Well written and interesting non- fiction books

Brother. Do. You. Love. Me. By Reuben and Manni Coe- Brother Manni "bronaps" Reuben who has Downs Syndrome from a care home but without much of a plan.

Do No Harm by Henry Marsh- neurosurgeon, worked abroad too. I want to say Ukraine but might be wrong. There was a brilliant documentary as well.

33 Revolutions Per Minute by Dorian Lynsky- history of protest songs

Ruth and Martin's Album Club by Martin Fitzgerald- famous people listen to "classic" albums for the first time. Good stocking filler maybe, or a punt extragor a music fan.

House of Fiction by Philys Richardson- about famous houses in English Literature such as Pemberley.

@Tootingbec and @Tiddlywinkly you might like Home Grown by Joan Smith.
In essence, the argument is that if domestic violence/ violence against women were taken more seriously some very serious crimes / terror attacks may have been prevented. For example, if I remember right, the Manchester arena bomber had attacked a fellow female pupil, but charges weren't pressed. Had they green his risk rating would have been higher. Joan Smith found that, when risk assessing, at one point violence against animals scored to up a tick box risk rating, but not against women.

She was fascinating about the Peter Sutcliffe case too, think that was in Misogynies.

Similar vein is Sisters in Law by Harriet Wistrich.

Bump

Black Diamonds - The rise & fall of an English dynasty by Catherine Bailey

Dreams of the Celt - a ‘novel’ account about Roger Casement by Mario Vargos Llosa (considered better than traditional biographical accounts and so beautifully written).

Millenium (and others) by Tom Holland (lots of history!)

Has anyone read Tales from the Dancefloor by Sacha Lord? It's not bad, if you are from the NW and middle aged and like music it's great. I have it classified as a bath book. Good to read, but if I dropped it into the bath I wouldn't be upset

It’s The Nuremberg Interviews by Leon Goldensohn. I’m just listening to the Hess chapter for a second time because it’s so unbelievable.

www.penguin.co.uk/books/371695/the-nuremberg-interviews-by-goldensohn-leon/9781844139194

I’ve just finished Is A River Alive by Robert Macfarlane. Really interesting and so beautifully written.

@PeonyPanda

Can you peorive a link to the American psychologist material?
Sounds really interesting.

Thank you SO much for this recommendation. I'm listening rather than reading and it's incredible. I'm two thirds of the way through. I'd like to give a description but I don't know where to start. It's definitely not a misery memoir, it's so so much more than that.

Some great ones I've read are:

Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality by Helen Joyce
The New Wild by Fred Pearce
Entangled Life by Merlin Sheldrake
A Taste for Poison by Neil Bradbury
A Very British Murder by Lucy Worsley

Oh, also The Wager (not my typical read at all, but excellent).

I really enjoyed The Five, Radium Girls and Singled Out (can you tell I'm interested in feminism?!).

I've been loving The Story of a Heart and I'm looking forward to reading Raising Hare.

I love a good biography or autobiography. I've finished one on a street photographer who worked as a nanny, Vivian Maier Developed

The Spy and the Traitor - Ben McIntyre

The story of one of the last KGB agents working for the west and what happened when - after years of double agency - he needed to escape.

Rose George is great - that's a really excellent book, and I can also heartily recommend her Nine Pints - all about blood - and The Big Necessity, which is a genuinely fascinating book about how cultures around the world tackle sanitation.

I read a lot of non-fiction and one of my unexpected hits of last year was Entanglement by Emma Tarlo - a history of hair. An amazing read.

For history, Anna Funder's Stasiland is great. Bart Van Es's The Cut-Out Girl, about a young Jewish girl in wartime Holland, was a moving read too.

I haven't read any of Atul Gawande's books but they sound interesting- has anyone on this thread read any and what did you think of them?

I have this on audio book. Utterly brilliant.

I enjoyed Guns, Germs and Steel but I there's a fair amount of criticism of its conclusions from anthropologists and historians. It's still worth reading but I think it should be viewed as one person's interpretation rather than widely accepted theory.

Guns, Germs and Steel, Jared Diamond. I thought this was fascinating.

Hitler, Stalin, Mum and Dad, Danny Finkelstein. I was mesmerised reading this. It's a family memoir. The fact that both his parents survived what their families were put through defies belief.

The best book I've read for years is the biography of a famous militant suffragette called Mary Raleigh Richardson. It came out this year. Quite an eye-opener.

Invisible Child - eight years in the making, the story of Dasani, a black child living in poverty in New York - mindblowingly brilliant.

Another vote for Bad blood, and Immortal life of Henrietta Lacks. If you like science Kat Arney’s Rebel Cell also good.
Would recommend A night to remember by Walter Lord - ( Titanic). Erik Larson’s Dead Wake (Lusitania.)

I’m so glad other people have read them. I was reading thinking - this should be the go to text for all history / politics students , and yet for me it was a random audible recommendation, and I’d never even heard of it. Should be compulsory - so relevant and I’ve got such a different appreciation now.

It was great wasn’t it? I heard a film was coming but there’s been no sign.

Such great recommendations- have taken note of a few of them!

I would also recommend Bad Blood by John Carryou (not sure of the surname spelling!) which is about Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos and how she duped everyone into thinking she had discovered a revolutionary way of doing blood tests.

Control by Jane Monkton Smith - not the most cheerful of topics but will make you look very differently at the way people and the media talk about and respond to domestic violence. She is an ex copper and now criminology professor who has studied the 10 stages that (99% men) go through until they murder their partners. Chilling stuff but vitally important

And as others have said, anything by Jon Ronson is great