Nonfiction Authors (page 4)

“I have always enjoyed doing experiments on myself in the style of Benjamin Franklin,” writes Rebecca Harrington in I’ll Have What She’s Having: My Adventures in Celebrity Dieting.

As a lifestyle reporter for New York magazine, Harrington puts intrepid inclination to good use, sampling celebrity diets for 3-10 days in the interest of the public good. I’ll Have What She’s Having is a combination of columns and new essays on eating like Gwyneth Paltrow, Jackie Kennedy, Karl Lagerfeld, Sophia ...

It seems I’ve managed to track the Dread Pirate Roberts to his secret lair.

The actor Cary Elwes, who famously portrayed the farmboy Westley in the movie The Princess Bride, not to mention critical roles in blockbusters like Days of Thunder, Twister, and Saw, is in Denver to promote his first memoir, As You Wish: Inconceivable Tales from the Making of The Princess Bride, co-written with Joe Layden. The 1987 film directed by Rob Reiner has long since become a ...

Private scandals and festering rivalries. A notoriously secretive aristocratic family. Decades of potentially embarrassing correspondence put to the torch. Poseurs and plots. Very juicy.

Could familial discord have been just as corrosive as industrial advances and social change in the collapse of the Fitzwilliams, a coal mining dynasty that was the wealthiest family in England at the turn of the 20^th century?

Catherine Bailey believed so and set out to document it. Black Diamonds: The Downfall of an Aristocratic ...

As a contractor, Joe Cottonwood made it a rule to avoid potential clients with white carpets. He knows he won’t get along with them, that they have unrealistic expectations of the world, and they aren’t going to like Cottonwood’s “rougher,” more “rustic style,” he says. He expects things to get rough, a bit dirty. That’s the ethos that guided him through more than 30 years of remodeling and rebuilding jobs near his home in La Honda, California, and ...

In Savage Harvest: A Tale of Cannibals, Colonialism, and Michael Rockefeller’s Tragic Quest for Primitive Art, Carl Hoffman’s reimagining of Michael C. Rockefeller’s death at the hands of the Asmat people on Nov. 20, 1961, seems startlingly real, enough to make the viscera churn. The brutality of the act of ritualistic cannibalism—replete with anatomical detail—is amplified by the tribesmen’s banter and jokes about what Rockefeller might have been doing when he was last alive.

Rockefeller’s remains were never found, but ...

Valentine’s Day in Afghanistan: The sky is a solid mass of clouds, snow has been falling for weeks, and a female soldier is huddled in her plywood hut making a valentine for her Afghani translator with glitter pens and construction paper. Helen Thorpe’s new book, Soldier Girls: The Battles of Three Women at Home and at War is filled with such intimate scenes; it is a strikingly original book about war.

Thorpe’s first book, Just Like Us: The True Story ...

The best nonfiction informs, surprises, inspires. Our Best Nonfiction Books of 2014 list includes meditations on poverty and injustice, philosophy and science, histories and mysteries, personal and private lives. Here are a few of our favorite things spoken by authors who helped us see what is in a fresh way. —Megan Labrise

"The people that love de Man and continue to support him fundamentally say that there is no necessary connection between what a person does or says in ...

Thanks to one prominent fan, an 800-page, 140-year-old British novel may soon experience a sales spike. New Yorker writer Rebecca Mead first read Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life as an intellectually ambitious 17-year-old. While studying at Oxford, building a successful journalistic career and starting a family, Middlemarch offered pleasures and profundities that spoke to each stage of life. My Life in Middlemarch, Mead’s heartfelt testimony to the evolution of her appreciation, will undoubtedly inspire new readers to pick up ...