By training, I’m a lawyer; by trade, I’m a storyteller. For the first decade of my literary career, I wrote novels. I wove together narrative tapestries that, while fictional, were adapted from the real world. Now, in my first work of nonfiction, Wastelands, I’ve flipped the script, taking a true story and telling it with all the page-turning plotting and rich characterization of the best fiction. I’ve seen the literary world from both sides of the divide, both as a writer and as a reader, and I’m happiest in the borderlands. So, it seems, are authors like Jonathan Harr, Michael Lewis, and Erik Larson.
I wrote...
Wastelands: The True Story of Farm Country on Trial
FromTo Kill a Mockingbird to A Time to Killto A Few Good Men, the courtroom drama is modern America’s version of Greek theater. Who doesn’t relish rooting for the underdog, witnessing a masterful cross-examination, or watching a team of legal gunslingers take down a maleficent corporation? Jonathan Harr’s A Civil Action offers all of that high-octane drama in a unique package: every word of the story is true. I read the book in college, and it inspired me to go to law school.A Civil Action has the brisk pacing and rich characterization of a novel, yet its real-world grounding makes it as enlightening as it is entertaining. When I set out to write my own book, I borrowed Harr’s template and wrote it like a legal thriller that just so happens to be true.
The story of a lawyer's battle to win compensation from two of America's largest industrial giants. He fought on behalf of 21 families whose lives were wrecked by illness and death due to the alleged poisoning of their town well. This case became renowned in American legal history.
If every American loves a good courtroom drama, every American also loves to hate the Sackler family, the billionaire founders of Purdue Pharma. It is hard to understate the devastation that this single family has caused in countless communities across the United States. In Empire of Pain, Patrick Radden Keefe, a journalist with The New Yorker, brings the Sacklers to life in three-dimensional technicolor and with prose that is at once elegant and delightful to read. The story he tells is shocking, disturbing, and admirably humane, a complex portrait of a family who built a dynasty, yet who knew early on that its crown jewel, OxyContin, was dangerously addictive and who peddled it like candy anyway. A lyrically written page-turner, Empire of Pain is hard to put down.
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEAR • A grand, devastating portrait of three generations of the Sackler family, famed for their philanthropy, whose fortune was built by Valium and whose reputation was destroyed by OxyContin. From the prize-winning and bestselling author of Say Nothing.
"A real-life version of the HBO series Succession with a lethal sting in its tail…a masterful work of narrative reportage.” – Laura Miller, Slate
The history of the Sackler dynasty is rife with drama—baroque personal lives; bitter disputes over estates; fistfights in boardrooms; glittering art collections; Machiavellian courtroom…
Michael Lewis is a literary magician. He can take the most obscure and unpalatable topic, find a story buried somewhere inside it, and turn that story into a book so good that you want to tell your friends about it. The Big Short is Lewis at his best. It tells the story of a motley crew of unconventional stock traders who saw the diabolical lie at the center of the subprime mortgage boom and bet against the market when the market was sizzling. They were Cassandras, destined never to be believed—until the market crashed in 2008, their detractors lost their shirts, and they made off like bandits. Also, with The Big Short, you get two for the price of one: Adam McKay, one of my favorite Hollywood directors, turned the book into a film that is as entertaining as its literary inspiration.
The real story of the crash began in bizarre feeder markets where the sun doesn't shine and the SEC doesn't dare, or bother, to tread: the bond and real estate derivative markets where geeks invent impenetrable securities to profit from the misery of lower- and middle-class Americans who can't pay their debts. The smart people who understood what was or might be happening were paralyzed by hope and fear; in any case, they weren't talking.
Michael Lewis creates a fresh, character-driven narrative brimming with indignation and dark humor, a fitting sequel to his #1 bestseller Liar's Poker. Out of a…
I’ve always had a fascination with America’s political capital, Washington, D.C.—the way it brings together some of the most brilliant and bombastic people in the universe, the way it serves as a petri dish of high-minded principles and low-brow appetites, the juxtaposition of glittering surface and seamy underside that made the early seasons of House of Cards so binge-able. In This Town, Mark Leibovich brings D.C. to life in a story that is at once stomach-churning, rage-inducing, and laugh-out-loud funny. If you’ve ever wondered what Washington is really like behind all the flag-waving and politicking, the talking points, and stage lights, this is the book for you.
From the New York Times bestselling author of Big Game: The NFL in Dangerous Times
Washington D.C. might be loathed from every corner of the nation, yet these are fun and busy days at this nexus of big politics, big money, big media, and big vanity. There are no Democrats and Republicans anymore in the nation's capital, just millionaires. Through the eyes of Leibovich we discover how the funeral for a beloved newsman becomes the social event of the year; how political reporters are fetishized for their ability to get their names into the…
When I was a kid, I loved history but hated history books. My favorite way to learn about the past was to read well-written historical novels. That was before Erik Larson landed on the literary scene. His books are as compelling as fiction, but they are entirely true. In The Devil in the White City, Larson tells the rollicking, tumultuous, and sordid story of the Chicago World Fair in 1893 through the eyes of the architects and savants whose genius brought the fair to life in the face of impossible odds and through the eyes of the Jekyll-and-Hyde businessman-cum-serial killer who stalked the fair for beautiful and unattached young women and left a trail of bodies as long as Jeffrey Dahmer before an intrepid investigator finally discovered his scheme—and basement crematorium.
The Chicago World Fair was the greatest fair in American history. This is the story of the men and women whose lives it irrevocably changed and of two men in particular- an architect and a serial killer. The architect is Daniel Burnham, a man of great integrity and depth. It was his vision of the fair that attracted the best minds and talents of the day. The killer is Henry H. Holmes. Intelligent as well as handsome and charming, Holmes opened a boarding house which he advertised as 'The World's Fair Hotel' Here in the neighbourhood where he was once…
The once idyllic coastal plain of North Carolina is home to a close-knit, rural community that for more than a generation has battled the polluting practices of large-scale farming taking place in its own backyard. After years of frustration and futility, an impassioned cadre of local residents, led by a team of intrepid and dedicated lawyers, filed a lawsuit against one of the world’s most powerful companies—and, miraculously, they won.
As vivid and fast-paced as a thriller, Wastelandstakes us into the heart of a legal battle over the future of America’s farmland and into the lives of the people who found the courage to fight.
He’s looking for the one thing she’s done with: family.
Brade Oliver arrives in Grand, Montana, looking for blood—and answers. Genetic tests reveal that his biological family may reside in the small, western town, and he’s on a mission to finally discover the one thing his adoptive family couldn’t give him: the truth.
Kendall McKinley craves a normal life, free of the demands, drama, and constraints of her dysfunctional family. Despite being focused on building her career and working on a restoration project, Kendall can’t help herself from noticing a handsome stranger the first night he arrives. But when Brade…
He’s looking for the one thing she’s done with: family.
Brade Oliver arrives in Grand, Montana, looking for blood—and answers. Genetic tests reveal that his biological family may reside in the small, western town, and he’s on a mission to finally discover the one thing his adoptive family couldn’t give him: the truth.
Kendall McKinley craves a normal life, free of the demands, drama, and constraints of her dysfunctional family. Despite being focused on building her career and working on a restoration project, Kendall can’t help herself from noticing a handsome stranger the first night he arrives. But when Brade…