty-one tons of gold that sank with it.
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Easy Riders Raging Bulls
by Peter Biskind
Examines the impact upon Hollywood of the generation of filmmakers from the 1960s to the 1980s.
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My Dark Places
by James Ellroy
The internationally acclaimed author of the L.A. Quartet and The Underworld USA Trilogy presents another literary masterpiece, this time a true crime murder mystery about his own mother. In 1958 Jean Ellroy was murdered, her body dumped on a roadway in a seedy L.A. suburb. Her killer was never found, and the police dismissed her as a casualty of a cheap Saturday night. James Ellroy was ten when his mother died, and he spent the next thirty-six years running from her ghost and attempting to exorcize it through crime fiction. In 1994, Ellroy quit running. He went back to L.A., to find out the truth about his mother--and himself. In My Dark Places, our most uncompromising crime writer tells what happened when he teamed up with a brilliant homicide cop to investigate a murder that everyone else had forgotten--and reclaim the mother he had despised, desired, but never dared to love. What ensues is a epic of loss, fixation, and redemption, a memoir that is also a history of the American way of violence.
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Till Death Us Do Part
by Vincent Bugliosi
In the Palliko-Stockton trial, prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi offered a brilliant summation that synthesized for the jury the many inferences and shades of meaning in the testimony, fitting all the pieces together in a mosaic of guilt. But will the jury be persuaded?
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I'm the One that I Want
by Margaret Cho
In a humorous look at her own life, based on her one-woman Off-Broadway show, the popular comedian describes her childhood education, her teenage years on the comedy circuit, and her battles with weight and substance abuse.
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The Bluegrass Conspiracy
by Sally Denton
When Kentucky Blueblood Drew Thornton parachuted to his death in September 1985—carrying thousands in cash and 150 pounds of cocaine—the gruesome end of his startling life blew open a scandal that reached to the most secret circles of the U.S. government. The story of Thornton and “The Company” he served, and the lone heroic fight of State Policeman Ralph Ross against an international web of corruption is one of the most portentous tales of the 20th century.
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Bitter Blood
by Jerry Bledsoe
In this powerful and riveting tale of three families connected by marriage and murder, of obsessive love and bitter custody battles, Jerry Bledsoe recounts the shocking events that ultimately took nine lives... The first bodies found were those of a feisty millionaire widow and her beautiful daughter in their posh Louisville, Kentucky, home. Months later, another wealthy widow and her prominent son and daughter-in-law were found savagely slain in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Mystified police first suspected a professional in the bizarre gangland-style killings that shattered the quiet tranquility of two well-to-do southern communities. But soon a suspicion grew that turned their focus to family. The Sharps. The Newsoms. The Lynches. The only link between the three families was a beautiful and aristocratic young mother named Susie Sharp Newsom Lynch. Could this former child "princess" and fraternity sweetheart have committed such barbarous crimes? And what about her gun-loving first cousin and lover, Fritz Klenner, son of a nationally renowned doctor?
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Not Fade Away
by Ben Fong-Torres
Presents a collection of the Rolling Stone writer's interviews and profiles, with descriptions of how stories were assigned, and the fallout that ensued
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The Lost History of the Canine Race
by Mary E. Thurston
From the mysterious healing dogs of ancient Rome to the canine conquistadors who helped claim the New World to the American doggie paratroopers of WWII, dogs have been our best friends and helpers from the Pliocene to the present day. Anthropologist Mary Elizabeth Thurston draws on ancient artifacts, documents, and contemporary photographs to dramatize the evolution of the human-dog relationship throughout the ages. 16 pages of photos.
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An Underground Education
by Richard Zacks
The best kind of knowledge is uncommon knowledge. Okay, so maybe you know all the stuff you're supposed to know--that there are teenier things than atoms, that Remembrance of Things Past has something to do with a perfumed cookie, that the Monroe Doctrine means we get to take over small South American countries when we feel like it. But really, is this kind of knowledge going to make you the hit of the cocktail party, or the loser spending forty-five minutes examining the host's bookshelves? Wouldn't you rather learn things like how the invention of the bicycle affected the evolution of underwear? Or that the 1949 Nobel Prize for Medicine was awarded to a doctor who performed lobotomies with a household ice pick? Or how Catherine the Great really died? Or that heroin was sold over the counter not too long ago? For the truly well-rounded "intellectual," nothing fascinates so much as the subversive, the contrarian, the suppressed, and the bizarre. Richard Zacks, auto-didact extraordinaire, has unloosed his admittedly strange mind and astonishing research abilities upon the entire spectrum of human knowledge, ferreting out endlessly fascinating facts, stories, photos, and images guaranteed to make you laugh, gasp in wonder, and occasionally shudder at the depths of human depravity. The result of his labors is this fantastically illustrated quasi-encyclopedia that provides alternative takes on art, business, crime, science, medicine, sex (lots of that), and many other facets of human experience. Immensely entertaining, and arguably enlightening, An Underground Education is the only book that explains the birth of motion pictures using photos of naked baseball players. Richard Zacks is the author of History Laid Bare: Love, Sex and Perversity from the Ancient Etruscans to Warren G. Harding, which was excerpted in classy magazines like Harper's and earned the attention of the even classier New York Times, which noted that "Zacks specializes in the raunchy and perverse." The Georgia State Legislature voted on whether to ban the book from public libraries. He has studied Arabic, Greek, Latin, French, Italian, and Hebrew, and received the Phillips Classical Greek Award at the University of Michigan. He has also told his publisher that he made a living in Cairo cheating royalty from a certain Arab country at games of chance, although the claim remains unverified. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, The Atlantic Monthly, Time, Life, Sports Illustrated, The Village Voice, TV Guide, and similarly diverse publications. Zacks is married and busy warping the minds of his two children, Georgia and Ziegfield. He resides in New York City, and can be reached via e-mail at rzacks@echonyc.com.
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Hidden from History
by Martin Bauml Duberman
Winner of two Lambda Rising Awards This richly revealing anthology brings together for the first time the vital new scholarly studies now lifting the veil from the gay and lesbian past. Such notable researchers as John Boswell, Shari Benstock, Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, Jeffrey Weeks and John D’Emilio illuminate gay and lesbian life as it evolved in places as diverse as the Athens of Plato, Renaissance Italy, Victorian London, jazz Age Harlem, Revolutionary Russia, Nazi Germany, Castro’s Cuba, post-World War II San Francisco—and peoples as varied as South African black miners, American Indians, Chinese courtiers, Japanese samurai, English schoolboys and girls, and urban working women. Gender and sexuality, repression and resistance, deviance and acceptance, identity and community—all are given a context in this fascinating work. "A landmark of a book and a landmark of ideas that will shatter ignorance and delusion."—Catharine Stimpson, University Professor and Dean Emerita of the Graduate School of Arts and Science at New York University “Ground-breaking.”—Publishers Weekly “The juxtaposition of diverse perspectives and research crossing boundaries of race, gender, culture, and time encourages a lively dialogue. Highly recommended for history collections, and especially gay studies.”—Library Journal
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Hit and Run
by Nancy Griffin
Tells the story of Sony Corporation's failed attempt to enter the Hollywood scene by hiring Jon Peters and Peter Gruber, whose involvement with successful films had been minimal at best, to run its newly acquired Columbia Pictures in 1989.
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The Executioner's Song
by Norman Mailer
Re-creates the crime, trial and events leading to the execution of convicted murderer Gary Gilmore, who requested the death sentence.
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Under the Banner of Heaven
by Jon Krakauer
Traces the 1984 murder of a woman and her child by fundamentalist Mormons, exploring the belief systems and traditions that mark the faith's most extreme factions and what their practices reflect about the nature of religion in America.
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Lindbergh
by A. Scott Berg
Even after twenty years, A. Scott Berg’s Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Charles Lindberg remains “the definitive account” of one of the 20th century’s most extraordinary figures. Few American icons provoke more enduring fascination than Charles Lindbergh—renowned for his one-man transatlantic flight in 1927, remembered for the sorrow surrounding the kidnapping and death of his firstborn son in 1932, and reviled by many for his opposition to America's entry into World War II. Lindbergh's is “a dramatic and disturbing American story,” says the *Los Angeles Times Book Review, and this biography—the first to be written with unrestricted access to the Lindbergh archives and extensive interviews of his friends, colleagues, and close family members—is “a thorough, level-headed evaluation of the glories, tragedies, and often infuriating complexities of this extraordinary life” (Newsday).
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The Architect of Desire
by Suzannah Lessard
The story of Stanford White--his scandalous affair with the 16-year-old actress Evelyn Nesbit, his murder in 1906 by her husband, the millionaire Harry K. Thaw, and the hailstorm of publicity that surrounded "the trial of the century"--has proven irresistable to generations of novelists, historians, and biographers. The premier neoclassical architect of his day, White's legacy to the world were such masterpieces as New York's original Madison Square Garden, the Washington Square Arch, and the Players, Metropolitan, and Colony clubs. He was also responsible for the palaces of such clients as the Whitneys, Vanderbilts, and Pulitzers, the robber barons of the Gilded Age whose power and dominance shaped the nation in its heady ascent at the turn of the century. As the century rolled on, however, the story of Stanford White and Evelyn Nesbit came to be viewed as glamorous and romantic, the darker narrative of White's out-of-control sexual compulsion obscured by time. Indeed, White's wife Bessie and his son Larry remained adamantly silent about the matter for the duration of their lives, a silence that reverberated through the next four generations of their extended family. Suzannah Lessard is the eldest of Stanford White's great grandchildren. It was only in her 30's that she began to sense the parallels between the silence about her great-grandfather's life and the silence about her own perilous experience as a little girl in her own home. Thus she became drawn to the remarkable history of her family in order to uncover its hidden truths, and in so doing to liberate herself from its enclosure at last. The result is a multi-layered memoir of astonishing elegance and power, one that, like a great building, is illumined room by room, chapter by chapter, until the whole is clearly seen.
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The Seventy Wonders of the Modern World
by Neil Parkyn
Describes the history, usage, and architectural uniqueness of seventy structures from around the world, including places of worship, castles, skyscrapers, bridges, dams, and statues.
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Movie Awards
by Thomas O'Neil
Every year all of the best pictures jump into a derby where they jockey for a dozen gold trophies before reaching the finish line at the Academy Awards. Here, Tom O'Neil offers an inside scoop on the year-by-year winners and losers of these top races: Academy Awards; Golden Globe; New York Film Critics Circle; Los Angeles Film Critics; National Society of Film Critics; Screen Actors Guild; Directors Guild of America; Writers Guild of America; Producers Guild of America; Independent Spirit; Sundance Film Festival; and National Board of Review. Also includes facts, stats and photos.
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I Am the Central Park Jogger
by Trisha Meili
The center of the 1989 case recounts the discovery of her badly injured body, her treatment and rehabilitation, the trials of the suspects, and her subsequent experiences.
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Kate Remembered
by Andrew Scott Berg
Recounts the remarkable life of leading lady Katharine Hepburn, presenting a portrait of the four-time Academy Award winner through her intimate conversations and private reflections on love, family, friendship, and show business.