Creative Nonfiction : best titles for teens

"New Yorker staff writer Grann (The Lost City of Z) burnishes his reputation as a brilliant storyteller in this gripping true-crime narrative, which revisits a baffling and frightening spree of murders occurring mostly in Oklahoma during the 1920s. "

"After graduating from Emory University in Atlanta in 1992, top student and athlete Christopher McCandless abandoned his possessions, gave his entire $24,000 savings account to charity and hitchhiked to Alaska, where he went to live in the wilderness.

Four months later, he turned up dead."

Herr brought the Vietnam War back home in all its uncensored, unadulterated reality in Dispatches. Proclaimed as the greatest book written not only on the Vietnam War, but also on any war,
John Leonard called it "a certain kind of reporting come of age - that is, achieving literature. It is the reporting of the 1960's at last addressing itself to great human issues, subjective, painfully honest, " John Le Carr called it simply: "The best book I have ever read on men and war in our time."

"Fifty years after John Howard Griffin darkened his skin and travelled through the segregated US south, his record of the fear and prejudice he experienced is still resonant."

"NEW JACK: GUARDING SING SING gives an inside look at the work of correctional guards. Its author, Ted Conover, spent a year working as a "newjack" — the inmate term for a newly-minted New York correctional officer — in New York's Sing Sing prison."

John Riley is an assistant professor with the Justice Center.

 

"Disguised as an illegal alien, the author explores the outlaw realm of illegal immigration at the Mexican-American border and describes the role of the coyotes--mercenaries who sneak Mexican laborers into America "

Journalist Bruder (Burning Book: A Visual History of Burning Man, 2007) expands her remarkable cover story for Harper's into a book about low-income Americans eking out a living while driving from locale to locale for seasonal employment.

"In April 2003, Aron Ralston was hiking alone in the Utah wilderness when he decided to go canyon climbing. Halfway up a rock face, disaster struck. In the first of three exclusive extracts from his harrowing new book, he recalls the accident that forced him to cut his own arm off."

Excerpt

"In these brief, direct essays, the author takes a sharp-eyed look back at her nearly two-year stay in a Boston psychiatric hospital 25 years ago. In April 1967, after a 20-minute interview with a psychiatrist she had never seen before, Kaysen, then 18 years old, was admitted to McLean Hospital, diagnosed as a borderline personality."