What was the last non fiction book you bought/ read/enjoyed?

[LemonAndAPear]

I'm always looking for non fiction recommendations and I'd appreciate any suggestions. Even if you haven't read it yet I'd be interested to know what you've bought recently.

TIA

I love him too! Did you watch the series with him and Paul Whitehouse going fishing? It was the highlight of our week here for a while!

Educated by Tara Westover
It's about a girl brought up in a mountain family in the USA, homeschooled, very much like a militia-type set up. It's autobiography so it's in a narrative style - it might not be what you're looking for, but it was great and I really enjoyed it.

Buddhism for Mothers

I'm not a Buddhist. Found it really helped me be a calmer parent.

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks is very good, part sciency, part social history.

To add to the Ian Mortimer list - The Time Travellers guide to Medieval England.

Notes from a Big Country by Bill Bryson. Some chapters are a bit dated (it was written in the 90s) but mostly it isn't at all. Also A Walk in the Woods by the same .

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks is very good, part sciency, part social history.

I read this years ago after seeing Oprah discuss it, but I came away uncomfortable about both the book and the show. This was a girl who was made to share a bedroom with her 5 years older male cousin, and then "they had their first child when she was 14". And then he gave her the disease that killed her. But the family brushes all this aside and is only angry that they haven't benefitted financially from the research carried out using cells collected during her treatment?

Wrong questions to be asking. Including by Oprah.

Ebook from the library, 'Rummage' - a history of recycling. Amazingly interesting.

The Enchanted Oak by Polly Pullar. It only comes out on Thursday but I got an early copy. The story of a life lived in nature in Scotland. She rehabilitates wildlife (squirrels etc) and is an utterly compelling writer. Really superb book and heartily recommend it if you love the natural world.

I haven't seen the Oprah show. I felt the book was pretty even handed in dealing with the issues, seeing things from the families pov.
I liked the fact that the author didn't demonise the scientists en masse. Eg the original scientist who cloned the cells and his wife who ran the lab worked long hours for not much pay and didn't themselves profit from it.

I know there was a film of the book which stirred up things with the family.

The Searchers by Robert Sackville West. Absolutely wonderful. Occasionally repetitive and some areas I'd have liked more discussion, and others a little less. But I found it incredibly emotional and insightful.

The Searchers is about the history and ongoing mission of searching for and memorialising the missing and dead of world war one.

I was given Putin's People by Catherine Belcher and the latest Anthony Beevor book about the Russian revolution

My DH read Kleptopia which sounds really interesting (if depressing)

And Away by Bob Mortimer

The Escape Artist by Jonathan Freeland.
About a young man and his friend who managed to escape from Auschwitz, having been compelled to do so not for personal survival, but to tell the world about the horrors of the factories of death, which were not yet known in the wider world, so that they could be stopped.
Horrifying and astounding.

Great thread, OP, have made a list!

Whoops! Ignore me I didn't see the Non-fiction bit!

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

Would def recommend.

@IAcceptCookies Ah - your message made me remember I had heard a snippet of what must have been that book (The Escape Artist) on R4 when driving the other week. Had thought I must find out what it was as it sounded amazing, then forgot all about it. I am going to put it on my holiday book order - thank you!

@dotty2 The Escape Artist was serialised (very abridged) on radio 4 recently so that will be what you heard. It's still available on BBC Sounds if you want to listen to the whole thing, read by the author.
I listened to it and have now ordered the book.

I buy and borrow (from the library) lots of non fiction and usually enjoy it a lot when I actually get round to reading it. I normally have a number of books on the go, and a couple of years ago - I can't remember whether it was Before Covid or since - I decided to plan my reading so I actually read some of the books which sound wonderful but that I've been delaying actually reading. So I try to have at least one non fiction book which is not a memoir - as I already read lots of memoirs - on the go. I am trying to alternate biographies of individuals with other non fiction, mostly history books.

Recent non fiction reads - enjoyed all

Straightfoward memoirs

Bernardine Evaristo, Manifesto
Miriam Margoyles, This Much is True
Laura Lippman, My Life as a Villainess
Lara Feigel, Free Woman: Life, Liberation and Doris Lessing

Individual Biographies

John Sutherland, Monica Jones, Philip Larkin and Me: Her Life and Long Loves (part memoir too)
Rachel Holmes, Eleanor Marx
Selina Todd, Tastes of Honey: The Making of Shelagh Delaney and a Cultural Revolution
Anne Sebba, Ethel Rosenberg: A Cold War Tragedy

Group biographies

Francesca Wade, Square Haunting
Lara Feigel, The Love-Charm of Bombs

History books - "enjoy" might be the wrong word here!

Paul Preston, The Spanish Holocaust: Inquisition and Extermination in Twentieth-Century Spain
Sarah Helm, If This Is a Woman: Inside Ravensbruck: Hitler's Concentration Camp for Women
Selina Todd, Snakes and Ladders: The Great British Social Mobility Myth

Read a long time ago and really want to reread

Barbara Taylor, Eve and the New Jerusalem

Left on Tenth.. Nora Ephron..loved that
Divided Lives..Lindale Gordon..yet to read
My Shit Therapist Michele Thomas..liked that

Read some years back- White Mischief by James Fox is good also , about shenigans and murder in the British aristocracy.

Just read Outside, the sky is blue by Christina McPherson. Starting in the late 1950s and going up to present day, it's the story of her family with childhood holidays spent in her mother's native Sweden, her older sister is schizophrenic and how Christina discovers that her older brother kept all the family correspondence particularly as her mother was a prolific letter writer.
It's warm and witty despite the many difficulties Christina has to face. One the best books I have read for ages.

Poverty Safari by Darren McGarvey. It's the best 'accessible' (i.e. not academic) book on class politics I've read in ages, and I read loads.
For me, it does a really nice job of finding a balance between structural inequality and personal responsibility as an explanation for, and a way out of, poverty.

@KStockHero

I have Poverty Safari TBR. The author has a new book out or coming out and extracts were serialised on R4.