Non-fiction recommendations

[Nonny]

I'm part of a relatively new book club (only in our second month) and we decided at our first meeting to alternate between fiction and non-fiction.

Our next pick will be non-fiction, and we all make suggestions and then vote, so I'm looking for recommendations.

Couple of things to keep in mind:
 - The club is with my coworkers and we meet during lunch at work, so nothing controversial
 - All of us individually have already read everything by Malcolm Gladwell; we don't want to re-read things, but all enjoy this style of book.
 - The bulk of the book club is comprised of men

[charlatti]

I haven't read anything by Gladwell, so I don't know what that style is. But here are some nonfiction books I've enjoyed:
Columbine
The Panic Virus
The Righteous Mind (politics, but more from a scientific/psychological side)
A Walk in the Woods
The Power of Habit
Maphead

[dorothyinAus]

I'm not a big non-fiction reader, but I have enjoyed:

This Is Your Brain on Music by Daniel Levitin
The Secret Life of Lobsters by Trevor Corson
Newton & the Counterfeiter by Thomas Levenson
The Professor and the Madman, and Krakatoa by Simon Winchester
In a Sunburned Country (also published as Down Under), Notes from a Small Island, and Neither Here Nor There all by Bill Bryson
What Einstein Told His Cook, and What Einstein Told His Cook 2 (Kitchen Science Explained) by Robert Wolke
Nicholas & Alexandra by Robert K. Massie
and
The Last Tsar by Edward Radsinsky

[elletr13]

I just finished Hellhound on His Trail by Hampton Sides and really enjoyed it.

[GilliC]

I never read Hiroshima in school, so I picked that up recently. It's definitely worth reading if you haven't already.

I thought that Longitude was surprisingly interesting. The early explorers understood latitude so early that I never realized how long it took them to figure out the east-west distances.

Stiff by Mary Roach is a bit disturbing in places, but I found it quite interesting. And I learned a lot about how to improve your odds of surviving a plane crash, which has oddly come in useful at multiple coffee-machine conversations. Weird!

And I have no idea if it's something they'd be interested in, but Life and Death in Shanghai by Nien Cheng is one of my favorite and most-recommended books in general. It's a very candid memoir of a Chinese woman who was imprisoned during Mao's Cultural Revolution. She is astonishingly objective about how her entire life was destroyed because two factions of the government were using her as a political pawn.

[BookLover]

The King's Speech: How One Man Saved the British Monarchy...the grandson of Lionel Logue found his old journals and complied some of it into this book. If you like the movie The King's Speech, you would like this.

Oogy: The Dog Only A Family Could Love...It's a touching book, but not a tear jerker.

The Duck Commander Family or Happy, Happy, Happy. If you are a fan of Duck Dynasty, these are good.

[duckduck]

Yes to anything by Bill Bryson!

[kirstinb]

Just started reading Freakonomics (they are forcing me to teach this to my English 9 classes next year), and so far, it's really interesting. Teaching Stiff to my English 10 and that is a good read too.

[BlackCanary]

-Pretty much any of Jen Lancaster's books
-Odd Girl Out: The Hidden Culture of Aggression in Girls by Rachel Simmons
-The Overachievers: The Secret Lives of Driven Kids by Alexandra Robbins
-Pledged: The Secret Life of Sororities by Alexandra Robbins
-America's Women: 400 Years of Dolls, Drudges, Helpmates, and Heroines by Gail Collins
-If Chins Could Kill: Confessions of a B Movie Actor by Bruce Campbell
-The Collected Autobiographies of Maya Angelou by Maya Angelou
-Let's Pretend This Never Happened: A Mostly True Memoir by Jenny Lawson (cluck cluck motherfucker!)
-The Dirt: Confessions Of The World's Most Notorious Rock Band by Tommy Lee
-Orange is the New Black: My Year in a Women's Prison by Piper Kerman
 

[msmerymac]

I agree that Hiroshima by John Hersey is amazing.

A quick read that was pretty fascinating is Moonwalking With Einstein.

Please Kill Me by Greil Marcus is an oral history of punk rock and it's amazing if that appeals to you. Same with Just Kids by Patti Smith.