Name three nonfiction books you absolutely loved and would recommend.
Let’s Take the Long Way Home by Gail Caldwell
And the Band Played On by Randy Shilts
Cloister Walk by Kathleen Norris
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I can’t decide which one of these four books to delete to follow your instructions of three books, so I am just going rogue and giving you four titles–in no particular order. All were EXCELLENT.
“The Sisterhood: The Secret History of Women at the CIA,” by Liza Mundy
“The Plague Year: America in the Time of Covid,” by Lawrence Wright
"The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration, by Isabel Wilkerson
“The Devil at His Elbow: Alex Murdaugh and the Fall of a Southern Dynasty,” by Valerie Bauerlein
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The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
Unbroken
Killers of the Flower Moon
There are others too that I’ve liked.
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The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabelle Wilkerson is one of the best NF books I’ve ever read.
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, by Rebecca Skloot
More recently–
All the Beauty in the World by Patrick Bringley
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I can relate to the folks who said it was hard to limit my response to three!
I’m going to go with:
The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
Being Mortal
I’m going to give myself two extra credit books, too:
Rough Sleepers
Astoria (Highly recommended if you liked The Wager.)
In looking at my book list I’m kind of surprised I’ve slacked off on the NF. I’m going to need to change that…
I agree on The Warmth of Other Suns and Henrietta Lacks. But I want to add 3 more which might be cheating. Four Hundred Souls, Kendi. Rough Sleepers. Poverty by America, Desmond
Good to recall them.
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I’ve loved several of the ones already posted so I went in search of some that might not be so well known.
The Other Dr Gilmer (Gilmer)
Fire Weather (Vaillant)
Facing the Mountain (Brown)
The Library Book (Orlean)
anything by Patrick Radden Keefe or Erik Larson
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Boys in the Boat by Daniel James Brown
How We Learn to Be Brave by Bishop Mariann Budde
Devil in the White City by Erik Larson
Runners-Up: Notes From a Small Island & Walk in the Woods, both by Bill Bryson
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The Art Thief by Michael Finkel
Killers of the Flower Moon by David Grann
The Devil in the White City by Erik Larson
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In Cold Blood by Truman Capote; John Adams by David McCullough; Wild Swans by June Chang.
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The Message by Ta-Nehisi Coates. Such an excellent writer and this book is so beautiful. Also, it is short, in the form of a letter to his students, so a quick read for those of you who are fast readers (I’m not!).
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A Century of Fiction in The New Yorker 1925-2025
The Escape Artist: The Man Who Broke out of Auschwitz to Warn the World
The Money Kings: The Epic Story of the Jewish Immigrants Who Transformed Wall Street and Shaped Modern America
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I loved Sisterhood!!! It was fascinating.
The Art Thief was surreal…hard to believe it actually happened. The Grann book was fabulous too.
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The Library Book was so interesting.
All the Beauty in the World was a quiet and beautiful book.
Oh…there are so many as non-fiction is a favorite genre. Since a few of my favs have been mentioned, I won’t repeat them.
Madame Fourcade’s Secret War (Lynne Olson)
Eat the Buddha - Life and Death in A Tibetan Town (Barbara Demick)
The Six: The Untold Story of the First Women in Space (Loren Grush)
Free: Coming of Age at the End of History (Lea Ypi)
And two I continually come back to…
The Book of Joy (His Holiness the Dalai Lama and Archbishop Desmond Tutu)
Braiding Sweetgrass (Robin Wall-Kimmerer)
I read Demick’s Nothing to Envy many years ago and thought it was enlightening. There are parts of it I still think about today. I’ll have to pick up Eat the Buddha.
I am really looking forward to Demick’s new book Daughters of the Bamboo Grove. It was published at the end of May and is sitting on my Kindle.