Category: non-fiction
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Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder by Salman Rushdie is a memoir going over the events before, during, and afterwards of the attempted murder of the author himself on August 12 of 2022. To be quite honest and clear, I had never heard of Salman Rushdie before this attack. I do remember getting notifications of…
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All the Devils Are Here: The Hidden History of the Financial Crisis by Bethany McLean and Joe Nocera goes into great detail on how the Great Financial Crisis of 2007-2009 came to be. It was either this book or “Too Big to Fail” by Andrew Sorkin. I chose the former because it’s supposed to go…
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The Devil’s Highway by Luis Alberto Urrea talks about a true story in the early 2000s regarding a group of illegal “entrants” who tried their luck crossing the Mexican border into the United States and how horribly the mission went for many of them. The book became a national bestseller and even a Pulitzer finalist.…
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With the Old Breed by E.B. Sledge is a memoir and recounting of the World War II battles at Peleliu and Okinawa Island. Private First Class E.B. Sledge, aka “Sledgehammer,” initially wanted to write the memoir to recount his hellish days of war for his family members only. He was then urged to publish the…
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Empress Dowager Cixi: The Concubine Who Launched Modern China by Jung Chang goes over the last few decades of China’s last dynasty, The Great Qing. Focusing squarely on the Empress Dowager Cixi, it covers the early days of her life to how she became the de facto ruler of China despite all odds. All roads…
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The Achilles Trap: Saddam Hussein, the C.I.A., and the Origins of America’s Invasion of Iraq by Steve Coll helps readers understand, as the title implies, the war against Iraq’s Saddam Hussein and how the continuous search for weapons of mass destruction ultimately led to their invasion by the United States. The Achilles Trap presents us…
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Zenith Man: Death, Love, and Redemption in a Georgia Courtroom by McCracken Poston Jr. goes over a highly bizarre case in the mid-90s in Ringgold, Georgia, where Alvin Ridley, a much-feared man in his neighborhood and a recluse, was accused of murdering his wife, whom no one has claimed to have seen in public for…
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The Cold War by Odd Arne Westad goes over in painstaking details one of the most tumultuous events, spanning several decades, post-World War II. Here is yet another crucial point in human history that was only briefly glanced over during high school history, and yet, the events that occurred shaped not just the United States…
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Imperial Twilight: The Opium War and the End of China’s Last Golden Age by Stephen Platt goes over one of China’s most embarrassing moment in its imperial history that still plays a role today in how modern China behaves. The Opium War fascinates me so much because I’ve seen it play a role is so…
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Built to Fail: The Inside Story of Blockbuster’s Inevitable Bust by Alan Payne talks about one of the biggest corporate collapse in American history. After having read the book, I honestly don’t think the author could have come up with a better title for the book. While Enron was caught doing financial magic tricks to…
The Mindless Catalog 