Texas Topaz Nonfiction List for Adults

Here are recommendations for adults from the 2024 Texas Topaz Nonfiction Reading List! The purpose of the Texas Topaz Reading List is to provide children, teens, and adults with recommended nonfiction titles that stimulate reading for pleasure and personal learning. Visit txla.org/topaz for the full list and lists from previous years.


Updated January 31, 2024
Lewisville Public Library
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The light we carry : overcoming in uncertain times
Obama, Michelle
Paper Book
#1 NEW YORK TIMES AND USA TODAY BESTSELLER * In an inspiring follow-up to her acclaimed memoir Becoming, former First Lady Michelle Obama shares practical wisdom and powerful strategies for staying hopeful and balanced in today's highly uncertain world.<...
Atlas of the heart : mapping meaningful connection and the language of human experience
Brown, Brené
Paper Book
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * In Atlas of the Heart, Brené Brown writes, "If we want to find the way back to ourselves and one another, we need language and the grounded confidence to both tell our stories and be stewards of the stories that we hear. This is the framework for...
The forever witness : how DNA and genealogy solved a cold case double murder
Humes, Edward
Paper Book
When Tanya Van Cuylenborg and Jay Cook were murdered during a trip to Seattle in the 1980s, detectives had few leads. They assumed Tanya and Jay were victims of a serial killer - but without any leads, the case seemed doomed. In deep-freeze, long-term storage, biological evidence from the crime sat...
Cobalt red : how the blood of the Congo powers our lives
Kara, Siddharth
Paper Book
The revelatory Pulitzer Prize finalist for General Nonfiction, New York Times and Publishers Weekly bestseller, shortlisted for the Financial Times Best Business Book of the Year Award. An unflinching investigation reveals the human rights...
Waco rising : David Koresh, the FBI, and the birth of America's modern militias
Cook, Kevin
Paper Book
Named one of The New Yorker's "Best Books of 2023" A news-making account of the war between David Koresh's Branch Davidians and the FBI, and how their standoff launched today's militias In 1993, David Koresh and a band of heavily armed evangelical...
A fever in the heartland : the Ku Klux Klan's plot to take over America, and the woman who stopped them
Egan, Timothy
Paper Book
The Roaring Twenties - the Jazz Age - has been characterized as a time of Gatsby frivolity. But it was also the height of the uniquely American hate group, the Ku Klux Klan. Their domain was not the old Confederacy, but the Heartland and the West. They hated Blacks, Jews, Catholics and immigrants in...
Fatty fatty boom boom a memoir of food, fat, and family
Chaudry, Rabia
Paper Book
"My entire life I have been less fat and more fat, but never not fat." At once a love letter to fresh roti, chaat, chicken pulao, ghee, pakoras, shorba, parathay and an often hilarious dissection of life in a Muslim immigrant family, Fatty Fatty Boom Boom is also a searingly honest portrait of a...
Friends, lovers, and the big terrible thing : a memoir
Perry, Matthew
Paper Book
INSTANT #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER #1 INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER The BELOVED STAR OF FRIENDS takes us behind the scenes of the hit sitcom and his struggles with addiction in this "CANDID, DARKLY FUNNY...POIGNANT" memoir (The New York Times) ...
Go back to where you came from : and other helpful recommendations on how to become American
Ali, Wajahat
Paper Book
This is just one of the many warm, lovely, and helpful tips that Wajahat Ali and other children of immigrants receive on a daily basis. Go back where, exactly? Fremont, California, where he grew up, but is now an unaffordable place to live? Or Pakistan, the country his parents left behind a half...
Over my dead body : unearthing the hidden history of America's cemeteries
Melville, Greg
Paper Book
A lively tour through the history of US cemeteries that explores how, where, and why we bury our dead The summer before his senior year in college, Greg Melville worked at the cemetery in his hometown, and thanks to hour upon hour of pushing a mower over the grassy acres, he came to realize what a...
Rough sleepers
Kidder, Tracy
Paper Book
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * The powerful story of an inspiring doctor who made a difference, by helping to create a program to care for Boston's homeless community--by the Pulitzer Prize-winning, New York Times bestselling author of Mountains Beyond Mountains "I...
Tell me everything : the story of a private investigation
Krouse, Erika
Paper Book
Winner of the 2023 Edgar Award for Best Fact Crime * A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice Part memoir and part literary true crime, Tell Me Everything is the mesmerizing story of a landmark sexual assault investigation and the female private...
The art thief : a true story of love, crime, and a dangerous obsession
Finkel, Michael
Paper Book
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * One of the most remarkable true-crime narratives of the twenty-first century * "The Art Thief, like its title character, has confidence, élan, and a great sense of timing."--The New Yorker A...
The Barbizon : the hotel that set women free
Bren, Paulina
Paper Book
A "captivating portrait" (The Wall Street Journal), both "poignant and intriguing" (The New Republic): from award-winning author Paulina Bren comes the remarkable history of New York's most famous residential hotel and the women who stayed there, including Grace Kelly, Sylvia...
The colony : faith and blood in a promised land
Denton, Sally
Paper Book
On the morning of November 4, 2019, an unassuming caravan of women and children was ambushed by masked gunmen on a desolate stretch of road in northern Mexico controlled by the Sinaloa drug cartel. Firing semi-automatic weapons, the attackers killed nine people and gravely injured five more. The...
The monster's bones : the discovery of T. Rex and how it shook our world
Randall, David K.
Paper Book
In the dust of the Gilded Age Bone Wars, two vastly different men emerge with a mission to fill the empty halls of New York's struggling American Museum of Natural History: Henry Fairfield Osborn, a privileged socialite whose reputation rests on the museum's success, and intrepid Kansas-born...
We should not be friends : the story of a friendship
Schwalbe, Will
Paper Book
A NEW YORKER BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR * A warm, funny, irresistible memoir that follows an improbable and life-changing college friendship over the course of forty years--from the best-selling author of The End of Your Life Book Club * "A rare view of male friendship."--NPR ...
You could make this place beautiful : a memoir
Smith, Maggie
Paper Book
INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * NPR Best Book of the Year * Time Best Book of the Year * Oprah Daily Best Memoir of the Year "A bittersweet study in both grief and joy." ­--Time ...

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