Category: investigative-journalism
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I had thought that learning about L. Ron Hubbard’s Scientology in Going Clear by Lawrence Wright would have been the kookiest and nuttiest thing I’d ever read regarding religion and cults. Charles Manson is definitely another very weird chapter in American history, but I feel that both can’t really compare to the story of the…
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I’ve always had a fascination with processed food. I think many people believe it’s bad for your health but may not actually know why that is, myself included. This book on ultra-processed food can help bridge that gap, but don’t expect it to be easy reading. Science can be hard to understand, and I believe…
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I’ve read a couple of investigative journalism novels by Erik Larson, and they were mostly enjoyable. The Devil in the White City, while still enjoyable, warrants a strong caution for any readers thinking this will be yet another typical true crime thriller in which either the hunt for or the life of the criminal dominates…
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Chalk this one up as another must-read novel for fans of nonfiction true crime and investigative journalism. It’s an incredible story about a serial killer in Italy that began in the late 1960s and has yet to be identified to this day—and likely never will be. In this book, a local crime reporter teams up…
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I’ll be honest. If I were to one day meet a sudden, mysterious, and untimely death, I’d likely want this author to investigate and write a book about it. Say Nothing was a great read and introduced me to him. I saw London Falling as one of his newest books to come out, read a…
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Let’s face it. Not many journalists can do what the author of this book did. To investigate a story and crime in the past, regardless of how infamous it is, for nearly twenty years is quite an achievement. The amount of frustration due to roadblocks and threats would likely make all but the most seasoned…
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Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets by David Simon chronicles a journalist’s exclusive one-year police “internship” in 1988, within Baltimore’s homicide investigative department. This is truly a remarkable piece of journalism. It’s hard and gritty, something you’d obviously expect coming into the book, but the author makes reading all six hundred pages a breeze.…
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The Outlaw Ocean by Ian Urbina takes the readers on a bleak and almost dystopian view of life out in the deep ocean. With almost four years of hands-on experience traveling to countries to report on the myriad of topics and stories for the book, it’s a sobering and also horrifying experience to really learn…
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Under the Banner of Heaven by John Krakauer talks about the brutal killing of an innocent woman and her baby daughter in the mid-1980s by two brothers whom one of them believed that doing so was doing God’s work. It’s the story about how Mormonism and equally important, how the different sects were created, especially…
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Jesus Wept: Seven Popes and the Battle for the Soul of the Catholic Church by Philip Shenon is an appropriately named investigative novel that delves into the lives of the previous six or seven popes and how their winning the conclave election to become supreme rulers of the Roman Catholic Church have created an uproar,…
The Mindless Catalog 