The Five Nonfiction Masterpieces That Changed My Life (Plus a Bonus)
I’m reading (belatedly) Say Nothing, Patrick Raddan Keefe’s 2019 epic narrative about the Irish Troubles, and halfway through the book I’m utterly gobsmacked. As an Irish-American, I’ve long taken an interest in the bloody turmoil of my native land, was deeply moved by the films In the Name of the Father, The Boxer and The Crying Game. But I’ve never read anything as intricately plotted, emotionally intense and compulsively page-turning on the subject as Say Nothing.
It got me thinking. What are the other deeply researched and brilliantly written nonfiction books on BIG subjects? I’m not talking about exceptional memoirs or essay collections or investigative treatises – those books belong in entirely different categories. Think instead about the ambitious works of nonfiction narrative that are as complex, haunting and revealing as the best modern fiction you’ve read – or better.
Here’s my short, randomly-ordered, admittedly off-the-top of my head list. What are YOUR selections?
· Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland. By Patrick Radden Keefe
Say Nothing: IRA militant Dolours Price
· The Best and the Brightest (about the architects of the Vietnam War). By David Halberstam
· And the Band Played On: People, Politics and the AIDS Epidemic. By Randy Shilts
And the Band Played On: San Francisco’s Castro district in the 1970s
· How to Live: Or a Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer. By Sarah Bakewell
· The Ratline: The Exalted Life and Mysterious Death of a Nazi Fugitive. By Philippe Sands
The Ratline: Otto Wachter and son
OK, and no false modesty here, I must add:
· The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA and the Rise of America’s Secret Government. By David Talbot
I aimed at changing readers’ perceptions of power, politics and the U.S. nation state. And I wrote it with the dreamlike sorcery of a movie. That’s what these other nonfiction masterpieces did to me, for me – changed me forever.
The Devil’s Chessboard: President Kennedy and nemesis Gen. Curtis LeMay