Nonfiction help

[indiana_j]

I need nonfiction recommendations.  I'm not normally a reader of nonfiction - fantasy and horror, with the occasional foray into mystery and, every once in a while, romance (I generally prefer my fiction to have romance in them but I'm not generally a fan of the romance novel, per say) - but I've read a few this year that I really liked.

Namely, Deborah Blum's The Poisoner's Handbook earlier this year (which I'd recommend reading, btw, it's really, really good and very well written) and currently The Billionaire's Vinegar by Benjamin Wallace, which is about a bottle of wine that sold for $156,000 - it's pretty good, if a bit dry at times.

I'd like to read more, especially since I'm getting a Kindle and won't necessarily have to have these in physical form, but I don't know what to get.  So I turn to you guys, with these things to be kept in mind:

* I really do like history and am not much of a science person.  However, that being said, as long as something is interesting and doesn't either make me feel stupid and / or make me feel like it's talking down to me, I can read.  Also, food related books (I have a book I'll be reading called The Foie Gras War) are a win.

* They have to be interesting.  The reason I generally prefer fiction to nonfiction is that the first is able to keep my attention and I have trouble doing so with nonfiction.  So, nonfiction that ... I don't know, feels like a good enough story to be fiction?

Areas of interest: food, history, science and any others that folks think I might be interested in.

Comments

[maureenans.livejournal.com]

I've been reading AFTERMATH: Cleaning up after CSI goes home by Gil Reavill.

if you want to know more about what happens after you die and whatnot...of course, that could just be me.

[miss-porcupine.livejournal.com]

Have you looked at Mark Bowden's stuff? He's a very engaging writer and has a pretty varied catalog. You know from Black Hawk Down, but out of the rest I'd recommend Guests of the Ayatollah (about the Iran Hostage Crisis) and Killing Pablo (about the rise and fall of Pablo Escobar).

[diamond-dust06.livejournal.com]

I just finished The Poisoner's Handbook a couple of weeks ago. So good! If you haven't yet, I really recommend The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot. The Great Influenza by John Barry about the 1918 Spanish flu epidemic is another excellent book about the birth of scientific medicine, although it's long and kind of boring at times. I borrowed it from Manda so you can ask her if you don't want to get your own copy ;)

If you're interested about evolution, Why Evolution is True by Jerry Coyne and Evolution: the Triumph of an Idea are two of the best introductions to the theory, the evidence, and in the case of the latter, the history of the science from Darwin to today.

And I can't recommend enough anything by Carl Sagan. The man was a genius. Billions and Billions and Demon-Haunted World are two of my favorites.

[kitchendinah.livejournal.com]

The Island of Lost Maps - Miles Harvey. I might get a particular frission of horror from it given my field, though.

[deathpixie]

Kitchen Confidential and Medium Raw by Anthony Bourdain.

The Bullpen Gospels by Dirk Hayhurst - yes, it's baseball, but you'd hardly notice it. ;) Lots of fun and a really great writing style. He's got Out of My League about playing for the Jays coming out in February.

And John Birmingham also writes amazing non-fiction. Leviathan is a brilliant history of Sydney, and Dopeland is about marijuana culture across Australia, both excellent reads.

[mike-smith.livejournal.com]

If you liked the Poisoner's Handbook, then you'll probably enjoy The Alchemy of Air by Thomas Hager. It's about the Haber-Bosch process, which made it possible to produce artificial ammonia using nitrogen in the atmosphere.

The reaction was something I learned in college chemistry, and I just appreciated it for its simplicity (3H₂ + N₂ at 500atm --> 2NH₃) but Hager explains just how important it was in changing the course of world history. Fixed nitrogen (i.e. ammonium and nitrate salts) are essential for agriculture, and before the Haber-Bosch process, humanity could only get them from natural sources. By the end of the 19th Century the population was quickly getting so large that eventually all of the arable land on earth would be unable to sustain it. Fritz Haber discovered that hydrogen and nitrogen could be reacted at high pressure and temperature to get ammonia, and Carl Bosch was the guy who figured out how to scale up that reaction to an industrial scale. Without them, a third of the people living today would starve to death. But there's a dark side, because those same nitrates are also used to make explosives. Their invention saved billions of lives, but it also provided their native Germany with means to wage two world wars.

It's a really interesting exploration of how technology is good or evil depending on how it's used. It doesn't go into great detail about the chemistry involved, but instead focuses on how big a problem the nitrate shortage was in the 19th Century, and how revolutionary the solution was in the 20th. It also has a fascinating human element. Haber, like many German Jews in the 1910's, hoped to use his scientific career to gain acceptance as a patriotic German. His breakthrough seemed to be a dream come true, but then the Nazis took over, and he soon realized that he would be rejected no matter what he accomplished or how hard he tried to assimilate.