These are a few of my favorite things in nonfiction . . .
Vincent Bugliosi: Helter Skelter (1974); And the Sea Will Tell (1991). Helter got me addicted to true crime for years until I went to rehab. Accounts of real psychopaths never get old. Hannibal Lecter is a clownish poseur compared to Manson, Bundy, Gacy and the boys. Sea Will Tell shows how a lawyer builds a case from scratch, if you ever wanted to know.
Gerald Durrell: My Family and Other Animals (1956). English family packs up and moves to Greek island of Corfu (which I can't really fault them for). Kid turns house into zoo when he drags in half the animal kingdom kicking, grunting, and squawking.
Tete-Michel Kpomassie: An African in Greenland (1981). Little boy in Togo reads book about Greenland and it becomes his life's dream to go there and live in an igloo and eat seal intestines with the Inuit, which he eventually does when he grows up. The ultimate clash of cultures.
Colin Turnbull: The Forest People (1961). Ethnography of Pygmies in the Belgian Congo. They are as weird as you think, which makes good reading.
David Sedaris: Naked (1997); Holidays on Ice (1997); Me Talk Pretty One Day (2000); Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim (2004); When You Are Engulfed in Flames (2008). Because they are not as *humorous* as they think they are I generally don't read humorists. They might be wry or sardonic, even witty, but are rarely out-and-out funny. Except for DS. Each noted book is a collection of autobiographical essays. At his best when he self-deprecates, which is often, DS is one of that very tiny group of authors (whose members I could count on one hand with a couple of fingers amputated) who can make me giggle like a twit. Every jocular observation and quip, casually sprinkled among his accounts of life's mundanities, is delivered deadpan and right on target. I just don't think prose gets any funnier than the final chapter of Naked, where DS spends a revealing week at a nudist colony.
Chuck Yeager: Yeager: An Autobiography (1986). Required some deft co-writing from Leo Janos since CY is as hick as possum stew. WWII chapters are good as he buzzes around in a P-51 Mustang but better is the saga of supersonic flight. CY, bolted into the X-1 which was rocket-powered and had no ejection seat, didn't know ahead if he would be reduced to atoms when he broke the sound barrier. He may not be able to conjugate verbs on his own but he's got guts to spare.
Francis Chichester: The Lonely Sea and Sky (1964). Autobio of globe-trotting biplane pioneer in the 1920s and -30s, navigating by sextant from his open cockpit as he finds breaks in the clouds. As good as Yeager for vicarious flyboys and armchair adrenaline junkies.
Hirō Onoda: No Surrender: My Thirty-Year War (1974). WWII soldier finally emerges from the Philippine jungle in 1974 and contradicts his book's title by giving up the fight. During his time in hiding he never believed the leaflets dropped from planes announcing the end of the war, nor his own brother and sister who told him the same bloody thing over loudspeakers, nor the countless radio broadcasts from various places around the world (including Japan), nor a fellow countryman who actually trekked into Lubang Island's forested mountains to inform him in person. It was all just propaganda, he figured. No, Onoda-san wasn't a nut, he was a Japanese soldier with orders (there is a difference) which were to hold down the fort indefinitely. Hai!
Fania Fénelon (Goldstein): Playing For Time (1976). She lived through Auschwitz because she was an "orchestra girl" performing music for the Nazis. Was highly motivated to play in tune every time.
Filip Müller: Eyewitness Auschwitz: Three Years in the Gas Chambers (1979). One of a handful of Sonderkommando (Special Worker Unit) to survive Birkenau, Auschwitz's death factory. The Sonderkommando were the guys who pried gold teeth from freshly gassed fellow Jews and who pushed the corpses into the ovens with pitchforks. For real. Birkenau made Dante's Inferno, and every other imagined version of Hell, look like Club Med. Read this and believe it.
Corrie ten Boom: The Hiding Place (1971). Not only did she conceal Jews in her Haarlem house during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands, she even cooked kosher meals for them and never charged rent, putting a new spin on the term "Dutch treat." Oy vey, I should have it this good! A Christian who walked the walk when it came to loving her neighbor. She got ratted out, though, and was whisked off to a concentration camp. All the shallow, self-absorbed, snotty little adolescents of the world should read this during their formative years and give themselves an even chance at evolving into real humans.
Tom Brown, Jr.: The Tracker (1978). To connect with nature he goes into the wild, usually without food and often naked (learning early on to avoid poison ivy and stinging nettles). New Agey but not in an entirely obnoxious way. Educational, too, if you ever need to identify critters by the prints they leave in mud or by the shape of their feces.
Matthew, Mark, Luke, John: The Four Gospels (50-70 A.D. or so). No, they're not the Hebrew Beatles but scribes of parallel narratives featuring a strong, likable protagonist and riveting conflicts. The tone is somewhat preachy and the villain is your basic Voldemort clone but suspense builds steadily throughout, culminating in a gripping courtroom drama. SPOILER ALERT: Hero dies but returns for denouement cameo - a contrivance, granted, but not an unwelcome one for most readers, who tend to be heavily invested. Recommended for sinners of all ages. Evidently, the authors settled for a payment of dried fish up front instead of a percentage of the post-publication profits, which would have proved more lucrative over time.
Gerald Durrell: My Family and Other Animals (1956). English family packs up and moves to Greek island of Corfu (which I can't really fault them for). Kid turns house into zoo when he drags in half the animal kingdom kicking, grunting, and squawking.
Tete-Michel Kpomassie: An African in Greenland (1981). Little boy in Togo reads book about Greenland and it becomes his life's dream to go there and live in an igloo and eat seal intestines with the Inuit, which he eventually does when he grows up. The ultimate clash of cultures.
Colin Turnbull: The Forest People (1961). Ethnography of Pygmies in the Belgian Congo. They are as weird as you think, which makes good reading.
David Sedaris: Naked (1997); Holidays on Ice (1997); Me Talk Pretty One Day (2000); Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim (2004); When You Are Engulfed in Flames (2008). Because they are not as *humorous* as they think they are I generally don't read humorists. They might be wry or sardonic, even witty, but are rarely out-and-out funny. Except for DS. Each noted book is a collection of autobiographical essays. At his best when he self-deprecates, which is often, DS is one of that very tiny group of authors (whose members I could count on one hand with a couple of fingers amputated) who can make me giggle like a twit. Every jocular observation and quip, casually sprinkled among his accounts of life's mundanities, is delivered deadpan and right on target. I just don't think prose gets any funnier than the final chapter of Naked, where DS spends a revealing week at a nudist colony.
Chuck Yeager: Yeager: An Autobiography (1986). Required some deft co-writing from Leo Janos since CY is as hick as possum stew. WWII chapters are good as he buzzes around in a P-51 Mustang but better is the saga of supersonic flight. CY, bolted into the X-1 which was rocket-powered and had no ejection seat, didn't know ahead if he would be reduced to atoms when he broke the sound barrier. He may not be able to conjugate verbs on his own but he's got guts to spare.
Francis Chichester: The Lonely Sea and Sky (1964). Autobio of globe-trotting biplane pioneer in the 1920s and -30s, navigating by sextant from his open cockpit as he finds breaks in the clouds. As good as Yeager for vicarious flyboys and armchair adrenaline junkies.
Hirō Onoda: No Surrender: My Thirty-Year War (1974). WWII soldier finally emerges from the Philippine jungle in 1974 and contradicts his book's title by giving up the fight. During his time in hiding he never believed the leaflets dropped from planes announcing the end of the war, nor his own brother and sister who told him the same bloody thing over loudspeakers, nor the countless radio broadcasts from various places around the world (including Japan), nor a fellow countryman who actually trekked into Lubang Island's forested mountains to inform him in person. It was all just propaganda, he figured. No, Onoda-san wasn't a nut, he was a Japanese soldier with orders (there is a difference) which were to hold down the fort indefinitely. Hai!
Fania Fénelon (Goldstein): Playing For Time (1976). She lived through Auschwitz because she was an "orchestra girl" performing music for the Nazis. Was highly motivated to play in tune every time.
Filip Müller: Eyewitness Auschwitz: Three Years in the Gas Chambers (1979). One of a handful of Sonderkommando (Special Worker Unit) to survive Birkenau, Auschwitz's death factory. The Sonderkommando were the guys who pried gold teeth from freshly gassed fellow Jews and who pushed the corpses into the ovens with pitchforks. For real. Birkenau made Dante's Inferno, and every other imagined version of Hell, look like Club Med. Read this and believe it.
Corrie ten Boom: The Hiding Place (1971). Not only did she conceal Jews in her Haarlem house during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands, she even cooked kosher meals for them and never charged rent, putting a new spin on the term "Dutch treat." Oy vey, I should have it this good! A Christian who walked the walk when it came to loving her neighbor. She got ratted out, though, and was whisked off to a concentration camp. All the shallow, self-absorbed, snotty little adolescents of the world should read this during their formative years and give themselves an even chance at evolving into real humans.
Tom Brown, Jr.: The Tracker (1978). To connect with nature he goes into the wild, usually without food and often naked (learning early on to avoid poison ivy and stinging nettles). New Agey but not in an entirely obnoxious way. Educational, too, if you ever need to identify critters by the prints they leave in mud or by the shape of their feces.
Matthew, Mark, Luke, John: The Four Gospels (50-70 A.D. or so). No, they're not the Hebrew Beatles but scribes of parallel narratives featuring a strong, likable protagonist and riveting conflicts. The tone is somewhat preachy and the villain is your basic Voldemort clone but suspense builds steadily throughout, culminating in a gripping courtroom drama. SPOILER ALERT: Hero dies but returns for denouement cameo - a contrivance, granted, but not an unwelcome one for most readers, who tend to be heavily invested. Recommended for sinners of all ages. Evidently, the authors settled for a payment of dried fish up front instead of a percentage of the post-publication profits, which would have proved more lucrative over time.
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