By Garet Garrett.  178 pages.  Guys, this book will blow your mind in it's prescience for today's economic issues--and it was written in 1931!
 
This book blows away the conventional interpretations of the crash of 1929, not only in its contents but that this book exists at all. It was written in 1931. He ascribes the crash to the pile of up debt, which in turn was made possible by the Fed printing machine. This created distortions in the production structure that cried out for correction. So what is the answer? Let the correction happen and learn from our mistakes.
Such is the thesis of the great Garet Garrett. But take note: this book was a big seller in 1931. In other words, two years before FDR arrived with his destructive New Deal, ascribing the depression to capitalism and speculation, Garrett had already explained what was really behind the correction.
 
It took Murray Rothbard to resurrect these truths decades later, and when he wrote this in 1963, it was a shock and we are still fighting an uphill battle to explain the true causes of the crash and following depression. But here in this wonderful book is an actual contemporary account that spelled it out plainly for the world to see.
 

The 1982 Boston Marathon was great theater: Two American runners, Alberto Salazar, a celebrated champion, and Dick Beardsley, a gutsy underdog, going at each other for just under 2 hours and 9 minutes. Neither man broke. The race merely came to a thrilling, shattering end, exacting such an enormous toll that neither man ever ran as well again. Beardsley, the most innocent of men, descended into felony drug addiction, and Salazar, the toughest of men, fell prey to depression. Exquisitely written and rich with human drama, Duel in the Sun brilliantly captures the mythic character of the most thrilling American marathon ever run—and the powerful forces of fate that drove these two athletes in the years afterward.

256 pages

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1594866287

Meyer sets out to integrate the war's discrete elements into a single work of popular history and delivers a worthy counterpoint to Hew Strachan's magisterial three-volume scholarly project, The First World War. A journalist and author (Executive Blues), Meyer doesn't offer original synthesis or analysis, but he does bring a clear, economical style to the war's beginnings; the gridlock produced by the successes and failures of both sides; the divided military and political counsels that hobbled efforts at resolving operational and diplomatic stalemates; and above all the constant carnage, on a scale that staggers the imagination. Meyer provides brief, useful background on subjects from the Armenian genocide to the Alsace-Lorraine question—topics he considers crucial to an understanding of the war, but too cursorily explained in most popular histories. Correspondingly, he blends "foreground, background, and sidelights" to highlight the complex interactions of apparently unconnected events behind the four-year catastrophic war that destroyed a world and defined a century. Constructing a readable, coherent text in that format is a demanding challenge, accomplished with brio.

http://www.amazon.com/World-Undone-Story-Great-1914/dp/0553382403/ref=pd_cp_b_1_img

~800 pages (so possible too long?)

350 pages. Chilling tale of the Essex, a whaling ship that was sunk in the middle of the Pacific by an 80-foot sperm whale in 1820. The story would come to mark the mythology of the 19th century as the Titanic did the 20th. In Philbrick's spare, well-paced version, we learn much about how Nantucket's culture was affected by the whaling industry boom, from its economy to its social habits. But the horrific heart of the narrative details the fate of the 20 sailors who attempted to sail several thousand miles back to Chile using only three pathetic open boats. Reaching home 93 days later, only eight sailors survived the ordeal of thirst, starvation and despair.