Which non-fiction book disturbed you the most?

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.

The rape of nanking

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.

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.

The Jakarta Method by Vincent Bevins.

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.

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…

king leopold's ghost was horrifying

Night by Ellie Wiesel

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.

The Looming Tower by Lawrence Wright, it was disturbing just how much was missed by US intelligence leading up to 9/11

Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee was an eye-opener for high school me.

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.

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.

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.

Under the Banner of Heaven creeped me out for years.

We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families: Stories from Rwanda

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.

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

Genie: A Scientific Tragedy put me off ready anything but light genre fiction for years.

Spoiler

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.

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

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

Manufacturing consent ~ Chomsky

When Rabbits Howl

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.

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.

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

Empire of the Summer Moon by SC Gwynne. The Comanches absolutely did not fuck around

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

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.

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

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. Spoiler

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