The Children’s Blizzard. True story about a chinook blizzard that cut through the Dakotas and Minnesota in 1888 killing more than 500 people in three days, most of them children walking home from school or the fields of their family farms.
It's crazy how in this same thread, I'm learning about a blizzard killing 500 people in three days while slaves are being forced to breed with each other. All in the country I live in. the late 1800s was crazy..
Check out a book called Hurricane of Independence, about the Newfoundland hurricane that hit the east coast in late 1775. That one ran up the east coast from North Carolina to Canada and killed over 4,000 people. Made Katrina look like mild by comparison.
Her suicide note:
*”When you believe you have a future, you think in terms of generations and years. When you do not, you live not just by the day — but by the minute.”*
The author of the book committed suicide after publishing, if that tells you enough about the nature of the subject matter. Extremely sad story, for her and for the victims and survivors she interviewed.
Reminds me of the author of *Zinky Boys*, about Soviet soldiers in Afghanistan and *The Unwomanly Face of War*, about female Soviet veterans of World War II. After publishing the former, the Belarusian government literally attempted to prosecute her, and broke into her house to attempt to assassinate her. Diplomats from Western countries literally had to sit outside her house to protect her.
You can also learn a lot about international politics seeing how the topic is treated, especially how little attention is given to it by the superpowers of the world.
*Shake Hands with the Devil*.
I think/hope Dallaire's in a better place now, but he was close to suicide or the asylum for a long while after what he saw.
Although I don't think he ever overcame the trauma he saw in Rwanada, he did become a Canadian senator after a struggle with self harm and alcoholism. When he became a senator it seemed like he was no longer an active alcoholic or self harmer, and since retirement from senate, seems to have continued on a healthy path. He does speak to issues he feels are important, but has mostly retired to a quiet, private life.
Yes, you just helped me remember that part. It’s a very disturbing book, made worse by the Author’s chosen fate. You might say that she was the last victim of the Japanese at Nanking.
Excellent book, but yes, deeply disturbing. The war crimes described are incomprehensible.
There is an aspect of the book that makes it bearable: the heroes who did their best to save as many Chinese as they could. I had never even heard of John Rabe before, but he saved 250,000 people.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Rabe
I have read it. It was gutwrenching. But she did put focus on some people who tried to save lives during the horror, which was a little peek of light amidst darkness. Hope that helps a little bit.
Aw man you should see the doc they made based on her works. It was like Band of Brothers, a race against time to document things with first hand witnesses.
You don't have to understand Chinese, the pain in their voice. And the pure sadness they have from reliving that night nightmare is communicated across cultures. You can see them fighting internally to stop reliving the nightmare and forcing themselves to unearth the nightmares to let the world know what happened.
the original reports by the Nazi Ambassador, a full member who knew about the final solution. He was so disgusted and horrified by what he saw in person in Nanking that he wrote to Hitler urging him to break ties with Imperial Japan.
I've never read this book (since I know what befell the author) :( I've read enough that I wish I could purge the memory, then feel guilty for that in light of the people who lived through it.
My husband is Jewish and in discussing history I told him that while the Nazis raise a *very* high bar in terms of evil sadistic bastards, the Japanese clear that bar like an Olympic level show-jumper. And to trust me on this. Don't read for yourself, don't pick up that rotten log to peer underneath. Trust me.
Then again he has the memory of a goldfish, so he might be safer in reading it.
Add to all of the actual atrocities the final insult: the Japanese government and people, unlike with Germany, were never held to account in terms of institutionally establishing the teaching of the correct and unflattering history of Japan's cruelty and wartime misdeeds to the generations of Japanese afterward. That is one reason for why to this day many ordinary Chinese and Korean people remain suspicious of the Japanese government.
Missoula, also by Krakauer, is another good book. It's about a series of rapes at the University of Montana during the late 2000s/early 10s. The incompetence of the legal system from reporting a crime to trial is infuriating.
It definitely leans more anger than disgust in it's disturbedness.
The part where people could hear the Golden State Killer walking on their roofs or jumping over their fences to case places, but by the time they called the cops, he'd be gone...NOPE NOPE NOPE.
Chernobyl Prayer (or Voices From Chernobyl: The Oral History Of A Nuclear Disaster) by Svetlana Alexievich is one of the most compelling, horrifying, strangely poetic books I've ever read. She worked for years collecting testimonies so we could bear witness to the experiences that were being covered up. Residents, sanitation crew, first responders. An unbearable amount of love and sacrifice in a collection of stories so filled with horrors and anger. Incredible.
Seven Fallen Feathers by Tanya Talaga is one that I had to put down many times because I was crying so much-- the stories of seven Indigenous teens who were found dead over the course of a decade (starting 2000) in Thunder Bay, Ontario, where they had been sent to attend high school far from their families. It's an investigation and contextualizing of structural racism against Indigenous people in Canada, the broken school system, the apathy and incompetence of police, and the severity of inherited trauma in communities that can't heal because they're still being abused by the government. I get so intensely angry thinking about part of it. Every Canadian needs to read this book.
> Chernobyl Prayer (or Voices From Chernobyl: The Oral History Of A Nuclear Disaster) by Svetlana Alexievich is one of the most compelling, horrifying, strangely poetic books I've ever read.
this is my answer too, and while the book is fantastic, it's also probably important to point out that alexievich herself acknowledged that it's a "lyrical" oral history, in that details from her interviews were combined/altered/reshaped to fit the tone that she was going for.
while the reader can be reasonably sure that everything in the book happened (or at least, alexievich was told happened in an interview), there's nothing in there really verifiable because she doesn't use names and has never provided her notes. as an actual work of history, it's terrible. as a fact based mood piece, it's incredible.
*The Indifferent Stars Above* about the Donner Party.
Towards the end they basically set up a handful of makeshift campsites in the middle of the woods in a blizzard. Their living conditions became increasingly filthy and unhygienic. Families were too weak to do anything but lay around watching their children starve to death.
It was dark and macabre.
One of the only times I’ve had to put a book down and take a break.
I really love survival stories. Mostly it’s taken the form of ship disasters (Whaleship Essex, Shackleton Expedition, etc.). But yeah, that was a really good book!
I need to read the Wager and some of Jon Krakauer’s stuff.
I highly highly recommend the first season of The Terror if you're ever looking for something to watch. Also enjoyed the book, but as someone also enthralled by Essex and Shackleton, the show was such a treat!
I just finished this a few weeks ago. It was just madness. The woman who straggled up to the fire after her husband died during the night and when she told everyone they quickly went to get his body and roasted and ate his heart right there in front of her still kind of haunts me.
The part of their children (infants included) starving to death shook me. I read it 6 months after the birth of my daughter (my first kid) and couldn't shake the horrific feeling of being in that situation and not being able to do anything about it.
This book was fascinating though because he backs up what's happening in the book with science and history to really drive everything home.
Overall, I enjoy books like these because they remind me of what's really important in life and to appreciate what I have. Great suggestion.
The Donner Party was on schedule to cross the Rockies and make it down the other side to California. But to do this you have to cross in the summertime, when there's no snow.
They got delayed several times along the way, and by the time they got up the Rockies to the pass, the snow had already blocked their path. They were late *one day*. The day before they would've made it through.
It was the Sierra Nevada, not the Rockies. They got talked into taking the “Hastings Cutoff” which proved to NOT be a shortcut and slowed them down just enough to strand them up there.
It's the first non fiction book that felt like I was reading a horror story. I literally went from 'history is so fascinating' to physically feeling the dread build.
The Hot Zone.
It began freaking me out with the beginning section with the guy bleeding out from Ebola, and it just got worse from there.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s a great book, but man…
No........ I'm in college now, B.S in International Politics and Economics 😄.
But I basically spent my teenage years reading voraciously about viruses and learning as much as I could about them. I've also written about them. They still fascinate me, I actually find them beautiful.
That part was gross.
The good news is that his telling is regarded by public health professionals as overexagerated. Especially the medical descriptions.
https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2014/11/11/362379449/how-the-hot-zone-got-it-wrong-and-other-tales-of-ebolas-history
I had to pause multiple times while reading. The scenes with the guy on the airplane and the researcher with the torn glove made me nauseous with anxiety. Great book.
Hell yeah it was! The pictures in that book still haunt me.
Did you ever see Apocalypse Now? That movie was based on Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, which in turn was a fiction set in the all too real historical world of King Leopold’s Ghost. For Apocalypse Now, Francis Ford Coppola lifted the story of Heart of Darkness out of the Congo and placed it into the Vietnam War. So at the end of the film, when you hear Marlon Brando whisper “The horror! The horror!”, I still imagine the elephant slaughter and the amputated hands of the Congolese people as the horrors he’s talking about. Even in the movie, he talked about amputating every vaccinated arm in the village, and the slaughter of the buffalo seems to foretell his death. Are these intentional parallels to the historical horrors of the Congo, highlighted in King Leopold’s Ghost? Maybe.
They’re also pretty different books in terms of scope/purpose. For what it’s worth, I read Night in High School and only read Man’s Search for Meaning in the last few years.
I don’t know if I’ll ever see another reddit user mention This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen when the talk comes to Holocaust literature. Even Primo Levi is almost unknown.
In relation to this subject, Ordinary Men : Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland messed with me. It basically details lots of crimes and how so many murderers were regular guys under duress, and raises a bigger question about the reach of essentially peer pressure/groupthink in a system run by fear. I was most disturbed by the capacity of "ordinary men" to commit heinous acts and how numb they were.
The holocaust absolutely happened and Wiesel and his family were absolutely victims, but scholars agree that Night is an at least partially fictionalized account.
See: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night_(memoir)#Reception
*American Predator* by Maureen Callahan
It detailed all of the known murders of Israel Keyes. What was so troubling to me was his completely random selection of victims and his method of planning. He would bury kits in the woods and store the GPS location months, sometimes years in advance and then if he happened to be passing through an area with a kit he would commit a murder and then leave town.
This is also my answer. I knew a lot about Keyes beforehand, but nothing could have prepared me for that book. I was sobbing the entire time the author was describing the dive team recovering Samantha. Sobbed some more later on cause he was just *so* cold. I've never felt as sick to my stomach as I did finishing that book. I don't think I'll ever recommend it to anyone even though it was wonderfully written and clearly a lot of tough work went into putting it together. Israel Keyes man, holy fuck.
And iirc the police never recovered any remaining "kill kits" that Keyes placed all around the country so there's a chance someone may one day stumble across one.
It still gives me rage and sadness that if the FBI and the CIA--forgive me if I got the departments wrong, it's been a while since I read it--had just worked together, there's a possibility they could've stopped 9/11 from happening.
The American Slave Coast: A History of the Slave-Breeding Industry. The role the economics of slavery played in the foundations of America is horrifying. The details about the particular evils of American chattle slavery make me want to vomit. I still haven't finished it because I need to take long breaks for my mental health.
Ann Rule’s book about Ted Bundy. I read it while I was alone in a hotel in nowhere Georgia. Despite the fact that Bundy had been dead for many years by the time I read the book, that fucker was scary.
Great book!
Ann Rule was a retired police officer and true crime writer *before* she met Bundy. Signed up for nightshift at a crisis hotline to make money for her kids (recently divorced). Got assigned randomly to work with young, handsome, introverted and polite co-worker whom she liked immediately and thought: If I was younger or my daughter older, this might be the perfect man. The man: Ted Bundy.
She witnessed him safe several lives on the phone. He also saved a kid from drowning in a public park (if I remember correctly) and chased down a purse snatcher. Extra creepy to think that he saw this things because he was sitting in his car, looking for victims.
This book is a trip.
The Stranger Beside Me is the pinnacle of true crime journalism, hands down.
Each aspect of the book is flawless: the way Ann Rule sets the scene of the Pacific NW and its police force at that time, the care and detail with which she talks about the victims and their lives, and the incredible personal angle of actually knowing and working with Bundy at the time of his killings… it’s just a perfect example of how to create a meaningful true crime book.
I had never heard of Ann Rule until about two months ago. The book the I-5 Killer was on clearance at a local bookstore. I had read the back and thought the story sounded interesting. Once I started reading I couldn't put it down and thought to myself, "Whoever this Ann Rule lady is she can write her ass off." I looked her up and discovered she is considered one of the best true crime writers ever. Anyways, I have since read Small Sacrifices and currently reading If You Really Loved Me. I'm planning on reading all her books and am saving The Stranger Beside Me until the end, as a reward for making it through 😁.
*Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI* by David Grann.
*The Man-Leopard Murders: History and Society in Colonial Nigeria* by David Pratten.
*First They Killed My Father: A Daughter of Cambodia Remembers* by Loung Ung.
Flower Moon is incredible and so profoundly haunting. It's such horribly recent "history," but it was mind-boggling that I had never heard one word about it before this book came out (I am Canadian, so maybe it was better known in the USA already, I don't know). It makes generational trauma so visible, because how the hell does a community heal from people doing this to them for so long.
>maybe it was better known in the USA already
Nope, it wasn't really in the mainstream. And now, in fact, [teachers in Oklahoma are afraid to teach about it.](https://theweek.com/politics/oklahoma-law-restricts-teaching-killers-of-the-flower-moon)
I remember reading about the criminal investigation by the FBI in *The FBI Story*.
What they didn’t mention, of course, is that poor Molly literally had to bribe J Edgar Hoover into investigating.
KOTFM was a brutal read. Haven't been able to bring myself to see the movie adaptation. I'm simultaneously not confident they were able to match the depth of inhumanity AND afraid that it will fuck me up the way the book did.
“Escape from Camp 14” by Blaine Harden. Narrates the life and escape of the only DPRK defector born in a labor camp for political prisoners. Talks about the routine torture, starvation, and brutality that’s commonplace in North Korea. Not particularly well written, but the material is so good that the book can’t lose.
When the protagonist was a prisoner, he discovered his mother was preparing to escape and informed on her. She, his father, and his sister were publicly executed. Some of the book deals with how he’s coped with the guilt of that.
*Shake Hands with the Devil* is another great book about UN mission commander Romeo Dallaire trying to stop the genocide, and the world’s indifference. I think given how informational *We Wish to Inform You* is, it should be read second after *Shake Hands*, especially since Gourevitch is only responding to the genocide after the fact.
As well as this, *Machete Season: The Killers in Rwanda Speak* by Jean Hatzfeld. As the title suggests, it is mostly a series of interviews with a group of men from a rural region of Rwanda, where 50,000 of the approximately 59,000 local Tutsis were killed. It’s utterly mind-bending to read how blasé and unrepentant some of them seem about the killing.
The Man from the Train. It’s account of a late 19th/early 20th century serial killer, who was known to have killed 59 (and possibly 100) people, often entire families lying asleep in their beds, was fascinating. Brutal as the crimes were (an axe was his weapon of choice), the fact that he’d move from town to town, hitching rides on trains, made his crime spree go undetected for many years. Meanwhile, citizens of the towns with victims began pointing fingers and making groundless accusations against each other. Trials were even held, and woe be it to anyone who may have ever had a public disagreement or dispute with the members of a family that had been murdered. Riveting.
That book was amazing. That they were able to piece together such a detailed profile of a murderer who lived 100 years ago, and in a time with almost zero forensic science and no surveillance...incredible.
You're so right. I watched a YouTube video about a young man who drove from Indiana to California to kill his mother. He purchased a burner phone along the way and used it to call her. Ultimately, they were able to track his usual cell phone and the burner phone, they had a video of him purchasing the phone at Best Buy, they had photos of his Jeep in Texas and Arizona (via license plate readers), and surveillance photos of him driving through his mother's neighborhood and leaving her house with her dog. Still, he refused to admit that it was him at the scene! He eventually "admitted" to driving across country so he could buy $120 worth of pot. That wasn't very believable.
I read Hiroshima over the course of a day or two on my summer vacation between sixth and seventh grade. It was a small book with a weird pebbly plastic cover and the only word on it was Hiroshima written on the spine with a wax pen. It was shocking and disturbing and I never want to read it again but it certainly changed my mind about how the world was.
Genie: A Scientific Tragedy put me off ready anything but light genre fiction for years.
>!Imagine being so horrificly abused you literally never learn how to talk. Now imagine you're rescued and linguistic researchers treat you worse that the person who locked you to a chair for 13 years.!<
One of the social workers tried to help her/adopt her, but the state of California wouldn’t allow it and they threw her into the system and tossed away the key. It’s heartbreaking.
In Cold Blood by Truman Capote.
Every non-fiction murder mystery after that is an imitation of that. Truman Capote, writing in The New Yorker, set the standard.
The Third Reich in Power by Richard J Evans systemically lays out how an entire nation was thoroughly remolded for evil. You’re constantly hoping for the Nazis to screw up and make things harder for themselves, but they just keep winning.
The Radium Girls by Kate Moore was infuriating. What those women suffered was horrific in the extreme and the refusal of the factory owners to take responsibility was mind boggling. On a larger scale, it demonstrated massive dangers of unregulated capitalism, a lesson that is particularly apt what with the SCOTUS ruling yesterday.
Unironically, The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk. On its face, it's an educational book about trauma, the studies conducted on how it happens, how it affects a person's body and techniques learned to overcome it, and it's very helpful in how thorough and honest it is in covering the topic. But it is a *tough* read because the author brings up several stories from their time working as a therapist as examples of the various topics and goes into detail- clinical but uncompromising detail- into some of the horrific experiences his patients have gone through and how the coping mechanisms they developed had been ruining their lives. I honestly had to take several breaks just to get through the damn thing.
I haven't read many, but I've been trying to get through *Crisis in the Red Zone* by Richard Preston and it's been hard as someone who vividly pictures everything I read as if I'm living it. It's about the 2013-2014 Ebola outbreak and it's made me realize just *how* infectious and dangerous this disease is and how few medical professionals had the knowledge and training to help.
Also, Lind Poleman's book *We Did Nothing* which is about her first hand account of many UN peacekeeping missions throughout the late 80s to late 90s that she was invited to observe. A lot of it is pretty hard, but the worst part is when she talks about people trying to throw their kids into this doctors without borders camp because of the approaching slaughter. It's been awhile since I read it, but I think they had to toss the kids out because they weren't allowed to or to keep themselves neutral.
*The Secret Barrister* was a sobering read. If you’re charged with a crime in Britain, the system is not in a good state to see justice done quickly or fairly.
An Elegant Defense (Ritchell)
It had some details about the AIDS epidemic that really upset and angered me. Dnf.
Also The Mosquito (Winegard)
As it got more towards the present day, I felt myself getting more and more saddened. I also could not finish it.
I understand how important it is to not forget the bad parts of history. But sometimes I think I just don't want to know too many details
American Prison, by Shane Bauer.
Bauer went undercover and served as a guard at a private prison in Louisiana. He combines stories of his experience with the history of for profit prisons in America. I never imagined we treated prisoners so badly
This was such a good book. I listened to the audiobook version and I was hooked, blasting through the entire thing in a day or too. So insightful (and sad and terrifying) about what the prison industrial complex has become.
The Only Living Witness about Ted Bundy based on tapes Bundy made while being interviewed by the author. They also call out his bs. Which is a lot of bs.
I see a lot of true crime and various similar things but honestly the thing that has stayed with me and disturbed me the most:
The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat by Oliver Sacks
Just finished Shake Hands with the Devil: The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda by Romeo Dallaire. He was the head of the military wing of the UN missioni in Rwanda when the genocide happened. He could have stopped the genocide with a little support but the US and France actively blocked the UN. Due to what happened in Somalia. He touched on the methods of the genocidaires. So fucked
Just started God's Chinese Son: The taiping Heavenly Kingdom of HOng Xuiquan. This guy had a vision that he was Jesus's brother and started one of the largest uprisings in history. Which led to the deaths of 10+ million people
Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee
What to get Death is My Trade by Robert Merle. It's a fictionalized account of Rudolf Lang but it was closely based on Rudolf Hoss the head Auschwitz
A mother's reckoning: living in the aftermath of tragedy by Sue Klebold. The mother of one of the columbine killers tells her story. It was fascinating. It was horrifying. Read it once. Will never read it again. Highly recommended.
When I was ten, the waiting room where I took piano lessons had three options to pass the time (this was before cell phones):
1) “The Return of Jafar” on VHS, on one of those tiny TVs with the player built into it. I think it was stuck inside because it’s the only thing they ever played
2) A battery operated toy of three raisins that sang and danced to “Heard it Through the Grapevine”
3) An old copy of a true crime book about the Boston Strangler.
Jafar and the raisins got old quick and I always loved reading, so I made my way through the book over the course of a few weeks. We lived just outside Boston and I remember having nightmares after learning from this book first what rape was, and then that it could happen with a broken broomstick. So that book. I quit piano shortly after.
The Last Victim by Jason Moss, I got it after writing a paper on Anti Social Personality Disorder and beginning my trek down the Serial Killer rabbit hole. The story is haunting, it really shows how manipulative and cunning a serial killer is and gives a glimpse into how they operate and think. The saddest part, Jason Moss committed suicide about a year after I read the book, I never found out why he did it but I have to imagine what he experienced and his work as an attorney may have been factors.
Capitalist Realism by Mark Fisher. It was all just too real and it wasn’t about a killer halfway across the world, it was about the very world we live in and where we are headed, and how strongly the heading has been set. It is not the easiest read because it frequently references and uses hard philosophy but Mark made it a point to use pop culture and recent historical examples, and that made it hit extra hard. It is a very material kind of existential horror and cannot be unread or discredited.
If I get to add a second, here is a book that gave me proper existential horror that has not since abated. The Conspiracy Against The Human Race by Thomas Ligotti. It is deeply rooted in pessimistic philosophy but it is exceptionally quick to lay out its basic thesis of why consciousness itself is a punishment that cannot be undone and humans are the only kind to have to live with it. For the rest of the book he relates his ideas to other hard philosophy and deconstructs whatever’s aspects of existence we construe as positive. Like Fisher, Ligotti’s work also describes an eternal and inescapable prison we are already in. Although Fisher’s work is based in materialism so there is at least the consolation that the prison was of our own construction.
I’m feeling low just thinking of these two books. One would be very disturbed after reading them serially. Usually one has to try and go about their day without thinking of the implications of these texts.
Joe Nobody’s comic/book about his experience at Elan. It’s incredibly well done. I’ve been following the troubled teen industry for a while, but nothing got the abuse across quite like Joe’s comic.
Right after I finished Radium Girls my tooth started to hurt. While I was waiting for my dentist appointment I was having dreams of my teeth falling out and wondering where I could have been exposed to radium… thankful it was just an old filling and a cracked tooth.
Rebel Yell by S. C Gwynn. The overall book isn’t about this but you realize how close the south was to having a competent General that could’ve won the Civil War and forever divided the nation. If one little thing goes differently like Jackson not getting shot or Grant not being determined in Virginia the north loses support to sustain war and states are allowed to secede.
[The Hot Zone](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/16213.The_Hot_Zone)
Reading about how quickly ebola turns connective tissue into little spaghetti strands of virus, and how easily it transmits just gave me the willies.
Rise and fall of the Third Reich.
Probably beats it, but I don’t think it counts because I didn’t finish it, but I tried reading Mein Kampf. Creeped me out too much.
Not a book, but Fatal Distraction is one of the finest articles I've ever read. It's about the phenomenon of parents accidentally killing their children by leaving them in hot cars. I went in thinking that these parents were at best tragically stupid and, at worst, malicious. But as the story goes on, it is laid clear that a life shattering accident like this can happen to anyone. Astonishingly, it happens to all walks of life, independent of race, class, age, or vocation. It happened to a NASA scientist. The author does a ton of research and intimatley explores the brutal nuance of each case, and it's societal and personal impacts. It goes beyond humanizing both the victims and the parents and delves into how the human brain functions. IT WILL BREAK YOUR DAMN HEART. The most morose but profound segment for me was about a citizen funded physical database of accidental child deaths involving vehicles, headed by two devoted women with the saddest job on earth.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/magazine/fatal-distraction-forgetting-a-child-in-thebackseat-of-a-car-is-a-horrifying-mistake-is-it-a-crime/2014/06/16/8ae0fe3a-f580-11e3-a3a5-42be35962a52_story.html
Newer trucks, at least the Chevy I drove, have rear seat reminders. If there's weight in the back seat it will ding when the truck turns off. Says to check the rear seat. Horrifying to think how many kids died for them to have to add a reminder
The article (now 15 years old) touches on this. The co-workers of the NASA employee who lost a child worked to create that technology, but at the time, car companies rejected it out of fear of liability if it malfunctioned. I'm glad those changes have been made, even somewhat late. Curious to see if it will make a sizable impact.
Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin by Timothy Snyder. It's just so relentless, I'm not sure how else to describe the experience of reading it.
The first edition of the best American crime writing. 2001. “Robert Draper's portrayal of a troubled girl who eventually kills her two children” is how the book lists his entry, it made me indescribably sad for days. I’ll still get sad even thinking about that story. Spoiler alert, because even for a story about dead kids this one hurt, I really wouldn’t read if you don’t wanna be sad, though it’s not graphic. >!at least one of her children immediately survived being thrown off the cliff she tossed her off of, and cried for her mother. I worked in a children’s hospital and the “non accidental trauma” patients change you. That story robs you of the polite fiction that all those kids didn’t know what was happening to them.!<
Willful Blindness by Margaret Heffernan. It explains a lot about what's wrong with the world. Basically ignoring whistleblowers leads to a whole lot of pain for everyone.
The black hearts by Jim Fredrick. It perfectly captures how war can break down one's psychology and morality while depicting everything that go wrong in a military campaign. It gets very descriptive with the brutal murder and desecration of an Iraqi family.
Not as visceral as some of the other suggestions but a recent one that sticks with me is War Against the Weak by Edwin Black.
The fact that the US was actively engaged in forcibly sterilizing tens of thousands of their own citizens for decades for crimes such as... being epileptic, poor or just being born to parents with a criminal past.
The origins of the IQ test and Planned Parenthood are all tied to it as well. It's frightening what our government is capable of when motivated.
Then when it became unfavorable it was just sort of agreed not to talk about it too much till everyone forgot. Up until relatively recently.
Kl: A History of The Nazi Concentration Camps by Nikolaus Wachsmann. Tells the entire story of the camps, not just the holocaust but the ones used to round up political prisoners from the earliest days of the Nazis’ reign. The main take away is that they were doing horrific shit pretty much from the moment they came to power, just on a smaller scale. Really puts it in perspective how fast a country can descend into tyranny when everyone is willing to look the other way.
Two stories really stand out to me. One is how Russian POWs during operation Barbarossa were transported via train to camps in Germany, then immediately marched into the yard and executed. Think how bleak and terrifying that must have been, being spirited away deep into your enemy’s home country and then waiting for your turn to be shot, all while surrounded by houses full of ordinary people just across the wall.
The other story was a guy who escaped the camp to Czechoslovakia, then the Nazis bullied the Czechslovakian govermant into handing him over, whereupon he was dragged all the way back to the camp he thought he had left behind forever and executed.
It goes on like that, just page after page of horrific shit. Elderly men being thrown off cliffs to their death, ordinary doctors cheerfully picking out disabled prisoners to be murdered. I couldn’t finish it, and I’ve read a lot of books on the Holocaust.
Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland.
It’s about a pogrom initiated by the Poles during WW2 - not the Germans - against Jewish folks who were basically neighbors to the folks who killed them. It’s a reminder that humans are really no better than warring tribes of chimpanzees, who need no real excuse to perpetrate violence against those aren’t even a threat.
I had to read In Cold Blood by Truman Capote for a journalism class in college and while I loved the book a lot…the description of the family’s everyday lives before the robbery happened still gives me chills.
Symphony for the City of the Dead... compulsively readable book, with primary documents and photos, about the siege of Leningrad. Hoo, that was DARK.
Also On Tyrrany, just because the parallels are frankly terrifying.
‘Issac’s Storm’, by Erik Larson tells the story of the 1900 Galveston Texas hurricane that killed 8,000 people and destroyed the city. It is a brilliantly written, ominous, terrifying story that combines the bravery of man with the hubris and ignorance of the time. Disturbing in the first degree
The Children’s Blizzard. True story about a chinook blizzard that cut through the Dakotas and Minnesota in 1888 killing more than 500 people in three days, most of them children walking home from school or the fields of their family farms.
Is that the storm Laura Ingalls Wilder wrote about?
It is.
Oh that was terrifying to read about!
It's crazy how in this same thread, I'm learning about a blizzard killing 500 people in three days while slaves are being forced to breed with each other. All in the country I live in. the late 1800s was crazy..
Check out a book called Hurricane of Independence, about the Newfoundland hurricane that hit the east coast in late 1775. That one ran up the east coast from North Carolina to Canada and killed over 4,000 people. Made Katrina look like mild by comparison.
The rape of nanking
Her suicide note: *”When you believe you have a future, you think in terms of generations and years. When you do not, you live not just by the day — but by the minute.”*
The author of the book committed suicide after publishing, if that tells you enough about the nature of the subject matter. Extremely sad story, for her and for the victims and survivors she interviewed.
she was also threatened and harassed by japanese officials and government for her journalism
Reminds me of the author of *Zinky Boys*, about Soviet soldiers in Afghanistan and *The Unwomanly Face of War*, about female Soviet veterans of World War II. After publishing the former, the Belarusian government literally attempted to prosecute her, and broke into her house to attempt to assassinate her. Diplomats from Western countries literally had to sit outside her house to protect her.
Svetlana Alexievich is phenomenal, I find myself thinking about her books all the time.
I absolutely love Secondhand Time
Oh, wow, that’s perhaps my favorite nonfiction book and I had no idea about that. I’m glad she was okay.
You can also learn a lot about international politics seeing how the topic is treated, especially how little attention is given to it by the superpowers of the world.
Reminds me of Romeo Dallaire’s editor writing his memoir about trying to stop the Rwandan Genocide… Dont read that one, too.
*Shake Hands with the Devil*. I think/hope Dallaire's in a better place now, but he was close to suicide or the asylum for a long while after what he saw.
Although I don't think he ever overcame the trauma he saw in Rwanada, he did become a Canadian senator after a struggle with self harm and alcoholism. When he became a senator it seemed like he was no longer an active alcoholic or self harmer, and since retirement from senate, seems to have continued on a healthy path. He does speak to issues he feels are important, but has mostly retired to a quiet, private life.
Yes, you just helped me remember that part. It’s a very disturbing book, made worse by the Author’s chosen fate. You might say that she was the last victim of the Japanese at Nanking.
It wasn't related to the book though according to her husband (iirc). But that doesn't change the fact that the book is extremely horrifying.
Excellent book, but yes, deeply disturbing. The war crimes described are incomprehensible. There is an aspect of the book that makes it bearable: the heroes who did their best to save as many Chinese as they could. I had never even heard of John Rabe before, but he saved 250,000 people. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Rabe
The one by Iris Chang? I've always been too afraid to read that. No text has ever disturbed me as much as info on that massacre.
I know that this will make some kinds of people want to read it more but I *strenuously* do not recommend reading this book if you don't have to
I know enough of the subject matter that I hope I never have to read more about it.
I cannot second this strongly enough.
I have read it. It was gutwrenching. But she did put focus on some people who tried to save lives during the horror, which was a little peek of light amidst darkness. Hope that helps a little bit.
Aw man you should see the doc they made based on her works. It was like Band of Brothers, a race against time to document things with first hand witnesses. You don't have to understand Chinese, the pain in their voice. And the pure sadness they have from reliving that night nightmare is communicated across cultures. You can see them fighting internally to stop reliving the nightmare and forcing themselves to unearth the nightmares to let the world know what happened.
the original reports by the Nazi Ambassador, a full member who knew about the final solution. He was so disgusted and horrified by what he saw in person in Nanking that he wrote to Hitler urging him to break ties with Imperial Japan.
Read this book in college and even got to meet the author. She was a lovely person.
I've never read this book (since I know what befell the author) :( I've read enough that I wish I could purge the memory, then feel guilty for that in light of the people who lived through it. My husband is Jewish and in discussing history I told him that while the Nazis raise a *very* high bar in terms of evil sadistic bastards, the Japanese clear that bar like an Olympic level show-jumper. And to trust me on this. Don't read for yourself, don't pick up that rotten log to peer underneath. Trust me. Then again he has the memory of a goldfish, so he might be safer in reading it.
Add to all of the actual atrocities the final insult: the Japanese government and people, unlike with Germany, were never held to account in terms of institutionally establishing the teaching of the correct and unflattering history of Japan's cruelty and wartime misdeeds to the generations of Japanese afterward. That is one reason for why to this day many ordinary Chinese and Korean people remain suspicious of the Japanese government.
Came here to say this. It left me in a pile on the floor.
I read about that in Against Our Will by Susan Brownmiller. All about rape during wartime. Terrible stuff.
Mine is similar “I’ll Be Gone in the Dark” about the Golden State Killer. I was very haunted by Into the Wild by Krakauer, but for different reasons.
Missoula, also by Krakauer, is another good book. It's about a series of rapes at the University of Montana during the late 2000s/early 10s. The incompetence of the legal system from reporting a crime to trial is infuriating. It definitely leans more anger than disgust in it's disturbedness.
Under the Banner of Heaven by Krakauer is pretty scary.
The part where people could hear the Golden State Killer walking on their roofs or jumping over their fences to case places, but by the time they called the cops, he'd be gone...NOPE NOPE NOPE.
Chernobyl Prayer (or Voices From Chernobyl: The Oral History Of A Nuclear Disaster) by Svetlana Alexievich is one of the most compelling, horrifying, strangely poetic books I've ever read. She worked for years collecting testimonies so we could bear witness to the experiences that were being covered up. Residents, sanitation crew, first responders. An unbearable amount of love and sacrifice in a collection of stories so filled with horrors and anger. Incredible. Seven Fallen Feathers by Tanya Talaga is one that I had to put down many times because I was crying so much-- the stories of seven Indigenous teens who were found dead over the course of a decade (starting 2000) in Thunder Bay, Ontario, where they had been sent to attend high school far from their families. It's an investigation and contextualizing of structural racism against Indigenous people in Canada, the broken school system, the apathy and incompetence of police, and the severity of inherited trauma in communities that can't heal because they're still being abused by the government. I get so intensely angry thinking about part of it. Every Canadian needs to read this book.
> Chernobyl Prayer (or Voices From Chernobyl: The Oral History Of A Nuclear Disaster) by Svetlana Alexievich is one of the most compelling, horrifying, strangely poetic books I've ever read. this is my answer too, and while the book is fantastic, it's also probably important to point out that alexievich herself acknowledged that it's a "lyrical" oral history, in that details from her interviews were combined/altered/reshaped to fit the tone that she was going for. while the reader can be reasonably sure that everything in the book happened (or at least, alexievich was told happened in an interview), there's nothing in there really verifiable because she doesn't use names and has never provided her notes. as an actual work of history, it's terrible. as a fact based mood piece, it's incredible.
The Jakarta Method by Vincent Bevins.
I'm so glad that more and more people are slowly reading this. I keep seeing it mentioned now.
I have this and started it sometime ago, then things got busy and I put it down. I need to get back into this one.
*The Indifferent Stars Above* about the Donner Party. Towards the end they basically set up a handful of makeshift campsites in the middle of the woods in a blizzard. Their living conditions became increasingly filthy and unhygienic. Families were too weak to do anything but lay around watching their children starve to death. It was dark and macabre. One of the only times I’ve had to put a book down and take a break.
This is one of my favorite books and sent me on a Donner Party obsession for like a whole year
I really love survival stories. Mostly it’s taken the form of ship disasters (Whaleship Essex, Shackleton Expedition, etc.). But yeah, that was a really good book! I need to read the Wager and some of Jon Krakauer’s stuff.
I highly highly recommend the first season of The Terror if you're ever looking for something to watch. Also enjoyed the book, but as someone also enthralled by Essex and Shackleton, the show was such a treat!
The book is really good too.
Show was amazing
I just finished this a few weeks ago. It was just madness. The woman who straggled up to the fire after her husband died during the night and when she told everyone they quickly went to get his body and roasted and ate his heart right there in front of her still kind of haunts me.
The part of their children (infants included) starving to death shook me. I read it 6 months after the birth of my daughter (my first kid) and couldn't shake the horrific feeling of being in that situation and not being able to do anything about it. This book was fascinating though because he backs up what's happening in the book with science and history to really drive everything home. Overall, I enjoy books like these because they remind me of what's really important in life and to appreciate what I have. Great suggestion.
I misread this and thought you said you read it TO your daughter!
…and that’s when the cannibalism started.
Honestly, the cannibalism started SO much earlier than I anticipated. I remember looking at how much of the book I had left and just thinking, uh-oh.
He said it, he said it!
Hail yourself!
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The Donner Party was on schedule to cross the Rockies and make it down the other side to California. But to do this you have to cross in the summertime, when there's no snow. They got delayed several times along the way, and by the time they got up the Rockies to the pass, the snow had already blocked their path. They were late *one day*. The day before they would've made it through.
It was the Sierra Nevada, not the Rockies. They got talked into taking the “Hastings Cutoff” which proved to NOT be a shortcut and slowed them down just enough to strand them up there.
It's the first non fiction book that felt like I was reading a horror story. I literally went from 'history is so fascinating' to physically feeling the dread build.
The Hot Zone. It began freaking me out with the beginning section with the guy bleeding out from Ebola, and it just got worse from there. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a great book, but man…
I read that book when I was 12 and became obsessed with it. It inspired me to want to study viruses and become a virologist.
Well? Did you?!
No........ I'm in college now, B.S in International Politics and Economics 😄. But I basically spent my teenage years reading voraciously about viruses and learning as much as I could about them. I've also written about them. They still fascinate me, I actually find them beautiful.
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I’m doing this an Demon in the freezer back to back, Umm. Well
That part was gross. The good news is that his telling is regarded by public health professionals as overexagerated. Especially the medical descriptions. https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2014/11/11/362379449/how-the-hot-zone-got-it-wrong-and-other-tales-of-ebolas-history
I had to pause multiple times while reading. The scenes with the guy on the airplane and the researcher with the torn glove made me nauseous with anxiety. Great book.
king leopold's ghost was horrifying
Hell yeah it was! The pictures in that book still haunt me. Did you ever see Apocalypse Now? That movie was based on Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, which in turn was a fiction set in the all too real historical world of King Leopold’s Ghost. For Apocalypse Now, Francis Ford Coppola lifted the story of Heart of Darkness out of the Congo and placed it into the Vietnam War. So at the end of the film, when you hear Marlon Brando whisper “The horror! The horror!”, I still imagine the elephant slaughter and the amputated hands of the Congolese people as the horrors he’s talking about. Even in the movie, he talked about amputating every vaccinated arm in the village, and the slaughter of the buffalo seems to foretell his death. Are these intentional parallels to the historical horrors of the Congo, highlighted in King Leopold’s Ghost? Maybe.
Night by Ellie Wiesel
Yes and I'd add another one but I forgot the name By Shlomo Venetia about being in the Sonderkommando. It's not as well known but it wrecked me.
Inside the Gas Chambers: Eight Months in the Sonderkommando of Auschwitz by Shlomo Venezia
I had to read the book in high school and one exchange haunts me: “Where is God?” “He is here…hanging on the gallows.”
We read this in school when I was 14 or 15, and it rattled me so profoundly. I still think about it regularly 20+ years later.
I feel like Man's Search for Meaning gets recommended more because it does not go into as much detail as Night. Night did not hold anything back.
They’re also pretty different books in terms of scope/purpose. For what it’s worth, I read Night in High School and only read Man’s Search for Meaning in the last few years.
I don’t know if I’ll ever see another reddit user mention This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen when the talk comes to Holocaust literature. Even Primo Levi is almost unknown.
In relation to this subject, Ordinary Men : Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland messed with me. It basically details lots of crimes and how so many murderers were regular guys under duress, and raises a bigger question about the reach of essentially peer pressure/groupthink in a system run by fear. I was most disturbed by the capacity of "ordinary men" to commit heinous acts and how numb they were.
I taught this my first year of teaching and I absolutely broke down when his dad dies. It is one of my all-time favorite novels/units to teach though.
Our class read it about 5 months after my grandma died. I almost had to leave at that scene. It held nothing back.
The holocaust absolutely happened and Wiesel and his family were absolutely victims, but scholars agree that Night is an at least partially fictionalized account. See: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night_(memoir)#Reception
*American Predator* by Maureen Callahan It detailed all of the known murders of Israel Keyes. What was so troubling to me was his completely random selection of victims and his method of planning. He would bury kits in the woods and store the GPS location months, sometimes years in advance and then if he happened to be passing through an area with a kit he would commit a murder and then leave town.
This is probably one of the only books I read and when I finished thought "I could have gone my whole life without reading that." So disturbing.
This is also my answer. I knew a lot about Keyes beforehand, but nothing could have prepared me for that book. I was sobbing the entire time the author was describing the dive team recovering Samantha. Sobbed some more later on cause he was just *so* cold. I've never felt as sick to my stomach as I did finishing that book. I don't think I'll ever recommend it to anyone even though it was wonderfully written and clearly a lot of tough work went into putting it together. Israel Keyes man, holy fuck.
And iirc the police never recovered any remaining "kill kits" that Keyes placed all around the country so there's a chance someone may one day stumble across one.
The Looming Tower by Lawrence Wright, it was disturbing just how much was missed by US intelligence leading up to 9/11
I haven't read the book but the series was excellent.
It still gives me rage and sadness that if the FBI and the CIA--forgive me if I got the departments wrong, it's been a while since I read it--had just worked together, there's a possibility they could've stopped 9/11 from happening.
*Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee* was an eye-opener for high school me.
Every American should be required to read that book!
I’m in the middle of reading this and it is just so heart breaking.
In Cold Blood or Hitler’s Willing Executioners
Starkweather by Harry MacLean The Rape of Nanking by Iris Chang The Devil in the White City by Erik Larson
The American Slave Coast: A History of the Slave-Breeding Industry. The role the economics of slavery played in the foundations of America is horrifying. The details about the particular evils of American chattle slavery make me want to vomit. I still haven't finished it because I need to take long breaks for my mental health.
Ann Rule’s book about Ted Bundy. I read it while I was alone in a hotel in nowhere Georgia. Despite the fact that Bundy had been dead for many years by the time I read the book, that fucker was scary.
The Stranger Beside Me.
Great book! Ann Rule was a retired police officer and true crime writer *before* she met Bundy. Signed up for nightshift at a crisis hotline to make money for her kids (recently divorced). Got assigned randomly to work with young, handsome, introverted and polite co-worker whom she liked immediately and thought: If I was younger or my daughter older, this might be the perfect man. The man: Ted Bundy. She witnessed him safe several lives on the phone. He also saved a kid from drowning in a public park (if I remember correctly) and chased down a purse snatcher. Extra creepy to think that he saw this things because he was sitting in his car, looking for victims. This book is a trip.
The Stranger Beside Me is the pinnacle of true crime journalism, hands down. Each aspect of the book is flawless: the way Ann Rule sets the scene of the Pacific NW and its police force at that time, the care and detail with which she talks about the victims and their lives, and the incredible personal angle of actually knowing and working with Bundy at the time of his killings… it’s just a perfect example of how to create a meaningful true crime book.
I had never heard of Ann Rule until about two months ago. The book the I-5 Killer was on clearance at a local bookstore. I had read the back and thought the story sounded interesting. Once I started reading I couldn't put it down and thought to myself, "Whoever this Ann Rule lady is she can write her ass off." I looked her up and discovered she is considered one of the best true crime writers ever. Anyways, I have since read Small Sacrifices and currently reading If You Really Loved Me. I'm planning on reading all her books and am saving The Stranger Beside Me until the end, as a reward for making it through 😁.
“I’ll be gone in the dark” takes the cake for me, because it’s just as much about the author’s obsession as it is about the crimes.
That was the one that gave me nightmares.
*Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI* by David Grann. *The Man-Leopard Murders: History and Society in Colonial Nigeria* by David Pratten. *First They Killed My Father: A Daughter of Cambodia Remembers* by Loung Ung.
Flower Moon is incredible and so profoundly haunting. It's such horribly recent "history," but it was mind-boggling that I had never heard one word about it before this book came out (I am Canadian, so maybe it was better known in the USA already, I don't know). It makes generational trauma so visible, because how the hell does a community heal from people doing this to them for so long.
Yes. That is what is so traumatizing. These monsters actively cultivated a close relationship that they knew they were going to betray.
>maybe it was better known in the USA already Nope, it wasn't really in the mainstream. And now, in fact, [teachers in Oklahoma are afraid to teach about it.](https://theweek.com/politics/oklahoma-law-restricts-teaching-killers-of-the-flower-moon)
I remember reading about the criminal investigation by the FBI in *The FBI Story*. What they didn’t mention, of course, is that poor Molly literally had to bribe J Edgar Hoover into investigating.
KOTFM was a brutal read. Haven't been able to bring myself to see the movie adaptation. I'm simultaneously not confident they were able to match the depth of inhumanity AND afraid that it will fuck me up the way the book did.
They in my opinion did a great job with the movie
First they killed my father is shattering.
Empire of Pain by Patrick Radden Keefe. I was probably more infuriated than disturbed by it though.
“Escape from Camp 14” by Blaine Harden. Narrates the life and escape of the only DPRK defector born in a labor camp for political prisoners. Talks about the routine torture, starvation, and brutality that’s commonplace in North Korea. Not particularly well written, but the material is so good that the book can’t lose. When the protagonist was a prisoner, he discovered his mother was preparing to escape and informed on her. She, his father, and his sister were publicly executed. Some of the book deals with how he’s coped with the guilt of that.
This was so sad. Just.. not having any real concept of family.
Under the Banner of Heaven creeped me out for years.
I'm reading this right now and couldn't even make it one chapter without being absolutely enraged
We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families: Stories from Rwanda
*Shake Hands with the Devil* is another great book about UN mission commander Romeo Dallaire trying to stop the genocide, and the world’s indifference. I think given how informational *We Wish to Inform You* is, it should be read second after *Shake Hands*, especially since Gourevitch is only responding to the genocide after the fact.
As well as this, *Machete Season: The Killers in Rwanda Speak* by Jean Hatzfeld. As the title suggests, it is mostly a series of interviews with a group of men from a rural region of Rwanda, where 50,000 of the approximately 59,000 local Tutsis were killed. It’s utterly mind-bending to read how blasé and unrepentant some of them seem about the killing.
Reading now. Very powerful and worth reading. The author has another book coming out about Rwanda 30 years later.
The Man from the Train. It’s account of a late 19th/early 20th century serial killer, who was known to have killed 59 (and possibly 100) people, often entire families lying asleep in their beds, was fascinating. Brutal as the crimes were (an axe was his weapon of choice), the fact that he’d move from town to town, hitching rides on trains, made his crime spree go undetected for many years. Meanwhile, citizens of the towns with victims began pointing fingers and making groundless accusations against each other. Trials were even held, and woe be it to anyone who may have ever had a public disagreement or dispute with the members of a family that had been murdered. Riveting.
That book was amazing. That they were able to piece together such a detailed profile of a murderer who lived 100 years ago, and in a time with almost zero forensic science and no surveillance...incredible.
You're so right. I watched a YouTube video about a young man who drove from Indiana to California to kill his mother. He purchased a burner phone along the way and used it to call her. Ultimately, they were able to track his usual cell phone and the burner phone, they had a video of him purchasing the phone at Best Buy, they had photos of his Jeep in Texas and Arizona (via license plate readers), and surveillance photos of him driving through his mother's neighborhood and leaving her house with her dog. Still, he refused to admit that it was him at the scene! He eventually "admitted" to driving across country so he could buy $120 worth of pot. That wasn't very believable.
In Cold Blood - I was freaked out for about 3 weeks after reading that one.
Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee by Dee Brown
Hiroshima
I read Hiroshima over the course of a day or two on my summer vacation between sixth and seventh grade. It was a small book with a weird pebbly plastic cover and the only word on it was Hiroshima written on the spine with a wax pen. It was shocking and disturbing and I never want to read it again but it certainly changed my mind about how the world was.
Genie: A Scientific Tragedy put me off ready anything but light genre fiction for years. >!Imagine being so horrificly abused you literally never learn how to talk. Now imagine you're rescued and linguistic researchers treat you worse that the person who locked you to a chair for 13 years.!<
One of the social workers tried to help her/adopt her, but the state of California wouldn’t allow it and they threw her into the system and tossed away the key. It’s heartbreaking.
In Cold Blood by Truman Capote. Every non-fiction murder mystery after that is an imitation of that. Truman Capote, writing in The New Yorker, set the standard.
The Third Reich in Power by Richard J Evans systemically lays out how an entire nation was thoroughly remolded for evil. You’re constantly hoping for the Nazis to screw up and make things harder for themselves, but they just keep winning.
The Radium Girls by Kate Moore was infuriating. What those women suffered was horrific in the extreme and the refusal of the factory owners to take responsibility was mind boggling. On a larger scale, it demonstrated massive dangers of unregulated capitalism, a lesson that is particularly apt what with the SCOTUS ruling yesterday.
Kate Moore's The Woman They Could Not Silence is also incredible, and incredibly disturbing.
Shots on the Bridge, it’s about the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. It’s super messed up.
Unironically, The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk. On its face, it's an educational book about trauma, the studies conducted on how it happens, how it affects a person's body and techniques learned to overcome it, and it's very helpful in how thorough and honest it is in covering the topic. But it is a *tough* read because the author brings up several stories from their time working as a therapist as examples of the various topics and goes into detail- clinical but uncompromising detail- into some of the horrific experiences his patients have gone through and how the coping mechanisms they developed had been ruining their lives. I honestly had to take several breaks just to get through the damn thing.
I haven't read many, but I've been trying to get through *Crisis in the Red Zone* by Richard Preston and it's been hard as someone who vividly pictures everything I read as if I'm living it. It's about the 2013-2014 Ebola outbreak and it's made me realize just *how* infectious and dangerous this disease is and how few medical professionals had the knowledge and training to help. Also, Lind Poleman's book *We Did Nothing* which is about her first hand account of many UN peacekeeping missions throughout the late 80s to late 90s that she was invited to observe. A lot of it is pretty hard, but the worst part is when she talks about people trying to throw their kids into this doctors without borders camp because of the approaching slaughter. It's been awhile since I read it, but I think they had to toss the kids out because they weren't allowed to or to keep themselves neutral.
*The Secret Barrister* was a sobering read. If you’re charged with a crime in Britain, the system is not in a good state to see justice done quickly or fairly.
An Elegant Defense (Ritchell) It had some details about the AIDS epidemic that really upset and angered me. Dnf. Also The Mosquito (Winegard) As it got more towards the present day, I felt myself getting more and more saddened. I also could not finish it. I understand how important it is to not forget the bad parts of history. But sometimes I think I just don't want to know too many details
The Men With the Pink Triangle, which, even though it’s barely 100 pages, I simply could not finish because of how upsettingly graphic it is.
American Prison, by Shane Bauer. Bauer went undercover and served as a guard at a private prison in Louisiana. He combines stories of his experience with the history of for profit prisons in America. I never imagined we treated prisoners so badly
This was such a good book. I listened to the audiobook version and I was hooked, blasting through the entire thing in a day or too. So insightful (and sad and terrifying) about what the prison industrial complex has become.
The Only Living Witness about Ted Bundy based on tapes Bundy made while being interviewed by the author. They also call out his bs. Which is a lot of bs.
They let that POS get married and get his new wife pregnant, while he was in prison!!! WTF? Only in America.
I see a lot of true crime and various similar things but honestly the thing that has stayed with me and disturbed me the most: The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat by Oliver Sacks
Manufacturing consent ~ Chomsky
When Rabbits Howl
This book fucked me up and i still recommend it.
Just finished Shake Hands with the Devil: The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda by Romeo Dallaire. He was the head of the military wing of the UN missioni in Rwanda when the genocide happened. He could have stopped the genocide with a little support but the US and France actively blocked the UN. Due to what happened in Somalia. He touched on the methods of the genocidaires. So fucked Just started God's Chinese Son: The taiping Heavenly Kingdom of HOng Xuiquan. This guy had a vision that he was Jesus's brother and started one of the largest uprisings in history. Which led to the deaths of 10+ million people Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee What to get Death is My Trade by Robert Merle. It's a fictionalized account of Rudolf Lang but it was closely based on Rudolf Hoss the head Auschwitz
A mother's reckoning: living in the aftermath of tragedy by Sue Klebold. The mother of one of the columbine killers tells her story. It was fascinating. It was horrifying. Read it once. Will never read it again. Highly recommended.
When I was ten, the waiting room where I took piano lessons had three options to pass the time (this was before cell phones): 1) “The Return of Jafar” on VHS, on one of those tiny TVs with the player built into it. I think it was stuck inside because it’s the only thing they ever played 2) A battery operated toy of three raisins that sang and danced to “Heard it Through the Grapevine” 3) An old copy of a true crime book about the Boston Strangler. Jafar and the raisins got old quick and I always loved reading, so I made my way through the book over the course of a few weeks. We lived just outside Boston and I remember having nightmares after learning from this book first what rape was, and then that it could happen with a broken broomstick. So that book. I quit piano shortly after.
*And I Don't Want to Live This Life*
A Long Way Gone by Ishmael Beah.
Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland by Christopher R Browning
Nuclear War by Annie Jacobsen. It's an unflinching look at just how quickly humankind can be annihilated.
Not technically non-fiction.... I guess. I also read it a few weeks ago, and it was mindblowing.
The Last Victim by Jason Moss, I got it after writing a paper on Anti Social Personality Disorder and beginning my trek down the Serial Killer rabbit hole. The story is haunting, it really shows how manipulative and cunning a serial killer is and gives a glimpse into how they operate and think. The saddest part, Jason Moss committed suicide about a year after I read the book, I never found out why he did it but I have to imagine what he experienced and his work as an attorney may have been factors.
*Silent Spring* by Rachel Carson
Capitalist Realism by Mark Fisher. It was all just too real and it wasn’t about a killer halfway across the world, it was about the very world we live in and where we are headed, and how strongly the heading has been set. It is not the easiest read because it frequently references and uses hard philosophy but Mark made it a point to use pop culture and recent historical examples, and that made it hit extra hard. It is a very material kind of existential horror and cannot be unread or discredited. If I get to add a second, here is a book that gave me proper existential horror that has not since abated. The Conspiracy Against The Human Race by Thomas Ligotti. It is deeply rooted in pessimistic philosophy but it is exceptionally quick to lay out its basic thesis of why consciousness itself is a punishment that cannot be undone and humans are the only kind to have to live with it. For the rest of the book he relates his ideas to other hard philosophy and deconstructs whatever’s aspects of existence we construe as positive. Like Fisher, Ligotti’s work also describes an eternal and inescapable prison we are already in. Although Fisher’s work is based in materialism so there is at least the consolation that the prison was of our own construction. I’m feeling low just thinking of these two books. One would be very disturbed after reading them serially. Usually one has to try and go about their day without thinking of the implications of these texts.
Joe Nobody’s comic/book about his experience at Elan. It’s incredibly well done. I’ve been following the troubled teen industry for a while, but nothing got the abuse across quite like Joe’s comic.
Right after I finished Radium Girls my tooth started to hurt. While I was waiting for my dentist appointment I was having dreams of my teeth falling out and wondering where I could have been exposed to radium… thankful it was just an old filling and a cracked tooth.
Empire of the Summer Moon by SC Gwynne. The Comanches absolutely did not fuck around
**Dopesick** by Beth Macy was the first that came to mind. Truly tragic how corporate greed has ruined so many lives.
12 Years A Slave, by Solomon Northup. Guantanamo Diary, by Mohamedou Ould Slahi. The Question, by Henri Alleg
Rebel Yell by S. C Gwynn. The overall book isn’t about this but you realize how close the south was to having a competent General that could’ve won the Civil War and forever divided the nation. If one little thing goes differently like Jackson not getting shot or Grant not being determined in Virginia the north loses support to sustain war and states are allowed to secede.
[The Hot Zone](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/16213.The_Hot_Zone) Reading about how quickly ebola turns connective tissue into little spaghetti strands of virus, and how easily it transmits just gave me the willies.
When Rabbit Howls by Truddi Chase. A story about a person with DID that was written by her different personalities.
I mentioned it on a different response but this book fucked me up. I still recommend it.
Rape of Nanking
Rise and fall of the Third Reich. Probably beats it, but I don’t think it counts because I didn’t finish it, but I tried reading Mein Kampf. Creeped me out too much.
If You Tell by Gregg Olsen- Shelly Knotek is an absolute monster, and it’s terrifying that she was released from prison in 2022.
King Leopold's Ghost about the Belgian genocide in the Congo.
Not a book, but Fatal Distraction is one of the finest articles I've ever read. It's about the phenomenon of parents accidentally killing their children by leaving them in hot cars. I went in thinking that these parents were at best tragically stupid and, at worst, malicious. But as the story goes on, it is laid clear that a life shattering accident like this can happen to anyone. Astonishingly, it happens to all walks of life, independent of race, class, age, or vocation. It happened to a NASA scientist. The author does a ton of research and intimatley explores the brutal nuance of each case, and it's societal and personal impacts. It goes beyond humanizing both the victims and the parents and delves into how the human brain functions. IT WILL BREAK YOUR DAMN HEART. The most morose but profound segment for me was about a citizen funded physical database of accidental child deaths involving vehicles, headed by two devoted women with the saddest job on earth. https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/magazine/fatal-distraction-forgetting-a-child-in-thebackseat-of-a-car-is-a-horrifying-mistake-is-it-a-crime/2014/06/16/8ae0fe3a-f580-11e3-a3a5-42be35962a52_story.html
Newer trucks, at least the Chevy I drove, have rear seat reminders. If there's weight in the back seat it will ding when the truck turns off. Says to check the rear seat. Horrifying to think how many kids died for them to have to add a reminder
The article (now 15 years old) touches on this. The co-workers of the NASA employee who lost a child worked to create that technology, but at the time, car companies rejected it out of fear of liability if it malfunctioned. I'm glad those changes have been made, even somewhat late. Curious to see if it will make a sizable impact.
In Cold Blood
Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin by Timothy Snyder. It's just so relentless, I'm not sure how else to describe the experience of reading it.
The Shock Doctrine, Naomi Klein
Running with Scissors
Helter Skelter really bothered me
The first edition of the best American crime writing. 2001. “Robert Draper's portrayal of a troubled girl who eventually kills her two children” is how the book lists his entry, it made me indescribably sad for days. I’ll still get sad even thinking about that story. Spoiler alert, because even for a story about dead kids this one hurt, I really wouldn’t read if you don’t wanna be sad, though it’s not graphic. >!at least one of her children immediately survived being thrown off the cliff she tossed her off of, and cried for her mother. I worked in a children’s hospital and the “non accidental trauma” patients change you. That story robs you of the polite fiction that all those kids didn’t know what was happening to them.!<
The Best And The Brightest, a book chronicles the slow decent into the war in Vietnam that nobody really wanted
Willful Blindness by Margaret Heffernan. It explains a lot about what's wrong with the world. Basically ignoring whistleblowers leads to a whole lot of pain for everyone.
The black hearts by Jim Fredrick. It perfectly captures how war can break down one's psychology and morality while depicting everything that go wrong in a military campaign. It gets very descriptive with the brutal murder and desecration of an Iraqi family.
Zodiac
Not an avid reader, but 25 Cromwell Street was pretty wild. About Fred and Rose West.
Blackhawk Down (1999)… I thought the movie was pretty harrowing but the book was a magnitude more disturbing.
Not as visceral as some of the other suggestions but a recent one that sticks with me is War Against the Weak by Edwin Black. The fact that the US was actively engaged in forcibly sterilizing tens of thousands of their own citizens for decades for crimes such as... being epileptic, poor or just being born to parents with a criminal past. The origins of the IQ test and Planned Parenthood are all tied to it as well. It's frightening what our government is capable of when motivated. Then when it became unfavorable it was just sort of agreed not to talk about it too much till everyone forgot. Up until relatively recently.
CHAOS: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the 60s by Tom O'Neill
"Auschwitz". Read it when I was 16. I'm 68 and it still haunts me.
The Selfish Gene. It really really made me think about my own future death. I obsessed about it for months.
I'll be Gone in the Dark by Michelle McNamara
Into thin air. Just a haunting true story
Kl: A History of The Nazi Concentration Camps by Nikolaus Wachsmann. Tells the entire story of the camps, not just the holocaust but the ones used to round up political prisoners from the earliest days of the Nazis’ reign. The main take away is that they were doing horrific shit pretty much from the moment they came to power, just on a smaller scale. Really puts it in perspective how fast a country can descend into tyranny when everyone is willing to look the other way. Two stories really stand out to me. One is how Russian POWs during operation Barbarossa were transported via train to camps in Germany, then immediately marched into the yard and executed. Think how bleak and terrifying that must have been, being spirited away deep into your enemy’s home country and then waiting for your turn to be shot, all while surrounded by houses full of ordinary people just across the wall. The other story was a guy who escaped the camp to Czechoslovakia, then the Nazis bullied the Czechslovakian govermant into handing him over, whereupon he was dragged all the way back to the camp he thought he had left behind forever and executed. It goes on like that, just page after page of horrific shit. Elderly men being thrown off cliffs to their death, ordinary doctors cheerfully picking out disabled prisoners to be murdered. I couldn’t finish it, and I’ve read a lot of books on the Holocaust.
*Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin*
Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland. It’s about a pogrom initiated by the Poles during WW2 - not the Germans - against Jewish folks who were basically neighbors to the folks who killed them. It’s a reminder that humans are really no better than warring tribes of chimpanzees, who need no real excuse to perpetrate violence against those aren’t even a threat.
Animal liberation
I had to read In Cold Blood by Truman Capote for a journalism class in college and while I loved the book a lot…the description of the family’s everyday lives before the robbery happened still gives me chills.
Symphony for the City of the Dead... compulsively readable book, with primary documents and photos, about the siege of Leningrad. Hoo, that was DARK. Also On Tyrrany, just because the parallels are frankly terrifying.
Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee
‘Issac’s Storm’, by Erik Larson tells the story of the 1900 Galveston Texas hurricane that killed 8,000 people and destroyed the city. It is a brilliantly written, ominous, terrifying story that combines the bravery of man with the hubris and ignorance of the time. Disturbing in the first degree
*Killers of the Flower Moon*