Here are 100 books that The Feather Thief fans have personally recommended if you like
The Feather Thief.
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I am drawn to stories that grip, teach, and hold power to account. Some of my favorite writers have the ability to do all of it in one go–Lawrence Wright, David Grann, Dan Fagin, etc. I just try to write stories I want to read. So, when I started looking into a pharmacist who made drugs in a dirty lab outside Boston and who shipped his fungus-plagued vials throughout the U.S., I saw an opportunity. As an investigative journalist, I seek stories that shine light on dark corners of government and industry, as well as those that have the chance to better things while entertaining and educating the reader.
This is a great blow-by-blow primer on how the best investigative journalism is done. As a journalist, I admired the bravery of the author taking on the powerful people who propped up Theranos and its wunderkind founder, Elizabeth Holmes.
It reminds me of why I love the work I do, which is often leads to dead ends because someone doesn’t want you to know the truth. Books like Bad Blood show that it’s important to have investigative journalists who don’t give up the fight and end up saving lives by exposing fraud.
The shocking true story behind The Dropout, starring the Emmy award-winning Amanda Seyfried, Naveen Andrews and Stephen Fry.
'I couldn't put down this thriller . . . a book so compelling that I couldn't turn away' - Bill Gates
Winner of the Financial Times/McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award 2018
The full inside story of the breathtaking rise and shocking collapse of Theranos, the multibillion-dollar biotech startup founded by Elizabeth Holmes, by the prize-winning journalist who first broke the story and pursued it to the end, despite pressure from its charismatic CEO and threats by her lawyers.
It is April 1st, 2038. Day 60 of China's blockade of the rebel island of Taiwan.
The US government has agreed to provide Taiwan with a weapons system so advanced that it can disrupt the balance of power in the region. But what pilot would be crazy enough to run…
As an author, I love reading books that feature writers and explore their daily ups and downs as well as their larger successes and failures. Working on a novel or an article is already a harrowing task, but throw in other complications like writer’s block, dangerous fans, and sources who won’t give you the information you need, and life gets a lot more challenging. These twisty tomes explore what happens when these writers find their own stories taking some perilous turns.
The once-promising writer Jacob Finch Bonner is out of ideas and down on his luck. When his student Evan Parker proclaims that his work-in-progress is sure to be a runaway hit, Bonner waits to see if this bold proclamation comes to fruition.
After Bonner learns Parker has died, he decides he’ll usher that story into the world—as his own. But someone knows Bonner isn’t the original author. Shame and suspense intertwine and heighten as this book speeds along. I enjoyed Korelitz’s exploration of how far an author will go for praise or even relevancy.
This novel also explores an idea that fascinates me: Who “owns” a story? Just because something happened to you or your family, does that mean no one else can tell it or embellish it? Author Anne Lamott says you own everything that happened to you, but how much should you tell, and how will others react…
** NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER! ** The Tonight Show Summer Reads Winner ** A New York Times Notable Book of 2021 **
"Insanely readable." ―Stephen King
Hailed as "breathtakingly suspenseful," Jean Hanff Korelitz’s The Plot is a propulsive read about a story too good not to steal, and the writer who steals it.
Jacob Finch Bonner was once a promising young novelist with a respectably published first book. Today, he’s teaching in a third-rate MFA program and struggling to maintain what’s left of his self-respect; he hasn’t written―let alone published―anything decent in years. When Evan Parker, his most arrogant student,…
My obsession with metamorphosis began after my wife and I discovered that we're going to have our third child. I started having nightly dreams about the butterflies I kept in a dry aquarium when I was a kid, waking up in the middle of the night with a flashlight strapped to my forehead, waiting to see them emerge from their chrysalis. A pregnancy somehow feels like our human version of emergence: few experiences are as life-changing as becoming a parent, and fewer wonders more exhilarating than the natural magic of metamorphosis. Both mark beginnings but are in fact continuations. Both, in different ways, are also forms of endings. Both make us wonder about the riddles of our world.
Maria Sibylla Merian was a 17th-century painter and naturalist who traveled with her daughter at the age of 52, in the year 1699, to observe and paint the life-cycle of butterflies and other insects in the Suriname jungles.
She was an extraordinary woman, often referred to as "the Mother of Ecology", and this is a beautiful book telling her story.
As it happens, Maria played an important role in cracking the mystery of metamorphosis, going back to the philosophers and naturalists of ancient Greece.
Before Darwin, before Audubon, before Gilbert White, there was Merian. An artist turned naturalist, known for her botanical illustrations, Maria Sybilla Merian was born in Germany just sixteen years after Galileo proclaimed that the earth orbited the sun. But at the age of fifty she sailed from Europe to the New World on a solo scientific expedition to study insect metamorphosis - an unheard-of journey for any naturalist at that time, much less an unaccompanied woman. When she returned she produced a book that secured her reputation, only to have it savaged in the nineteenth century by scientists who disdained…
The Year Mrs. Cooper Got Out More
by
Meredith Marple,
The coastal tourist town of Great Wharf, Maine, boasts a crime rate so low you might suspect someone’s lying.
Nevertheless, jobless empty nester Mallory Cooper has become increasingly reclusive and fearful. Careful to keep the red wine handy and loath to leave the house, Mallory misses her happier self—and so…
I grew up in the foothills of the Adirondack Mountains in upstate New York and spent many weekends hiking, camping, and fishing with my parents. Identifying and understanding the plants and animals around me was always interesting, and this love of nature has stayed with me as an adult. I now live near Lake Michigan and am an avid hiker, birdwatcher, and an Indiana Master Naturalist. I take endless inspiration from the natural world in my illustration work and believe that co-existing with, respecting, and preserving the natural world is central not just to the integrity of our planet, but to our very humanity.
This book is a fascinating look at ornithology through the ages, from mythology and legend to the evolution of our scientific understanding of birds today. It includes beautiful illustrations from medieval monks to early naturalists through the 20th century. Even the most casual birdwatcher will learn something fascinating from this book; I read it slowly, digesting a section at a time, and it’s one I’m sure I’ll return to again and again.
For thousands of years people have been fascinated by birds, and today that fascination is still growing. In 2007 bird-watching is one of the most popular pastimes, not just in Britain, but throughout the world, and the range of interest runs from the specialist to the beginner.
In The Wisdom of Birds, Birkhead takes the reader on a journey that not only tells us about the extraordinary lives of birds - from conception and egg, through territory and song, to migration and fully fledged breeder - but also shows how, over centuries, we have overcome superstition and untested 'truths' to…
It has always seemed to me that humans underestimate the abilities—and particularly the conscious lives—of non-human animals. We, humans, are not apart from (and above) but live in a continuum of consciousness with the rest of life. All these books share stories of relationships between human and non-human animals. They make clear that we are connected to and part of all life on Earth. We are all in this together, and we better take good care of our shared natural living world.
Godfrey-Smith is a philosopher, but also an avid diver.
This is an engaging and readable philosophical examination of the mind of a very different kind of creature, an octopus. He grounds his thoughts both in his many diving interactions with octopuses and in what we know of the evolution of life—and mind—on Earth.
'Brilliant' Guardian
'Fascinating and often delightful' The Times
SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2017 ROYAL SOCIETY SCIENCE BOOK PRIZE
What if intelligent life on Earth evolved not once, but twice? The octopus is the closest we will come to meeting an intelligent alien. What can we learn from the encounter?
In Other Minds, Peter Godfrey-Smith, a distinguished philosopher of science and a skilled scuba diver, tells a bold new story of how nature became aware of itself - a story that largely occurs in the ocean, where animals first appeared.
Tracking the mind's fitful development from unruly clumps of seaborne cells to…
I grew up in the foothills of the Adirondack Mountains in upstate New York and spent many weekends hiking, camping, and fishing with my parents. Identifying and understanding the plants and animals around me was always interesting, and this love of nature has stayed with me as an adult. I now live near Lake Michigan and am an avid hiker, birdwatcher, and an Indiana Master Naturalist. I take endless inspiration from the natural world in my illustration work and believe that co-existing with, respecting, and preserving the natural world is central not just to the integrity of our planet, but to our very humanity.
This book is probably my favorite among natural history reading I’ve come across. A chance encounter at the library, I ended up buying a copy for myself as well as gifting it to several friends. Barnes weaves together short vignettes about science, observation, and personal encounters with nature organized from the tiniest life forms to some of the largest. Biologist JBS Haldane once said, “The universe is not only stranger than we imagine; it is stranger than we can imagine.” This book proves it with memorable anecdotes and a wonderful sense of kinship and compassion for life both like us and completely unlike us.
Life on Planet Earth is not weirder than we imagine. It's weirder than we are capable of imagining. Ten Million Aliens opens your eyes to the real marvels of the planet we live on.
Don’t mess with the hothead—or he might just mess with you. Slater Ibáñez is only interested in two kinds of guys: the ones he wants to punch, and the ones he sleeps with. Things get interesting when they start to overlap. A freelance investigator, Slater trolls the dark side of…
I‘m primarily a poet, and it seems natural to love prose that gets the most out of every word. I also deeply admire the great works of—say, Theodore Dreiser, who seems, to me, to splash words all over the page. Don’t get me wrong. But it’s precision I love and admire most. It’s what I’ve striven for. It’s what appeals to me in the books I’ve chosen. The phrase “the style is the man” simply iterates the notion that the writer who comes closest to his (or her, of course) innermost passions, deepest held convictions, and writes with clarity in expressing them, is, in fact, the author himself.
O’Connor’s stories reveal good and evil as clearly as if viewed by a jeweler—through the loupe.
What she observed in the world around her, she expressed with clarity, and such reflections are not easily absorbed. They are deep and sometimes horrifying. Sometimes she actually made me uncomfortable by forcing me to feel slight touches of... perhaps not evil, but malicious or malevolent impulses residing in much of mankind.
Strange, too, is her ability to show irony and amusement in the great human comedy. I find her stories impossible to turn away from.
An essential collection of classic stories that established Flannery O’Connor’s reputation as an American master of fiction—now with a new introduction by New York Times bestselling author Lauren Groff In 1955, with the title story and others in this critical edition, Flannery O’Connor firmly laid claim to her place as one of the most original and provocative writers of her generation. Steeped in a Southern Gothic tradition that would become synonymous with her name, these stories show O’Connor’s unique view of life—infused with religious symbolism, haunted by apocalyptic possibility, sustained by the tragic comedy of human behavior, confronted by the…
I'm clinical psychology professor at UMass Boston and expert on mentoring relationships. When I was a senior in high school, my dad left behind thirty years of marriage, four kids, and a complicated legal and financial history to start a new life. I couldn't fully comprehend the FBI investigation that forced his departure—any more than I could've fathomed the fact that my classmate Jim Comey would eventually lead that agency. I was also reeling from a discovery that my dad had “shortened” his name from Rosenzweig to Rhodes, a common response to anti-Semitism. It was during that period that I experienced the benefits of mentors and the joy of books about hidden agendas and subtexts.
Bad City: Peril and Power in the City of Angels, written by investigative reporter Paul Pringle is another gem of this literary genre.
What began as Pringle’s investigation of a young woman’s overdose, led him to the prominent dean of the Keck School of Medicine at the University of Southern California (USC). Once on this trail, he uncovered the corruption at USC, the incompetence of the Pasadena Police Department, and a coverup at the Los Angeles Times.
After reading the first few pages, I was forced to cancel all meetings and plans. Pringle investigative reporting not only helped to uncover the toxic mix of money and power, but the mechanics and drudgery of getting to the bottom of things.
"Pringle’s fast-paced book is a master class in investigative journalism... when institutions collude to protect one another, reporting may be our last best hope for accountability." ―The New York Times
For fans of Spotlight and Catch and Kill comes a nonfiction thriller about corruption and betrayal radiating across Los Angeles from one of the region's most powerful institutions, a riveting tale from a Pulitzer-prize winning journalist who investigated the shocking events and helped bring justice in the face of formidable odds.
On a cool, overcast afternoon in April 2016, a salacious tip arrived at the L.A. Times that reporter Paul…
I’m an award-winning British singer/songwriter who you have probably never heard of. Since completing my first novel I’ve also titled many other multi-genre works. My passion is based on anything and everything that has never been done before. I say this; “If you wish to feel happy, take a pill - if you seek a cure, then face the truth.” I’ve written songs about 9/11, The Holocaust, Execution by hanging in Iran – all themes that many would say are ‘unapproachable’. I am a Neurodiverse writer who won the Principal’s Award for Outstanding Achievement in Education – let me share that success with you. My disability is a gift, not a curse.
This infamous child killers work remains banned in my home country (UK) but is widely available online. Brady and Hindley (his partner) were child killers, both incarcerated for life and both died in prison.
This book was read for curiosity only, whilst writing my own ‘inside the mind of a psychopathic killer’ narrative, I wanted to understand how a ‘real serial killer’ would really think. He wrote The Gates of Janus whilst incarcerated at Ashworth high-security psychiatric hospital.
Brady’s intention was that it be published anonymously, however, this could never be allowed to happen. It is in 2 parts 1) He describes his involvement in the 6 murders from the perspective of ‘understanding himself’ and part 2) His advice as offered to law enforcement in solving such future cases (in this it falls flat).
I recommend it only if you want to understand his thought process – just as Hitler’s Mein…
Ian Brady and Myra Hindley's spree of torture, sexual abuse, and murder of children in the 1960s was one of the most appalling series of crimes ever committed in England, and remains almost daily fixated upon by the tabloid press. In The Gates of Janus, Ian Brady himself allows us a glimpse into the mind of a murderer as he analyzes a dozen other serial crimes and killers.
Criminal profiling by a criminal was not invented by the dramatists of Dexter.
Novelist and true-crime writer Colin Wilson, author of the famous and influential book The Outsider, remarks in his introduction…
I am a professor of philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where I work on ethics and related questions about human agency and human knowledge. My interest in adversity is both personal and philosophical: it comes from my own experience with chronic pain and from a desire to revive the tradition of moral philosophy as a medium of self-help. My last book was Midlife: A Philosophical Guide, and I have also written about baseball and philosophy, stand-up comedy, and the American author H. P. Lovecraft.
I don’t know if misery loves company but I’m convinced that failure does. When their projects fall flat, my kid likes nothing better than to hear about the wreckage of mine: romantic fiascos, flunked tests, athletic defeats. Joe Moran’s “book of solace,”If You Should Fail, is in part a compendium of stories like these, in part an effort to dislodge our tendency to think of human beings as winners or losers at all.“To call any life a failure, or a success, is to miss the infinite granularity, the inexhaustible miscellany of all lives,” Moran writes. “A life can’t really succeed or fail at all; it can only be lived.”
'There is an honesty and a clarity in Joe Moran's book If You Should Fail that normalises and softens the usual blows of life that enables us to accept and live with them rather than be diminished/wounded by them' Julia Samuel, author of Grief Works and This Too Shall Pass
'Full of wise insight and honesty. Moran manages to be funny, erudite and kindly: a rare - and compelling - combination. This is the essential antidote to a culture obsessed with success. Read it' Madeleine Bunting
Failure is the small print in life's terms and conditions.
