Quirky Nonfiction

Catch Me If You Can: The Amazing Story of the Youngest and Most Daring Con Man in the History of Fun and Profit   by Frank Abagnale, Jr. (B Abagnale)
Frank Abagnale, alias Frank Williams, Robert Conrad, Frank Adams and Robert Monjo, was one of the most daring con men, forgers, impostors and escape artists in history. During his brief but notorious criminal career, Abagnale donned a pilot's uniform and copiloted a Pan Am jet, masqueraded as the supervising resident of a hospital, practiced law without a license, passed himself off as a college sociology professor and cashed more than $2.5 million in forged checks – all before he was 21. A hilarious, stranger-than-fiction account of his sumptuous life on the lam, international escapades and ingenious escapes.

A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson (500 Bry)
Popular writer Bryson turns from geographical to temporal realms to summarize what has happened from the time of the Big Bang to now, especially as it pertains to items of local interest, such as the solar system, earth, life and humans.

We're Just Like You, Only Prettier: Confessions of a Tarnished Southern Belle by Celia Rivenbark (975 Riv)
Funny and irreverent, this collection of essays is a must-read for women everywhere – even Yankees!

Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers by Mary Roach (611 Roach)
Stiff is an oddly compelling, often hilarious exploration of the strange lives of our bodies postmortem. For 2,000 years, cadavers – some willingly, some unwittingly – have been involved in science's boldest strides and weirdest undertakings. In this fascinating account, Mary Roach visits the good deeds of cadavers over the centuries and tells the engrossing story of our bodies when we are no longer with them.

The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales by Oliver Sacks (616.8 Sacks)
In his most extraordinary book, "one of the great clinical writers of the 20th century" (The New York Times) recounts the case histories of patients lost in the bizarre, apparently inescapable world of neurological disorders. Oliver Sacks's The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat tells the stories of individuals afflicted with fantastic perceptual and intellectual aberrations: patients who have lost their memories, and with them the greater part of their pasts; who are no longer able to recognize people and common objects; who are stricken with violent tics and grimaces or who shout involuntary obscenities; whose limbs have become alien; who have been dismissed as retarded yet are gifted with uncanny artistic or mathematical talents. If inconceivably strange, these brilliant tales remain, in Dr. Sacks's splendid and sympathetic telling, deeply human. They are studies of life struggling against incredible adversity, and they enable us to enter the world of the neurologically impaired, to imagine with our hearts what it must be to live and feel as they do. A great healer, Sacks never loses sight of medicine's ultimate responsibility: "the suffering, afflicted, fighting human subject."

Cookoff: Recipe Fever in America by Amy Sutherland (641.5973 Sutherla)
Following a small group of contestants for a year on the contest circuit, journalist Sutherland introduces readers to well-known cookoff luminaries as well as some of the most bizarre cooks and recipes at local and national contests across the country.

Enslaved by Ducks: How One Man Went From Head of Household to Bottom of the Pecking Order by Bob Tarte (B Tarte)
When Bob Tarte left the city and bought a house in rural Michigan, he was counting on a tranquil life. At first, it was a little disorienting: Songbirds in the morning. Vultures sailing overhead by day. Raccoons prowling the property at night. But at least that was all outside and he was (safely) inside. Then, Bob married Linda. She wanted a rabbit, which seemed, at the time, innocuous enough – until the bunny chewed through their electrical wiring and then hid inside the wall, just beyond Bob's reach. But that was just the beginning. Wouldn't a parrot be fun? Linda said. Bob suddenly found himself constructing pens, cages, barriers; buying feed, scooping poop, spoonfeeding at mealtime. One day he realized that he no longer had a life of quiet serenity but had become a servant to a relentlessly demanding family: Stanley Sue, a gender-switching African grey parrot; Hector, a cantankerous shoulder-sitting Muscovy duck; Howard, an amorous ringneck dove; and a motley crew of others. Somehow, against every instinct in him, Bob had unwittingly become their slave.

Lily Dale: The True Story of the Town That Talks to the Dead by Christine Wicker (133.9 Wicker)
In some ways, Lily Dale – a village in upstate New York populated by the largest community of spiritualists in the world – seems like "the little town that time forgot." Founded in 1879, Lily Dale has long been Mecca for people who truly believe that they can communicate with the dead, that angels literally watch over earthlings' everyday lives, and that the vocation of medium is no more unusual than teacher or police officer. Visitors to the town have been as diverse as Susan B. Anthony and Mae West. Baptist by upbringing and a respected religion reporter for the Dallas Morning News, Wicker writes that "a good way to judge a religion's validity is by the effect it has on people's lives." She went to Lily Dale to find out what the residents were like: wacky? forerunners of New Agers? She arrived as a skeptic and left still somewhat doubtful but with a surprisingly open mind.

The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary by Simon Winchester (423 Win)
William C. Minor (1834-1920) was a Civil War surgeon whose war experience caused his personality to change. He became paranoid and was eventually diagnosed as schizophrenic. After three years in an asylum, he went to Europe in 1871 in pursuit of rest, getting as far as London before his paranoia caught up with him and he killed George Merritt. An English court found him not guilty on the ground of insanity, and Minor was sent to Broadmoor. Coming across a leaflet for volunteers to help compile a history of the English language, Minor offered his services, remaining vague about his background. After 17 years of correspondence, the editor of the Oxford English Dictionary came to meet Minor, who had submitted 10,000 definitions to the project, and was surprised that the genius was a patient at the Broadmoor Asylum. Finally released in 1910, Minor returned to the United States.

(List created 7/05)