Nonfiction that reads like fiction


Showing 1 - 20 of 44  There are a total of 45 valid entries on the list.
Book cover for "Anansi's gold"
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Average Rating:
4 stars
Book cover for "The art thief"
Star rating for The art thief
Average Rating:
3.8 stars
Description:
"For centuries, works of art have been stolen in countless ways from all over the world, but no one has been quite as successful at it as the master thief Stéphane Breitwieser. Carrying out more than two hundred heists over nearly ten years-in museums and cathedrals all over Europe-Breitwieser, along with his girlfriend who worked as his lookout, stole more than three hundred objects, until it all fell apart in spectacular fashion. In The Art Thief,...
Book cover for "Bad blood"
Star rating for Bad blood
Average Rating:
4.6 stars
Description:
"In 2014 Theranos founder and CEO Elizabeth Holmes was widely seen as the female Steve Jobs: a brilliant Stanford dropout whose startup 'unicorn' promised to revolutionize the medical industry with a machine that would make blood tests significantly faster and easier ... There was just one problem: The technology didn't work. For years, Holmes had been misleading investors, FDA officials, and her own employees. When [the author], working at The Wall...
Book cover for "The biggest bluff"
Star rating for The biggest bluff
Average Rating:
4.6 stars
Description:
"How a New York Times bestselling author and New Yorker contributor parlayed a strong grasp of the science of human decision-making and a woeful ignorance of cards into a life-changing run as a professional poker player, under the wing of a legend of the game"--
Book cover for "The body"
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Average Rating:
4.1 stars
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"Bill Bryson, bestselling author of A Short History of Nearly Everything, takes us on a head-to-toe tour of the marvel that is the human body. As compulsively readable as it is comprehensive, this is Bryson at his very best, a must-read owner's manual for everybody. Bill Bryson once again proves himself to be an incomparable companion as he guides us through the human body--how it functions, its remarkable ability to heal itself, and (unfortunately)...
Book cover for "Catch and kill"
Star rating for Catch and kill
Average Rating:
4.1 stars
Description:
Now an HBO documentary series streaming on HBO Max. 
One of the Best Books of the Year
 Time * NPR * Washington Post * Bloomberg News * Chicago Tribune * Chicago Public Library * Fortune * Los Angeles Times * E! News * The Telegraph * Apple * Library Journal  In...
Book cover for "The code"
Star rating for The code
Average Rating:
4 stars
Book cover for "The devil in the white city"
Star rating for The devil in the white city
Average Rating:
3.9 stars
Description:
An account of the Chicago World's Fair of 1893 relates the stories of two men who shaped the history of the event--architect Daniel H. Burnham, who coordinated its construction, and serial killer Herman Mudgett.
Book cover for "The diary of a young girl"
Star rating for The diary of a young girl
Average Rating:
4.1 stars
Description:
A thirteen-year-old Dutch-Jewish girl records her impressions of the two years she and seven others spent hiding from the Nazis before they were discovered and taken to concentration camps. Includes entries previously omitted. An uncut edition of Anne Frank's diary includes entries originally omitted by her father and provides insight into Anne's relationship with her mother. Compelling and candid, this diary introduced the world to a girl filled...
Book cover for "Educated"
Star rating for Educated
Average Rating:
4.2 stars
Description:
"An unforgettable memoir about a young girl who, kept out of school, leaves her survivalist family and goes on to earn a PhD from Cambridge University"--Amazon.com.
Book cover for "Eighty days"
Star rating for Eighty days
Average Rating:
3.5 stars
Description:
NATIONAL BESTSELLER
On November 14, 1889, Nellie Bly, the crusading young female reporter for Joseph Pulitzer’s World newspaper, left New York City by steamship on a quest to break the record for the fastest trip around the world. Also departing from New York that day—and heading in the opposite direction by train—was a young journalist from The Cosmopolitan magazine, Elizabeth Bisland. Each woman was determined...
Book cover for "The end of everything"
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Average Rating:
3.3 stars
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A rising star in astrophysics presents an accessible and eye-opening look at five ways the universe could end, and the lessons each scenario reveals about the most important concepts in cosmology.
Book cover for "A fever in the heartland"
Star rating for A fever in the heartland
Average Rating:
4.6 stars
Description:
"The Roaring Twenties -- the Jazz Age -- has been characterized as a time of Gatsby frivolity. But it was also the height of the uniquely American hate group, the Ku Klux Klan. Their domain was not the old Confederacy, but the Heartland and the West. They hated Blacks, Jews, Catholics and immigrants in equal measure, and took radical steps to keep these people from the American promise. And the man who set in motion their takeover of great swaths...
Book cover for "The fifth risk"
Star rating for The fifth risk
Average Rating:
4.4 stars
Description:
Presents a narrative account of the post-2016 election chaos that took over Washington to reveal how a small number of uninformed Trump appointees are triggering devastating world consequences.
Book cover for "Five days at Memorial"
Star rating for Five days at Memorial
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Average Rating:
3.7 stars
Description:
"Pulitzer Prize winner Sheri Fink's landmark investigation of patient deaths at a New Orleans hospital ravaged by Hurricane Katrina -- and her suspenseful portrayal of the quest for truth and justice. After Katrina struck and the floodwaters rose, the power failed, and the heat climbed, exhausted caregivers chose to designate certain patients last for rescue. Months later, several health professionals faced criminal allegations that they deliberately...
Book cover for "The ghost map"
Star rating for The ghost map
Average Rating:
3.9 stars
Description:
A chronicle of Victorian London's worst cholera outbreak traces the day-by-day efforts of Dr. John Snow, who put his own life on the line in his efforts to prove his previously dismissed contagion theory about how the epidemic was spreading.
Book cover for "The glass castle"
Star rating for The glass castle
Average Rating:
4.2 stars
Description:
The child of an alcoholic father and an eccentric artist mother discusses her family's nomadic upbringing, during which she and her siblings fended for themselves while their parents outmaneuvered bill collectors and the authorities. In the tradition of Mary Karr's "The Liars' Club" and Rick Bragg's "All Over But the Shouting," Jeannette Walls has written a stunning and life-affirming memoir about surviving a willfully impoverished, eccentric and...
Book cover for "Grunt"
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Average Rating:
4.3 stars
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A New York Times / National Bestseller
"America's funniest science writer" (Washington Post) Mary Roach explores the science of keeping human beings intact, awake, sane, uninfected, and uninfested in the bizarre and extreme circumstances of war.

Grunt tackles the science behind some of a soldier's most challenging adversaries—panic, exhaustion, heat, noise—and introduces us to the scientists who

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Book cover for "Having and being had"
Star rating for Having and being had
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Average Rating:
4 stars
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"Having just purchased her first home, the author embarks on a self-audit of the value system she has bought into. The essays in this volume offer an interrogation of work, leisure, and the lived experience of capitalism"--
Book cover for "Hidden figures"
Star rating for Hidden figures
Average Rating:
3.5 stars
Description:
Starting in World War II and moving through to the Cold War, the Civil Rights Movement and the Space Race, Hidden Figures follows the interwoven accounts of Dorothy Vaughan, Mary Jackson, Katherine Johnson and Christine Darden, four African American women who participated in some of NASA's greatest successes. It chronicles their careers over nearly three decades they faced challenges, forged alliances and used their intellect to change their own lives,...