Here are 4 books that Auntie Mame fans have personally recommended once you finish the Auntie Mame series.
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Thanks to formative experiences playing Where In The World Is Carmen Sandiego?, I’ve long been obsessed with international true crime capers. There’s just something about the genre, and how it ties together colorful characters, audacious escapades, and fantastic locales, that sucks me in. As a longtime journalist, I’ve sought out and chronicled many narratives in this vein – from snowboarding bank robbers, to an expedition in search of the origins of the world’s most expensive coffee bean, to the wild story that led to my bookThe Curse of the Marquis de Sade. Here are my favorite nonfiction books on international capers, guaranteed to take readers on globetrotting adventures.
This book jumped out at me at a bookstore one day, and I loved it so deeply that I sought out the author when I learned he lived nearly and we became good friends.
Rubinstein stumbled upon a true crime story most reporters only dream of – that of hard-drinking third-string Hungarian hockey goalie Attila Ambrus, who took up bank robbing and triggered the largest manhunt in post-communist Eastern European history – and then was smart enough to let the story tell itself, bit by incredible bit.
The result is a wild ride through the chaos of post-Cold War Hungary with a rambunctious antihero for whom you can’t help but root.
Attila Ambrus was a gentleman thief from Transylvania, a terrible professional hockey goalkeeper - and preferred women in leopard-skin hot pants. During the 1990s, while playing for the biggest hockey team in Budapest, Ambrus took up bank robbery to make ends meet. Arrayed against him was perhaps the most incompetent team of crime investigators the Eastern Bloc had ever seen: a robbery chief who had learned how to be a detective by watching dubbed Columbo episodes, a forensics officer who wore top hat and tails on the job, and a driver so inept he was known only by a Hungarian…
“Write what you know.” Every writer knows this. I have done that; first, in a novella, Losing Addison, which I recently made into a psychological thriller featuring Sherilyn Fenn (release date: June 28, 2022). The story is based on a nightmare I had in 2011. In addition, I have written two novels, By A Thread and The Falls, both of which involve Mormon missionaries caught up in events that test their integrity, forcing them to make difficult choices as said missionaries discover same-sex attractions more deeply rooted than they—and their superiors—would like to admit.
Senselessis the embellished account of Nick Prince, a jaded census worker, who is required to prowl rural backwoods in search of the folks who, for one reason or another, didn’t return their completed census questionnaires as required by law. Bannon, who actually worked for over a decade in this role, explains that Title 13 of the U.S. Code forbids census employees from revealing anything they learn about the individuals they visit, under penalty of hefty fines and prison time. This conceit makes for some hysterical maneuverings that, according to Bannon, are based on some actual events he’s forbidden to relate in non-fiction prose. It’s hard to tell where fiction and non-fiction diverge as Nick encounters a sequestered polygamist compound far off the grid. Hilarity ensues when a desperate wife decides he’s her ticket out of captivity and she convinces him to help her rescue the rest of the clan…
Nick Prince just wants to go drown his sorrows at the Safari Club and pine for Beth, his lost college love. But before he can do that, his job with the U.S. Census Bureau requires him to face down reluctant respondents in the remote forests of Oregon, who repel him with everything from pit bulls to shotguns.
When a chance encounter in the tiny town of Elwood lands him in the midst of a loopy polygamist clan, it sets off a wild, wacky race to save himself, his job, and his bleeding heart. You won't know whether to laugh or…
There's something about broken people trying to do good that has always resonated with me. In basic training, a drill sergeant with debilitating PTSD told us what combat would be like through a storm of choking sobs and a haze of tears. He needed us to know. Even if it broke him. Working as an investigator in Denver and Washington, I watched people with complicated pasts and uncertain futures fight tooth and nail (sometimes literally) to put human traffickers behind bars. Literature has always been a bridle for that wildness I saw in the world. A tool for taking the ghashing, stomping, unruliness of the human experience and making it rideable, relatable, survivable.
A savage, icepick of a hitman novel that will bury itself in your cerebellum. It’s a slippery, sexy book about the making and subsequent unmaking of a contract killer, complete with all the usual trappings and a few resolutely unusual ones. halfway through this novel, I realized that there weren't any rules to this. That you just built humans from scratch and turned them loose in your world and whatever they did, they did. A guy stabs someone with his own fibula in this book. Eat that Macgyver.
Meet Peter Brown, a young Manhattan ER Doctor who has a past he'd prefer to stay hidden. When a figure from the old days emerges it looks increasingly unlikely that his secret will stay intact. Nicholas LoBrutto, aka Eddy Squillante, is given three months to live, and it's clear to Peter that the clock is ticking for both of them. He must do whatever it takes to keep him - and his patient - alive.
As a travel writer, author, broadcaster, speaker, and producer, I’ve reported from over 100 countries on 7 continents for major print and digital publications worldwide and networks like National Geographic and Travel Channel. I kicked off my career with a solo, 12-month round-the-world backpacking adventure, largely inspired by the formative books I read below. Embracing the world with insatiable curiosity, an open heart, an open mind, a sense of humour, and enthusiasm to share my stories clearly resonated. Here I am, two decades later, author of a half-dozen bestselling books that focus on my own eclectic travels, which will hopefully inspire others as these books inspired me.
A deserved, all-time classic, this book seems to transcend time to capture the spirit of wanderlust. I was young and impressionable when I read it for the first time, and it inspired a sense of profound restlessness to explore, grow, and hit the road to see for myself.
Neal Cassidy and Jack Kerouac are wild, occasionally unhinged protagonists, and their journey consists of hustling, romance, and drinking their way to a good time. Kerouac’s writing made me long for similar misadventures, where life is simple and finding the road is all that matters. Subversively, the novel promotes a full life and whole human experience, which makes working 9 to 5 that much more difficult.
The legendary novel of freedom and the search for authenticity that defined a generation, now in a striking new Pengiun Classics Deluxe Edition
Inspired by Jack Kerouac's adventures with Neal Cassady, On the Road tells the story of two friends whose cross-country road trips are a quest for meaning and true experience. Written with a mixture of sad-eyed naivete and wild ambition and imbued with Kerouac's love of America, his compassion for humanity, and his sense of language as jazz, On the Road is the quintessential American vision of freedom and hope, a book that changed American literature and changed…
