Neal Thompson

I'm the author of Kickflip Boys: A Memoir of Freedom, Rebellion, and the Chaos of Fatherhood (May 2018). Tony Hawk called it "fun, moving, raw and relatable.” Michael Chabon said it "captures the ache, fizz, yearning and frustration of being the father of adolescent boys." Maria Semple calls it "a riveting, touching, and painful read! My stomach was in knots page after page."

I've written four other books - stories about flawed and adventurous men - and have blabbed about those on ESPN, the History Channel, PBS, C-Span, Fox, TNT, and NPR. Plus five minutes on The Daily Show.

My previous book, A CURIOUS MAN - a bio of eccentric world-traveling millionaire/playboy cartoonist Robert 'Believe It or Not' Ripley - was an Oprah.com Book of the Wee

If you like author Neal Thompson here is the list of authors you may also like

Buy books on Amazon

Total similar authors (27)

Alan Shepard

Astronaut Alan Bartlett Shepard, Junior, the first American in space on 5 May 1961, also commanded the mission of Apollo 14 to the Moon in 1971.

This retired rear admiral in the Navy of the United States, an aviator, the second person. Ten years later, he, the fifth such person, walked.

People original named him for Mercury in 1959. After Yuri Alekseyevich Gagarin, he the second such person, reached 116 miles of altitude during a suborbital flight. Prosper Ménière's disease, an inner ear condition, grounded him until an operation in 1969 fixed the problem. During the third lunar exploration from 31 January to 9 February 1971, he, the first and only such man, golfed.

Two years after diagnosis with leukemia, he died.
Buy books on Amazon
Gerald Clarke

Gerald Clarke is a journalist and biographer.

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name. See this thread for more information.
Buy books on Amazon
James R. Hansen

James R. Hansen is a professor of history at Auburn University in Alabama.His book From the Ground Up won the History Book Award of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics in 1988. For his work, The Wind and Beyond (NASA) - (six-volume series), he was awarded the Eugene Ferguson Prize for Outstanding Reference Work by the Society for the History of Technology in 2005.

Buy books on Amazon
Jim Lovell

James Arthur Lovell Jr. was an American astronaut, naval aviator, test pilot and mechanical engineer. In 1968, as command module pilot of Apollo 8, he along with Frank Borman and William Anders, became one of the first three astronauts to fly to and orbit the Moon. He then commanded the Apollo 13 lunar mission in 1970 which, after a critical failure en route, looped around the Moon and returned safely to Earth.
A 1952 graduate of the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland, Lovell flew F2H Banshee night fighters. He was deployed in the Western Pacific aboard the aircraft carrier USS Shangri-La. In January 1958, he entered a six-month test pilot training course at the Naval Air Test Center at Naval Air Station Patuxent River, Mary
Buy books on Amazon
Jim DeFede

Jim DeFede joined CBS News Miami in January 2006 and serves as an investigative reporter for the station, as well as a host of its Sunday morning public affairs program "Facing South Florida."
Buy books on Amazon
Malala Yousafzai

Girls education activist and youngest-ever Nobel Prize laureate.

New memoir, FINDING MY WAY, and book tour tickets available for pre-order today!
Buy books on Amazon
Annie Jacobsen

ANNIE JACOBSEN is a Pulitzer Prize finalist and New York Times bestselling author. Her books include: AREA 51; OPERATION PAPERCLIP; THE PENTAGON’S BRAIN; PHENOMENA; SURPRISE, KILL VANISH; and FIRST PLATOON.

Her newest book, NUCLEAR WAR: A SCENARIO, is an international bestseller.

Jacobsen’s books have been named Best of the Year and Most Anticipated by outlets including The Washington Post, USA Today, The Boston Globe, Vanity Fair, Apple, and Amazon. She has appeared on countless TV programs and media platforms—from PBS Newshour to Joe Rogan—discussing war, weapons, government secrecy, and national security.

She also writes and produces TV, including Tom Clancy’s JACK RYAN.

Jacobsen graduated from Princeton University where she was Captain of
Buy books on Amazon
Wes Moore

Westley Watende Omari Moore (born October 15, 1978) is an American politician, investment banker, author, television producer, and nonprofit executive serving as the 63rd governor of Maryland since 2023. A member of the Democratic Party, he is the first Black governor of the state, the third Black person elected as governor of any U.S. state, and as of 2023, the only incumbent black governor of any U.S. state.

Born in Maryland and raised largely in New York, Moore graduated from Johns Hopkins University and received a master's degree from Wolfson College, Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. After several years in the U.S. Army and Army Reserve, Moore became an investment banker in New York. Between 2010 and 2015, Moore published five books, includin
Buy books on Amazon
Gengoroh Tagame

Gengoroh Tagame is a Japanese manga artist who specializes in gay BDSM erotic manga, many of which depict graphic violence. The men he depicts are hypermasculine, and tend to be on the bearish side.

Born into a family descended from samurai, Tagame began his career as a manga artist in 1982, while he was studying graphic design at Tama Art University (多摩美術大学). His works have been published in several Japanese gay magazines, including Sabu, G-men and SM-Z. Since 1986, he has used the pen-name Gengoroh Tagame, and since 1994 Tagame has lived off the profits of his art and writings. In recent years, Tagame has edited a two volume artbook series about the history of gay erotic art in Japan from the 1950s to the present, 日本のゲイ・エロティック・アート (Nihon n
Buy books on Amazon
Gene Kranz

Eugene Francis "Gene" Kranz is a retired NASA flight director and manager. Kranz served as a flight director during the Gemini and Apollo programs, and is best known for his role in saving the crew of Apollo 13. He is also famous for his trademark flattop hairstyle, and the wearing of vests (waistcoats) of different styles and materials during missions for which he acted as flight director. Kranz has received the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Buy books on Amazon
Kai Bird

Kai Bird is an American Pulitzer Prize-winning author and journalist, best known for his biographies of political figures. He has also won the National Book Critics Circle Award for biography, the Duff Cooper Prize, a Woodrow Wilson Center Fellowship, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He is a Contributing Editor of The Nation magazine.

Bird was born in 1951. His father was a U.S. Foreign Service officer, and he spent his childhood in Jerusalem, Beirut, Dhahran, Cairo and Bombay. He finished high school in 1969 at Kodaikanal International School in Tamil Nadu, South India. He received his BA from Carleton College in 1973 and a M.S. in Journalism from Northwestern University in 1975. Bird now lives in Miami Beach, Florida with his wife, Susan Goldm
Buy books on Amazon
Don Winslow

Don Winslow is the author of twenty-one acclaimed, award-winning international bestsellers, including the New York Times bestsellers The Force and The Border, the #1 international bestseller The Cartel, The Power of the Dog, Savages, and The Winter of Frankie Machine. Savages was made into a feature film by three-time Oscar-winning writer-director Oliver Stone. The Power of the Dog, The Cartel and The Border sold to FX in a major multimillion-dollar deal to air as a weekly television series beginning in 2020.

A former investigator, antiterrorist trainer and trial consultant, Winslow lives in California and Rhode Island.

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name. See this thread for more informatio
Buy books on Amazon
Percival Everett

Percival L. Everett (born 1956) is an American writer and Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Southern California.

There might not be a more fertile mind in American fiction today than Everett’s. In 22 years, he has written 19 books, including a farcical Western, a savage satire of the publishing industry, a children’s story spoofing counting books, retellings of the Greek myths of Medea and Dionysus, and a philosophical tract narrated by a four-year-old.

The Washington Post has called Everett “one of the most adventurously experimental of modern American novelists.” And according to The Boston Globe, “He’s literature’s NASCAR champion, going flat out, narrowly avoiding one seemingly inevitable crash only to steer straigh
Buy books on Amazon
Alfred Lansing

An American journalist who wrote for Collier's, among other magazines and was later an editor for Time, Inc. Books.

Alfred Lansing served in the US Navy from 1940-46. He received the Purple Heart for his wartime service.

Later he attended North Park College, 1946-48, Northwestern University, 1948-50.

Lansing became a member of the Scott Polar Research Institute, Cambridge, England in 1957.

Buy books on Amazon
Neal Bascomb

Neal Bascomb is a national award-winning and New York Times bestselling author of a number of books, all non-fiction narratives, all focused on inspiring stories of adventure or achievement. His work has been translated into over 18 languages, featured in several documentaries, and optioned for major film and television projects.

Born in Colorado and raised in St. Louis, he is the product of public school and lots of time playing hockey. He earned a double degree in Economics and English Literature at Miami University (Ohio), lived in Europe for several years as a journalist (London, Dublin, and Paris), and worked as an editor at St. Martin’s Press (New York). In 2000, he started writing books full time.

His first book HIGHER was selected for
Buy books on Amazon
Elizabeth Warren

Elizabeth Warren (born 1949) is an American academic and politician, and the current senior U.S. Senator from Massachusetts and a Democrat. She is the Leo Gottlieb Professor of Law at Harvard Law School -- where she taught contract law, bankruptcy, and commercial law -- and devoted much of the past three decades to studying the economics of middle class families. In the wake of the 2008-9 financial crisis, she became the chair of the Congressional Oversight Panel created to investigate the U.S. banking bailout (formally known as the Troubled Assets Relief Program). In that role, she has provided a critical check on the U.S. Department of the Treasury and has been a leading advocate for accountability and transparency. Since 2007, she had ad
Buy books on Amazon
Mary Roach

Mary Roach is a science author who specializes in the bizarre and offbeat; with a body of work ranging from deep-dives on the history of human cadavers to the science of the human anatomy during warfare.

Mary Roach is the author of the New York Times bestsellers STIFF: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers; GULP: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal, PACKING FOR MARS: The Curious Science of Life in the Void; BONK: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex; and GRUNT: The Curious Science of Humans at War.

Mary has written for National Geographic, Wired, Discover, New Scientist, the Journal of Clinical Anatomy, and Outside, among others. She serves as a member of the Mars Institute's Advisory Board and the Usage Panel of American Heritage Dictionary
Buy books on Amazon
Robert Kurson

Robert Kurson is an American author, best known for his bestselling book, "Shadow Divers," the true story of two Americans who discover a sunken World War II German U-boat and for "Crashing Through," the story of an entrepreneur who regains his eyesight after a lifetime of blindness.

Kurson began his career as an attorney, graduating from Harvard Law School and practicing real estate law. His professional writing career began at the Chicago Sun-Times, where he started as a sports agate clerk and soon gained a full-time features writing job. In 2000, Esquire published “My Favorite Teacher,” his first magazine story, which became a finalist for a National Magazine Award. He moved from the Sun-Times to Chicago magazine, then to Esquire, where h
Buy books on Amazon
Stephen King

Stephen Edwin King was born the second son of Donald and Nellie Ruth Pillsbury King. After his father left them when Stephen was two, he and his older brother, David, were raised by his mother. Parts of his childhood were spent in Fort Wayne, Indiana, where his father's family was at the time, and in Stratford, Connecticut. When Stephen was eleven, his mother brought her children back to Durham, Maine, for good. Her parents, Guy and Nellie Pillsbury, had become incapacitated with old age, and Ruth King was persuaded by her sisters to take over the physical care of them. Other family members provided a small house in Durham and financial support. After Stephen's grandparents passed away, Mrs. King found work in the kitchens of Pineland, a ne
Buy books on Amazon
Michael Lewis

Michael Monroe Lewis is an American author and financial journalist. He has also been a contributing editor to Vanity Fair since 2009, writing mostly on business, finance, and economics. He is known for his nonfiction work, particularly his coverage of financial crises and behavioral finance.
Lewis was born in New Orleans and attended Princeton University, from which he graduated with a degree in art history. After attending the London School of Economics, he began a career on Wall Street during the 1980s as a bond salesman at Salomon Brothers. The experience prompted him to write his first book, Liar's Poker (1989). Fourteen years later, Lewis wrote Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game (2003), in which he investigated the success of
Buy books on Amazon
Monte Reel

MONTE REEL is the author of two previous books, Between Man and Beast and The Last of the Tribe. His writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, Harper's, and other magazines. He currently writes for Bloomberg Businessweek as part of its Projects & Investigations staff, and previously was a foreign correspondent for The Washington Post. He lives in Illinois.
Buy books on Amazon
Tom Wolfe

Wolfe was educated at Washington and Lee Universities and also at Yale, where he received a PhD in American studies.

Tom Wolfe spent his early days as a Washington Post beat reporter, where his free-association, onomatopoetic style would later become the trademark of New Journalism. In books such as The Electric Koolaid Acid Test, The Right Stuff, and The Bonfire of the Vanities, Wolfe delves into the inner workings of the mind, writing about the unconscious decisions people make in their lives. His attention to eccentricities of human behavior and language and to questions of social status are considered unparalleled in the American literary canon.

He is one of the founders of the New Journalism movement of the 1960s and 1970s.

Tom Wolfe is
Buy books on Amazon
Paul Ingrassia

Paul Ingrassia was an American Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who served as managing editor of Reuters from 2011 to 2016.
Buy books on Amazon
Barbara Kerley

Barbara Kerley was born in Washington, D.C. and has lived in many places, including Nepal and the tropical island of Guam. She has written about almost everything: 19th C iguanodons, Teddy Roosevelt, world peace, Mark Twain's donkey, and the pleasure of following your curiosity.
Buy books on Amazon
W. Bernard Carlson

W. Bernard Carlson is professor of science, technology, and society in the School of Engineering and Applied Science and professor of history at the University of Virginia. His books include Technology in World History and Innovation as a Social Process: Elihu Thomson and the Rise of General Electric, 1870-1900.
Buy books on Amazon
George M. Marsden

George M. Marsden is the Francis A. McAnaney Professor of History Emeritus at the University of Notre Dame. He has written extensively on the interaction between Christianity and the American culture and has published numerous books, including Jonathan Edwards: A Life, which won the prestigious Bancroft Prize given for the best work of history. He lives in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
Buy books on Amazon
Monte Reel

MONTE REEL is the author of two previous books, Between Man and Beast and The Last of the Tribe. His writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, Harper's, and other magazines. He currently writes for Bloomberg Businessweek as part of its Projects & Investigations staff, and previously was a foreign correspondent for The Washington Post. He lives in Illinois.
Buy books on Amazon