Pete Dexter's Paper Trails
"With authority and a strange grace, Dexter has crafted a powerful portrait of the underbelly of the American Dream. In this sprawling collection of finely etched prose, noted novelist Dexter (Paris Trout) lays bare the darker workings of the human experience." These non-fiction pieces were assembled mostly from his newspaper columns. Of Dexter's many other books, I have only read Paris Trout and Deadwood (another great read), both of which were made into films, but now I'm on the lookout for more.
Bill Bryson's Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid Anyone who has ever read any of Bryson's books know what a treat it is; this is his latest and it's hilarious and nostalgic. If you have never read anything of his, go to Amazon or your local library and start with A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail or In a Sunburnt Country about Australia.
Howard Marks' Autobiography This book is an autobiography of a dope smuggler, full of interesting real life experiences, exceptional in that Marks just happens to be an Oxford Graduate, had links with MI6, CIA, and DEA and provides all the details of his operations. He smuggled drugs and laundered money to the tune of more than $30,000,000 in the mid-70s. At one point he wrote that 28 tons of marijuana were consumed each day in the 70s which I couldn't believe so I googled it and found a DEA website that stated, "In 1979, an estimated 10-15,000 tons of marijuana were consumed in the United States." So, there you go.
