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Non-fiction books that are well researched and well written or memoirs and biographies can be really wonderful. I have mentioned some that I have read this past year when I had my list of challenge books. I usually don’t rush through a non-fiction book, but take my time.
Recently I traveled up the Danube River in the book The Danube: A Journey Upriver from the Black Sea to the Black Forest by Nick Thorpe. I also spent time in the West listening to coyotes and watching all kinds of birds while reading Talking to the Moon: Wildlife Adventures on the Plains and Prairies of Osage Country by John Joseph Mathews.
A few years ago, I enjoyed climbing and camping in redwoods while reading Wild Trees by Richard Preston. I sailed the seas with Sir Francis Drake by John Sugden.
I spent years with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and so many courageous people while reading three books by Taylor Branch that are really important:
Parting the Waters: America in the King Years 1954-1963
Pillar of Fire: America in the King Years 1963-65
At Canaan’s Edge: America in the King Years 1965-68
I also read An Ordinary Man the autobiography of Paul Rusesabagina with Tom Zoellner who in Rwanda saved 1268 people both Hutus and Tutsi.
Another favorite:
The Cat from Hue by John Laurence
My recent list of favorites that I read this year:
Catherine the Great by Robert K. Massie
Citizen: An American Lyric by Claudia Rankine
The Measure of a Man: A Spiritual Autobiography by Sidney Poitier
The Passing of the Armies by Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain
1863: The Rebirth of a Nation by Joseph E. Stevens
Goodbye to a River by John Graves
The Little Book of Revolution by David Akadjian
A book that was based on a real woman which I read a few weeks ago was The Lilac Girls by Martha Hall Kelly. It is set in WW II and shows the life of three ladies. It is a haunting story, and we must never forget.
Pictures and the story about how the author learned about the people in the book is here and is worth a look:
www.marthahallkelly.com/...
The novel started with Victoria Magazine.
I carried this article from the May 1999 Victoria Magazine around with me for months, not knowing it would lead me to write Lilac Girls, a novel about Caroline Ferriday and how she comes to the aid of a group of Polish women who had survived Ravensbruck, Hitler’s only all-female concentration camp. I have a crazy love of all things lilac and fell hard for the story of Caroline Ferriday and her garden.
The article said she was an incredible woman: Broadway actress, debutante, philanthropist: “When she wasn’t on stage or abroad, the debonair Shakespearean actress Miss Caroline Ferriday always headed for the Victorianized colonial home she’d inherited from her parents in 1953.” The article was in my wallet for so long it became smooth and shiny. I’d take it out and read it, hoping to take the drive, three hours north of where I lived in Fairfield, to Bethlehem, Ct. But at the time I had three young children, so it was hard to break away.
…
But it was the black and white photograph of a group of Polish women there on the desk that stopped me. “They are the Lapins–the rabbits,” the guide said. “Caroline took up their cause after they were experimented upon by the Nazis at Ravensbruck Concentration Camp.” At the end of the tour we went to the charming little gift shop in the old summer kitchen behind the house.
What are your favorite non-fiction books?
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Write On! 2016 Turkey-Trot & Word-Count Edition
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Readers & Book Lovers Series
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