Historical Non-fiction
Explore the best historical non-fiction books that bring the past to life. Discover gripping tales of real events, legendary figures, and forgotten eras in this curated list of must-reads.
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Arthur & George
by Julian Barnes
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • BOOKER PRIZE FINALIST • From the bestselling author of The Sense of an Ending comes an “extraordinary … first rate” novel (The New York Times Book Review) that follows the lives of two very different British men and explores the grand tapestry of late-Victorian Britain. As boys, George, the son of a Midlands vicar, and Arthur, living in shabby genteel Edinburgh, find themselves in a vast and complex world at the heart of the British Empire. Years later—one struggling with his identity in a world hostile to his ancestry, the other creating the world’s most famous detective while in love with a woman who is not his wife—their fates become inextricably connected.
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The Devil in the White City
by Erik Larson
#1 NATIONAL BESTSELLER • NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST • From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Splendid and the Vile comes the true tale of the 1893 World's Fair in Chicago and the cunning serial killer who used the magic and majesty of the fair to lure his victims to their death. “As absorbing a piece of popular history as one will ever hope to find.” —San Francisco Chronicle Combining meticulous research with nail-biting storytelling, Erik Larson has crafted a narrative with all the wonder of newly discovered history and the thrills of the best 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, in a malign parody of the White City, built his “World’s Fair Hotel” just west of the fairgrounds—a torture palace complete with dissection table, gas chamber, and 3,000-degree crematorium. Burnham overcame tremendous obstacles and tragedies as he organized the talents of Frederick Law Olmsted, Charles McKim, Louis Sullivan, and others to transform swampy Jackson Park into the White City, while Holmes used the attraction of the great fair and his own satanic charms to lure scores of young women to their deaths. What makes the story all the more chilling is that Holmes really lived, walking the grounds of that dream city by the lake. The Devil in the White City draws the reader into the enchantment of the Guilded Age, made all the more appealing by a supporting cast of real-life characters, including Buffalo Bill, Theodore Dreiser, Susan B. Anthony, Thomas Edison, Archduke Francis Ferdinand, and others. Erik Larson’s gifts as a storyteller are magnificently displayed in this rich narrative of the master builder, the killer, and the great fair that obsessed them both.
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Thunderstruck
by Erik Larson
A true story of love, murder, and the end of the world’s “great hush.” In Thunderstruck, Erik Larson tells the interwoven stories of two men—Hawley Crippen, a very unlikely murderer, and Guglielmo Marconi, the obsessive creator of a seemingly supernatural means of communication—whose lives intersect during one of the greatest criminal chases of all time. Set in Edwardian London and on the stormy coasts of Cornwall, Cape Cod, and Nova Scotia, Thunderstruck evokes the dynamism of those years when great shipping companies competed to build the biggest, fastest ocean liners; scientific advances dazzled the public with visions of a world transformed; and the rich outdid one another with ostentatious displays of wealth. Against this background, Marconi races against incredible odds and relentless skepticism to perfect his invention: the wireless, a prime catalyst for the emergence of the world we know today. Meanwhile, Crippen, “the kindest of men,” nearly commits the perfect murder. With his unparalleled narrative skills, Erik Larson guides us through a relentlessly suspenseful chase over the waters of the North Atlantic. Along the way, he tells of a sad and tragic love affair that was described on the front pages of newspapers around the world, a chief inspector who found himself strangely sympathetic to the killer and his lover, and a driven and compelling inventor who transformed the way we communicate.
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Portrait of a Killer
by Patricia Daniels Cornwell
Now updated with new material that brings the killer's picture into clearer focus. In the fall of 1888, all of London was held in the grip of unspeakable terror. An elusive madman calling himself Jack the Ripper was brutally butchering women in the slums of London's East End. Police seemed powerless to stop the killer, who delighted in taunting them and whose crimes were clearly escalating in violence from victim to victim. And then the Ripper's violent spree seemingly ended as abruptly as it had begun. He had struck out of nowhere and then vanished from the scene. Decades passed, then fifty years, then a hundred, and the Ripper's bloody sexual crimes became anemic and impotent fodder for puzzles, mystery weekends, crime conventions, and so-called "Ripper Walks" that end with pints of ale in the pubs of Whitechapel. But to number-one New York Times bestselling novelist Patricia Cornwell, the Ripper murders are not cute little mysteries to be transformed into parlor games or movies but rather a series of terrible crimes that no one should get away with, even after death. Now Cornwell applies her trademark skills for meticulous research and scientific expertise to dig deeper into the Ripper case than any detective before her--and reveal the true identity of this fabled Victorian killer. In Portrait of a Killer: Jack the Ripper, Case Closed, Cornwell combines the rigorous discipline of twenty-first century police investigation with forensic techniques undreamed of during the late Victorian era to solve one of the most infamous and difficult serial murder cases in history. Drawing on unparalleled access to original Ripper evidence, documents, and records, as well as archival, academic, and law-enforcement resources, FBI profilers, and top forensic scientists, Cornwell reveals that Jack the Ripper was none other than a respected painter of his day, an artist now collected by some of the world's finest museums: Walter Richard Sickert. It has been said of Cornwell that no one depicts the human capability for evil better than she. Adding layer after layer of circumstantial evidence to the physical evidence discovered by modern forensic science and expert minds, Cornwell shows that Sickert, who died peacefully in his bed in 1942, at the age of 81, was not only one of Great Britain's greatest painters but also a serial killer, a damaged diabolical man driven by megalomania and hate. She exposes Sickert as the author of the infamous Ripper letters that were written to the Metropolitan Police and the press. Her detailed analysis of his paintings shows that his art continually depicted his horrific mutilation of his victims, and her examination of this man's birth defects, the consequent genital surgical interventions, and their effects on his upbringing present a casebook example of how a psychopathic killer is created. New information and startling revelations detailed in Portrait of a Killer include: - How a year-long battery of more than 100 DNA tests--on samples drawn by Cornwell's forensics team in September 2001 from original Ripper letters and Sickert documents--yielded the first shadows of the 75- to 114 year-old genetic evid...
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The Professor and the Madman
by Simon Winchester
The Professor and the Madman, masterfully researched and eloquently written, is an extraordinary tale of madness, genius, and the incredible obsessions of two remarkable men that led to the making of the Oxford English Dictionary -- and literary history. The compilation of the OED began in 1857, it was one of the most ambitious projects ever undertaken. As definitions were collected, the overseeing committee, led by Professor James Murray, discovered that one man, Dr. W. C. Minor, had submitted more than ten thousand. When the committee insisted on honoring him, a shocking truth came to light: Dr. Minor, an American Civil War veteran, was also an inmate at an asylum for the criminally insane. This P.S. edition features an extra 16 pages of insights into the book, including author interviews, recommended reading, and more.
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Classic Crimes
by W. N Roughead
CLASSIC CRIMES BY WILLIAM ROUGHEAD ALSO BY W. ROUGHEAD: RHYME WITHOUT REASON TWELVE SCOTS TRIALS THE RIDDLE OF THE RUTHVENS GLENGARRYS WAY THE FATAL COUNTESS THE REBEL EARL MALICE DOMESTIC THE EVIL THAT MEN Do BAD COMPANIONS WHAT Is YOUB VERDICT? IN QUEER STREET ROGUES WALK HERE KNAVES LOOKINGGLASS MAINLY MURDER THE SEAMY SIDE NECK OR NOTHING RASCALS REVIVED REPROBATES REVIEWED Notable British Trials: DR. PRITCHARD DEACON BRODIE CAPTAIN PORTEOUS OSCAR SLATER MRS MCLACHLAN MAHY BLANDY BURKE AND HARE KATHARINE NAIRN J. D MERRETT J.W LAURIE CLASSIC CRIMES CONTENTS PREFACE: BY JAMES BRIDIE KATHARINE NAIRN DEACON BRODIE THE WEST PORT MURDERS To MEET Miss MADELEINE SMITH CONSTANCE KENTS CONSCIENCE THE SANDYFORD MYSTERY THE BALHAM MYSTERY DR PRITCHARD REVISITED THE ARRAN MURDER THE ARDLAMONT MYSTERY THE SLATER CASE THE MERHETT MYSTERY PREFACE THIS age of atheists, materialists and neopsychologists finds little place in its cosmogony for the entity Called Evil, By and large, we agree with the old Scotswoman who held that Whats naturals no nasty. By and large, the practical application of our theories seems to work even less satisfactorily than in the days when the personal Devil was a familiar and even popular figure, I am no great reader, but I get the impression that the few writers who still cherish His memory and seriously examine His works are a few English and French Roman Catholics and a handful of Calvinists north of the Tweed. I get the further impression that the Catholics are afraid of Him and that the Calvinists treat Him with the affectionate regard shown by pathologists to their favourite strains of streptococci. Before I expatiate on the greatest living exponent of the Calvinist attitude to Evil, may I be allowed a word or two on the Crime Novel? I have been reading a little of Cheyney and Charteris, who stem, I believe, rom a very flourishing American school. These books deal with the war of Society against its enemies without accepting explicitly or implicitly any idea of a moral Universe. Except from the point of view of physical beauty, there is little to choose between the athletic, ingenious, chainsmoking, whiskyswilling hero and the villains he socks, slugs, pokes in the kisser, outwits and finally rubs out Even the simple morality of the Queensberry Rules has no place in the fights. These are Ossianic in their primitiveness, as much as in their incredibility.
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I Am Murdered
by Bruce Chadwick
Wythe lived long enough to accuse his grandnephew of poisoning him and two other members of his household. Why did three prominent doctors insist that he hadn't been poisoned at all? Learn the grisly, fascinating, and often astounding tale of Wythe's murder and America's very first "trial of the century."
