This book is a collection of nonfiction essays that editor Ira Glass read and enjoyed over the years and eventually brought together to be published in one book. Glass is the producer of the NPR show "This American Life" (which is also a podcast that Tommy listens to) and from what I gather, these essays are somewhat similar in style to that radio show. Glass's introduction laments that there isn't a snappy name for this type of writing; some people apparently call it "literary non-fiction," but he says that that's too stuffy and boring for what it really is. What it really is is really great storytelling--using real facts and real live people and real things that happened in real life, as much as real things can happen and be described and told in a story. Each of the essays is really fascinating: one about a fourteen-year-old kid who got called up by the SEC for "manipulating the stock market" (because he was doing what actual stockbrokers do every day), one about Saddam Hussein and what he was really like (written back when he was alive), one where the author goes and befriends and becomes a part of a gang of marauding and vandalizing soccer fans in Britain, one about the man behind a violently right-wing talk radio show and how he and the show worked, and about ten more. This book went right up my nonfiction alley.
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