Here are 100 books that The Curse of the Marquis de Sade fans have personally recommended if you like
The Curse of the Marquis de Sade.
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My father was a stage magician, and I grew up looking for the gimmick behind the marvel. As a journalist, I gravitated toward true crime and the many varieties of fraud, deception, and misdirection on display in any high-stakes criminal trial. I am particularly fascinated by elaborate cons, whether they involve sideshow mitt readers, political hucksters, or cryptocurrency barons. When I found out that a century ago my hometown was the center of a Big Con operation that raked in millions, I had to learn more. The result is my book Gangbuster.
Out of all the investigative reporting that emerged from the 2008 financial meltdown, Henriques’ account of the scheme that out-Ponzied Ponzi is the book that stays with me.
The Madoff story is about brazen lies and insatiable greed, to be sure, but Henriques’ approach is nuanced, thorough, yet accessible, showing the complacency (one might say complicity) of investors and regulators, dazzled or cowed by Madoff’s magic.
How do you pull off a $65 billion scam? With a lot of help.
Who is Bernie Madoff, and how did he pull off the biggest Ponzi scheme in history? In "The Wizard of Lies", Diana B. Henriques of "The New York Times" - who has led the paper's coverage of the Madoff scandal since the day the story broke - has written the definitive book on the man and his scheme, drawing on unprecedented access and more than one hundred interviews with people at all levels and on all sides of the crime, including Madoff's first interviews for publication since his arrest. Henriques also provides vivid details from the various lawsuits, government investigations,…
My father was a stage magician, and I grew up looking for the gimmick behind the marvel. As a journalist, I gravitated toward true crime and the many varieties of fraud, deception, and misdirection on display in any high-stakes criminal trial. I am particularly fascinated by elaborate cons, whether they involve sideshow mitt readers, political hucksters, or cryptocurrency barons. When I found out that a century ago my hometown was the center of a Big Con operation that raked in millions, I had to learn more. The result is my book Gangbuster.
Linguistics professor Maurer was fascinated by con-artist slang and subcultures, but this classic 1940 work is more than a sociology treatise.
It offers precious insights and yarns from the aristocrats of the underworld, the operators of the Big Con, a high-stakes form of flim-flammery that required many talented performers and thrived in the early years of the twentieth century.
(The fake betting parlor in the movie The Sting is a good example of how these folks operated.)
Maurer peels back the layers of a juicy world of crime and deception.
The classic 1940 study of con men and con games that Luc Sante in Salon called “a bonanza of wild but credible stories, told concisely with deadpan humor, as sly and rich in atmosphere as anything this side of Mark Twain.”
“Of all the grifters, the confidence man is the aristocrat,” wrote David Maurer, a proposition he definitely proved in The Big Con, one of the most colorful, well-researched, and entertaining works of criminology ever written. A professor of linguistics who specialized in underworld argot, Maurer won the trust of hundreds of swindlers, who let him in on not simply…
My father was a stage magician, and I grew up looking for the gimmick behind the marvel. As a journalist, I gravitated toward true crime and the many varieties of fraud, deception, and misdirection on display in any high-stakes criminal trial. I am particularly fascinated by elaborate cons, whether they involve sideshow mitt readers, political hucksters, or cryptocurrency barons. When I found out that a century ago my hometown was the center of a Big Con operation that raked in millions, I had to learn more. The result is my book Gangbuster.
This as-told-to memoir by Weil, better known as the Yellow Kid, is a crash course in grifts of all kinds, from petty barroom scams to elaborate shady deals in oil, stocks, and real estate.
Weil is a witty tour guide and a gifted impostor, posing as a geologist, banker, or tycoon as needed. To me, what’s most eye-opening is his total lack of compassion for his victims, whom he regards as greedy suckers who deserve to be fleeced.
Criminals rarely see themselves as in the wrong, and Weil’s efforts to justify his larcenous career make for an intriguing con played on the reader.
The story of Joseph “Yellow Kid” Weil, a man who could—and often did—pull off scams to outshine The Sting.
In his long career as a confidence man, Joseph “Yellow Kid” Weil swindled the public of more than eight million dollars and established the reputation for robbery and trickery. Always beating the police at their own game, “Yellow Kid” used phony oil deals, women, fixed races, and an endless list of other tricks to best an increasingly gullible public. One day, he was Dr. Henri Reuel, a noted geologist who traveled around and told his hosts that he was a representative…
Tap Dancing on Everest, part coming-of-age memoir, part true-survival adventure story, is about a young medical student, the daughter of a Holocaust survivor raised in N.Y.C., who battles self-doubt to serve as the doctor—and only woman—on a remote Everest climb in Tibet.
My father was a stage magician, and I grew up looking for the gimmick behind the marvel. As a journalist, I gravitated toward true crime and the many varieties of fraud, deception, and misdirection on display in any high-stakes criminal trial. I am particularly fascinated by elaborate cons, whether they involve sideshow mitt readers, political hucksters, or cryptocurrency barons. When I found out that a century ago my hometown was the center of a Big Con operation that raked in millions, I had to learn more. The result is my book Gangbuster.
Nobody was better than New Yorker writer Mitchell at capturing the gritty realities of the Bowery, but he met his match when he decided to profile Joe Gould, a Harvard-educated bohemian said to be working on a massive “Oral History of Our Time.”
Twenty years later, Mitchell returned to his subject and revealed the secret he’d learned shortly after the first piece was published: that Gould had perpetrated (with Mitchell’s unwitting help) one of the great literary hoaxes of all time – not out of greed or a desire for fame, but out of desperation and mental illness.
But is Mitchell giving us the straight story, or is there more he’s not telling? This labyrinth of smoke and mirrors still astonishes me.
'It's a masterpiece, of course, but more than that it shows that there is some such thing as being a simple observer' Nicci French, Independent
It was 1932 when Joseph Mitchell first came across Joe Gould, a Harvard-educated vagrant of Greenwich Village. Penniless, filthy, scurrilous, charming, thieving, Joe Gould was widely considered a genius. He was working on a book he called an Oral History - the longest book ever written he claimed, formed of recorded conversations set down in exercise books. Of course, when Gould died the great epic was nowhere to be found.
I love history. I’ve loved it ever since I was a kid, listening to my dad’s history lectures. And in my history classes, I always tucked away stories about women. There weren’t many; most were trailblazers like Amelia Earhart or Susan B. Anthony. They were completely admirable, but I wanted to know about the women who had strayed from the straight and narrow: the murderers, the liars, and the thieves. Now, I write about women committing crimes throughout history. As a reader, I can never resist a story about a woman from the past doing things she shouldn’t. These books were endlessly entertaining and sometimes downright chilling to read.
This book tells the story of Therese Humbert, swindler extraordinaire. There’s just something thrilling about a con artist fighting their way through life with nothing more than their own wits. I loved reading about Therese’s boldness and cleverness.
I felt I could live vicariously through her as she hustled her way into French society. Her fraud lasted for years, and I couldn’t help admiring her coolness under fire. Her story made for an exciting and incredible read.
Chronicles the life of ThTrFse Humbert, the fabled "billionaire's daughter," covering her rise from peasant status to high society salon doyenne, and citing the carefully fabricated illusions she wove around herself in order to rise to power.
When I headed the Executive Education Center at the University of Michigan I had the opportunity to meet with many great leaders and observe them in action. I also enjoy interacting with faculty colleagues who conduct state-of-the-art research on leadership. Because of this experience, I believe that leaders are made, not born, and that reading biographies, psychological studies, philosophical commentary, histories, and fiction like the books on my list is one of the best ways to gain insight into what you need to become a great leader.
This is the heartwarming and inspiring story of the journey a great chef took from serving as a lowly apprentice to becoming a leader in establishing new food traditions in America. I especially enjoyed the many funny stories about Pepin and his family. Warning: the book includes many of his favorite recipes that will cause hunger pangs as you read the book.
In this captivating memoir, the man whom Julia Child has called “the best chef in America” tells the story of his rise from a frightened apprentice in an exacting Old World kitchen to an Emmy Award–winning superstar who taught millions of Americans how to cook and shaped the nation’s tastes in the bargain.
We see young Jacques as a homesick six-year-old boy in war-ravaged France, working on a farm in exchange for food, dodging bombs, and bearing witness as German soldiers capture his father, a fighter in the Resistance. Soon Jacques is caught up in the hurly-burly action of his…
Benghazi: A New History is a look back at the enigmatic 2012 attack on the US mission in Benghazi, Libya, its long-tail causes, and devastating (and largely unexamined) consequences for US domestic politics and foreign policy. It contains information not found elsewhere, and is backed up by 40 pages of…
As a young boy, I dreamed of becoming a novelist. I was fascinated and inspired by Les Années Folles, The Crazy Years of 1920’s Paris, when artists of all disciplines, from countries all around the world came together electrifying the City of Lights with an artistic passion. My mother was French. France is my 2nd country, where I spend a portion of each year. While researching my novel, The Memory of Love, I stayed in the actual atelier of my protagonist Chrysis Jungbluth, a young, largely unknown painter of that era. I visited, too, the addresses of dozens of the artists who bring the era alive again in our imagination.
Having read well over two dozen books on the subject of French history, with a general focus on the especially vibrant period in Paris from the end of World War I to the beginning of World War II, and a laser focus on the 1920s, I find it nearly impossible to rank these five books in the order of their importance. That said, I am choosing this book as my 1st recommendation because at 416 pages, and richly illustrated by hundreds of stunning photographs and images, it casts the broadest, most comprehensive net over this extraordinary era. I proclaim the two decades in Paris that readers will discover in this book, to represent the most important international convergence of painters, sculptors, intellectuals, novelists, poets, playwrights, journalists, dancers, actors, choreographers, musicians, composers, photographers, designers, and fashionistas, in the history of the world. Do I exaggerate? Here is a very incomplete list,…
During the années folles following World War I, Paris underwent a creative fever that brought artists and intellectuals from around the world to the City of Light. The bohemian charms of Montparnasse attracted artists such as Picasso, Chagall, and Giacometti, while a vibrant café culture provided a forum for disputes between Dadaists and Surrealists and gave rise to a group of expatriate writers. The creative energy was all-encompassing, establishing Paris as the epicenter of new trends in the arts, a position it would occupy until World War II. This newest title in a celebrated series addresses such diverse topics as…
I worked for ten years as a guard at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, as narrated in my memoir, All the Beauty in the World. I’ve found that readers are fascinated by the art in the Met but also by the “living museum,” which includes five hundred security guards keeping watch over millions of visitors each year. I’ve read a variety of workplace memoirs to study how authors depict the rhythms of work and the feel of particular workplaces. I’m especially passionate when there are larger themes at play and thus clear reasons why we should care.
This is a workplace memoir in part because of the engaging, disgusting scenes where he labors as a plongeur (dishwasher) in a grimy French restaurant. But in a broader sense, it’s a book about the hard work of being poor.
Every sentence is intelligent and the overall thrust is deeply moral—Orwell’s calling card.
From the author of 1984, the classic semi-autobiographical story about the adventures of a penniless British writer in two cities.
Down and Out in Paris and London follows the journey of a writer among the down-and-out in two great cities. Without self-pity and often with humor, this novel is Orwell at his finest-a sobering, truthful protrayal of poverty and society.
I'm a former television news producer who worked for Barbara Walters and Peter Jennings at ABC News, and at Dateline NBC and CBS’s 60 Minutes. I was always a journalist, but mid-career, I switched lanes from TV to writing. Since then, I've contributed essays and stories to many publications, among them Vogue, Travel & Leisure, The New York Times, BBC Travel, and others. I mostly write about travel, but also cover beauty, wellness, international development, and health. I'm the recipient of five Lowell Thomas Awards for excellence in travel journalism, including one for Travel Journalist of the Year. My book of essays, A Hard Place to Leave: Stories From a Restless Life comes out in May 2022.
I can’t remember a 600-page book that I’ve ever read so fast and yes, so hungrily. Baker’s trajectory defies credulity. Above all, it is the paradigmatic story of a Black American targeted by racism in her own country, who found acceptance and fame (and in Baker’s case, so much more) in Paris. From the slums of St. Louis, at nineteen she became an instant sensation with her dazzling performance at La Revue Nègre. She strolled the Champs Élysées with a cheetah and, during the war, hid Jewish refugees in her château in the Dordogne. In the 1963 March on Washington, she spoke alongside Dr. Martin Luther King, the only woman to address the crowd that day. With exhaustive research that never weighs down the narrative, author Jean-Claude Baker, her unofficial thirteenth child who worked for her towards the end of her life, paints a portrait of a hugely complex woman.…
Based on twenty years of research and thousands of interviews, this authoritative biography of performer Josephine Baker (1906-1975) provides a candid look at her tempestuous life. Born into poverty in St. Louis, the uninhibited chorus girl became the sensation of Europe and the last century's first black sex symbol. A heroine of the French Resistance in World War II, she entranced figures as diverse as de Gaulle, Tito, Castro, Princess Grace, two popes, and Martin Luther King, Jr. Yet Josephine was also, as one critic put it, "a monster who made Joan Crawford look like the Virgin Mary." Jean-Claude Baker's…
Meet Lev Gleason, a real-life comics superhero! Gleason was a titan among Golden Age comics publishers who fought back against the censorship campaigns and paranoia of the Red Scare. After dropping out of Harvard to fight in World War I in France, Gleason moved to New York City and eventually…
I have always been fascinated by France and things French. In graduate school, no women’s history was on our required reading lists. As a young woman, though, entering a professional field in which women were few on the ground, much less studied, I became an avid reader of biographies of achieving women – partly to learn how they were able to surmount (or not) the obstacles that confronted them in a male-dominated world. The five stellar biographies of French women I present here are products of the newer work in retrieving women’s histories. They are deeply researched and engagingly written. They confirm the saying that “truth is stranger than fiction.”
This splendid biography traces the life and times of the Marquise Du Châtelet, born in Paris in December 1706, who became one of the most erudite women of her époque. For fifteen years she was the companion to Voltaire, the best-known of the French philosophes. She mastered calculus and translated Newton’s Principia, in addition to carrying on an active social life and raising several children. She died at the age of 42, following the birth of a daughter conceived with another lover. The author explains her subject’s life course as “from a life of frivolity to a life of the mind.” It’s a great read.
Documents the life of the French Enlightenment-era intellectual, from her aristocratic youth and controversial choice to become the mistress of Voltaire to her mathematical and scientific achievements and work as a translator of Newton.
