Nonfiction that reads like fiction


Showing 1 - 20 of 28  There are a total of 45 valid entries on the list.
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 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 "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"
Star rating for The end of everything
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Average Rating:
3.3 stars
Description:
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 "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 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

...
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,...
Book cover for "Hidden Valley Road"
Star rating for Hidden Valley Road
Average Rating:
4.5 stars
Description:
"Don and Mimi Galvin seemed to be living the American dream. After World War II, Don's work with the Air Force brought them to Colorado, where [they had twelve chidlren] ... In those years, there was an established script for a family like the Galvins, ... and they worked hard to play their parts. But behind the scenes was a different story: ... by the mid-1970s, six of the ten Galvin boys, one after the other, were diagnosed as schizophrenic. How...
Book cover for "I'm glad my mom died"
Star rating for I'm glad my mom died
Average Rating:
4.2 stars
Description:
"A heartbreaking and hilarious memoir by iCarly and Sam & Cat star Jennette McCurdy about her struggles as a former child actor--including eating disorders, addiction, and a complicated relationship with her overbearing mother--and how she retook control of her life"--
Book cover for "The immortal life of Henrietta Lacks"
Star rating for The immortal life of Henrietta Lacks
Average Rating:
4.1 stars
Description:
Documents the story of how scientists took cells from an unsuspecting descendant of freed slaves and created a human cell line that has been kept alive indefinitely, enabling discoveries in such areas as cancer research, in vitro fertilization, and gene mapping.
Book cover for "In Cold Blood"
Star rating for In Cold Blood
Average Rating:
3.9 stars
Description:
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • The most famous true crime novel of all time "chills the blood and exercises the intelligence" (The New York Review of Books)and haunted its author long after he finished writing it.

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...
Book cover for "In the garden of beasts"
Star rating for In the garden of beasts
Average Rating:
4 stars
Description:
In 1933, President Roosevelt personally selected William E. Dodd to be the United States ambassador to Nazi Germany. Dodd took his family with him, including his daughter Martha. Initially enamored with the Nazi party and its passion, Martha supported the Third Reich. However, when Hitler's violent policies became apparent, Martha changed her opinion and watched in horror. Here, author Erik Larson offers a chilling first-person account of Germany's...
Book cover for "Into the wild"
Star rating for Into the wild
Average Rating:
4.5 stars
Description:
A portrait of Chris McCandless chronicles his decision to withdraw from society and adopt the persona of Alexander Supertramp, offering insight into his beliefs about the wilderness and his tragic death in the Alaskan wilderness. In April 1992 a young man from a well-to-do family hitchhiked to Alaska and walked alone into the wilderness north of Mt. McKinley. His name was Christopher Johnson McCandless. He had given $25,000 in savings to charity,...
Book cover for "Into thin air"
Star rating for Into thin air
Average Rating:
4.7 stars
Description:
#1 NATIONAL BESTSELLER • The epic account of the storm on the summit of Mt. Everest that claimed five lives and left countless more—including Krakauer's—in guilt-ridden disarray.

“A harrowing tale of the perils of high-altitude climbing, a story of bad luck and worse judgment and of heartbreaking heroism.”—People
A Los Angeles Times Best Nonfiction Book of the Last 30 Years
A...
Book cover for "Just mercy"
Star rating for Just mercy
Average Rating:
4.4 stars
Description:
The founder of the Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery, Alabama recounts his experiences as a lawyer working to assist those desperately in need, reflecting on his pursuit of the ideal of compassion in American justice.