A well-written account of how Callahan spent 76 days alone and adrift in a life raft after his ship sank in a storm. He was an expert sailor and had been on a long solo voyage before that, so he was well-equipped to handle the situation. He goes into fascinating detail about how he set up his tiny raft (complete with hand-drawn diagrams), caught ( Read more... )

By the author of Hatchet and about a bazillion other wildernessy books ( Read more... )

A nonfiction book about fruit. If you're thinking, "That's an awfully broad topic," yep ( Read more... )

This is one of my all-time favorite books on food; I'm reviewing it because I recently re-read it. It's a survey of India's regional cooking, with recipes and photos. I have not tried the recipes as Indian cooking is really difficult if you don't have a background in it and know what dishes are supposed to taste like because you once ate them at ( Read more... )

I am browsing a book on accidents in the Grand Canyon, blurbed by Tony Hillerman. It combines apparently solid reporting with extraordinarily melodramatic asides. I just now hit the section on incidents involving venomous creatures (very rare) which says people's fears of them are overblown and they shouldn't think of them as "death-slaves of the ( Read more... )

This New Yorker article by Kathryn Schultz with the amazing title When Twenty-Six Thousand Stinkbugs Invade Your Home is the sort of writing that makes me happy that nonfiction exists. It's disgusting, hilarious, informative, disturbing, extremely well-written, and definitely should not be read by insect-phobes. It is the exact opposite of the book ( Read more... )

The Curse of Nonfiction strikes again: fascinating topic, dry book.

An account of pioneering burn surgeon Archibald McIndoe and The Guinea Pig Club, a group of badly burned WWII airmen who he treated in a small hospital in England. McIndoe not only revolutionized techniques for treating and reconstructing burn injuries, he also helped the men ( Read more... )

Nonfiction about a brief but fateful encounter between a German ace fighter pilot and an American bomber crew, in mid-air; forty years later, the two pilots met up again. The book started out as a magazine article, and I bet it was a terrific one. It’s a great story and unlike many WWII stories, this one is about people’s best behavior rather than ( Read more... )

Illness memoirs, like child abuse memoirs, have a number of pitfalls. They’re about depressing topics and so are hard not to depress the reader, they’re often by people who don’t write professionally and so are not well-written, and as the subject is inherently self-focused, they can very easily come across as self-absorbed. Even if they manage to ( Read more... )

A readable, gripping, informative, and convincing report on the War On Drugs. Hari covers its despicable history starting in the 1930s (created by a sort of coalition of racist politicians and gangsters eager to profit), its horrific results (millions of murders, overdoses, and lives needlessly destroyed), the actual science and psychology of ( Read more... )