Non-fiction for People Who Hate Non-Fiction

Two men, each handsome and unusually adept at his chosen work, embodied an element of the great dynamic that characterized America's rush toward the twentieth century. The architect was Daniel Hudson Burnham, the fair's brilliant director of works and the builder of many of the country's most important structures, including the Flatiron Building in New York and Union Station in Washington, D.C. The murderer was Henry H. Holmes, a young doctor who,...

"... An archaeological romp through the entire history of humankind--and through all five senses--from tropical Polynesian islands to forbidding arctic ice floes, and everywhere in between."--Provided by publisher.

A vivid, dramatic and authoritative account of the most influential family in Italian history: The Medici. Against the background of an age that saw the rebirth of ancient and classical learning, Strathern explores the intensely dramatic rise and fall of the Medici family in Florence, as well as the Italian Renaissance which they did so much to sponsor and encourage. He follows the lives of many of the great Renaissance artists and scientists with...

A round-the-globe journey through the periodic table explains how the air people breathe reflects the world's history, tracing the origins and ingredients of the atmosphere to explain air's role in reshaping continents, steering human progress, and powering revolutions. "The fascinating science and history of the air we breathe: It's invisible. It's ever-present. Without it, you would die in minutes. And it has an epic story to tell. In Caesar's...

"In the tradition of Fast Food Nation and The Omnivore's Dilemma, an extraordinary investigation into the human lives at the heart of the American grocery store What does it take to run the American supermarket? How do products get to shelves? Who sets the price? And who suffers the consequences of increased convenience end efficiency? In this alarming expose, author Benjamin Lorr pulls back the curtain on this highly secretive industry. Combining...

When I say that I was a feminist in kindergarten, I am not exaggerating. As a child, Isabel Allende watched her mother, abandoned by her husband, provide for her three small children. As a young woman coming of age in the late 1960s, she rode the first wave of feminism. She has seen what has been accomplished by the movement in the course of her lifetime. And over the course of three marriages, she has learned how to grow as a woman while having a...

"On November 6, 1860, Abraham Lincoln became the fluky victor in a tight race for president. The country was bitterly at odds; Southern extremists were moving ever closer to destroying the Union, with one state after another seceding and Lincoln powerless to stop them. Slavery fueled the conflict, but somehow the passions of North and South came to focus on a lonely federal fortress in Charleston Harbor: Fort Sumter. Master storyteller Erik Larson...

"'This book is Clint Smith's contemporary portrait of the United States of America as a slave-owning nation. Beginning in his own hometown of New Orleans, Smith leads the reader through an unforgettable tour of monuments and landmarks, those that are honest about the past and those that are not, that offer an intergenerational story of how slavery has been central in shaping our nation's collective history, and ourselves" -- Provided by the publisher. Beginning...

"A collection of essays taking aim at the legitimacy of the modern feminist movement, arguing that it has chronically failed to address the needs of all but a few women"--Provided by publisher. "Today's feminist movement has a glaring blind spot, and paradoxically, it is women. Mainstream feminists rarely talk about meeting basic needs as a feminist issue, argues Mikki Kendall, but food insecurity, access to quality education, safe neighborhoods,...