Nonfiction Recommendations Based on Popular Fiction
Some stories stay with you long after the final page. If you’re looking for your next read, check out some Basic Books titles that explore the real history, ideas, and people behind today’s most talked-about novels.
A revelatory new history of the Irish Great Famine, showing how the British Empire caused Ireland’s most infamous disaster.
“Vigorous and engaging.” —Fintan O’Toole, The New YorkerIn 1845, European potato fields were attacked by a novel pathogen. But it was only in Ireland that the blight’s devastation reached apocalyptic levels, leaving more than a million dead and forcing millions more to emigrate. In Rot, historian Padraic X. Scanlan offers a new account of the Great Famine, showing how Ireland’s place in the British Empire made it uniquely vulnerable to starvation.
The unsung story of heroic World War II combat nurses sent into the battles of Iwo Jima and Okinawa to save thousands of American soldiers and Marines.
“Impeccably researched, The Flight Nurses’ War provides new insights into female military service. A moving and important book.” —Clare Mulley, author of Agent ZoThe Pacific Theater was the setting for some of World War II’s bloodiest battles, and yet much of its history remains untold. As the war in Europe was winding down, fierce Japanese resistance and mounting casualties slowed the US advance toward Japan. The terrible death toll of doctors, medics, and corpsmen forced the United States Navy to deploy combat nurses to contested airfields, where they triaged desperately wounded men and evacuated them to safety.
In The Flight Nurses’ War, award-winning historian Leah Garrett traces the lives of a team of nurses from their small-town origins to the devastation of Iwo Jima and Okinawa.
“A moving, beautifully written account, by turns raw and tender.” —Los Angeles Times
Between 1987 and 1989, Alepho, Benjamin, and Benson, like tens of thousands of other young boys known as the Lost Boys, took flight from the massacres of Sudan’s civil war. They set out in search of refuge with little more than the clothes on their backs and walked nearly one thousand miles, sustained only by the sheer will to live.
They Poured Fire on Us From the Sky is a deeply affecting account of that unimaginable journey.
“A powerful guide to building teams that thrive under pressure.” ―Adena Friedman, chair and CEO, Nasdaq
The leader of a major NASA mission provides a practical guide to developing teams that excel in high-stakes situations.Lindy Elkins-Tanton leads NASA’s Psyche mission, a $1.2 billion megaproject that sent a spacecraft on an eight-year journey to investigate an asteroid between Mars and Jupiter. Along the way, she has managed challenges ranging from potentially catastrophic technological malfunctions and overbudget subcontractors to fraught email chains about who clogged the toilet. And she has done it all while building an extraordinary team culture.
In Mission Ready, Elkins-Tanton provides a blueprint for building strong teams capable of delivering exceptional results in high-pressure situations.
In 1808, an American merchant ship happened upon an uncharted island in the South Pacific and unwittingly solved the biggest nautical mystery of the era: the whereabouts of a band of fugitives who, after seizing their vessel, had disappeared into the night with their Tahitian companions.
In 2018, Brandon Presser visited the island to live among its present-day families; two clans bound by circumstance and secrets. While on the island, he pieced together Pitcairn’s full story: an operatic saga that holds all who have visited in its mortal clutch—even the author.
Told through vivid historical and personal narrative, The Far Land offers an unprecedented glimpse at life on the fringes of civilization, and how, perhaps, it’s not so different from our own.
“An absorbing account of India’s transformation” (The Guardian) from democracy towards autocracy told through “brilliant on-the-ground reportage” (The Times).
Since Narendra Modi’s election in May 2014, India has become more dysfunctional and dangerous than ever. The “world’s largest democracy” has seen a cascade of events ushered in by a nationalistic and religious government that have threatened the freedoms and identities of its citizens.In The New India, journalist Rahul Bhatia investigates this slow burn of democracy in India, connecting past and present to offer the first thorough account of how the country is sliding towards autocracy.
The riveting story of a World War II broadcaster’s campaign to counter Nazi propaganda, told alongside the author’s own quest to confront the disinformation fueling Russia’s war on Ukraine
In the summer of 1941, Britain and its allies were struggling to combat Hitler’s powerful propaganda machine, which boasted of his inevitable victory and smeared his enemies as liars. British claims to the contrary had little impact—except for the broadcasts of Der Chef, a German who questioned the Nazi Party. Der Chef galvanized Hitler’s opponents across the globe with damning intel on high-ranking Nazi officials and rumors of internal rebellion. Yet all the while, he was a fictional persona created by the British propagandist Sefton “Tom” Delmer.
As Peter Pomerantsev tells Delmer’s pulse-pounding story, he finds himself pulled into a wartime propaganda effort of his own. Following Russia’s invasion of his native Ukraine, Pomerantsev looks to Delmer to understand how to combat disinformation, manipulate the passions of supporters and enemies alike, and turn the tide of an information war.