One of the best non-fiction I’ve read in the last few years is The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver. It is excellent…especially if you like to read about the data points, and relevance of them. It’s really a great read.
Science: I loved the book “The Coming Plague” by Laurie Garrett.
My H loved that too. ^^^^
Did anyone mention “Endurance: Shackleton’s Incredible Voyage” by Alfred Lansing? I listened to it on audio. Riveting.
I read someone mentioned “Into Thin Air”. Very good. Another good mountaineering book is “Touching the Void”.
I enjoyed Stephen Ambrose’s “Undaunted Courage”.
"The Six Wives of Henry VIII"and “The Life of Elizabeth I”, both by Alison Weir.
I loved Sex in History by Reay Tannahill. She covers the entire history of sex for the whole world which is saying something! I would get the latest edition (1982?) where she included an afterword about AIDS. (Otherwise, it ended during what I call the Golden Age of Sex - cheap and safe contraceptives, no more STDs thanks to penicillin, and no AIDS yet). Did you know that the century after the invention of the chimney was known as the century of bastards because it made privacy, and therefore infidelity, easier?
I could not make it through The Signal & the Noise. I love Nate Silver’s political website (and now podcast), but got bogged down halfway through the book.
Romani, if you haven’t read it yet, “The Hot Zone” will keep you up at night. 
Ok @intparent you win this round. I just went and read the description and within about 30 seconds, I found myself downloading it.
Beginning it now to test your theory about it keeping me up. For science, of course 
The only filters I’m using are “non-fiction” and “general-audience good reading”, so I’m not sure if all of these would be up your alley.
Several of mine have already been mentioned: Steve Jobs (Isaacson), Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded, Seabiscuit, Guns Germs & Steel, Into Thin Air (almost literally couldn’t put down).
Two public-health type books:
The Demon Under the Microscope, Thomas Hager
The Great Influenza, John M. Barry
Another one which sprang to mind:
All the Devils Are Here, Bethany McLean & Joe Nocera, about the financial crisis of 08-09.
“The Hot Zone” is amazing! It is both engrossing and terrifying.
Those first chapters where Monet gets sick and then RIDES ON AN AIRPLANE…horrifying.
Richard Evans’ trilogy on Nazi Germany.
- The Coming of the Third Reich - very relevant history of how a cultured nation descended into chaos and bring forth a murderous regime into power through the ballot box.
- The Third Reich in Power - how the Nazis used its power to govern and prepare the population for the coming war.
- The Third Reich at War - how the Third Reich implemented its racial policies in the East and other ways of mobilizing the nation during the war until the bitter end.
Nixonland, the Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America by Rick Perlstein
Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader: North Korea and the Kim Dynasty by Bradley K. Martin
A Time of Gifts by Patrick Leigh Fermor
The Guns of August by Barbara Tuchman
I made it through the first chapter of Hot Zone last night. I couldn’t put it down (though did manage to sleep! :p) I forwarded it to a few of my public health friends.
It’s absolutely fascinating. My skin crawled at several of the descriptions but so interesting! (Although I admit as a fierce animal advocate and someone who is against animal testing except in the most extreme circumstances- many of the descriptions about what happened to the monkeys made me very, very sad.)
romanigypsyeyes,
Brom in #60 is right. Mezrich has had two books that I know of turned into movies (1) the accidental billionaires and (2) BDH which was a Kevin Spacey movie.
Give Mezrich credit.
He knows how to pick a good topic.
I was totally engrossed in Straight Flush but it wandered at the end, like I said, as if Mezrich got bored or was rushing. I was so into the book and topic I did some internet research and discovered all the cheating stuff that brought down the company so when I got the latter quarter of the book I was ready for it and I found myself totally agreeing with all the negative comments I had read about Mezrich on poker and gambling related blogs where they are ripping him a new one for his shoddy research and calling him and out and out liar for his portrayal of events.
Mezrich is guilty as charged, IMHO.
Not only is the story of how 6 college beer drinking, skirt chasing frat guys created a billionaire dollar business in the blink of an eye amazing but how they cheated, at least the founder did, and how they got caught cheating by the their customers doing research and blogging about it. It is simply amazing they were able to piece together the truth. It isn’t like the cops were going to help them.
So, Mezrich’s portrayal of these guys as heroes, clearly so that he get another movie deal, is disgusting to me. Otherwise, I love the way he writes. He creates drama. It was a true page turner.
Some really good books mentioned, here are some of my recent readings/suggestions
Erik Larsen- In the Garden of Beasts (about the US ambassador at the time of the rise of Adolph Hitler, has a lot about how Hitler was basically enabled by the west, despite reports he and others were sending back about the regime). Dead Wake is about the Lusitania sinking, and it clears up a lot of misperceptions, and just how the whole thing was a classic example of a seeming series of weird events leading to a tragedy (that also openly wonders whether the UK admirality wasn’t setting up a scenario like the Lusitania to get the US into WWI).
William Manchester “The Last Lion” books, about Churchill. I just finally got around to reading the 3rd book, which was finished by another author because Manchester was too old and sick to finish it. I just finished reading the 3rd volume, that covers from the time Churchill became PM in 1940 until his death (most of it is about WWII, and the immediate post war period). It shares the tone of the other 2 books, if the writing is a bit different, and like the other books it paints a pretty detailed portrail, both good and bad, of who Churchill was, without diminishing his importance. If anything, it also paints a picture of other people from that era that is a lot more balanced, for example FDR and his many lacks of foresight, or that neither Marshall nor Eisenhower were particularly great military leaders in their vision of things, or that FDR in many ways treated Churchill with disdain,which given that England kept Hitler at bay for 2 years almost single handedly, was pretty childish (and also foolishly believed that Stalin could be trusted, while also detailing just how much of the burden Russia took in WWII). Long books, not light reading, but worth it.
For goofy history (as I like to call it), try Mark Kurlansky “Cod: A History”, and “The Big Oyster” and his book about the Basque people. Stewart Lee Allan is similar, “The Devil’s Cup” is about the history of coffee, and “In the Devil’s Garden” is a history of food taboos ( for example, how the church fathers who banned tomato sauce for being ‘too sensuous’ and thus would provoke lust, weren’t mobbed by Italians I don’t know, tomato sauce is a lot more scared than the church:).
“Downtown” by Pete Hamill, which is a story/memoir of what he defines as downtown Manhattan through NYC history. Pete Hamill is one of a dying breed, a native NYC ite and reporter, and it is both personal memoir and history.
“Damon Runyon” by Jimmy Breslin. Another old time NYC ite, Breslin’s bio of Runyon , a transplanted NY’er who as a newspaperman and short story writer became associated with the city (if you ever saw the musical or movie “Guys and Dolls”, it was based on several of his short stories, which I highly recommend, I am probably the only person my age who even knows of Runyon and his stories of NYC in the 1920’s and 30’s, they were my bedtime stories growing up). Not just a good bio, but it also brings a newspaperman’s eye to the city of the times, what the society was like, and being Breslin it doesn’t leave out the real people of the city Runyon was writing about, including those usually left out, so it is a social history as much as a bio.
'Musicophilia" by Oliver Sachs, which like most of his books, shows the incredible complexity (and weirdness) of the human mind, in this case dealing with music.
“Truman” by David McCullough, if you can deal with a huge tome (very interesting, though). “Random Family” by Adrian Nicole Leblanc, about the Bronx (NY) - great writing and compelling story but depressing. “Our Crowd” by Stephen Birmingham (immigrant Jewish banking families in NYC around 1900) - great and very entertaining writing. I loved “The Spirit Catches You…” and “Henrietta Lacks” also, as several people have mentioned.
Michael Lewis writes great, readable non-fiction, a lot of it financial based and some of it morphed into movies: Liar’s Poker, The Big Short, Blind Side, Moneyball.
@NoVAdad99 those books just rose to the top of my list.
My research revolves around eugenics and I don’t know as much about Germany during this time as I should.
https://westviewpress.com/books/race-in-north-america/
Given your area of interest, Brian Smedley is someone you should know, an expert in racial disparity in US healthcare. His mother was a professor at Binghamton before moving to VCU.
My wife reads some books more along these lines; my non-fiction is more nerdy engineering stuff and some history(“Rising Tide”, about the 1927Mississippi River flood and the foundation of American flood control, for example). She recently read * Five Days at Memorial * about the killing of patients during Hurricane Katrina.
Devil in the Grove: Thurgood Marshall, The Groveland Boys and the Dawn of a New America, The Warmth of Other Suns
A Midwife’s Tale by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich is one of my favorites, romani! If you ever get to Maine, the Maine Humanities Council produced a wonderful self-guided tour of buildings and locations mentioned in Martha Ballard’s diary.
http://dohistory.org/martha/MB_WalkingTour.pdf
rosered (and someone else) already suggested one of my favorites:
Random Family is long, but it covers a bunch of your topics and is a book that stays with you (though not exactly in a happy way).
The Genius Factory: The Curious History of the Nobel Prize Sperm Bank
by David Plotz
Love at Goon Park: Harry Harlow and the Science of Affection
by Deborah Blum (biography of the scientist who did the cloth vs. wire mesh monkey-mothers study–history of psychology, the science of child development, emotional learning theory, research methods and ethics, monkeys)
Without a Map
by Meredith Hall (memoir by a woman who gave her child up for adoption in 1965)
Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What it Says about Us)
by Tom Vanderbilt
The Girls of Atomic City: The Untold Story of the Women who Helped Win World War II
by Denise Kiernan (women who worked in the factories in Tennessee that were enriching uranium for use in atomic weapons)
When breath becomes air (new book–posthumously-published memoir by a young surgeon of his life before and after cancer diagnosis)
by Paul Kalanithi
Fairyland : a memoir of my father / Alysia Abbott
A memoir of growing up motherless in 1970s and '80s San Francisco with an openly gay father.
The Sweeter the Juice
by Shirlee Taylor Haizlip - A memoir about a multiracial family and perceptions of race.
You probably already know this one:
There are No Children Here : the story of two boys growing up in the other America
by Alex Kotlowitz (life in a Chicago housing project)