Narrative nonfiction, as good as a novel?

13 years ago

Having a curious mind, I do a lot of reading for information in addition to reading fiction, which is ultimately reading for stories. However, I rarely read the kind of nonfiction that tells a story, but a true one. I would say that Tracy Kidder's two books House and The Soul of a New Machine fit this description. I enjoyed them both, but not so much his later work. I've read others from time to time, but really not very often. Often I pick up such a book, skim the first chapter, but ultimately put it down. I'm bored.

A friend of my husband recommended that he read Shadow Divers by Robert Kurson. It is a story of two divers back in the early days of scuba who did some dangerous diving on an old wreck. It is the story of their adventurous investigations. Now this did not appeal to me at all but my husband loved it. He and the friend who recommended the book were scuba divers themselves back in the 1960's, though they never did anything so risky as the diving described in the book. My husband was eager that I read it, but I was reluctant. His friend's wife had liked it, he told me. Finally I said that I would read the first chapter. If it caught my interest, I would read the book. If not, I'd given it a fair try.

Well, I'm hooked. Totally hooked. It's not going back to the library until I'm done.

So, those of you who read this genre, what have you come across that was absolutely compelling? What nonfiction have you read that really could stand up to a good novel? Clearly I'm missing out on some good books, if I could only find them amidst the flood of accurate-but-dull and the exciting-but-sensationalized.

Rosefolly

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Comments (9)

ccrdmrbks
13 years ago
Before I even opened the thread I thought to myself, "well, I can recommend Shadow Divers anyway." I found it very compelling, and I am glad you are hooked!
J C
13 years ago
I did the same thing! Shadow Divers is the standard by which certain books - nonfiction that reads like fiction - can be judged. I must put it on my reread list.

The recent book by Rebecca Skloot, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks approaches this standard. To be honest, I wasn't thrilled with this book, but several people whose judgment I trust loved it for that very reason. Also, the first part of Age of Wonder by Richard Holmes might be included. Unfortunately the book lost steam after that, IMHO, but it is quite a long book, so you might just read the first half!

I will have to look in my archives, I remember a true story of a WWII escape that rivaled any novel I have ever read - a sole survivor from a failed mission who was hidden by locals and finally walked across mountains to freedom.
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That link doesn't work for me, Tony, and I'm not sure I can explain it. Maybe the image of the pages from the book are on the screen, but the text isn't available to my screen reader. I keep coming back to Woodyoak's comments about the original three metaphors in this post's title. She wrote, "Perhaps what metaphor is useful depends on the stage of the gardens development and the particular objective under consideration as well as the mindset of the gardener at the time." Woodyoak, your garden sounds much further along than my own. Which got me thinking about time. There's been a thread here a while back about how to create the look and feel of age in a garden. In other words, artificial aging. The more recent thread about the beautiful ruins of an old stone barn is the real thing. But, some of the design questions still hinge on how you want to tell the story of those stones or what story you choose to tell. I live on an average street, in an average house, in a town that is so average it came in 2nd in the contest to be the "real" Springfield where the Simpsons live. Glaciers dominated this region for a very long time, and then prairies interspersed with thick bands of forest grew here for tens of thousands of years. For just a couple of handfuls of decades European settlers farmed the surface of this land, while a little later first and second generation immigrants mined it. Most of the homeowners within the city limits are required to purchase insurance for mine subsidence. Not always a comforting thought, as this is the region of the new Madrid fault line, famous for relative inactivity, famous for the strongest earthquake ever recorded in the lower 48 states. That's a story that my father, a geologist, liked to tell to get the hairs on the back of our necks to stand on end. He felt downright cheated when I called him a few years back to tell him I'd experienced a tiny little seismic tremor. An elderly friend told us that one of the largest mine heads was located about a three minute walk from my house. In a slightly different direction I can walk 3 or 4 minutes to where the last corn fields were sold three years ago. Now McMansions have sprouted up on their tiny lots. Amili wrote, "But then perhaps the garden is more often meant to be the setting for a good story, the lush and sensuous backdrop, a catalyst, not the author." Which got me to ask myself, "Why have I been going down this road?" Why try to make a garden tell a story? "To celebrate," writes Nandina. And that's what I would attempt to do in telling stories. Not the stories of western expansion, industrialization, or the blanding of life in suburbia. The stories I play with in my mind's eye are celebrations. They help me to dream my garden more clearly when, as now, it sleeps beneath an ice storm. Wellspring
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Thanks...I like the fact that most are from non-fiction, history. Good way to "meet" new authors I might enjoy. josh
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I read both fiction and non-fiction. usually have one or two of ech type going at the same time. Often a fiction book will get me to go into more depth of a subject-- ie i read a bio of jos. banks while reading patrick o'brian's sea-adventures that master and commander movie was based on. just one to many references to banks, made me dig up a bio to fit him into the books i was reading-- that lead to reading the botany of desire. right now i'm working on wincheseter's book about the 1906 san fransisco earthquake that i came a cross while looking thru the 'new non-fiction' section at our library. I read the horatio hornblower novels to compary to obrian's and edded up reading a book about tamenny (sp)hall in new york which caused me to read a bio of john adams, and because we were going to washington a read a history of 'clover' adams too. strange on how books will lead you on a thread of reading. I'm finishing peter tremayne's mystery series of sister fidelma in 7th cent ireland, no idea where that will take me, but it prompted me to pick-up books on celtic knotwork. so i read and read and read, obscure references lead me from place to place. diggerb
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Usually I read five or six nonfiction books for every one fiction, but here lately I've gone through a spurt of novel reading. Fiction takes so much more effort for me that now I'm ready to kick back and pamper myself for a while with the following: The Riddle and the Knight: In Search of Sir John Mandeville, the World's Greatest Traveller by Giles Milton - Sir John is suspected of being one of the biggest travelogue-writing frauds of all time; but was he really? The author attempts to find out by going himself to the places Mandeville claimed to have journeyed through. I just read a bit about Milton going to visit the Patriarchate of the Greek Orthodox Church in Istanbul (Constantinople in Mandeville's time) but he found himself in a seedy part of town and needed directions. Passing an Orthodox Church he stepped inside its door to find a woman in the vestibule. He asked her and after she told him which way to go, Milton asked her if she was a Romioi (a direct descendant of the Roman founders of Constantinople): "No," she said. "I'm Italian. From Bologna." She didn't look Italian, and I asked when she had moved to Istanbul. She paused for a moment, then said: "I think we moved here four centuries ago." If Milton keeps up this sort of thing, I'm going to love this book! The Degaev Affair by Richard Pipes (History, Biography) I'm not well-informed about Russian history, so this bio of an obscure-to-me political terrorist who witnessed the assassination of Tsar Alexander II and then directly helped plot the assassination of the chief of Russia's security organization ordinarily would not have attracted me. But I read the back cover anyway, for some reason, and was instantly intrigued because this terrorist, Sergei Degaev, eventually wound up at -- of all places! -- the University of South Dakota as an avuncular mathematics professor known as Alexander Pell. "Jolly little Pell" and his pleasant wife were evidently great favorites of his students, the faculty, and the townspeople. This guy was a terrorist? Huck's Raft: A History of American Childhood by Steven Mintz The romanticized notions and nostalgia for the halycon days of childhood can be dispensed with quite quickly when we realize that the whole idea of childhood as we think of it only goes back to around the first part of the twentieth century. Even Samuel Clemens who did more than any other American writer of his day to capture the essence of nineteenth-century boyhood was under no illusions that childhood, for the most part, was about one-tenth bliss and nine-tenths pure hell. This overview of the history of American childhood from the 17th century to the beginning of the 21st century looks to be fascinating -- I sure hope so.
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kathy9norcal
13 years ago
I, too, loved Shadow Divers. As far as non-fiction that can rival a novel, a few come to mind. I loved Devil In The White City, the story of the Chicago World's Fair and a serial killer who operated in Chicago at the same time.

Born To Run was simply wonderful. A book about long distance running, but really much, much more. It told the story about the author's search for a timid Mexican tribe of Indians who are know to be the world's fastest runners. I dare you not to get a pair of Five Fingers after reading this. (I am not a runner, never will be!)

And another top favorite is Into The Wild by John Krakauer, described by Publishers Weekly, "After graduating from Emory University in Atlanta in 1992, top student and athlete Christopher McCandless abandoned his possessions, gave his entire $24,000 savings account to charity and hitchhiked to Alaska, where he went to live in the wilderness." I thought about this true story long after I read the book.

Lastly, a non-fiction book I could not put down was The Sociopath Next Door. Everyone I described it to had to get their own copy.

Have fun and thanks for starting this thread. I also hope to get some good recommendations.
netla
13 years ago
One I can recommend is Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage by Alfred Lansing, about Ernest Shackleton's failed polar expedition of 1914-17. It is one of those stories about incredible heroism in the face of incredible hardships, but most importantly: it's well-written and reads like a novel (a thriller, in fact).
Chris_in_the_Valley
13 years ago
Richard Preston's The Hot Zone reads like a thriller. All about the emergence of the Ebola and Marburg viruses and how they were tracked and identified.

In addition to Eric Larson's Devil in the White City check out his Isaac's Storm about the deadliest hurricane in American history (still!) - Galveston in 1900.
woodnymph2_gw
13 years ago
I second both "Isaac's Storm" and "Into the Wild." I could not put either one down.
rosefolly
Original Author
13 years ago
I finished Shadow Divers and am happy to report that it held its momentum until the end. Very satisfying.

Next I'll try another of the books recommended here, depending on what is available at my local library. Do please keep the suggestions coming!

R
Bizzo
13 years ago
Great Thread! I have a long drive to work, and just started listening to Audio Books. I've been seeking out non-fiction books for my drive. Ava's Man by Rick Bragg is a non-fiction narrative I picked up at the library and enjoyed.

Here is a link that might be useful: Reviews of Ava's Man
J C
13 years ago
The book I mentioned above is called We Die Alone by David Howarth. I can second many of the recommendations here and thank those who reminded me of them. Into the Wild and Devil in the White City were both terrific, and I would bet they are both readily available at libraries. One good thing about nonfiction books of this type is that they seem to escape culling.

Narrative nonfiction, as good as a novel?

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Narrative nonfiction, as good as a novel?

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