Have any FUN non-fiction recs? - Page 2

[HollyBearsMom]

I just finished The Tender Bar and loved it.

http://www.amazon.com/TENDER-BAR-J-R-Moehringer/dp/1401300642

"Long before it legally served me, the bar saved me," asserts J.R. Moehringer, and his compelling memoir The Tender Bar is the story of how and why. A Pulitzer-Prize winning writer for the Los Angeles Times, Moehringer grew up fatherless in pub-heavy Manhasset, New York, in a ramshackle house crammed with cousins and ruled by an eccentric, unkind grandfather. Desperate for a paternal figure, he turns first to his father, a DJ whom he can only access via the radio (Moehringer calls him The Voice and pictures him as "talking smoke"). When The Voice suddenly disappears from the airwaves, Moehringer turns to his hairless Uncle Charlie, and subsequently, Uncle Charlie's place of employment--a bar called Dickens that soon takes center stage. While Moehringer may occasionally resort to an overwrought metaphor (the footsteps of his family sound like "storm troopers on stilts"), his writing moves at a quick clip and his tale of a dysfunctional but tightly knit community is warmly told. "While I fear that we're drawn to what abandons us, and to what seems most likely to abandon us, in the end I believe we're defined by what embraces us," Moehringer says, and his story makes us believe it. --Brangien Davis

 

I have read all of Augusten Burroughs books if if you like the genre they are great. 

[philomom]

Originally Posted by elisheva 

The Secret Life of Lobsters by Trevor Corson is super-interesting - Maine lobster fishing culture, lobster fishery politics, all about lobster themselves. Corson write for The Atlantic, too.

Loved that one! He also did one about sushi.

[AtYourCervices]

The Legacy of Luna (written by Julia "Butterfly" Hill). It's about her time spent living in a redwood tree, attempting to prevent loggers from cutting it down.

No Law Against Mercy (by Barbara Lyn Lapp and Rachel Lapp).

 

In 1993, 15-year-old Billy Stefan was in state custody, isolated from his family, drugged, and beaten. His father helped him escape from the boy's home--his place of torment--and the authors, Barbara Lyn Lapp and Rachel Lapp, offered him refuge in their home. As authorities searched for the missing boy, the Lapp sisters helped him with secret media interviews that spilled across the nation his terrifying accounts of abuse at the hands of America's child protective system.

I know it's not "fun", but it is an interesting read. 

Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything your American History textbook got wrong by James Loewen. Self explanatory.