The 6 Of The Greatest (True) Stories Ever Written

Below, I’d like to recommend what I think are just a few of the classics of the genre. These are books I loved so much that I read them.

1. In the Heart of the Sea : The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex

- by Nathaniel Philbrick

Did you know that Moby Dick was based on a true story? And that the real story is arguably better? There was a real whaling ship that was broken in half by an angry sperm whale. And then it gets crazy. The members of the crew escaped in three lifeboats, traveling thousands of miles at sea with little food and water until they slowly resorted cannibalism (like drawing straws, killing and then eating the loser, cannibalism). Besides being an utterly unbelievable story, this book also gives a great history into the whaling industry and the cowboy-like entrepreneurs who led it. Wow.

2. Barbarians at the Gate: The Fall of RJR Nabisco 

- by Bryan Burrough & John Helyar

Honestly, a leveraged buyout of RJR Nabisco (yes, the cracker company and the tobacco brands were once one company) by a couple of investment bankers in 1988 should be a really boring book. But somehow it isn’t. It not only isn’t, it’s basically a microcosm of the entire finance industry in the 80s. There are so many characters, so many twists and turns, so much detail. Look, I just went through the Dov Charney/American Apparel saga from the inside and as crazy as that I still on many occasions found myself saying, “Meh, still not as good as Barbarian.” Also the writer of this book, Bryan Burroughs, is just a plain master of this genre. His other two books are 100% worth reading and just as good as this one: The Big Rich and Public Enemies deserve to be on this list.

3. The River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt’s Darkest Journey

- by Candace Millard

I thought I knew about Theodore Roosevelt. This book opens with him stranded in the Amazon jungle begging his son to let him kill himself so he wouldn’t be a burden on their exploring party any longer. And then it gets better from there. I mean, did you know he is credited with being the first to chart and navigate a totally unknown river as long as the Nile? And that he did that after he was President, just for fun? I’m not sure I need to explain much else, but if you needed more convincing, I will say that Candice Millard who wrote Destiny of the Republic (which I highly recommend) wrote this too and it’s better than her last book. Not only is there a bunch of great history and drama here, it shows a human side of Roosevelt I had not understood before.

4. And the Sea Will Tell
- by Vincent Bugliosi and Bruce Henderson

 It’s hard for me to say which Vincent Bugliosi book is best, but I am partial to the And the Sea Will Tell because it’s different than his others. Bugliosi was famously the prosecutor of Charles Manson and wrote a great book about it in Helter Skelter. In this book, he’s the defense attorney for Jennifer Jenkins (not her real name), a woman tried for the murder of married strangers committed by her boyfriend on a small island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. They were caught when they pulled into a Hawaiian yacht club with the dead couples boat…painted in a different color. Some six years later, the wife’s body was found in a chest which washed up in a heavy storm. WTF right? Was she in on it? Did her weird boyfriend do it alone? What possible motivate did they have? Bugliosi empathizes with his client but she remains a mystery to him and to us. Most people think she was complicit in the murders but not Bugliosi, who tells the story not only of what happened on this lonely island but the riveting trial and ultimate acquittal.

5. The Tiger: A True Story of Vengeance and Survival

- by John Vaillant

This book is good. That’s why I have recommended it so many different times by now. Even if it was just the main narrative–the chase to kill a man-eating Tiger in Siberia in post-communist Russia–it would be worth reading, but it is so much more than that. The author explains the Russian psyche, the psyche of man vs. predator, the psyches of primitive peoples and animals, in such a masterful way that you’re shocked to find 1) that he knows this, and 2) that he fit it all into this readable and relatively short book. You may have heard about the story on the internet a while back: a tiger starts killing people in Russia and a team is sent to kill it (Russia is so unreal, they already have a team for this). At one point, the tiger is cornered and leaps to attack the team leader…and in mid-air the soldier’s rifle goes into the tigers open jaws and down his throat all the way to the stock, killing the tiger at the last possible second. The autopsy later revealed that the tiger had been shot something like a dozen times during its life and lived. And on top of that Vaillant also wrote an amazing book called The Golden Spruce, about one of the most unique trees to ever grow on this planet—until it was chopped down by an eco-terrorist with mental problems…and then mysteriously disappeared and was never seen again.

6. Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How it Changed America

- by John M. Barry

This book is amazing and its subject matter isn’t constrained to just the South or the flood of 1927. It opens with the rich citizens of New Orleans hurrying to the levee to survey a growing emergency and ends with a decision that influenced the direction of America in innumerable ways—from its next President to the permanent decline of the South’s most important city to race relations for the next fifty years. It’s one of those books that is so meticulously researched and so masterly written that it is at once a book guaranteed to be a success (it was) and so much more educational than a book of its popularity would suggest.

But of course, these books are history at its most interesting. It’s not always history you’d think that you’d care about but trust me, pick up one of these book and see what happens.