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The best thing about nonfiction books is that they can teach you something new without being tedious about it. Here are 10 books that challenged my perspective or introduced me to a concept that had never crossed my brain jelly before.
Mind-Opening Nonfiction
STIFF: THE CURIOUS LIVES OF HUMAN CADAVERS BY MARY ROACH
Mary Roach takes the age-old question, "What happens to us after we die?" quite literally. And in Stiff, she explores the "lives" of human cadavers from the time of the ancient Egyptians all the way up to current campaigns for human composting. Along the way, she recounts with morbidly infectious glee how dead bodies are used for research ranging from car safety and plastic surgery (you'll cancel your next collagen injection after reading this!), to the authenticity of the Shroud of Turin.
Impossible (and irreverent) as it may sound, Roach has written a book about corpses that's both lively and fresh. She traveled around the globe to conduct her forensic investigations, and her findings are wryly intelligent. While the myriad uses for cadavers recounted are often graphic, Roach imbues her subject with a sense of dignity, choosing to emphasize the oddly noble purposes corpses serve, from organ donation to lifesaving medical research.
Readers will come away convinced of the enormous debt that we, the living, owe to the study of the remains of the dead. And while it may not offer the answer to the ancient mystery we were hoping for, Stiff offers a strange sort of comfort in the knowledge that, in a sense, death isn't necessarily the end.
Why I recommend it: It's a modern classic for a reason. I love Mary Roach's nonfiction because she asks the morbid questions that normal people are afraid to ask. This book is about what happens to bodies that are donated to science. It's fast-paced, funny, interesting, and never disrespectful to the corpses. I couldn't put it down.
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So You've Been Publicly Shamed by Jon Ronson
For the past three years, Jon Ronson has travelled the world meeting recipients of high-profile public shamings. The shamed are people like us—people who, say, made a joke on social media that came out badly, or made a mistake at work. Once their transgression is revealed, collective outrage circles with the force of a hurricane and the next thing they know they're being torn apart by an angry mob, jeered at, demonized, sometimes even fired from their job. People are using shame as a form of social control.
Why I recommend it: Jon Ronson examines the history of public shaming and looks at modern examples of it. He does focus a lot on social media “call-out culture,” but he also discusses shaming in prisons, courts, as therapy, and as a sexual fetish.
I didn't always agree with the way that the author approaches the topic, but this is still the type of nonfiction that I love. The author has a sense of humor. The writing style is very readable and not dry at all. The book covers a wide range of topics related to public shaming, but it moves through them quickly, so I never got bored. I constantly felt like I was learning something, which is what I look for in a nonfiction book. It hits that perfect intersection of educational and intensely interesting.In Cold Blood by Truman Capote
On November 15, 1959, in the small town of Holcomb, Kansas, four members of the Clutter family were savagely murdered by blasts from a shotgun held a few inches from their faces. There was no apparent motive for the crime, and there were almost no clues.
As Truman Capote reconstructs the murder and the investigation that led to the capture, trial, and execution of the killers, he generates both mesmerizing suspense and astonishing empathy.
Why I recommend it: This is the book that got me hooked on crime nonfiction. I was severely bullied in high school. I always spent my lunch hour reading books in the stairwell and hoping that no teachers or security guards discovered my hiding place. I have vivid memories of reading this book while sitting on the stairs. The story fascinated me and completely creeped me out. As soon as I finished the book, I turned it over and started reading it again.
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Black Like Me by John Howard Griffin
In the Deep South of the 1950s, journalist John Howard Griffin decided to cross the color line. Using medication that darkened his skin to deep brown, he exchanged his privileged life as a Southern white man for the disenfranchised world of an unemployed black man. His audacious, still chillingly relevant eyewitness history is a work about race and humanity—that in this new millennium still has something important to say to every American.
Why I recommend it: Griffin’s diary shows the day-to-day challenges of being a Black person in the South. It definitely deepened my understanding of segregation because it includes a lot of information that I don’t remember learning in school.
Also, it made me sad that a white man had to live through segregation and racism before other white people would take it seriously. During the time that John Howard Griffin was conducting his experiment, there were Black activists trying to draw attention to the problems in the South. Many white people refused to listen to the activists. This book was groundbreaking when it was published because it was one of the first times that a white person had written extensively about the experiences of Black people. John Howard Griffin was seen as a “credible source” by many white people who wouldn’t listen to the activists.The diary discusses Griffin’s transition back to his regular life. This is one of the most interesting parts because it shows the hatred and mistrust that the races had for each other. After Griffin’s skin turned white again, it was no longer safe for him to be in the Black neighborhoods. When the experiment was made public, he was called a “race traitor” and had to move his family to Mexico to avoid angry white supremacists.
If you're interested in history, you need to read this book.
MY FRIEND DAHMER BY DERF BACKDERF
You only think you know this story. In 1991, Jeffrey Dahmer—the most notorious serial killer since Jack the Ripper—seared himself into the American consciousness. To the public, Dahmer was a monster who committed unthinkable atrocities. To Derf Backderf, “Jeff” was a much more complex figure: a high school friend with whom he had shared classrooms, hallways, and car rides.
In My Friend Dahmer, a haunting and original graphic novel, writer-artist Backderf creates a surprisingly sympathetic portrait of a disturbed young man struggling against the morbid urges emanating from the deep recesses of his psyche—a shy kid, a teenage alcoholic, and a goofball who never quite fit in with his classmates. With profound insight, what emerges is a Jeffrey Dahmer that few ever really knew, and one readers will never forget.
Why I recommend it: It does an amazing job of showing Dahmer's troubled teenage years without making him a likeable character. I love how the author contrasts his normal teenage life with Dahmer's extremely abnormal teenage life. There were many times when someone could have stepped in and questioned Dahmer's bizarre behavior, but people are so caught up in their own problems and successes that we don't really pay attention to each other. Hindsight is 20/20, right?
If you're interested in true crime, I highly recommend this graphic novel. It's sad and unsettling, but since the events all occur before Dahmer became a killer, it's not gory.
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Smoke Gets In Your Eyes & Other Lessons From The Crematory by Caitlin Doughty
Most people want to avoid thinking about death, but Caitlin Doughty—a twenty-something with a degree in medieval history and a flair for the macabre—took a job at a crematory, turning morbid curiosity into her life’s work. Thrown into a profession of gallows humor and vivid characters (both living and very dead), Caitlin learned to navigate the secretive culture of those who care for the deceased.
Smoke Gets in Your Eyes tells an unusual coming-of-age story full of bizarre encounters and unforgettable scenes. Caring for dead bodies of every color, shape, and affliction, Caitlin soon becomes an intrepid explorer in the world of the dead. She describes how she swept ashes from the machines (and sometimes onto her clothes) and reveals the strange history of cremation and undertaking, marveling at bizarre and wonderful funeral practices from different cultures.
Her eye-opening, candid, and often hilarious story is like going on a journey with your bravest friend to the cemetery at midnight. She demystifies death, leading us behind the black curtain of her unique profession. And she answers questions you didn’t know you had: Can you catch a disease from a corpse? How many dead bodies can you fit in a Dodge van? What exactly does a flaming skull look like?
Why I recommend it: The author graduated from college with a degree in medieval history, and the only job she could get was “beer wench” at a medieval-themed restaurant. She decides to work at a crematory instead. This book is a collection of darkly humorous anecdotes, observations, death-related history, and insider information about how the funeral industry operates.
You’d expect a book about death to be depressing, but this one isn’t. I actually laughed out loud a few times because the author has a wonderful sense of humor. Her coworkers are funny, too. I guess you need to laugh a lot if you’re going to burn bodies for a living.
The book isn’t all funny, though. Working with bodies and grieving families has an impact on the author’s mental health. I love that she’s honest about the difficult parts of her job. It would’ve been easy to make this book humorous and nothing else.
I read the majority of the book in one sitting. It’s an engaging, informative memoir.
SAPIENS: A BRIEF HISTORY OF HUMANKIND BY YUVAL NOAH HARARI
100,000 years ago, at least six human species inhabited the earth. Today there is just one. Us. Homo sapiens.
How did our species succeed in the battle for dominance? Why did our foraging ancestors come together to create cities and kingdoms? How did we come to believe in gods, nations and human rights; to trust money, books and laws; and to be enslaved by bureaucracy, timetables and consumerism? And what will our world be like in the millennia to come?
In Sapiens, Dr Yuval Noah Harari spans the whole of human history, from the very first humans to walk the earth to the radical–and sometimes devastating–breakthroughs of the Cognitive, Agricultural and Scientific Revolutions. Drawing on insights from biology, anthropology, paleontology and economics, he explores how the currents of history have shaped our human societies, the animals and plants around us, and even our personalities. Have we become happier as history has unfolded? Can we ever free our behavior from the heritage of our ancestors? And what, if anything, can we do to influence the course of the centuries to come?
Bold, wide-ranging and provocative, Sapiens challenges everything we thought we knew about being human: our thoughts, our actions, our power, and our future.
Why I recommend it: If you took everything that interests me about humans and crammed it into one book, you’d come up with this one. It delivers exactly what it promises in the title. It’s provocative and thought-provoking.
I didn’t always agree with the author’s conclusions (especially about the agricultural revolution), but he argues his points well enough that I can see where he’s coming from. I’m surprised at how quickly I flew through this book. It’s massive and more academic than what I usually read, but I couldn’t put it down because the writing style is engaging, and the author asks interesting questions. I love that the book focuses on humanity as a whole and not on individual humans. I need to find more history books like this one. Recommendations, please.
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The Last Girl: My Story Of Captivity, And My Fight Against The Islamic State by Nadia Murad
Nadia Murad was born and raised in Kocho, a small village of farmers and shepherds in northern Iraq. A member of the Yazidi community, she and her brothers and sisters lived a quiet life. Nadia had dreams of becoming a history teacher or opening her own beauty salon.
On August 15th, 2014, when Nadia was just twenty-one years old, this life ended. Islamic State militants massacred the people of her village, executing men who refused to convert to Islam and women too old to become sex slaves. Six of Nadia's brothers were killed, and her mother soon after, their bodies swept into mass graves. Nadia was taken to Mosul and forced, along with thousands of other Yazidi girls, into the ISIS slave trade.
Nadia would be held captive by several militants and repeatedly raped and beaten. Finally, she managed a narrow escape through the streets of Mosul, finding shelter in the home of a Sunni Muslim family whose eldest son risked his life to smuggle her to safety.
Why I recommend it: This memoir will make you want to punch people in the face. There's a quote on the back from The Economist that says "horrific and essential reading." I'd agree with that. Why are genocides still happening in modern times? Why are terrorists using Facebook to sell sex slaves? (Seriously, WTF Facebook? Moderate your content.)
For me, the most interesting part of the memoir is Nadia's observations about people who see problems and choose to ignore them. Here's a paragraph for you:
"Maybe, I thought, it was asking too much of a normal family to fight back against terrorists like the men in ISIS, men who threw people they accused of being homosexual off rooftops; men who raped young girls because they belonged to the wrong religion; men who stoned people to death. My willingness to help others had never been tested like that. But that was because Yazidis had never been shielded by their religion, only attacked. Hisham and his family had remained safe in ISIS-occupied Mosul because they were born Sunni and therefore were accepted by the militants. Until I showed up, they'd been content to wear their religion as armor. I tried not to hate them for it, because they were showing me such kindness, but I didn't love them."
This book should be required reading.
The Stranger In The Woods: The Extraordinary Story Of The Last True Hermit by Michael Finkel
My favorite part of the book is the information about historical hermits. Who knew that antisocial loners were so interesting? The book also explores the psychological reasons why people become hermits.
Cannibalism: A Perfectly Natural History by Bill Schutt
For centuries scientists have written off cannibalism as a bizarre phenomenon with little biological significance. Its presence in nature was dismissed as a desperate response to starvation or other life-threatening circumstances, and few spent time studying it. A taboo subject in our culture, the behavior was portrayed mostly through horror movies or tabloids sensationalizing the crimes of real-life flesh-eaters. But the true nature of cannibalism—the role it plays in evolution as well as human history—is even more intriguing (and more normal) than the misconceptions we've come to accept as fact.
In Cannibalism: A Perfectly Natural History, zoologist Bill Schutt sets the record straight, debunking common myths and investigating our new understanding of cannibalism's role in biology, anthropology, and history in the most fascinating account yet written on this complex topic. Schutt takes readers from Arizona's Chiricahua Mountains, where he wades through ponds full of tadpoles devouring their siblings, to the Sierra Nevadas, where he joins researchers who are shedding new light on what happened to the Donner Party—the most infamous episode of cannibalism in American history. He even meets with an expert on the preparation and consumption of human placenta (and, yes, it goes well with Chianti).
Bringing together the latest cutting-edge science, Schutt answers questions such as why some amphibians consume their mother's skin; why certain insects bite the heads off their partners after sex; why, up until the end of the twentieth century, Europeans regularly ate human body parts as medical curatives; and how cannibalism might be linked to the extinction of the Neanderthals. He takes us into the future as well, investigating whether, as climate change causes famine, disease, and overcrowding, we may see more outbreaks of cannibalism in many more species—including our own.
Why I recommend it: This book gave me nightmares about dying from mad cow disease. Nightmares probably don’t sound like a good thing, but if I’m thinking about a book in my sleep, it must be doing something right. Mad cow disease is especially terrifying because the British government tried to suppress info about it to protect the beef industry. Yeah . . . we’re all screwed.
The writing style is funnier than I expected. My favorite chapters are the ones about Christopher Columbus. I knew about the damage he did to the places he “explored,” but I didn’t know his connection to cannibalism. Queen Isabella decided that only New World cannibals could be enslaved. Selling slaves was big business, so Columbus and his followers slapped the cannibal label on pretty much everybody. I love that the author examines the history of cannibalism and how our (often irrational) fears of it have shaped the modern world. It’s a unique approach to the subject.
Which nonfiction book opened your mind?
Yikes! (the cannibalism one!) GREAT list - wow, lots of interesting topics shared. I recently read There Are Rivers in the Sky which is my provided me introduciton to the atrocities suffered by the Yadizi community so now I should/want to read The Last Girl. (I wonder if Elif Shafak also read this and it inspired her fictionalized account.)
ReplyDelete(and sorry about all the misspellings I see now that I posted that comment. #sigh)
DeleteThis is an excellent list tackling some truly difficult subjects. I love that you found books that manage to engage some of these topics with humor.
ReplyDeleteWow - so many great titles here, I'm not sure which to look for first...maybe Black Like Me (since I live in Alabama). I'll just bookmark your whole page to return to. :)
ReplyDeleteI read Smoke Gets in Your Ideas a few years back and learned so much too. I was surprised how much I enjoyed it. ha.
What a great combination of interesting nonfiction! I've only read Stiff (last year) and Black Like Me (decades ago), but both were definitely eye-opening.
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