Tag Archives: Nonfiction

Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup

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John Carreyrou     Pages: 303    Published: 2018

The book: Elizabeth Holmes founded Theranos in 2003. She claimed to have a blood testing machine that would make blood tests faster and less painful for patients: only a pin prick of blood was required, instead of a traditional needle draw.
By 2015 Holmes was the new darling of the tech world. Her company was valued at $9 billion. Holmes net worth was estimated to be $4.5 billion. Read more

The Diary of a Bookseller

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Shaun Bythell          Pages: 310           Published: 2017

The book: Shaun Bythell lives in Wigtown, a small Scottish town that is known as Scotland’s Book Town. It has a large number of bookshops and hosts an annual book festival. Shaun owns the oldest bookshop in Wigtown: a delightful place crammed with secondhand books on every topic imaginable and unimaginable.
This is his diary. It captures a year in his life selling books. Read more

The Feather Thief

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Kirk Wallace Johnson         Pages: 308            Published: 2018

The book: One evening in 2009, after an orchestral performance at the Royal Academy of Music, twenty-year-old flute player, Edwin Rist, pulled off the biggest theft ever at the British Museum of Natural History. He stole hundreds of rare bird exhibits. The author, Kirk Wallace Johnson, on hearing about the heist, was intrigued. In this book he tells the very gripping true story of this bizarre crime. Read more

Red Dust Road

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Jackie Kay                       Pages: 289                Published: 2010

The book: Jackie Kay was born in Scotland. Her birth mother was white and her birth father was a black Nigerian student. She was adopted when she was a baby by a white Scottish couple who were members of the communist party. This is the story of Jackie’s search for her birth parents. Jackie Kay is Scotland’s Macher (Poet Laureate). Read more

The Battle For Spain: The Spanish Civil War 1936 – 1939

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Antony Beevor                               Pages: 526                      Published: 2006

The book: Beevor originally published a book on the Spanish Civil War in 1982, but nearly 25 years of more research had been done in Spain and documents, not previously accessible, held in both German and Russian archives, became available, so he completely rewrote the book.  This is a detailed and comprehensive history of the war. Read more

The Girl with Seven Names: Escape from North Korea

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Hyeonse Lee           Pages: 293            Published: 2015

The book: Lee was born and grew up in North Korea. At the age of seventeen she escaped to China. She lived in China for ten years and then worked out how to get to South Korea. Her mother and brother were still in North Korea, and Lee wanted to get them out. This is Lee’s true story of her life in North Korea and her subsequent escape to freedom. Read more

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