Killer Show: The Station Nightclub Fire, America's Deadliest Rock Concert

Into the Wild

Jon Krakauer · 207 pages

In April 1992 a young man from a well-to-do family hitchhiked to Alaska and walked alone into the wilderness north of Mt. McKinley. His name was Christopher Johnson McCandless. He had given $25,000 in savings to charity, abandoned his car and most of his possessions, burned all the cash in his wallet, and invented a new life for himself. Four months later, his decomposed body was found by a moose

After the Fire: A True Story of Friendship and Survival

Robin Gaby Fisher · 269 pages

On January 19, 2000, a fire raged through Seton HallUniversity 's freshman dormitory, killing three students and injuring 58 others. Among the victims were Shawn Simons and Alvaro Llanos, roommates from poor neighborhoods who made their families proud by getting into college. They managed to escape, but both were burned terribly. AFTER THE FIRE is the story of these young men and their courageous

A Deadly Wandering: A Tale of Tragedy and Redemption in the Age of Attention

Matt Richtel · 409 pages

From Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Matt Richtel, a brilliant, narrative-driven exploration of technology's vast influence on the human mind and society, dramatically-told through the lens of a tragic "texting-while-driving" car crash that claimed the lives of two rocket scientists in 2006. In this ambitious, compelling, and beautifully written book, Matt Richtel, a Pulitzer Prize-winning repor

Into the Abyss: How a Deadly Plane Crash Changed the Lives of a Pilot, a Politician, a Criminal and a Cop

Carol Shaben · 305 pages

An account of a deadly commuter plane crash that took place in northern Canada in 1984 involving a pilot, a politician, a cop and the criminal he was escorting.

The Punch: One Night, Two Lives, and the Fight That Changed Basketball Forever

John Feinstein · 375 pages

When a fistfight broke out between the Houston Rockets and the Los Angeles Lakers one night in 1977, All-Star Rudy Tomjanovich raced to break it up. He was met by Kermit Washington, a good player with a great reputation, and by an astonishingly ferocious punch, a single blow that has reverberated in both men's lives ever since. With his unerring insight into the deeper truths of professional sport

Deep Down Dark: The Untold Stories of 33 Men Buried in a Chilean Mine, and the Miracle That Set Them Free

Hector Tobar · 309 pages

Relates the experiences of the thirty-three men who endured entrapment beneath thousands of feet of rock for a record-breaking sixty-nine days during the San José mine collapse outside of Copiapó, Chile, in August 2010.

Hit Men: Power Brokers and Fast Money Inside the Music Business

Fredric Dannen · 407 pages

Copiously researched and documented, Hit Men is the highly controversial portrait of the pop music industry in all its wild, ruthless glory: the insatiable greed and ambition; the enormous egos; the fierce struggles for profits and power; the vendettas, rivalries, shakedowns, and payoffs. Chronicling the evolution of America's largest music labels from the Tin Pan Alley days to the present day, Fr

The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test

Tom Wolfe · 416 pages

One of the most essential works on the 1960s counterculture, Tom Wolfe's The Electric Kool-Aid Test is the seminal work on the hippie culture, a report on what it was like to follow along with Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters as they launched out on the "Transcontinental Bus Tour" from the West Coast to New York, all the while introducing acid (then legal) to hundreds of like-minded folks, stagi

Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania

Erik Larson · 464 pages

It is a story that many of us think we know but don't, and Erik Larson tells it thrillingly, switching between hunter and hunted while painting a larger portrait of America at the height of the Progressive Era. Full of glamour and suspense, Dead Wake brings to life a cast of evocative characters, from famed Boston bookseller Charles Lauriat to pioneering female architect Theodate Pope to President

Zodiac

Robert Graysmith · 355 pages

Zodiac is a non-fiction book written by Robert Graysmith about the unsolved serial murders committed by the "Zodiac Killer" in San Francisco in the late 1960s and early '70s.

The Lost Child of Philomena Lee: A Mother, Her Son and a 50 Year Search

Martin Sixsmith · 442 pages

"When she became pregnant as a teenager in Ireland in 1952, Philomena Lee was sent to a convent to be looked after as a "fallen woman." Then the nuns took her baby from her and sold him, like thousands of others, to America for adoption. Fifty years later, Philomena decided to find him. Meanwhile, on the other side of the Atlantic, Philomena's son was trying to find her. Renamed Michael Hess, he h

The Dressmaker of Khair Khana: Five Sisters, One Remarkable Family, and the Woman Who Risked Everything to Keep Them Safe

Gayle Tzemach Lemmon · 287 pages

When the Taliban took control of Kabul, Kamela Sediqi and all the women of Kabul saw their lives transformed. Overnight, they were banned from schools and offices and even forbidden from leaving their front doors on their own. The economy collapsed and young men left the city in search of work and security. Desperate to help her family and support her five brothers and sisters at home, Kamela bega

The Jordan Rules: The Inside Story of Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls

Sam Smith · 333 pages

Nine Parts of Desire: The Hidden World of Islamic Women

Geraldine Brooks

The Great Shark Hunt: Strange Tales from a Strange Time

Hunter S. Thompson · 624 pages

Without You, There Is No Us: My Time with the Sons of North Korea's Elite

Suki Kim · 291 pages

"A ... memoir of teaching English to the sons of North Korea's ruling class during the last six months of Kim Jong-il's reign"--Amazon.com It is 2011, and all universities in North Korea have been shut down for an entire year, the students sent to construction fields-- except for the 270 students at the all-male Pyongyang University of Science and Technology (PUST), a walled compound where portra

The Demon in the Freezer

Richard Preston · 266 pages

"The bard of biological weapons capturesthe drama of the front lines."-Richard Danzig, former secretary of the navyThe first major bioterror event in the United States-the anthrax attacks in October 2001-was a clarion call for scientists who work with "hot" agents to find ways of protecting civilian populations against biological weapons. In The Demon in the Freezer, his first nonfiction book sinc

From Beirut to Jerusalem

Thomas L. Friedman · 560 pages

Examines Israeli-Palestinian relations, the PLO, Israeli politics, Lebanese factions, news reporting from the Middle East, and other issues of the Middle East.

Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA

Tim Weiner · 727 pages

Here is the hidden history of the CIA: why eleven presidents and three generations of CIA officers have been unable to understand the world; why nearly every CIA director has left the agency in worse shape than he found it; and how these failures have profoundly jeopardized United States national security. For sixty years, the CIA has managed to maintain a formidable reputation in spite of its ter

Stasiland: Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall

Anna Funder

Dead Man Walking: An Eyewitness Account of the Death Penalty in the United States

Helen Prejean · 278 pages

Sister Helen Prejean's poignant account of her experiences ministering to two Death Row inmates.

Pirate Hunters: Treasure, Obsession, and the Search for a Legendary Pirate Ship

Robert Kurson · 304 pages

Traces the high-stakes quest of John Mattera and Shadow Divers' Chatterton to find the lost pirate ship of Joseph Bannister, discussing their teamwork with technology-eschewing Tracy Bowden and the story behind Bannister's elusive treasure.

Outcasts United: A Refugee Team, an American Town

Warren St. John · 288 pages

The extraordinary tale of a refugee youth soccer team and the transformation of a small American townClarkston, Georgia, was a typical Southern town until it was designated a refugee settlement center in the 1990s, becoming the first American home for scores of families in flight from the world's war zones--from Liberia and Sudan to Iraq and Afghanistan. Suddenly Clarkston's streets were filled wi

Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq

Thomas E. Ricks · 487 pages

The definitive military chronicle of the Iraq war and a searing judgment on the strategic blindness with which America has conducted it, drawing on the accounts of senior military officers giving voice to their anger for the first time.Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post senior Pentagon correspondant Thomas E. Ricks's Fiasco is masterful and explosive reckoning with the planning and execution o