Beauty and the Inferno.

Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything

Steven D. Levitt, Stephen J. Dubner · 320 pages

*A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything* Which is more dangerous, a gun or a swimming pool? What do schoolteachers and sumo wrestlers have in common? Why do drug dealers still live with their moms? How much do parents really matter? How did the legalization of abortion affect the rate of violent crime? These may not sound like typical questions for an economist to ask. But

Smells Like Dead Elephants: Dispatches from a Rotting Empire

Matt Taibbi · 288 pages

"Smells Like Dead Elephants brings together notorious journalistic agitator Matt Taibbi's most incisive and hilarious work from his column in Rolling Stone. Written during a period in our history with no shortage of outrage to compel Taibbi's pen, these pieces paint a shocking portrait of our government at work, or rarely working. But Taibbi doesn't just hit inside the Beltway, he gets into the ac

Midnight in Mexico: A Reporter's Journey Through a Country's Descent into Darkness

Alfredo Corchado · 294 pages

Since 2006, more than seventy thousand people have been killed in the Mexican drug war. In a country where the powerful are rarely scrutinized, noted Mexican American journalist Alfredo Corchado continues to report on government corruption, murders in Juarez, and the ruthless drug cartels of Mexico. In 2007, Corchado received a tip that he could be their next target. Rather than leave his country,

The Shadow of the Sun: My African Life

Ryszard Kapuscinski · 325 pages

"Ryszard Kapuscinski Arrived in Africa in 1957, at the beginning of the end of colonial rule - the "sometimes dramatic and painful, sometimes enjoyable and jubilant" rebirth of a continent. The Shadow of the Sun sums up the author's experiences ("the record of a forty-year marriage") in this place that became the central obsession of his remarkable career.". "From the hopeful years of independenc

We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live: Collected Nonfiction

Joan Didion · 1,141 pages

"Slouching Towards Bethlehem captures the counterculture of the sixties, its mood and lifestyle, as symbolized by California, Joan Baez, Haight-Ashbury. The White Album covers the revolutionary politics and the "contemporary wasteland" of the late sixties and early seventies, in pieces on the Manson family, the Black Panthers, and Hollywood. Salvador is a riveting look at the social and political

The Assassin from Apricot City: Reportage from Turkey

Witold Szablowski · 210 pages

Gangster Warlords: Drug Dollars, Killing Fields, and the New Politics of Latin America

Ioan Grillo · 377 pages

"In a ranch south of Texas, the man known as The Executioner dumps five hundred body parts in metal barrels. In Brazil's biggest city, a mysterious prisoner orders hit-men to gun down forty-one police officers and prison guards in two days. In southern Mexico, a meth maker is venerated as a saint while enforcing Old Testament justice on his enemies. A new kind of criminal kingpin has arisen: part

Mafia State: How one reporter became an enemy of the brutal new Russia

Luke Harding

Narcoland: The Mexican Drug Lords and Their Godfathers

Anabel Hernandez · 377 pages

The definitive history of the drug cartels, Narcoland takes readers to the front lines of the "war on drugs," which has so far cost more than 60,000 lives in just six years. Hernández explains in riveting detail how Mexico became a base for the mega-cartels of Latin America and one of the most violent places on the planet. At every turn, Hernández names names - not just the narcos, but also the po

Amexica: War Along the Borderline

Ed Vulliamy · 440 pages

Out of the Ordinary: True Tales of Everyday Craziness

Jon Ronson · 256 pages

A collection of Jon's "Guardian" features, reworked and with new material, with a common theme: the ways in which people get themselves into wholly irrational bubbles, within which all manner of lunacy makes perfect sense. In Jon's previous two books, "Them" and "The Men Who Stare at Goats", the nuttiness took place a long way from everyday life - on US military bases, or at Jihad training camps,

Songs of the Doomed: More Notes on the Death of the American Dream

Hunter S. Thompson · 320 pages

The noted journalist and political and social commentator recalls significant moments in his life and in the country's life.

Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers

Tom Wolfe · 153 pages

The Terror Years: From al-Qaeda to the Islamic State

Lawrence Wright · 480 pages

"Eleven powerful pieces first published in The New Yorker recall the path terror in the Middle East has taken from a more peaceful time in 1990s Israel to the recent beheadings of reporters by ISIS.With the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Looming Tower, Lawrence Wright became generally acknowledged as one of our major journalists writing on terrorism in the Middle East. This collection draws on several

Somebody Told Me: The Newspaper Stories of Rick Bragg

Rick Bragg · 282 pages

Dreamland: The True Tale of America's Opiate Epidemic

Sam Quinones · 377 pages

Sam Quinones chronicles how, over the past 15 years, enterprising sugar cane farmers in a small county on the west coast of Mexico created a unique distribution system that brought black tar heroin-- the cheapest, most addictive form of the opiate, 2 to 3 times purer than its white powder cousin-- to the veins of people across the United States.

The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals

Michael Pollan · 450 pages

What should we have for dinner?" To one degree or another this simple question assails any creature faced with a wide choice of things to eat. Anthropologists call it the omnivore's dilemma. Choosing from among the countless potential foods nature offers, humans have had to learn what is safe, and what isn't—which mushrooms should be avoided, for example, and which berries we can enjoy. Today, as

Eating Animals

Jonathan Safran Foer · 341 pages

After spending much of his life shifting between various omnivore and herbivore eating habits, the author presents a thought provoking look at why and how humans choose their diets. Delivering the pros and cons of eating meat, he invites readers on an insightful exploration into the many facets of food. Brilliantly synthesizing philosophy, literature, science, memoir, and his own detective work,

The New Journalism

Norman Mailer, Nicholas Tomalin, Joe McGinniss, George Plimpton, James Mills, John Gregory Dunne, John Sack, Joan Didion, 'Adam Smith', Rex Reed, Robert Christgau, Gay Talese, Richard Goldstein, Michael Herr, Truman Capote, Joe Eszterhas, Terry Southern, Hunter S. Thompson, Barbara L. Goldsmith, Gar · 394 pages

Selections from Rex Reed, Gay Talese, Richard Goldstein, Michael Herr, Truman Capote, Joe Eszterhas, Terry Southern, Hunter S. Thompson, Norman Mailer, Nicholas Tomalin, Tom Wolfe, Barbara L. Goldsmith, Joe McGinniss, George Plimpton, James Mills, John Gregory Dunne, John Sack, Joan Didion, "Adam Smith," Robert Christgau, and Garry Wills.

News of a Kidnapping

Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found

Suketu Mehta · 542 pages

A native of Bombay, Suketu Mehta gives us an insider's view of this stunning metropolis. He approaches the city from unexpected angles, taking us into the criminal underworld of rival Muslim and Hindu gangs; following the life of a bar dancer raised amid poverty and abuse; opening the door into the inner sanctums of Bollywood; and delving into the stories of the countless villagers who come in sea

Crime Beat: Stories Of Cops And Killers

Michael Connelly · 304 pages

The Gay Talese Reader: Portraits and Encounters

Gay Talese · 265 pages

Americana: Dispatches from the New Frontier

Hampton Sides · 450 pages