In Cold Blood
1966 · 343 pages
In 1959 two ex-convicts murdered a Kansas farm family of four they had never met. Capote spent years with the killers and turned reporting into a novel, patient and entirely without comfort.
★ 8.0
The Books canon
Sourced and shelved.
Every book chosen by hand and annotated for why it matters.
Browse all 1,178 books or filter by subject, era, place, and author.
Browse all 1,178 books or filter by subject, era, place, and author.
The Best and the Brightest
1972 · 688 pages
The men who walked America into Vietnam were the most credentialed in Washington, and Halberstam shows how their brilliance became the problem. He reconstructs the meetings and memos that made escalation feel reasonable.
★ 7.0
All the President's Men
1974 · 361 pages
Woodward and Bernstein worked doorsteps, phone books, and a source who met Woodward in a parking garage, tracing campaign money into the White House. Journalism has measured itself against this reporting ever since.
★ 6.8
And the Band Played On
1987 · 656 pages
Shilts reconstructed the AIDS epidemic's first years and showed the deaths were a political choice, from unfunded research to blood banks that refused to screen. He learned his diagnosis the day he finished.
★ 6.8
The Journalist and the Murderer
1990 · 163 pages
Every journalist knows what he does is morally indefensible, Malcolm opens, then proves it through a convicted murderer suing the writer who befriended him and delivered him to readers as a sociopath.
★ 5.3
Wiseguy
Life in a Mafia Family
1985 · 304 pages
Henry Hill spent twenty-five years as a Lucchese associate, from stolen cigarettes to the Lufthansa robbery, and Pileggi lets him tell it himself. Scorsese lifted whole scenes of Goodfellas straight from it.
★ 4.9
The Honored Society
1964 · 265 pages
Lewis walked postwar Sicily and found monks running extortion from the confessional and Mafia bosses installed as mayors by American liberators, whose invasion, he argues, restored what Mussolini had nearly destroyed.
★ 4.7
Killings
1984 · 320 pages
One killing per chapter, in towns no reporter usually visits, including a Kentucky landowner who shot a documentary filmmaker for trespassing. Trillin cares how these Americans lived, not how they died.
★ 4.7