Books like The Confidence Men by Margalit Fox

In 1893 Chicago, Erik Larson weaves the story of visionary architect Daniel Burnham and the cunning serial killer H.H. Holmes, whose crimes unfolded against the backdrop of the World’s Columbian Exposition.

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks follows the story of Henrietta Lacks, a poor black tobacco farmer whose cancer cells were taken in 1951 without her consent and later became the first immortal human cell line, HeLa, driving major scientific breakthroughs while raising questions of ethics, race, and medical exploitation.

During World War I, women painted clock dials with radium, a glowing but toxic substance, leading to illness and a landmark workers’ rights struggle in America.

Explore the quirky and dramatic stories behind every element on the periodic table, from Gandhi’s iodine debate to Marie Curie’s radium woes and laboratory pranks with gallium.

Simon Winchester chronicles the life of Cambridge biochemist Joseph Needham, whose passion for China led him to uncover the empire's pioneering inventions—from printing to the compass—and to author the monumental *Science and Civilisation in China* series.

The extraordinary life of the man who founded Islam, and the world he inhabited-- and remade.

In eighteenth‑century London, Jack Sheppard and Edgeworth Bess are famed thieves and lovers whose true story has never been recorded—until a scholar finds a long‑lost manuscript that may be a gender‑defying confession or a hoax.

A fool and his money are soon parted, so the saying goes. And if the job is done right, the fool doesn't even realize it's happened until the wily con artist has moved on to the next victim or the next town. In this entertaining and eye-opening book, dennis m. Marlock, a retired cop and chairman of the board for the international law enforcement organization professionals against confidence crime, takes the reader into the mind and greedy heart of the con man. You'll learn the mechanics behind famous swindles such as the pigeon drop, the jamaican switch, bank-examiner schemes, three-card monte and even fortune-telling. You'll find out why a good scam artist rarely gets caught and, if he does, how he gets away with the lightest punishment or no punishment at all. If you've ever read a news story about a sucker getting taken and wondered how he could have fallen for that, you need to read this book before an honest-faced stranger offers you a deal too good to pass up.

Max Hastings illuminates the frantic opening year of World War I, tracing diplomacy’s collapse, the early battles of the Marne, Ypres and Tannenberg, and the brutal Eastern Front, while assessing leaders and ordinary soldiers to explain why Germany’s defeat saved Europe.

A captivating true story of the charismatic Charles Ponzi, the man behind the Ponzi scheme that brought the Roaring Twenties to life.

"Along with millions of other Frenchmen, Louis Barthas, a thirty-five-year-old barrelmaker from a small wine-growing town, was conscripted to fight the Germans in the opening days of World War I. Corporal Barthas spent the next four years in near-ceaseless combat, wherever the French army fought its fiercest battles: Artois, Flanders, Champagne, Verdun, the Somme, the Argonne. Barthas' riveting wartime narrative, first published in France in 1978, presents the vivid, immediate experiences of a frontline soldier. This excellent new translation brings Barthas' wartime writings to English-language readers for the first time. His notebooks and letters represent the quintessential memoir of a "poilu," or "hairy one," as the untidy, unshaven French infantryman of the fighting trenches was familiarly known. Upon Barthas' return home in 1919, he painstakingly transcribed his day-to-day writings into nineteen notebooks, preserving not only his own story but also the larger story of the unnumbered soldiers who never returned. Recounting bloody battles and endless exhaustion, the deaths of comrades, the infuriating incompetence and tyranny of his own officers, Barthas also describes spontaneous acts of camaraderie between French poilus and their German foes in trenches just a few paces apart. An eloquent witness and keen observer, Barthas takes his readers directly into the heart of the Great War"-- Contains primary source documents.

Robert Gerwarth examines how the violence that erupted after World War I—pogroms, mass expulsions, and paramilitary clashes—shaped 20th‑century Europe and set the stage for fascism.

An inspiring true story of a WWII pilot’s survival, resilience, and redemption, examined through detailed battlefield context and human courage.

"A century after the outbreak of the First World War, a powerful explanation of why the war's legacy continues to shape our world. The war would make a celebrity out of Woodrow Wilson and would ratify the emergence of the US as the dominant force in the world economy"--

Three British airmen downed over Germany during WWI plot a daring escape from a high‑security POW camp, turning captivity into a stage for ingenuity and daring.

A detailed biography of the last stand against war, examining the key figures and ideals that shaped an era.