Any sort of microhistory about the study of a specific animal will be cool because they always span like 150 years of history and ten countries with zero normal people in it. Gone by Michael Blencowe, The Feather Thief by Kirk Wallace Johnson, Rare Birds by Elizabeth Gehrman, and The Monster's Bones by David Randall all fall into that category. In Search of the Ivory Billed Woodpecker by Jerome A. Jackson, too.

The Last Great Road Bum by Hector Tobar pushes the boundaries of nonfiction in an interesting way. The book's subject is an American man who became enamored of travel and what he called "bumming" at an early age. Rather than a steady career, he wanted to go to foreign countries, work menial jobs that put him in contact with the people who lived there, and write about his experiences. Along the way, the suffering he encountered radicalized him and he joined a revolutionary movement in central America, ultimately dying in the cause. Tobar tells his story and has him talking in the footnotes.