Category: Creative Non-Fiction

September 4, 2022

Rogues by Patrick Radden Keefe ** (of 4)

Keefe is the author of a couple of other books I thought were terrific (Empire of Pain, Say Nothing), but not this one. A staff...

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August 19, 2022

River of the Gods by Candace Millard **** (of 4)

By the 1860s California had absorbed an influx of hundreds of thousands of gold miners, the southern states of the U.S. had seceded, and North...

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July 27, 2022

To a Mountain in Tibet by Colin Thubron *** (of 4)

Mount Kailash in Tibet is a mountain revered and sanctified by Hindus and Muslims. Walking around its base cleanses the soul and brings respect and...

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June 20, 2022

Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher by Timothy Egan *** (of 4)

As the 19th century was drawing to a close, the photographer Edward Curtis took it upon himself to photo-document and record ethnographic information on every...

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March 23, 2022

The Secret Life of Groceries by Benjamin Lorr **** (of 4)

At some level all of us who shop for food know that canned tomatoes don’t really grow in cans and that frozen shrimp don’t really...

America

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August 20, 2017

In the Kingdom of Ice by Hamptom Sides **** (of 4)

At the end of the nineteenth century, because no one had ever been there, the virtual consensus among geographers was that the North Pole resided...

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October 31, 2016

H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald **** (of 4)

Three parallel stories expertly told. In the first, the author trains a goshawk to fly from her glove to hunt pheasants and rabbits on the British...

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October 20, 2016

The Worst Hard Time by Timothy Egan *** (of 4)

This recounting of America’s dust bowl is a vivid, filthy painting of an American environmental disaster brought about by greed, hubris, and ignorance. After demolishing...

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October 20, 2016

Hogs Wild: Selected Reporting by Ian Frazier *** (of 4)

Many of the essays, interviews, and reports collected here were first published in the New Yorker, but not one of them is less interesting reading a...

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July 22, 2016