Read Alikes
Museum of the Missing: A History of Art Theft
by Simon Houpt
My Life in France
by Julia Child
Book of Lost Books
by Stuart Kelly
The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11
by Lawrence Wright
Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee
by Dale Brown
Cancer Vixen
by Marisa Acocella Marchetto
Epileptic
by Daniel B
The 8:55 to Baghdad: From London to Iraq on the Trail of Agatha Christie
by Andrew Eames
Human cargo
by Caroline Moorehead
The Ode Less Travelled
by Stephen Fry
Queen of the Oddballs
by Hillary Carlip
Poet’s Choice
by Edward Hirsch
Encyclopedia of an ordinary life : volume one
by Amy Krouse Rosenthal
To rule the waves : how the British Navy shaped the modern world
by Arthur Herman
Tab Hunter confidential : the making of a movie star
by Tab Hunter
Truck : a love story
by Michael Perry
The United States of Arugula : how we became a gourmet nation
by David Kamp
River of doubt : Theodore Roosevelt's darkest journey
by Candice Millard
Reading Like a Writer
by Francine Prose
Best American Essays of 2006
by Lauren Slater, guest ed.
One Bullet Away: The Making of a Marine Officer
by Nathaniel Fick
War Made New: Technology, Warfare, and the Course of History: 1500 to Today
by Max Boot
Shadow of the Bear: Travels in Vanishing Wilderness
by Brian Payton
Museum of the Missing: A History of Art Theft
by Simon Houpt
No Shortcuts to the Top: Climbing the World’s 14 Highest Peaks
by Ed Viesturs with David Roberts
The Bill from My Father
by Bernard Cooper
The Trouble with Tom: The Strange Afterlife and Times of Thomas Paine
by Paul Collins
The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million
by Daniel Mendelsohn
The Worst Hard Time
by Timothy Egan
Viva la Repartee: Clever Comebacks & Witty Retorts...
by Mardy Grothe
A Perfect Union : Dolly Madison and the creation of the American nation
by Catherine Allgor
This is Your Brain on Music : the science of a human obsession
by Daniel J. Levitin
Dead Reckoning : great adventure writing from the golden age of exploration
by Helen Whybrow
Beauty Tips from Moose Jaw : travels in search of Canada
by Will Ferguson
Stuffed : adventures of a restaurant family
by Patricia Volk
The Judgment of Paris
by Ross King
The Children in Room E4: American Education on Trial
by Susan Eaton
Fowl Weather
by Bob Tarte
Walt Disney
by Neal Gabler
The House on Boulevard Street: New and Selected Poems
by David Kirby
The Golden Spruce: A True Story of Myth, Madness, and Greed
by John Vaillant
The Great War for Civilisation
by Robert Fisk
Barrow’s Boys
by Fergus Fleming
Sunday money : speed, lust, madness, death.
by Jeff MacGregor
The Long Road Home
by Marth Raddatz
The Eiger Obsession
by John Harlin III
Book Description
Brad Matsen’s Descent: The Heroic Discovery of the Abyss takes us back more than 70 years to the great story of naturalist William Beebe and wealthy adventurer Otis Barton’s successful attempts to go deeper into the ocean than anyone had ever descended before. Barton designed a “bathysphere,” a steel ball with a four-and-a-half-foot circumference, hanging from a wire rope, which depended for its ventilation on the two men waving a palm leaf fan during their submersion in the ocean. In the years between 1929 and 1934, Barton and Beebe, in more than 20 dives, explored the ocean down to a depth of nearly half a mile, many times deeper than anyone had ever gone before. Matsen writes well, and he captures not only the sense of adventure (and real danger) that these two men faced, but also explores their personal relationship, which was quite dicey (in fact, they ended up not speaking to one another). (In one of those examples of the unexpected joys of reading, I learned that one of wives of womanizing Beebe was none other than Elswyth Thane, the author of a series of historical romances that’s high on my list of guilty pleasure reads.)
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