Three Nonfiction Titles by David McCullough

Today, Alan Bernstein looks at three excellent pieces of nonfiction writing by historian David McCullough.
In recent years, the popular historian David McCullough has garnered both praise and popularity for his biographies of  Harry Truman and John Adams and for his study of the first year of the American Revolution, 1776.  However,  he first obtained critical [...]

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Columbine, by Dave Cullen

Within hours of the massacre last week at Fort Hood, reporters were asking Dave Cullen if the rampage was “like Columbine.” Cullen cautions that we can’t know yet—that we must wait for the facts. “If we guess now, the myths will be with us forever.”
Cullen knows how hard myths die. He was a reporter at [...]

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Zeitoun, by Dave Eggers

Here’s a tale with a bracing lack of ambiguity. It is a shameful story, an incredible story that I wish were a work of fiction.
Abdulrahman Zeitoun exemplified the “American dream.” A Syrian-American citizen who had settled in New Orleans in 1994, he ran his own successful painting and contracting company, and was known to customers [...]

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Eat This, Not That, by David Zinczenko

David Zinczenko is the editor-in-chief of Men’s Health magazine. I first noticed his “Eat This, Not That” column in the Yahoo.com Health section. One of the major shortcomings of any diet, according to Zinczenko, is that people do not have much control over how their food is prepared when they eat out at a restaurant.  [...]

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1,001 Things They Won’t Tell You: An Insider’s Guide to Spending, Saving and Living Wisely, by Jonathan Dahl

1,001 Things They Won’t Tell You dishes out the inside scoop on harmful, hidden business practices, and provides ways for consumers to protect themselves. The book comprises one hundred of the “10 Things They Won’t Tell You” articles from Smart Money magazine–now updated, expanded, and arranged into eleven categories such as “your money,” “goods [...]

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The Gifts of the Jews, by Thomas Cahill

 
What is it about a ragtag group of nomads that has both inspired and outraged civilizations for four millenia?  In the second book of his Hinges of History series,  Thomas Cahill digs into the larger themes that separate the Jewish peoples from the people around them, and shows how the evolution of a culture, a [...]

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The Men Who Stare at Goats, by Jon Ronson

“You brought a veterinarian into this?” I asked, surprised.
“Yeah, the guy was a friend of mine,” said Guy.
“And he provided the goat?”
“Yeah.”
“What about the Hippocratic oath?” I asked.
“What?” said Guy, a little crossly.
“I’m just surprised that a civilian veterinary surgeon would provide a healthy goat so some soldiers could try to stare it to death.” [...]

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State by State: A Panoramic Portrait of America, edited by Matt Weiland and Sean Wilsey

Road trip! Well, the literary kind, anyway.
Editors for the Paris Review and McSweeney’s have assembled the usual suspects and then some for this interesting assortment of essays about the fifty states and District of Columbia. The goal is an homage to the New Deal’s Federal Writers Project, a WPA program that created an even wider [...]

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Never Suck a Dead Man’s Hand: Curious Adventures of a CSI by Dana Kollmann

One of my colleagues brought this book to me, because she thought I might like it. The title alone piqued my interest, so I gave it a try. The author starts off by debunking a few myths about crime scene investigation. She explains that real CSIs don’t wear mini-skirts and heels to work and they [...]

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In the Shadow of No Towers, by Art Spiegelman

It has been eight years to the day since America was attacked on September 11, 2001. To commemorate, I’d like to discuss the best piece of 9/11 literature I’ve encountered in those eight years, a nonfiction graphic novel by Art Spiegelman, In the Shadow of No Towers.
Even if you don’t normally read graphic novels, you [...]

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