Most Interesting Historical Non-fiction?

Great WWII books about our boys in the trenches:

Band of Brothers
Flags of Our Fathers
Flyboys

Timely suggestion: Rising Tide

Undaunted Courage written by Stephen Ambrose about Merriwether Lewis of Lewis and Clark was pretty good.

This is one not many people have probably read but my god it was an interesting read:

LINK

Now the Hell Will Start: One Soldier's Flight from the Greatest Manhunt of World War II

Story really gets rolling when a black soldier who has been drugged out and stressed out from the war shoots an officer who tries to disarm him when he is acting in a very unstable fashion.

The guy flees into the woods and lives successfully among head hunters... even marrying the daughter of one of the tribes chiefs

Apparently a true story. Off the charts because it seemed more like historical fiction

Let Us Now Praise Famous Men by James Agee w/ photos by Walter Evans

quote:

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The book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men grew out of an assignment the two men accepted in 1936 to produce a magazine article on the conditions among white sharecropper families in the U.S. South. It was the time of U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt's "New Deal" programs designed to help the poorest segments of the society. Agee and Evans spent eight weeks that summer researching their assignment, mainly among three white sharecropping families mired in desperate poverty. They returned with Evans' portfolio of stark images—of families with gaunt faces, adults and children huddled in bare shacks before dusty yards in the Depression-era nowhere of the deep south—and Agee's detailed notes.

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It's a microlook at America during that time, basically three slices of life rather than panning back and looking at systematic effects. The prose is incredible. Actually it reads more like poetry.

Hellhound on His Trail - about the manhunt to capture Martin L. King's assassin

Looming Tower - deals with the history of al-qaeda up until 9/11

Founding Brothers

1776

Legacy of Ashes - Hist of the CIA

Patriotic Fire: Andrew Jackson and Jean Laffite at the Battle of New Orleans by Winston Groom. This book gives an excellent back story to events that led to two men who hated each other to team up to fight the British.