Week 8, Assignments 3 & 4
The four nonfiction genres I am choosing are: History, Travel, Food and Disaster/Survival. History is in the Dewey area of 973 to 999. Travel is in 910 to 920; food in 641; and disaster in 910.9164.

For the history genre, I would suggest that fiction readers try the book The Poker Bride: The First Chinese in the Wild West by Christopher Corbett. This might be of interest to readers who enjoy the fiction of authors Amy Tan and Lisa See, who write of strong Chinese-American women immigrants, family relationships and Chinese history. Set in the era of the California Gold Rush in 1849, when thousands of Chinese arrived in San Francisco to seek their fortunes, the book focuses on the "legend of one extraordinary woman as a lens into this experience."According to Amazon.com, the book tells of Polly, a young Chinese concubine, who was "brought by her owner to a remote mining camp in the highlands of Idaho, where he lost her in a poker game. Polly and her new owner then settled at an isolated ranch on the banks of the Salmon River. As the Gold Rush receded, it took with it the Chinese miners, but left behind Polly, who would make headlines when — as an old woman — she emerged from the Idaho hills nearly half a century later to tell her astounding story."

In the food genre area, fiction readers might like the book Empires of Food: Feast, Famine and the Rise and Fall of Civilizations by Evan D. G. Fraser and Andrew Rimas. This is "a history of how food undergirds civilizations rise and fall."

A good title in the travel genre is the famous story of a transocean scientific expedition, Kon-Tiki, by Thor Heyerdahl. In 1947, Heyerdahl and a small crew set sail from the Pacific coast of South America, attempting to demonstrate the possibility that the Polynesians may have originated in South America." He decided to prove his theory by building a boat using the materials that would have been available to those pre-Columbian sailors. The result was  a raft built from balsa wood, bamboo, and hemp. After sailing for three months and 4,300 nautical miles on the open sea they sighted land, the Polynesian island of Puka Puka.
I believe this book would appeal to readers who like fictional sea adventures, such as those written by Patrick O'Brian about the British Royal Navy during the Napoleonic Wars, or the Horatio Hornblower books, written by C. S. Forester.

The disaster/survival book I would recommend is Ten Degrees of Reckoning: A True Story of Survival by Hester Rumberg. This is the harrowing story of a tragedy at sea which claimed the lives of three of the four members of the Sleavin family and its aftermath. This book would appeal to readers of thrillers and suspense.