The Reads That Made Me — DeWayne Searcy

The one that started it all

Before there was a reader, there was one book.

The book that made me a reader

The Walking Drum

Louis L'Amour · 1984

Read & re-listened 5–6 times

L'Amour is remembered for the American West, but this is the book where he left the frontier behind — a sweeping historical adventure set in the twelfth century. Its hero is Mathurin Kerbouchard, a young Breton who, with his family's world torn apart, sets out across the medieval one: from the coast of Brittany into Moorish Spain and the great libraries of Córdoba, and onward toward Byzantium and the East — as sailor, scholar, and swordsman, hunting for the father he refuses to believe is dead.

What makes it unforgettable isn't the adventure; it's the hunger underneath it. Kerbouchard reads his way across the world — he treats knowledge as the one thing no one can take from him. It's a novel that quietly argues the so-called Dark Ages were nothing of the kind, and that a person can educate himself into a bigger life. L'Amour meant it as the first of a trilogy and never finished the rest, so it stands alone, which somehow suits it.

I've read and listened to it five or six times. It's brilliant — and it's the reason I became a person who reads books.

My favorite author — Erik Larson

The master of narrative nonfiction: true history that reads like a novel and never invents a thing.

In the summer of 2024, right after I finished The Demon of Unrest, I wrote to The Corner Bookstore in New York on a whim and asked how a person might get autographed copies of everything Erik Larson had written. A bookseller named Nick took it on. When Larson was next in town, he signed the set — personalized, “To DeWayne” — and the books made their way home to Birmingham. They're the ones I'd carry out of a fire.

There's a reason I chased them down. When I set out to write my own family's history, Larson was the standard I measured against — documentary nonfiction with the pulse of a novel and the discipline of a footnote. He is a large part of why the trilogy I wrote exists in the shape it does.

The shelf below is his full catalog. I've read all of it; the last one I hadn't, Lethal Passage, I finally read on a flight home from Madrid.

1999

Isaac's Storm

A Man, a Time, and the Deadliest Hurricane in History

The 1900 Galveston hurricane — still the deadliest natural disaster in U.S. history — and the confident young weatherman who never saw it coming.

✒ Signed · To DeWayne

2003

The Devil in the White City

Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair That Changed America

The dazzling 1893 Chicago World's Fair braided with the quiet evil of H. H. Holmes, the serial killer who preyed on it. The book that made him famous.

✒ Signed · To DeWayne

2006

Thunderstruck

—

Marconi's race to conquer the wireless, entwined with the transatlantic manhunt for the murderer Dr. Crippen — the first killer caught by radio.

✒ Signed · To DeWayne

2011

In the Garden of Beasts

Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler's Berlin

The first U.S. ambassador to Nazi Germany, William Dodd, and his family watching the Third Reich harden around them in real time.

✒ Signed · To DeWayne

2015

Dead Wake

The Last Crossing of the Lusitania

The final voyage of the great liner and the U-boat stalking it — a countdown that helped pull America into the First World War.

✒ Signed · To DeWayne

2020

The Splendid and the Vile

A Saga of Churchill, Family, and Defiance During the Blitz

Churchill's first year as prime minister, told through the year the bombs fell — leadership, and an ordinary family life, carried on under fire.

✒ Signed · To DeWayne

2024

The Demon of Unrest

A Saga of Hubris, Heartbreak, and Heroism at the Dawn of the Civil War

The five tense months from Lincoln's election to the first shot at Fort Sumter. The one I'd just finished when I wrote to the bookstore.

✒ Signed · To DeWayne

1994

Lethal Passage

How the Travels of a Single Handgun Expose the Roots of America's Gun Crisis

Early Larson — an investigation that follows one handgun to indict a whole system. The last of his books I read; I saved it for a long flight.

✒ Signed · To DeWayne

1992

The Naked Consumer

How Our Private Lives Become Public Commodities

His first book, and eerily early — how marketers quietly harvest the details of our lives. Written decades before we all agreed to it daily.

✒ Signed · To DeWayne

2021

No One Goes Alone

A Novel

The outlier — Larson's only work of fiction, a Victorian-era ghost story built on real psychical research. Released first as audio.

✒ Signed · To DeWayne

More shelves will follow — I read across a lot of rooms. But these two are the foundation: the novel that made me a reader, and the writer who showed me that the truth, told well, can hold you like any story.