100 Books Like All the Sinners Bleed

One of the best explanations I’ve read of the rise of Fascism in Hitler’s Germany. I agree that ignoring the lessons of history means we’ll be forced to endure repetition. And Kerr paints such a chilling scenario no one in their right mind would wish the maxim to come true. His prose applies color and form like an artist at the top of their game.

At times I found him reminiscent of Chandler in the way he portrays the Nazis as the worst gangsters in the game. This is the first book of the Bernard Gunther series, and I was so enthralled that I raced through the others in just a few days. His storyline is filled with horror, passion, fear, and pathos—a tour de force of emotions.

I absolutely loved this book. Michael Crummy is an incredibly clear writer and tells an incredibly clear and compelling story about life in a Newfoundland outport (Mockbeggar) in the 1800s, focusing on a sibling rivalry between merchants, the widow Caine, and her brother Abel Strapp.

Life there is hasty, brutish, and short. The descriptions of daily life, including violence, made everyone in our book club squirm. But what I liked most was that he takes the reader right to Mockbeggar (and its neighbour, Nonsuch) - within a page or two, you feel like you are inside a church in Mockbeggar. From that point on, you never leave the outport and its way of life.

Behind the Glass is an entire book about a building and the family that built it, lost it, and then reclaimed its heritage 60 years later. It is a complex nonfiction book written by an anthropologist, Michael Lambek, a grandchild of the couple that built the house in 1929. It is about the family, their friendship with famous philosophers like Martin Heidegger and Ernst Tuegend, but most of all, about the house.

If you are an avid supporter of cities, like I am, buildings are fascinating - for their history, their design, and, more recently, for their carbon reduction potential. The Villa Tugendhat, the glass house, was (and remains) a modernist masterpiece designed by Miles Van der Rowe in 1928. As an architect, Van der Rowe was incredibly influential in major cities globally - in my home city of Toronto, for example.

This book focuses on the philosophical reasons the… show more.

This book is a lovingly and expertly written biography of an underappreciated but vastly significant economist, Herman Daly. Professor Daly was an early proponent of ecological economics, and his work is becoming increasingly important and relevant if we want to stop climate breakdown.

One of the main reasons we are approaching climate breakdown is because neo-liberal economic theories and the economic system they have led to through trade agreements and the like rely on false or oversimplified assumptions—like pollution is free or that any resource constraints can be met by new inventions. The fact that neither is true—and the policy implications that set out from that conclusion - are persuasively documented in this biography.

The book is about economics and a great economist who brilliantly and convincingly demonstrated that the Planet and human resource demands on it must be included in our economic analysis and rules. As such, the biography… show more.

This in-depth account of the infamous Tuskegee Syphilis Study is considered a classic in the field of medical ethics. Though Greg Dober and I have recently discovered the true origins of the Public Health Service’s “non-treatment study” and former Surgeon General Thomas Parran’s critical role in the ugly saga, Jones’s book is still the best chronicle available, and lays out a devastating narrative of how a sophisticated but uncaring and racist scientific establishment could annually examine and not treat hundreds of unschooled Alabama sharecroppers suffering from a deadly disease. 

It’s funny because he wanted to call it My Nigs, but didn't like the idea of white people saying, I loved your collection My Nigs!

That first poem “My President” just floored me with how he heralded all his friends by nominating them for office, like “the boys outside Walgreens selling candy/ for a possibly fictional basketball team” or the guy who hooks him up with a free slice of pizza as long as Danez gives him time to say salat.

There’s a poem about getting beat up, at once an act of violence and an act of care for while they're beating you up, they’re weirdly making sure they don’t kill you. 

Noting my fortune to have been a reader of this book before its official surfacing to the national public, I was first drawn to those poems that again gave me back my memory. Poems reminisced on Migos, Blu & Exile, and others.

Soon after, it's display of self-portraiture unfolded into a mastery of wit, celebrating how music is always a task of discovery first.

“I saw stranger; looked again, I saw friend,” Watkins writes with an intelligence marked by the fruit of reorientation and heart that comes with inhabiting and celebrating your own tribe.

As a long-time fan of this author, I always find myself in his characters and very much engrossed in the story.

This story was filled with deep suspense wrapped around a good romance, and it kept me turning pages until the end. I received this book at a conference from the author and I was so engrossed in this book I finished it by the time I was home from the event.

Bass Reeves, a real individual, was a slave in Texas and, as personal attendant and crack shot, accompanied his owner, an officer in the 11th Texas Cavalry Regiment, into battle during the Civil War.

The lyrical and colorful narrative closely resembles Bass Reeves’s speech and thoughts, so that one flows into the other. That’s fine writing. Thompson reveals in meticulous detail behavioral traditions between owner and slave and between the slaves themselves that reflect the injustice rife at that time.

This is the first novel in a trilogy, and I’m eagerly awaiting the next two books.

I have always considered Philip Roth to be a master stylist and, even more, a brilliant author of the way that characters think and feel. This book is also wonderful for the way its ironies unfold in a story that is riveting, disturbing, and revealing.

I am intrigued by the way that Roth can confront important social issues. Even though this was written several years ago, I find it to be particularly relevant to the debates about diversity that seem to concern us most as a society today.