Only the gemmiest of gems in this category. Any of these books could probably dilate time on a plane if you brought them up there to read.
nicholas pileggi
This was the first book of Pileggi's that I read. I watched Goodfellas a couple years ago and actually didn't care much for the characters, but I remembered one day that it was based on this book and placed a hold on it. I think this might've been the first book where I immediately knew it was peak just by reading the first couple of sentences.
Pileggi does this thing where he uses a metric f-ton of dialogue to tell his stories, so at a certain point it feels like a first-person book. It's pulled off very well, even though all the mafia terminology got a bit confusing for a dumba** like me sometimes.
also nicholas pileggi
Unlike with Goodfellas, I didn't watch Casino before reading this one. I remember hearind somewhere that the movie ran upwards of three hours long and that was just a massive turn off for me.
Told in much the same way as Wiseguy, this book follows the rise and fall of the mafia in Vegas (at least I think so), and does a bit of parallel storytelling with both Frank Rosenthal and Tony Spilotro. I'm realizing as I write this that once you've read one you've basically read the other, but hey! Two cakes, amirite?
yes, i read all three of this guy pileggi's books
It's really unfortunate he only wrote these three. I probably could've devoured at least like five more of this guy's books.
This book follows a private detective and uses a bit more third person than the other two books. It's still peak regardless. He gives a ton of mini storylines throughout the book that are all neatly tied up at the end, even though according to Pileggi rarely any of the cases PIs are involved in have neat endings.
david grann
I somewhat wanted to watch the movie, but I didn't really have time and saw this in a Shanghai bookstore I was browsing one day and so decided to read it on a whim. Boy was I glad.
This was actually the book that got me to google more nonfiction books that were written like fiction. There's a good amount of photos throughout, and I found myself silently rooting for the investigators as the book wound on.
erik larson
This book is really two in one. Half the chapters tell the building of the Chicago World's Fair, while the other half tell the story of H. H. Holmes, one of the 19th century's most notorious serial killers.
Larson does this thing where he won't reveal the name of an entity until later in the book for spoiler reasons, and I think it's a pretty cool thing to do in a nonfiction book. The foreshadowing does get a bit too obvious, sometimes. I predicted one of the major plot points like a whole half of the book before it actually happened, and I spent way too long just waiting for it to get to the actual point.
Also some Reddit thread says that half the H. H. Holmes story is, like, fabricated, so read this at your own risk? I guess? Nevertheless, this book is still peak.
kate moore
The book starts out okay. There's a bit too many characters that are introduced, seemingly willy-nilly. Though from the start, basically all of them are tagged with death. Every other sentence describing stuff like how they ignorantly painted radium onto their faces made me say, out loud, "oh no."
Moore pulls no punches in describing their conditions. I winced as she described every awful thing the radium did to those poor womens' bodies. A good number of the people introduced are dead by the first third.
It's in the last third, though, where Moore really locks TF in, describing one particular group of womens' lawsuit against the company that made them work with radium paint. I can't lie, I cried. Every sentence drips with grief and scorn for the scummy corpos that tried to dodge liability at every step of the way, and I was on the edge of my seat (metaphorically, of course) in anticipation of the verdict.
Absolute cinema, this book. Can't recommend it enough.
david grann
Yeah, another Grann book. This one was written after COVID, but I didn't know that until it contained a reference to social distancing of all things!
Though the synopsis sets you up for a Lord of the Flies-esque story where everyone becomes nothing more than savages by the end, the actual story that's told comes nowhere close to that. I lowkey found it a bit anticlimactic.
However, the actual history of the events doesn't take away from the writing in the slightest. Grann constructs his characters in such an elegant manner that at a certain point I forgot these were real people that he had to learn about through primary sources and whatnot.
All in all, peak book. Killers of the Flower Moon does still have it beat, though.
gina & gregg hill
As much as Wiseguy tried to show the downfall of Henry Hill in an unflattering way, it still romanticized the gangster life in some respect. This book shatters whatever is left of that.
Written by his kids, it starts around the end of the Lufthansa heist. Even at the beginning, when they're still in primary school, Gina and Gregg pull no punches in chronicling their father's horrific parenting and abuse, from dealing cocaine in the house to hosting depraved orgies.
After that it shifts to the part of the story Wiseguy never covered, probably because Henry had nothing going from him after the gangster life. This is where the conflicts really start to heat up, especially when Gregg grows up and is able to put up more of a fight.
Reading this felt like watchig a car crash in slow motion. It was horrific, but something about it just made me keep on reading to see if any miracle would happen and change the family for the better. Things did get better, but only at the very end, where- actually, maybe I won't say anything for the sake of spoilers.
Just read it yourself- it's good.
john carreyou
This book, which covers the meteoric rise and fall of Theranos, is absolute cinema.
I was grinning the entire way through this book. I'm not sure if schadenfreude is the right word to describe this, but it was, amazing, in some sense, seeing all the scandalous crap that went on on this company before they got busted.
Also, despite the numerous people named in this book, I never really felt like I was losing track of the plot. Carreyou focuses in on one section of characters at a time and reintroduces critical ones so that I never had to ask myself, "Wait, who was that again?"
Near the later end, when it starts to cover how Holmes and Co. were busted, there's a major shift in the narrative that made me audibly gasp. This might be one of the first times that a book has genuinely caught me off guard. Maybe it helped that I didn't read the synopsis, but still. That twist (which I obviously won't tell for spoiler reasons) was FIRE.
timothy egan
I swear, these authors must spend five times as long on the intro as they do other portions of the book. It makes sense, since it's meant to give you a first impression, but so many of these fiction-like-nonfiction books have introductions that are straight, unadulterated peak.
This isn't to say the actual content of this book is bad. To no one's surprise, it takes place in and around Oklahoma's No Man's Land, covering the events leading up to and during the Dust Bowl. Egan stitches together this period of history from a ton of families' perspectives, ultimately creating a poignant and haunting narrative.
As soon as the story starts, with all the families moving in and taking up farming, I just knew things are going to go horribly wrong, and it sure as hell does. With each dust storm discussed, I hoped it was the last paragraph, the last chapter, that before things would go back to the way they were before. But alas, it never did. Even then, despite this kind of lacking closure, the ending still delivered as much as it could.
I will say, the introduction of characters is a bit scattered, with some only being introduced halfway through the book, but it's a very minor thing. Certainly not enough to bring this book down from peak.
stephen r brown
A wonderful story that doesn't waste time on tangents and gets straight to the juiciest parts of the story. It covers the Great Northern Expedition, commanded by Vitus Bering in the 18th century and all the places where it went wrong. My copy of the book also had two maps indicating the expedition route with helpful place markers, though it did kinda sorta spoil what I think is a major plot point. But given that this is nonfiction, can "spoilers" really be a thing?
Tremendous book- I'd say it's comparable to The Wager in terms of shipwreck stories. This one even managed to have character development, but that might just be because of luckier source material. The cast of relevant characters also rapidly narrows down by the middle so there wasn't any difficulty in keeping track of names.
richard l parry
STRAIGHT FIRE BRO JESUS CHRIST I DON'T THINK I'VE FINISHED A BOOK FASTER
Absolute masterpiece in storytelling and reporting bro, this might be one of the best ones I've read so far. Some chapters it takes a standard narrative nonfiction approach like This American Life. Parry follows the parents who lost their children at Okawa Primary School due to the 2011 Tohoku tsunami, and continuously interviews them as each of them processes grief in their own way. Other times it zooms out, focusing on characters that at first seem completely irrelevant to the central plot but wind up connecting in a much more abstract fashion to the central thread. Occasionally Parry adds points to a recurring argument of his about the aftermath of the tsunami was emblematic of many other issues in Japanese society and culture. You might think this is a very sus thing to argue, but he handles it remarkably well. I can't do it justice in these paragraphs.
Even removing the genuinely tear-jerking story (I cried at so many points holy) of parents seeking justice for their child, Parry just crafts his sentences in such a way that I can't even explain. Every other paragraph has an insanely quotable sentence, and despite the unfamiliar Japanese names I never found myself going back tens of pages just to keep track of who certain people were.