Reading list (nonfiction)

This article is a to-do list of books which interest me, in some cases referencing the Hennepin County Library system.

See also Category:Books (nonfiction), Category:Writers (nonfiction), Snippets.

Peder Sjögren

Peder Sjögren (1905–1966), born as Gösta Sjögren, was a Swedish writer who fought in the Spanish Civil War and the Continuation War. Many of his books were based on those experiences.

Gösta Tage Filip Sjögren was born in 1905, outside Växjö, in the province of Småland, and at the age of 10 moved to Stockholm. Aged 17, he was sent to Rome, after which he travelled to the Balkans, Spain, North Africa, Poland, and Finland. As an antifascist during the Spanish Civil War, he joined the International Brigades and was wounded in combat. His experiences in the war provided him with themes for several of his novels. After his recovery, he was arrested as a suspected spy, but subsequently escaped from Spain on a British warship. Having worked as a journalist, his best articles were collected into his first book, Bar barbar (1937). In spite of this book and occasional radio plays and short stories, Sjögren did not attract attention until the appearance of Black Palms (Svarta palmkronor, 1944), which became a film by Lars-Magnus Lindgren in 1968. His second novel, Bread of Love (Kärlekens bröd, 1945), was based on his experiences as a volunteer in the Finnish Continuation War of 1941-44. A film of the book directed by Arne Mattsson (1953) was banned in Finland.

Dante's Equation

Dante's Equation is a novel written by Jane Jensen and published in 2003. It was nominated for the Philip K. Dick Award[1][2] and received a Special Citation for it.

The novel tells the discovery of many people, two of them physicists, that the fifth dimension obeys a (species of spiritual) law of nature where Good and Evil control the lower dimensions.

Martin van Creveld

The Decline of the State

Masahiko Fujiwara

Masahiko Fujiwara (Japanese: 藤原 正彦 Fujiwara Masahiko; born July 9, 1943 in Shinkyo, Manchukuo (now China)) is a Japanese mathematician, who is best known as an essayist.

He comes from a cultured family: his father Jirō Nitta and mother Tei Fujiwara were both popular authors. He graduated from the University of Tokyo in 1966. He began writing after a two-year position as associate professor at the University of Colorado, with a book Wakaki sugakusha no Amerika designed to explain American campus life to Japanese people. He also wrote about the University of Cambridge, after a year's visit (Harukanaru Kenburijji: Ichi sugakusha no Igirisu). In a popular book on mathematics, he categorized theorems as beautiful theorems or ugly theorems. He is also known in Japan for speaking out against government reforms in secondary education. He wrote The Dignity of a State, which according to Time Asia was the second best selling book in the first six months of 2006 in Japan [1]. In 2006 he published Yo ni mo utsukushii sugaku nyumon ("An Introduction to the World's Most Elegant Mathematics") with the writer Yoko Ogawa: it is a dialogue between novelist and mathematician on the extraordinary beauty of numbers.

As a mathematician, he is a professor emeritus at Ochanomizu University. His major work is on Diophantine equations.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masahiko_Fujiwara

https://web.archive.org/web/20060305054831/http://www.childresearch.net/RESOURCE/RESEARCH/1999-1998/COMMENT.HTM

https://www.asymptotejournal.com/nonfiction/masahiko-fujiwara-literature-and-mathematics/

Siegfried Bär

The Fall of the House of Rascher: The bizarre life and death of the SS-doctor Sigmund Rascher Kindle Edition

Mona Golabek

Golabek co-wrote a book entitled The Children of Willesden Lane that chronicles her mother's experience with the Kindertransport which was published in 2002.

Mathematics without Apologies: Portrait of a Problematic Vocation

By Michael Harris

The Mind of the Mathematician

By Michael Fitzgerald, Ioan James, Professor Ioan James

The Purple Decades

Tom Wolfe

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Purple_Decades

Gerard Donovan.

Schopenhauer's Telescope is the debut novel of Irish novelist and poet Gerard Donovan.

Desmond King-Hele

Doctor of Revolution: The Life and Genius of Erasmus Darwin

Letters from the Battle-Fields of Paraguay

• Letters from the Battle-Fields of Paraguay (nonfiction)

Lorenzo Albacete

God at the Ritz: Attraction to Infinity

Hermione Eyre

Viper Wine

Caroline Bird

The Invisible Scar

Kirkus Reviews:

Hapless Herbert Hoover chose the term ""depression"" because he felt it did not have the fright potential of such established terms for financial disaster as ""panic"" or ""crisis."" This, and 1001 other facts have been rescued from the near oblivion that blankets the '30's in popular histories (or in tribal memory, for that matter) by an author who knows how to shake dry economic source material until the buried gold of essential fact and ideas fall into plain view. These are burnished with personal anecdote and vivid passages from the contemporary record -- speeches and newspaper features. Her title is her thesis. She contends that this willfully forgotten period has affected national attitudes and individual behavior right down to the youngest adults today. She charts the changes (and the failures to change) in politics, social welfare, employment, selling, marriage, women, and styles of dress, decor and decorum. There are whole chapters in which each paragraph could be the springboard for another whole book or study. There is nothing in print analyzing the Depression in these terms of this scope. The author, a contributor to Fortune magazine and a fascinated student of her subject, can write. If your invisible scar twinges on hearing the refrain from ""Brother. Can You Spare a Dime?"" you should take the time for this -- it tells you why.

Timothy Gowers

Mathematics: A Very Short Introduction (2002).

Peter Henri Bortoft

Peter Henri Bortoft (1938 – 29 December 2012) was a British independent researcher and teacher, lecturer and writer on physics and the philosophy of science. He is best known for his work The Wholeness of Nature, considered a relevant and original recent interpretation of Goethean science. His book Taking Appearance Seriously: The Dynamic Way of Seeing in Goethe and European Thought was published in 2012.

Charles Biederman

In addition to creating art, Biederman wrote extensively, self-publishing more than a dozen books about art. He also carried on a long correspondence with the physicist David Bohm. The letters exchanged by Biederman and Bohm were published as The Bohm-Biederman Correspondence: Creativity in Art and Science.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Biederman

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Bohm

Ron Aharoni

Aharoni is the author of several nonspecialist books; the most successful is Arithmetic for Parents, a book helping parents and elementary school teachers in teaching basic mathematics. He also wrote a book on the connections between Mathematics, poetry and beauty and on philosophy, The Cat That is not There. His book, "Man detaches meaning", is on a mechanism common to jokes and poetry. His last to date book is Circularity: A Common Secret to Paradoxes, Scientific Revolutions and Humor, which binds together mathematics, philosophy and the secrets of humor.

Elena Poniatowska

Querido Diego (Dear Diego) is an epistolary recreation of Diego Rivera’s relationship with his first wife, Russian painter Angelina Beloff with the aim of “de-iconize” him.

William Ian Beardmore Beveridge

William Ian Beardmore (WIB) Beveridge was an Australian animal pathologist and ... the author of The Art of Scientific Investigation in 1957,[3] and Influenza, the Last Great Plague, in 1977.

Karl Schroder

Karl Schroder's 2014 novel Lockstep featured tour-de-force worldbuilding, even by the incredibly high standards of Karl Schroder novels: the human race speciates into cold-sleeping cicadas who only wake for one day in ten, or a hundred, or a million, allowing them to traverse interstellar distances and survive on the meager energy and materials available in deep space; with his new novella The Million, Schroder shows us how Lockstep is lived on Earth, the cradle of the human species, where a brutal murder threatens to blow apart the life of a very out-of-step protagonist.

https://boingboing.net/2018/08/14/cicada-schemes.html

Thomas Ligotti

Thomas Ligotti (born July 9, 1953) is a contemporary American horror author and reclusive literary cult figure.[1] His writings have been noted as being rooted in several literary genres – most prominently weird fiction – and have overall been described by critics such as S.T. Joshi as works of "philosophical horror", often written as short stories and novellas and with similarities to gothic fiction.[1] The worldview espoused by Ligotti in both his fiction and non-fiction has been described as profoundly pessimistic and nihilistic.[1][2] The Washington Post called him "the best kept secret in contemporary horror fiction."

Géza Csáth

The Magician’s Garden, and Other Stories (also published as Opium, and Other Stories) by Géza Csáth (Among his other accomplishments, Csáth was a short story writer and a psychiatrist. His stories often feature a similar mix of cruelly demented characters and morbid atmosphere associated with the tales of Edgar Allan Poe. Csáth was addicted to morphine, opium, and sex. He committed suicide by taking poison not long after he shot and killed his wife.)

http://weirdfictionreview.com/2011/11/exclusive-interview-thomas-ligotti-on-weird-fiction/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%A9za_Cs%C3%A1th

Chemical Warfare: Secrets Almost Forgotten

James S. Ketchum (born ca. 1931, Manhattan, New York, New York) is a retired psychiatrist and US Army colonel who worked for almost a decade (1960-1969) on the U.S. military’s top secret psychochemical warfare program at the Edgewood Arsenal, Maryland, which pursued research on chemicals to be used to “incapacitate the minds” of adversaries.

BZ: As described in retired Army psychiatrist James Ketchum's autobiographical book Chemical Warfare: Secrets Almost Forgotten (2006), work proceeded in 1964 when a general envisioned a scheme to incapacitate an entire trawler with aerosolized BZ; this effort was dubbed Project DORK.

Steven Pressfield

Tides of War is a novel by Steven Pressfield, chronicling the Peloponnesian War.

Elizabeth Gilbert

The Signature of All Things is a novel by Elizabeth Gilbert. It was originally published in 2013 and longlisted for the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction.

Bruce Chatwin

The Viceroy of Ouidah is a novel published in 1980 by Bruce Chatwin, a British author.

Michael Sipser

The Theory of Computation

Arielle Saiber

... her latest book, Measured Words: Computation and Writing in Renaissance Italy (University of Toronto Press, 2017). These “excellent and varied computers,” she explains, “were the people who calculated quantities, formulated algorithms, proposed new mathematical objects and equations, tested proofs.”

Runaway Horses

Runaway Horses (奔馬 Honba) is a 1969 novel by Yukio Mishima, the second in his Sea of Fertility tetralogy. Mishima did much research to prepare for this novel, including visiting locations recorded in the book and searching for information on the Shinpūren Rebellion (神風連の乱 Shinpūren no Ran).

Stephanie Cowell

Stephanie Cowell’s “Claude & Camille” is both a historical novel and a romance, but Cowell’s graceful, moving treatment of Claude and Camille Monet’s turbulent love defies categorization.

http://archive.boston.com/ae/books/articles/2010/04/11/tragic_families_and_turbulent_love/

Lindsey Davis

Saturnalia is a 2007 historical mystery crime novel by Lindsey Davis and the 18th book of the Marcus Didius Falco Mysteries series. Set in Ancient Rome, the novel stars Marcus Didius Falco, informer and imperial agent.

Steven Millhauser

The Knife Thrower and Other Stories by Steven Millhauser, first published in 1998 by Crown Publishers, Inc., New York City. It is a collection of short stories, some of which were published by various journals, such as The Paris Review, Harper's Magazine, and The New Yorker. It continues in a similar vein to Millhauser's previous efforts that mix the extraordinary into everyday life.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Knife_Thrower_and_Other_Stories

Eamonn McGrath

His second novel, The Charnel House follows life in a TB sanitarium in the 1950s, from where young engineering student Richard Cogley sees little chance of escape. Lyrically written, it is one of few novels that examines the social effects of the white plague in Ireland, a central theme of the book being the indifference of society to the suffering of others.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eamonn_McGrath

Barbara Gowdy

• So Seldom Do We Look On Love (short stories)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbara_Gowdy

Yukio Mishima

The Temple of the Golden Pavilion (金閣寺 Kinkaku-ji) is a novel by the Japanese author Yukio Mishima. It was published in 1956 and translated into English by Ivan Morris in 1959.

Donald MacIntosh

Travels in the White Man's Grave

Ameisen, Olivier

The End of My Addiction

Minneapolis Central (2nd floor Business and Science) Adult Nonfiction Book RC565 .A4685 2009

Jesse Ernest Wilkins Jr.

In 2010 a niece of Wilkins, Carolyn Marie Wilkins, Professor of Music at the Berklee College of Music in Boston, wrote of Wilkins' father and her family more generally in her biography Damn Near White: An African American Family's Rise from Slavery to Bittersweet Success.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Ernest_Wilkins_Jr.

Edmund Bohun

In 1885, Bohun's diary and autobiography were published by S. Wilton Rix.

S. Wilton Rix, The Diary and Autobiography of Edmund Bohun Esq (1885)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edmund_Bohun

Tobias Dantzig

Number: The Language of Science: A Critical Survey Written for the Cultured Non-Mathematician is a popular mathematics book written by Russian-American mathematician Tobias Dantzig. The original U.S. publication was by Macmillan in 1930.[1] A second edition (third impression) was published in 1947 in Prague, Czechoslovakia by Melantrich Company. It recounts the history of mathematical ideas, and how they have evolved.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Number:_The_Language_of_Science

Fred Chester Bond

Autobiography.

"Bond's autobiography[9] describes life in Colorado in the 1920s and shows some ways in which it was still somewhat pioneering compared with today. It also describes the experience of working as a foreign engineer in South America and some of the poverty encountered, discord argued, friendships made, and mining projects worked on.[9] An interesting account of uranium mining in Canada at Port Radium is given."

• Bond, Fred C. (2011), Bond, Laurie J., ed., It Happened to Me, Bruce F. Bond. Autobiography, published posthumously.
• Bond, Fred C. (2011) [1972], Bond, Bruce F., ed., To Know What We Are (2 ed.), Bond Publishing. Metaphysical work, republished 2011.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Chester_Bond

Gisevius, Hans Bernd

To the Bitter End

Minneapolis Central (4th floor General) Adult Nonfiction Book (Stacks) 943.085 G53

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Bernd_Gisevius

Fred C. Bond

• Bond, Fred C. (2011), Bond, Laurie J., ed., It Happened to Me, Bruce F. Bond. Autobiography, published posthumously.
• Bond, Fred C. (2011) [1972], Bond, Bruce F., ed., To Know What We Are (2 ed.), Bond Publishing. Metaphysical work, republished 2011.

A. V. Christie

Ann Victoria "A V." Christie (February 2, 1963 – April 7, 2016) was an American poet.

Her first poetry collection, Nine Skies, won the 1996 National Poetry Series prize. The poet Henri Cole described it as "hard-bitten, luxuriant and true," and the Philadelphia-area poet Eleanor Wilner called it "diamond-faceted, elliptical." W.S. DiPiero said of her 2014 collection The Wonders that "her poems invoke and respect strangeness and make strangeness feel near."

John Gill Lemmon

John Gill Lemmon, Recollections of Rebel Prisons (Andersonville)

Charles Williams

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Williams_(British_writer)

How Not to Be Wrong

How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking, written by Jordan Ellenberg, is a New York Times Best Selling book that connects various economic and societal philosophies with basic mathematics and statistical principles.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_Not_to_Be_Wrong

Men of Mathematics

• Men of Mathematics (nonfiction)

Andri Snær Magnason

Andri Snær Magnason (b. 14 July 1973) is an Icelandic writer. He has written novels, poetry, plays, short stories, essays and CDs. His work has been published or performed in more than 30 countries.

His novel, LoveStar, was chosen “Novel of the year” by Icelandic booksellers 2002, received the DV Literary Award and a nomination to the Icelandic Literary Prize, and was awarded the Philip K. Dick Award Special Citation of Excellence in 2013.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andri_Sn%C3%A6r_Magnason

Rudyard Kipling

• With the Night Mail
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aerial_Board_of_Control

Ralph Barton

Bruce Kellner. The Last Dandy: Ralph Barton, American Artist, 1891-1931. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1991. ISBN 0-8262-0774-X

E. T. A. Hoffmann's novella

E. T. A. Hoffmann's novella, Mademoiselle de Scudéri. A Tale from the Times of Louis XIV [Das Fräulein von Scuderi. Erzählung aus dem Zeitalter Ludwig des Vierzehnten].

Jay Hosler

Cartooning entomologist Jay Hosler's forthcoming young adult graphic novel Last of the Sandwalkers masterfully combines storytelling with science; in this essay, he explains how beautifully comics play into the public understanding of science -- and why that understanding is a matter of urgency for all of us.

György Konrád

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gy%C3%B6rgy_Konr%C3%A1d

Though Konrád has frequently portrayed his Berettyóúfalu childhood in his novels, and particularly in The Feast in the Garden, he attempted to present this period in a more precise documentary form in two more recent books, Departure and Return (2001) and Up on the Hill During a Solar Eclipse (2003). The first of these books treats a single year – 1944-45 – while the second covers fifty, after beginning with a reflection on the final years of the twentieth century, more precisely the morning solar eclipse of 1999, experienced from the peak of St. György Hill. These books were published separately in Europe, and together in New York as A Guest in My Own Country (2007).

Czesław Miłosz

Czesław Miłosz (30 June 1911 – 14 August 2004) was a Polish poet, prose writer, translator and diplomat. His World War II-era sequence The World is a collection of twenty "naïve" poems. Following the war, he served as Polish cultural attaché in Paris and Washington, D.C., then in 1951 defected to the West. His nonfiction book The Captive Mind (1953) became a classic of anti-Stalinism.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Captive_Mind

Waddington on Art and Science

Behind Appearance; a Study Of The Relations Between Painting And The Natural Sciences In This Century (1960, MIT press)

Conrad Hal Waddington

Diary of a Japanese Military Brothel Manager

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diary_of_a_Japanese_Military_Brothel_Manager

Stephen Budiansky

• Code Warriors: Nsa's Codebreakers and the Secret Intelligence War Against the Soviet Union (2017). ISBN 978-080-417-097-0
• Mad Music: Charles Ives, the Nostalgic Rebel (2014). University Press of New England. ISBN 978-1-61168-399-8
• Blackett's War: The Men Who Defeated the Nazi U-Boats and Brought Science to the Art of Warfare (2013). Knopf. ISBN 978-0307595966, detailing the contributions to the war effort made by Patrick Blackett and his scientific colleagues in the early 1940s.
• Perilous Fight: America's Intrepid War with Britain on the High Seas, 1812–1815 (2011). Knopf. ISBN 978-0-307-27069-6
• Murder, By the Book (2008). Black Sheep Press. ISBN 978-1-4348-3767-7
• The Bloody Shirt: Terror After the Civil War (2007). Viking. ISBN 978-0-452-29016-7
• Her Majesty's Spymaster: Elizabeth I, Sir Francis Walsingham, and the Birth of Modern Espionage (2005). Viking. ISBN 978-0-452-28747-1
• Air Power: The Men, Machines, and Ideas That Revolutionized War, from Kitty Hawk to Iraq (2004). Viking. ISBN 0-14-303474-X
• The Character of Cats (2002). Viking. ISBN 0-670-03093-7
• The Truth About Dogs (2000). Viking. ISBN 0-670-89272-6
• The World According to Horses: How They Run, See, and Think (2000). Henry Holt. ISBN 0-8050-6054-5
• Battle of Wits: The Complete Story of Codebreaking in World War II (2000). Free Press. ISBN 978-0-7432-1734-7
• If A Lion Could Talk: Animal Intelligence and the Evolution of Consciousness (1998). Free Press. ISBN 0-684-83710-2
• The Nature of Horses (1997). Free Press. ISBN 978-0-684-82768-1
• Nature's Keepers (1995). Free Press. ISBN 0-02-904915-6
• The Covenant of the Wild (1992). Yale University Press (reprint ed, 1999). ISBN 978-0-300-07993-7

Spurs

"Spurs" is a short story by Tod Robbins. The story was published in February 1923 in Munsey's Magazine and included in Robbins' 1926 anthology Who Wants a Green Bottle? and Other Uneasy Tales. In 1932 the story became the basis for the Tod Browning produced film Freaks.

You Can't Win

You Can't Win is an autobiography by burglar and hobo Jack Black, written in the early to mid-1920s and first published in 1926. It describes Black's life on the road, in prison and his various criminal capers in the American and Canadian west from the late 1880s to early 20th century. The book was a major influence upon William S. Burroughs and other Beat writers. It was made into a film in 2015.

Carole Morin

Carole Morin is a Glasgow-born novelist who lives in Soho, London. To date she has had four novels published: Lampshades, Penniless in Park Lane, Dead Glamorous, and Spying On Strange Men.

John Calder

• Pursuit: The Uncensored Memoirs of John Calder

Aharon Appelfeld

Aharon Appelfeld

Trevanian

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trevanian
  • The Eiger Sanction (1972)
  • The Loo Sanction (1973)
  • The Main (1976)
  • Shibumi (1979) - meta-spy
  • The Summer of Katya (1983) - psychological horror
  • Incident at Twenty-Mile (1998) - Western
  • Hot Night in the City (2000) - short shorty collection
  • The Crazyladies of Pearl Street (2005) - semi-autobiography

Per Olov Enquist

• The Visit of the Royal Physician
• The Book About Blanche and Marie

Claude Berge

• Who killed the Duke of Densmore? - a murder mystery based on a mathematical theorem

https://jacquerie.github.io/duke/

http://www.cs.kent.edu/~dragan/ST-Spring2016/island-story.pdf

http://kasmana.people.cofc.edu/MATHFICT/mfview.php?callnumber=mf277

Jesse L. Lasky

• I Blow My Own Horn

Zoltán Pál Dienes

• Memoirs of a Maverick Mathematician

Erle Stanley Gardner

• Shills Can't Cash Chips

David Nickle

• Eutopia

Clark R. Mollenhoff

• Washington Cover-Up: How Bureaucratic Secrecy Promotes Corruption and Waste in the Federal Government (1962), Doubleday. ISBN 0548443475 (2007 edition)
• Tentacles of Power: The Story of Jimmy Hoffa (1965), World Publishing
• Despoilers of Democracy: The real story of what Washington propagandists, arrogant bureaucrats, mismanagers, influence peddlers, and outright corrupters are doing to our Federal Government (1965), Doubleday
• The Pentagon: Politics, Profits and Plunder (1967), G.P. Putnam's Sons
• Strike Force: Organized Crime and the Government (1972), Prentice Hall, ISBN 0-13-852772-5
• The Man Who Pardoned Nixon (1976), The K.S. Giniger Company, Inc., ISBN 978-0-900997-89-1
• Game Plan for Disaster (1976), W.W. Norton & Co., ISBN 0-393-05543-4
• Investigative Reporting: From Courthouse to White House (1981), Macmillan, ISBN 0-02-381870-0
• Atanasoff: Forgotten Father of the Computer (1988), ISBN 0-8138-0032-3

I am a Cat

I am a Cat by Natsume Sōseki.

Once an Eagle

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Once_An_Eagle

Killer Angels

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Killer_Angels

Boris Vian

• Mood Indigo - Minneapolis Central (1st floor General) Adult Fiction Book VIAN
• Blues for A Black Cat & Other Stories - Minneapolis Central (1st floor General) Adult Fiction Book VIAN

As Vernon Sullivan:

• J'irai cracher sur vos tombes (I Shall Spit on Your Graves) (Éditions du Scorpion, 1946)
• Les morts ont tous la même peau (The Dead All Have the Same Skin) (Éditions du Scorpion, 1947)
• Et on tuera tous les affreux (To Hell With the Ugly) (Éditions du Scorpion, 1948)
• Elles se rendent pas compte (They Do Not Realize) (1948–50, published 1950 by Éditions du Scorpion)

Nonfiction cross-reference

• Reading at night (nonfiction)