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24 books with the same feel
Include books by the same authorAnnie's Ghosts: A Journey Into a Family Secret
Steve Luxenberg · 401 pages
Beth Luxenberg was an only child. Everyone knew it: her grown children, her friends, even people she’d only recently met. So when her secret emerged, her son Steve Luxenberg was bewildered. He was certain that his mother had no siblings, just as he knew that her name was Beth, and that she had raised her children, above all, to tell the truth.By then, Beth was nearly eighty, and in fragile health.
The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry
Jon Ronson · 275 pages
"In this madcap journey, a bestselling journalist investigates psychopaths and the industry of doctors, scientists, and everyone else who studies them. The Psychopath Test is a fascinating journey through the minds of madness. Jon Ronson's exploration of a potential hoax being played on the world's top neurologists takes him, unexpectedly, into the heart of the madness industry. An influential psy
The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest
Stieg Larsson · 602 pages
> Lisbeth Salander—the heart of Larsson’s two previous novels—lies in critical condition, a bullet wound to her head, in the intensive care unit of a Swedish city hospital. She’s fighting for her life in more ways than one: if and when she recovers, she’ll be taken back to Stockholm to stand trial for three murders. With the help of her friend, journalist Mikael Blomkvist, she will not only have t
Brain on Fire: My Month of Madness
Susannah Cahalan · 288 pages
The book narrates Cahalan's issues with anti-NMDA receptor encephalitis and the process by which she was diagnosed with this form of encephalitis. She wakes up in a hospital with no memory of the events of the previous month, during which time she would have violent episodes and delusions. Her eventual diagnosis is made more difficult by various physicians misdiagnosing her with several theories s
The Bell Jar
Sylvia Plath · 258 pages
The Bell Jar is a classic of American literature, with over two million copies sold in this country. This extraordinary work chronicles the crack-up of Esther Greenwood: brilliant, beautiful, enormously talented, successful - but slowly going under, and maybe for the last time. Step by careful step, Sylvia Plath takes us with Esther through a painful month in New York as a contest-winning junior
Weekends at Bellevue: Nine Years on the Night Shift at the Psych E.R.
Julie Holland · 310 pages
Documents a psychiatrist's employment at New York City's Bellevue Hospital while sharing the life lessons she learned from her patients and colleagues, describing some of the more remarkable cases of her career and their influences on her family life.
How the Other Half Lives
Jacob A. Riis · 246 pages
A photographic collection exposing social conditions and daily life in the slums of late 19th century New York City. The title of the book is a reference to a sentence by French writer and philosopher François Rabelais, who famously wrote in his Pantagruel : "one half of the world does not know how the other half lives" ("la moitié du monde ne sait pas comment l'autre vit").
The Lives They Left Behind: Suitcases from a State Hospital Attic
Darby Penney, Peter Stastny · 206 pages
Foreword / Robert Whitaker -- 1. He took them on their last walk -- 2. Who were the people that went to Willard and why did they go there? --3. How I would have furnished my room (if not for the voices) -- 4. In permanent limbo: she kept asking for dispensation (until her doctor turned into the devil incarnate) -- 5. Children were buried and she knit her life away -- 6. Like a fly in a spider web
American Ground: Unbuilding the World Trade Center
William Langewiesche · 224 pages
American Ground is the story - until now untold - of the people who responded to the destruction of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. Within days, William Langewiesche made his way into the innermost recesses of the collapse. By virtue of the integrity and excellence of his previous work, he quickly secured unique, unrestricted, around-the-clock access to the site, the rescue workers a
Cork Dork: A Wine-Fueled Adventure Among the Obsessive Sommeliers, Big Bottle Hunters, and Rogue Scientists Who Taught Me to Live for Taste
Bianca Bosker · 450 pages
A tech reporter describes her introduction to the world of master sommeliers and her in-depth investigation into the source of their interests and skills, an effort marked by work with elite tasting groups, encounters at exclusive New York restaurants, visits to California winemakers and more.--
Lucky Loser: How Donald Trump Squandered His Father's Fortune and Created the Illusion of Success
Russ Buettner, Susanne Craig · 528 pages
"Lucky Loser: How Donald Trump Squandered His Father’s Fortune and Created the Illusion of Success" by Russ Buettner and Susanne Craig is an investigative account of Donald Trump’s finances, drawing on decades of tax records, business documents, and insider testimony. The book argues that Trump’s public image as a self-made billionaire is largely a myth, built on vast financial support from his fa
The Central Park Five: A Chronicle of a City Wilding
Sarah Burns · 240 pages
An in-depth account of one of New York City's most notorious crimes. On April 20, 1989, the body of a woman is discovered in Central Park, her skull badly smashed. Within days, five black and Latino teenagers confess to her rape and beating. The ensuing media frenzy and hysterical public reaction is extraordinary. The young men are tried and convicted as adults, despite the fact that the teens qui
Broadmoor Revealed: Victorian Crime and the Lunatic Asylum
Mark Stevens · 192 pages
Amazing Grace: The Lives of Children and the Conscience of a Nation
Jonathan Kozol · 284 pages
Amazing Grace is a book about the hearts of children who grow up in the South Bronx - the poorest congressional district of our nation. Without rhetoric, but drawing extensively upon the words of children, parents, and priests, this book does not romanticize or soften the effects of violence and sickness. One fourth of the child-bearing women in the neighborhoods where these children live test po
The Mole People: Life in the Tunnels Beneath New York City
Jennifer Toth · 267 pages
Thousands of people live in the subway, railroad, and sewage tunnels that form the bowels of New York City. This book is about them, the so-called "mole people" living alone and in communities, in the frescoed waiting rooms of long-forgotten subway tunnels and in pick-axed compartments below busway platforms. It is about how and why people move undergraound, who they are, and what they have to say
Young Money: Inside the Hidden World of Wall Street's Post-Crash Recruits
Kevin Roose · 336 pages
Bedlam: London and its Mad
Catharine Arnold · 313 pages
Catharine Arnold takes us on a tour of Bedlam and examines London's attitude to madness along the way. We travel through the ages, from the barbaric `exorcisms' of the medieval period to the Tudor belief that a roast mouse, eaten whole, was the cure. We see the reforming zeal of eighteenth century campaigners and the development of the massive Victorian asylums. This was the era of the private mad
The Last Shot: City Streets, Basketball Dreams
Darcy Frey · 231 pages
It ought to be just a game, but basketball on the playgrounds of Coney Island is much more than that - for many young men it represents their only hope of escape from a life of crime, poverty, and despair. It is their last shot. This is the story of a small group of high school boys who have given their young lives to basketball, as neighborhood stars and as team members of the Abraham Lincoln Hig
Black Edge: Inside Information, Dirty Money, and the Quest to Bring Down the Most Wanted Man on Wall Street
Sheelah Kolhatkar · 368 pages
"Steven A. Cohen is a Wall Street legend. Born into a middle class family in a decidedly upper class suburb on Long Island, he was unpopular in high school and unlucky with girls. Then he went off to Wharton, and in 1992 launched the hedge fund SAC Capital, which grew into a $15 billion empire. He cultivated an air of mystery and reclusiveness--at one point, owned the copyright to almost every pic
102 Minutes: The Untold Story of the Fight to Survive Inside the Twin Towers
Jim Dwyer, Kevin Flynn · 384 pages
Church of Marvels
Leslie Parry · 308 pages
"New York, 1895. Sylvan Threadgill, a night soiler cleaning out the privies behind the tenement houses, finds an abandoned newborn baby in the muck. An orphan himself, Sylvan rescues the child, determined to find where she belongs. Odile Church and her beautiful sister, Belle, were raised amid the applause and magical pageantry of The Church of Marvels, their mother's spectacular Coney Island side
The Perfect Scent: A Year Inside the Perfume Industry in Paris and New York
Chandler Burr · 336 pages
No journalist has ever been allowed into the ultrasecretive, highly pressured process of originating a perfume. But Chandler Burr, the New York Times perfume critic, spent a year behind the scenes observing the creation of two major fragrances. Now, writing with wit and elegance, he juxtaposes the stories of the perfumes--one created by a Frenchman in Paris for an exclusive luxury-goods house, the
The Address
Fiona Davis · 254 pages
"After a failed apprenticeship, working her way up to head housekeeper of a posh London hotel is more than Sara Smythe ever thought she'd make of herself. But when a chance encounter with Theodore Camden, one of the architects of the grand New York apartment house The Dakota, leads to a job offer, her world is suddenly awash in possibility--no mean feat for a servant in 1884. In 1985, Bailey Camde