The best narrative nonfiction books about people dealing with mayhem, madness, and misadventures

David Grann “stumbled upon” this sordid mystery, in the process reviving forgotten crimes committed in the 1920s. Killers of the Flower Moon centers on lucrative oil rights pegged to reservation land out West owned by the Osage Indian tribe, whose members begin turning up dead under suspicious circumstances. Questions go unanswered for years until J. Edgar Hoover’s nascent FBI takes over the investigation.

The closing chapters are a coda of sorts about lingering racial injustice. Grann enters the narrative, but pulls it off without becoming a distraction. Killers of the Flower Moon is a compelling, important read and now would be a good time to dive in. The pandemic-delayed movie—directed by Martin Scorcese and starring Robert DiNiro and Leonardo DiCaprio—hits theaters this spring.

Depression-era Dust Bowl storms and economic calamity are the villains of Timothy Egan’s The Worst Hard Time, which won the 2006 National Book Award for nonfiction. Cattle go blind and choke on swirling sand. Lives turn so relentlessly bleak, distraught parents give away their children. Egan superbly documents the many miseries in Oklahoma and the strength of character needed to endure, but that state may not have gotten the worst of it. I wrote a book about an integrated baseball team that played in Bismarck, North Dakota during those grim days. So many inhabitants fled, it wasn’t until 2011 that the population of North Dakota recovered to its 1930 peak.

Think of The Worst Hard Time not simply as history, but as a harbinger of what natural-disaster travails might lie ahead with climate change.

After soundly losing the 1912 presidential election to Woodrow Wilson, Theodore Roosevelt wants to cleanse his mind and spirit. Rather than take a cushy ‘round-the-world cruise, he attempts the first unmapped trip down a rapids-choked, piranha-infested tributary of the Amazon. The name “River of Doubt” perhaps should have deterred him. But Teddy and his mates press on and persevere through disease, drownings, starvation, death, and Indigenous Indian attacks; providing Candice Millard with fodder for her wonderfully gritty book.

How hair-raising an adventure was it? Shortly after a frazzled Roosevelt returns to the comforts of home, two expeditions set out to duplicate his feat. One group quickly gets spooked by Indians shooting poison arrows and bails. The other expedition? Millard notes, “Its members were never seen again.”

Jon Krakauer lives to tell and write the tale of two misguided climbs up Mount Everest taking place the same weekend in May 1996. He’s there on a magazine assignment that morphs into a powerful book about bravery and also the hazards of hubris. Two world-class mountaineers (New Zealander Rob Hall and American Scott Fischer) take the risk of escorting commercial clients up Everest, some of whom have no business being there beyond the ability to pay about $60,000 apiece. Eight people perish in wicked weather, including Hall and Fischer. Seven others have to be rescued.

I recommend the paperback edition, which has an afterward not included with the hardcover. The book resonates on a personal level. I climbed Mount Kilimanjaro on a Fischer-led trip two years before. Scott invited me on this expedition. I couldn’t go, so instead received a chilling phone message from his assistant at 2 o’clock that Sunday morning: “Give me a call. I’ve got some bad news.”

The book surprisingly lacks a gut-punch ending, but Hiroshima is a masterpiece of narrative reconstruction, beginning precisely at 8:15 a.m. on August 6, 1945. That’s when a uranium bomb flattens Hiroshima, Japan, killing 280,000 people and ushering in the Nuclear Age. Nine months later, John Hersey secured permission from the U.S. military to enter the city. He was on the ground only two weeks, but manages to recreate in riveting detail the lives of six survivors, hoping “readers would be able to become the characters enough to suffer some of the pain.”

I own a 1946 first edition; the pages yellow, the scene sets and anecdotes still fresh. The book is only 30,000 words, a reprint of the article that first ran in The New Yorker. Try reading it in tandem with “Hiroshima: The Aftermath”, which appeared in the July 15, 1985 issue of The New Yorker and has Hersey revisiting those six transformed lives on the fortieth anniversary of the bombing