Creative Nonfiction : best titles for teens

KIRKUS REVIEWRun-for-cover writing from scary places, by Junger (A Perfect Storm, 1997), a man with an appetite for the ragged edge of life and the ability to write about it with restrained power. Deeply affecting stories of a ruthless world, natural and man-made, that will leave you stunned and distraught.

The real-life saga of Frank Bender, who unexpectedly rode a commercial photography career to a parallel gig reconstructing the faces of unidentified murder victims and suspects.

A Wall Street–savvy consultant, turned Navajo rug trader, Daugherty "set out to find weavers on the reservation; she aimed to sell their rugs and tapestries to wealthy collectors on the East Coast."  A deal gone bad with an English-speaking Navajo weaver leaves Daugherty feeling duped.

Heda Kovály, the Czech translator of Roth, Chandler and Bellow, had a tragic history. In 1941, the mass deportation of Jews from Prague was instituted by the Nazis. "We were not yet inured to sounds of gunshots followed by agonizing screams, to unendurable thirst, nor to the suffocating air in the crammed cattle cars." Before they reached the Lodz ghetto, many perished on the long march in the snow, naked and barefoot.

"When Bill Bryson and his family moved back to the United States, he found himself living only a few miles away from the Appalachian Trail. Being fond of hiking, he latched onto the idea of attempting to through-hike the Appalachian Trail ...."

Hilary Mantel:  "Henrietta Lacks is a medical specimen of quite another kind. No dead woman has done more for the living, and yet we can imagine her easily from her photograph, a vivacious woman who was only 31 years when she died in 1951 in a "coloured ward" in Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore."

"A Train in Winter is not a story of ethnic victims, but of political resisters. It tells the tale of many of the 230 Frenchwomen of Convoi 31000, deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau on 24 January 1943, of whom only 49 survived."

Canadian content. " There’s that whole history of genocide against the first peoples, for starters, though some may say this has little to do with our contemporary reality. "

GrrlScientist: Written by a historian and shortlisted for the 2014 Wellcome Trust Book Prize, Wounded traces a soldier's journey from injury on the battlefield to recovery in Britain, documenting how modifications during the Great War forever changed how medical care is provided to front-line soldiers today

"In mid-December 2010, the Suffolk County police discovered the bodies of four women, each wrapped in burlap, on a desolate, bramble-covered stretch of sand called Gilgo Beach. The corpses were later identified as those of four prostitutes,"

As he travels through Mexico’s Sierra Madre, one of the largest drug-producing regions in the world, British journalist Grant (American Nomads ) encounters a rugged landscape where the mythical old Mexico meets the challenges of the new.

Sports journalist Crothers' moving account of an impoverished Ugandan girl's unlikely rise to prominence in the world of competitive chess.

An autobiographical account of an ingenious plan to escape from a Turkish prisoner-of-war camp in 1917 still thrills Neil Gaiman: " It is a true story, underplayed, a story of heroism, of magic and of madness. And you can wonder, as I wonder now, as I wondered when I was 10, whether what Hill and Jones went through was worth it – whether their madness actually kept them sane."

The story of Brenin, the wolf, and his owner, Mark Rowland, an animal-loving philosopher ....

"It's an unusual little book: not quite an autobiography (a lot of the time its subject cedes the limelight to his four-legged companion), nor straightforwardly a work of philosophy ... It is perhaps best described as the autobiography of an idea, or rather a set of related ideas, about the relationship between human and non-human animals."

A prescient World War II diary by a German judge who loathed the Nazi regime yet was a military judge during the war.

"A suicide mission – a task which is so dangerous for the people involved that they are not expected to survive... Luttrell has an identical twin brother named Morgan, both towering at 6’5, 230 pounds and both are Navy Seals. They began preparing for their rough adult lives since boys,"