Category: non-fiction
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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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Above the Noise: My Story of Chasing Calm by DeMar DeRozan is the biography of one of the Toronto Raptors’ current all-time leading scorers and one of the NBA’s most deadly mid-range shooters today. Although it’s true that many professional athletes literally came from nothing prior to gaining superstardom, I was for some odd reason…
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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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Apocalypse: How Catastrophe Transformed Our World and Can Forge New Futures by Lizzie Wade goes over some of our world’s history’s most devastating apocalyptic events, showing us that regardless of what gets thrown at us, humans eventually will find a way to survive and move forward. If you’re feeling depressed about today’s world and how…
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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,…
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Killing the Witches: The Horror of Salem, Massachusetts by Bill O’Reilly and Martin Dugard goes over the Salem witch trials of the late 1600s. I’ve always been fascinated by the witch trials, even going back to when I was a kid. Even though we were obviously taught that the accused were actually innocent, it still…
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The Siege: A Six-Day Hostage Crisis and the Daring Special-Forces Operation That Shocked the World by Ben Macintyre tells the story of how six Arab gunmen stormed the Iranian embassy in London in 1980 while the U.S. embassy hostage crisis in Tehran was happening simultaneously. Not only did it change London forever afterwards because of…
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Challenger: A True Story of Heroism and Disaster on the Edge of Space by Adam Higginbotham details the tragic accident of the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster in February of 1986. I was excited to learn about this incident and knew the book and story were in good hands with Adam. Having read and absolutely loved…
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Yes, I’m a book nerd. Always have been and always will be. Ever since third or fourth grade, I remember having to do book reports and actually loving it while almost every other kid dreaded this horrible and time-wasting activity. While other kids selected the absolute thinnest of books that they could get away with,…
The Mindless Catalog 