Reddit reviews Dispatches

In a rather different vein from a lot of the suggestions I'm seeing here, I want to plug Michael Herr's Dispatches as an incredible piece of Vietnam literature. There's also If I Die in a Combat Zone by Tim O'Brien.

If you're willing to consider graphic novels, check out Maus, Persepolis, and Laika.

If you're interested at all in vampires and folklore, I recommend Food for the Dead. Really interesting read.

A history-teacher friend of mine recently gave me The Lost City of Z by David Grann. I haven't gotten around to reading it yet, but it came highly recommended.

By the by, last year I required my students (high school seniors) to select and read a non-fiction book and gave them the following list of suggestions. Columbine was one of the really popular ones, and I had a bunch of kids (and a few teachers) recommending it to me, but, again, I haven't gotten to it yet.

• Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything by Steve D. Levitt
  
• The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference by Malcolm Gladwell
  
• Blink by Malcolm Gladwell
  
• The Omnivore’s Dilemna: A Natural History of Four Meals by Michael Pollan
  
• Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal by Eric Schlosser
  
• Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America by Barbara Ehrenreich
  
• Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell
  
• Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers by Mary Roach
  
• Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies by Jared Diamond
  
• A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson
  
• Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation by Lynne Truss
  
• In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto by Michael Pollan
  
• The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins
  
• The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary by Simon Winchester
  
• Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex by Mary Roach
  
• A Brief History of Time: The Updated and Expanded Tenth Anniversary Edition by Stephen Hawking
  
• The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales by Oliver Sacks
  
• The World is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century by Thomas L. Friedman
  
• Columbine by Dave Cullen
  
• Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed by Jared Diamond
  
• Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong by James W. Loewen
  
• The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon by David Grann
  
• The Hot Zone: A Terrifying True Story by Richard Preston
  
• Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife by Mary Roach
  
• SuperFreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes, and Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance by Steven D. Levitt
  
• Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void by Mary Roach
  
• Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Emil Frankl
  
• At Home: A Short History of Private Life by Bill Bryson
  
• Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer
  
• Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen by Christopher McDougall
  
• The Mother Tongue: English and How It Got that Way by Bill Bryson
  
• Emotional Intelligence 2.0 by Travis Bradberry
  
• The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins
  
• The Ghost Map: The Story of London’s Most Terrifying Epidemic--and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World by Steven Johnson
  
• Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces that Shape Our Decisions by Dan Ariely
  
• Food For the Dead: On the Trail of New England’s Vampires by Michael E. Bell
  
• Sex at Dawn: How We Mate, Why We Stray, and What It Means for Modern Relationships by Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jetha
  
• Ladies of Liberty: The Women Who Shaped Our Nation by Cokie Roberts

Well I mean this guy wrote it, they are his stories https://www.amazon.com/Dispatches-Michael-Herr/dp/0679735259

Dispatches by Michael Herr is a great read from a reporter's perspective in Vietnam.

Dispatches by Michael Herr. It's exactly like Fear and Loathing except you replace the Vegas Strip with a South Korean jungle and add sadness.

That line wasn't written for the movie, it's something a serviceman actually said to Michael Herr, and apparently the psychopath meant it.

https://www.amazon.com/Dispatches-Michael-Herr/dp/0679735259

My suggestion is to read book-length journalism by top-tier journalists. Below are some examples. Also, you should check out the Longform podcast, which has interviews with journalists about their careers and their work.

David Carr - The Night of the Gun
David Remnick - Reporting: Writings from the New Yorker
Jennifer Gonnerman - Life on the Outside: The Prison Odyssey of Elaine Bartlett
Ta-Nehisi Coates - The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood
Jessica Mitford - The American Way of Death Revisited
Wendy Ruderman & Barbara Laker - Busted: A Tale of Corruption in the City of Brotherly Love
Michael Herr - Dispatches

Dispatches by Micheal Herr. It's a war correspondent's memoir of covering the Vietnam war (I think for Esquire). It's my favourite book because Herr is just a really damned good writer.

Based on this book, Herr was hired by Stanley Kubrick to work on the screenplay for Full Metal Jacket. Quite of few scenes from this book made it into the film.

Random quote:

>"Going out at night the medics gave you pills, Dexedrine breath like dead snakes kept too long in a jar. [...] I knew one 4th division Lurp who took his pills by the fistful, downs from the left pocket of his tiger suit and ups from the right, one to cut the trail for him and the other to send him down it. He told me that they cooled things out just right for him, that could see that old jungle at night like he was looking at it through a starlight scope. "They sure give you the range," he said."


Amazon link

Google Books link

Check out Dispatches by Michael Herr. It's basically an oral history written as a novel in the journalistic style. Many of the characters in this book went on to be adapted for the screen in Apocalypse Now and Full Metal Jacket.