Recommend good factual book?

[Hillpig]

"Mudpuddles and other outrages" by Raymond Hillpig Smythe (my uncle). Inventor of the Hillpig Smythe treking stick and buried in City Road cemetery.

 

It may be out of print.

[Anna B]

Anything by Bill Bryson, particularly 'A short history of everything'

[information]

Thank you for all the fantastic responses, I have so far chosen two, which are now ordered and many more to look into.

 

Looks like this thread is going cost a lot of money, I did ask.

[lectrolove]

Any of the Mass Observation compilations. This one has local interest:

 

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Our-Hidden-Lives-Remarkable-Diaries/dp/0091897335

[gnvqsos]

In my humble opinion here we have two of the best posts ever to grace the forums of Sheffield. Laughed myself into a small blackout - congratulations chaps you have earned my eternal esteem.

 

Cheers-it beats the usual tongue-lashing from Eilleen Wilde.

[Tim Grindley]

Sorry I know this is the writers section, but I thought whom better to give advice on books!

 

I read a lot, too much but hey. I only like to read factual books. In short I've hit a wall on finding a good book, so has anyone got any recommendations?

 

Thanks.

 

Guns Germs and Steel.

 

Best book I have ever read. You will be 20 IQ points wiser (not better at IQ tests though) after reading it.

 

It's a history of human civilisation and why it's our Western culture that has achieved this fantastic thing rather than anyone else.

[marmalade3]

Try The Intellectual History of the British Working Class by Jonathan Rose

It's one of the best books I have ever read -starts way back when shepherds left books in stone walls for other shepherds to pick up and read - and also talks about how the working class were forbidden to read - much too dangerous, too good, try it.

[johncocker]

midnight in peking, by paul french

I love books that try and solve crimes which have everybody baffled.

I read this while I was in china ,couldn't put it down.

paul french does some brilliant detective work on this case.

 

 

This is a true crime novel about the upper middle class adopted daughter, Pamela Werner, of a ranking English Civil servant, Edward Theodore Chalmers Werner, who was found brutally murdered [organs removed from the body and all her ribs broken outward] on January 8, 1937 about a month before her 20th birthday.

 

Supernatural spirits were first thought to have done it as the body was found in the Shadow of what was colloquially called the Fox Tower, thought to be inhabited by the spirits of foxes; it was actually a guard tower to the walled enclave of the foreign ligations of Peking. The body was found in an area just outside of the walled city called the badlands and would be similar to what we would call the slums.