Books like The Feather Thief: Beauty, Obsession, and the Natural History Heist of the Century

01

Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup

John Carreyrou · Business

Bad Blood is Wall Street Journal reporter John Carreyrou's account of Theranos, the blood-testing startup founded by Elizabeth Holmes that claimed its proprietary technology could run hundreds of diagnostic tests from a single finger-prick of blood.

A kindred memoir read.

02

A Beautiful Mind

Sylvia Nasar · Biography

Sylvia Nasar's biography of the mathematician John Nash — Nobel laureate, game theory pioneer, and paranoid schizophrenic — is one of the finest accounts of genius and mental illness in biographical literature.

A kindred memoir read.

03

Agent Zigzag: A True Story of Nazi Espionage, Love, and Betrayal

Ben Macintyre · History

Eddie Chapman was a safecracker, con man, and professional criminal who became Britain's most remarkable double agent during World War II.

A kindred memoir read.

04

Ghost Soldiers: The Forgotten Epic Story of World War II's Most Dramatic Mission

Hampton Sides · History

Ghost Soldiers tells the story of the January 1945 raid on the Cabanatuan prisoner-of-war camp in the Philippines — a mission to rescue 513 American and Allied prisoners, survivors of the Bataan Death March, before the retreating Japanese army could execute them.

A kindred memoir read.

05

Barbarian Days

William Finnegan · Memoir

Barbarian Days is William Finnegan's memoir of a life spent surfing — from his childhood in Los Angeles and Hawaii through decades of obsessive searching for waves across the Pacific, Asia, Africa, and eventually the cold waters of New York.

Both dig into obsession.

06

The Lost City of Z

David Grann · Memoir

David Grann's account of the British explorer Percy Fawcett's disappearance in the Amazon in 1925 — and of Grann's own journey into the jungle to investigate — is one of the most compelling works of narrative journalism of the 2000s.

Both dig into obsession.

07

The Monster of Florence

Douglas Preston · Memoir

Between 1974 and 1985, a serial killer known as the Monster of Florence murdered sixteen people — couples parked in cars in the hills outside the city — and was never conclusively identified.

Both dig into obsession.

08

The Soul of a New Machine

Tracy Kidder · Memoir

Tracy Kidder's account of the engineers at Data General Corporation who designed a new minicomputer under enormous competitive pressure in the late 1970s won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award in 1982 and effectively invented the genre of technology-company narrative journalism.

Both dig into obsession.

09

Fermat's Enigma

Simon Singh · Science

In 1637, Pierre de Fermat scrawled a note in the margin of a mathematics book claiming to have found a proof that no three positive integers can satisfy the equation a^n + b^n = c^n for any integer value of n greater than 2 — but that the margin was too narrow to contain it.

Both dig into obsession.

10

Moby-Dick

Herman Melville · Literary fiction

Moby-Dick opens with one of the most famous sentences in American literature — "Call me Ishmael" — and immediately establishes a voice that is learned, digressive, sardonic, and strange.

Both dig into obsession.

11

November 9

Colleen Hoover · Contemporary fiction

Fallon and Ben meet in a diner on November 9th, the day Fallon is leaving Los Angeles to move across the country.

Both dig into obsession.

12

The Maidens

Alex Michaelides · Thriller

The Maidens opens on Mariana Andros, a group therapist living in London, still raw from the sudden death of her husband.

Both dig into obsession.