Authors Like Jon Ronson

The nearest thing Ronson has to a twin: the polite, slightly awkward Englishman who lets extremists and eccentrics talk until they reveal themselves, and who stays more interested in them than in mocking them. The Call of the Weird is the book to start with, because it is about the same question Ronson keeps asking — what happens to these people after the journalist goes home.

The closest British writer to Ronson in both subject and voice. The Heretics is Them with a sharper question: not just what strange people believe, but why any of us — the author included — believe anything. Selfie covers some of the same ground as So You've Been Publicly Shamed, from the angle of the self rather than the crowd.

Almost the same comic register as Ronson: a narrator who turns up in person, admits to being squeamish or out of her depth, and still asks the question nobody else in the room will. Her subjects are scientists rather than extremists, but Spook — researchers trying to prove the soul exists — is pure Ronson territory, and Grunt overlaps with The Men Who Stare at Goats.

Orlean shares Ronson's habit of attaching herself to one magnetic, difficult person and following them into a world with its own rules. She is gentler and more lyrical, but the instinct is the same: the eccentric is not a punchline but a way of seeing how ordinary people decide what matters. Both have also seen their reporting turned into unusual films.

Ronson's subjects without the jokes. Going Clear covers the Church of Scientology, which runs through The Psychopath Test, and Remembering Satan is the serious version of a question Ronson keeps returning to: how a person, or a whole community, comes to believe something that is not true. Read him when you want the full investigation rather than the encounter.

Bright-Sided is the closest thing to The Psychopath Test in her work: a journalist walking into a whole industry of belief — seminars, coaches, gurus — and asking who it actually serves. She is angrier and more political than Ronson, but she shares his eye for the absurd detail and his sympathy for the people caught up in it.

The lighter, sunnier cousin of Ronson's first-person method: the writer as the anxious guinea pig, reporting on his own confusion. Jacobs is less interested in other people's darkness than Ronson, but The Year of Living Biblically puts him among literalists and believers with the same mix of comedy and respect.

Gladwell and Ronson both turn psychology into story and both are drawn to the moment when a person's judgement of another person goes wrong; Talking to Strangers is the book that comes closest to The Psychopath Test. The difference is that Gladwell builds to a confident theory, while Ronson ends up doubting his. Critics have long faulted Gladwell for simplifying research, so read him as a storyteller rather than the last word.

Where Ronson goes looking for the psychopath in the boardroom, Lewis shows the systems that reward unusual minds and the people who see what others miss. He is a better plotter than Ronson and less self-doubting, and Going Infinite drew criticism for being too close to its subject — which makes it an interesting book to read against Ronson's warier portraits.

The ancestor of the whole approach: go and live among a tribe with its own beliefs and rituals, and write it as a story. Ronson's voice is the opposite of Wolfe's — plain, nervous and self-mocking where Wolfe is all exclamation marks and white suit — but the subcultures, from the Pranksters to the astronauts, are the same kind of material.