You are here: Home > Recreation > Good Reads > If you like…

Recreation

Longitude by Dava Sobel

Amir D. Aczel The riddle of the compass

Discusses the 12th century invention of the compass, its dramatic influence on navigation and its impact on the development of world trade and the Age of Discovery.

Michael Allin Zarafa

The true story of a giraffe's journey from the plains of Africa to the heart of post-Napoleonic France.

Bella Bathurst The Lighthouse Stevensons: the extraordinary story of the building of the Scottish lighthouses by the ancestors of Robert Louis Stevenson

Jean-Dominique Bauby The diving bell & the butterfly

Jean-Dominique Bauby was paralyzed and able to communicate only by blinking his left eye. Yet he dictated this book by blinking one letter at a time. Although Bauby said his existence was like being "trapped inside a diving bell in the ocean depths," he wrote without sentimentality or self-pity.

John Beasant Stalin's silver

Beasant recreates the USS John Barry's fateful voyage and death-defying salvage. With help from the mission's survivors, he resolves a 50-year-old mystery: where was the merchant ship taking its precious cargo?

John Berendt Midnight in the garden of good and evil

In charming, beautiful, and wealthy old-South Savannah, Georgia, the local bad boy is shot dead inside of the opulent mansion of a gay antiques dealer, and a gripping trial follows.

Clark Blaise Time lord: Sir Sandford Fleming and the creation of standard time

David Bodanis E=mc2: a biography of the world's most famous equation

Mark Bowden Black hawk down: a story of modern war

On 3 October 1993, 140 US soldiers abseiled from helicopters in Mogadishu, Somalia. Their mission was to abduct two warlords and return to base. Instead, they fought for their lives against armed Somalis, and this account tells of the battlefield of injured and killed.

Victoria Bruce No apparent danger:the true story of volcanic disaster at Galeras and Nevado del Ruiz

Deborah Cadbury The dinosaur hunters: a story of scientific rivalry and the discovery of the prehistoric world

David Clark Newton's tyranny: the suppressed scientific discoveries of Stephen Gray and John Flamsteed

Judith Cook Dr Simon Forman: a most notorious physician

Simon Forman rose from a poor upbringing in Wiltshire to become one of the wealthiest doctors in Elizabethan London.

Mike Dash Tulipomania: the story of the world's most coveted flower and the extraordinary passions it aroused

Pete Davies The devil's music: in the eye of the hurricane

The epic true story of the most destructive storms on earth.

Jared Diamond Guns, germs and steel: the fates of human societies

John Emsley The shocking history of phosphorus: a biography of the devil's element

Richard Fortey Life: an unauthorised biography : a natural history of the first four thousand million years of life on Earth

Richard Fortey Trilobite! eyewitness to evolution

Simon Garfield Mauve: how one man invented a colour that changed the world

Janet Gleeson The arcanum:the extraordinary true story of the invention of European porcelain

Janet Gleeson The moneymaker

The story of John Law (1671-1729) - the philanderer, gambler and duelist who invented modern finance

Jill Hamilton Marengo: the myth of Napoleon's horse

Eric Hansen Orchid fever: a horticultural tale of love, lust and lunacy

Jonathan Harr A Civil action

A riveting look into a legal drama in which two large corporations are set against a few working-class families whose children have been stricken with leukemia.

Laura Hillenbrand Seabiscuit: the making of a legend (798.4 HIL)

The author retraces the journey of Seabiscuit, a horse with crooked legs and a pathetic tail that made racing history in 1938, thanks to the efforts of a trainer, owner, and jockey who transformed a bottom-level racehorse into a legend.

Lucy Jago Northern Lights: how one man sacrificed love, happiness and sanity to unlock the secrets of space

This is the tale of visionary scientist Kristian Birkeland's sacrifice of love and happiness on a journey of scientific discoveryto explain the Northern Lights. The journey cost him his sanity and his life - but it left us with a legacy that still remains central to our understanding of the world.

McKay Jenkins White death: in the path of an avalanche

An account of avalanches, told through the tale of one group of mountaineers who climbed into the northern Rockies of Glacier Park in 1969. After an avalanche and despite a huge rescue operation, it was 188 days before five young men were released by the snowfield that entombed them.

Sebastian Junger The perfect storm: a true story of men against the sea

Arno Karlen Biography of a germ

A portrait of Borrelia burgdorferi (or Bb), the bacterium that causes Lyme disease, that follows the genealogy of the germ back to our common ancestor and beyond.

Mary Karr The Liar's club: a memoir

In this funny, razor-edged memoir, Mary Karr, an award winning poet and critic, looks back at her upbringing in a swampy East Texas refinery town with a volatile, defiantly loving family.

Mary Karr Cherry: a memoir

The sequel to "The Liar's Club" which covers Karr's teenage years.

Randal Keynes Annie's box: Charles Darwin, his daughter and human evolution

Gary Kinder Ship of gold in the deep blue sea

The mighty Central American, a ship carrying almost 600 people and a wealth of gold, sank in a "perfect hurricane" in 1857.

Ross King Brunelleschi's dome: the story of the great cathedral in Florence

Jon Krakauer Into thin air: a personal account of the Mt Everest disaster

Jon Krakauer Into the wild

Christopher McCandless traded a bright future--a college education, material comfort, uncommon ability and charm--for death by starvation in an abandoned bus in the woods of Alaska.

Mark Kurlansky Cod: a biography of the fish that changed the world

Robert Lacey and Danny Danziger The year 1000: what life was like at the turn of the first millennium: an Englishman's world

Erik Larson Isaac's storm: a man, a time and the deadliest hurricane in history

On September 8, 1900, a massive hurricane slammed into Galveston, Texas. A tidal surge of some four feet in as many seconds inundated the city, while the wind destroyed thousands of buildings. By the time the water and winds subsided, entire streets had disappeared and as many as 10,000 were dead--making this the worst natural disaster in America's history.

Michael Lewis The new new thing: how some man you've never heard of just changed your life

The story of Jim Clark, the founder of Silicon Graphics, Netscape, and Healtheon. The narrative discusses Clark's entrepreneurial ideas and sheds light on the history of the Internet, all in the midst of exploring the creation and travels of Clark's high-tech computer-controlled single-mast sailboat.

Rachel Lichtenstein Rodinsky's room

Recluse David Rodinsky lived above a synagogue in the heart of the Jewish East End of London. In 1969 he disappeared. His room, a chaos of writings, annotated books and maps, gramophone records, and clothes, remained undisturbed for 20 years.

Thomas Lynch The undertaking: life studies from the dismal trade

Thomas Lynch is a poet and memoirist, as well as a funeral director. In this collection of essays, the two vocations meet - homages to parents who have died and to children who shouldn't have, its tales of golfers tripping over grave markers, portraits of gourmands and hypochondriacs, lovers and suicides.

Peter Marshall The philosopher's stone: a quest for the secrets of alchemy

Alchemy is an ancient, but still practised, science concerned with transformation: base metal into gold; mortal into immortal. This book investigates the realities behind the mythology of alchemy and searches for the element which can make it a reality, the legendary Philosopher's Stone.

Russell Martin Beethoven's hair: an extraordinary historical odyssey and a musical mystery solved

As Beethoven lay dying in 1827, a young musician named Ferdinand Hiller came to pay his respects to the great composer. In the days after Beethoven's death, Hiller snipped a lock of his hair as a keepsake. This book follows the lock to its 1994 sale at Sotheby's, and describes the scientific research done on it to uncover information about Beethoven's life.

Giles Milton Nathaniel's nutmeg: how one man's courage changed the course of history

The book deals with the competition between England and Holland for possession of the spice-producing islands of Southeast Asia throughout the 17th century.

Andrew Motion Wainewright: the poisoner

Wainewright was known in the heart of the Romantic movement, but ended up being transported as a convict to Australia.

Charles Nicholl The reckoning: the murder of Christopher Marlowe

Susan Orlean The orchid thief

This book is centred on south Florida and John Laroche, a charismatic schemer once convicted of attempting to take endangered orchids from the Fakahatchee swamp, a state preserve. Laroche, a horticultural consultant who once ran an extensive nursery for the Seminole tribe, dreams of making a fortune for the Seminoles and himself by cloning the rare ghost orchid Polyrrhiza lindenii.

Anna Pavord The tulip

In an auction held in Holland in February 1637, 99 lots of tulip bulbs fetched a staggering 90,000 guilders, more than $3.5 million in today's money. Tulipomania had reached its height, and its story is told in this book on the most seductive of flowers.

Nathaniel Philbrick In the heart of the sea: the epic true story that inspired Moby Dick

Sian Rees The floating brothel: the extraordinary true story of the Lady Julian and its cargo of female convicts bound for Botany Bay

Matt Ridley Genome: the autobiography of a species in 23 chapters

Christopher Ross Tunnel visions: journeys of an underground philosopher

Christopher Ross, philosopher and traveller, decided to cease his journeyings and go underground, quite literally. What, exactly, will he find under the surface of London?

Karl Sabbagh A rum affair: a true story of botanical fraud

Professor John Heslop Harrison was one of the most respected botanists of the first half of the 20th century. His greatest passion was for the plants of the Hebridean islands off the west coast of Scotland. He came to believe that some of the islands' plants were survivors from a time before the last Ice Age. In support of his theory, Heslop Harrison began to report sightings of plants that no one had ever seen on the islands before, and the botanical community started to get suspicious.

Simon Schama Rembrandt's eyes

Schama contrasts the life of Rembrandt with Peter Paul Rubens, whose meteoric rise and sustained success as a society painter forms a revealing contrast with Rembrandt's unhappier relationship with fame and fortune.

Charles Seife Zero: the biography of a dangerous idea

Charles Seife traces the origins and history of the number zero from Aristotle to superstring theory by way of Pythagoras, the Kabbalists, and Einstein.

Simon Singh The code book: the science of secrecy from ancient Egypt to quantum cryptograph

Simon Singh Fermat's last theorem: the story of a riddle that confounded the world's greatest minds for 358 years

xⁿ + yⁿ = zⁿ, where n represents 3, 4, 5, …no solution
"I have discovered a truly marvelous demonstration of this proposition which this margin is too narrow to contain." With these words, the seventeenth-century French mathematician Pierre de Fermat threw down the gauntlet to future generations. What came to be known as Fermat's Last Theorem looked simple; proving it, however, became the Holy Grail of mathematics, baffling its finest minds for more than 350 years.

Donald Smith Chief Buffalo Child Long Lance: the glorious imposter

A gripping story of a young man of indeterminate ancestry who was born in poverty in turn-of-the-last-century North Carolina. Brilliant, vigorous, extremely handsome, he escaped the economic and social confines of his community by reinventing himself.

Dava Sobel Galileo's daughter: a drama of science, faith and love

Dava Sobel Longitude: the true story of a lone genius who solved the greatest scientific problem of his time

Tom Standage The Victorian Internet: the remarkable story of the telegraph and the nineteenth century's on-line pioneers

Douglas P. Starr Blood: an epic history of medicine and commerce

Paul Strathern Mendeleyev's dream: the quest for the elements

Samantha Weinberg A fish caught in time: the search for the coelacanth

Stanley Williams Surviving Galeras

The true-life adventure story of one of the world's leading volcano experts. In 1993, Stanley Williams was investigating Galeras, what he thought was a dormant volcano in Colombia. But it blew, killing nine members of his expedition. Against all odds Williams survived.

Simon Winchester The map that changed the world: the tale of William Smith and the birth of a science

The first geological map was made by an Oxfordshire farmer's son and engineer called William Smith. This is the tale of his life and work in modern geology and explores his creation of a lavish map detailing his discovery that rocks are composed of many different layers.

Simon Winchester The surgeon of Crowthorne: a tale of murder, madness and the love of words

The story of William Chester Minor who helped write the Oxford English dictionary.

Larry Zuckerman The potato: from the Andes in the sixteenth century to fish and chips, the story of how a vegetable changed history