100 Books Like America Is in the Heart

No book captures more clearly and compellingly the horrific, inspiring, and vital histories and stories of Native Americans than Brown’s.

I love the ways that Brown offers a profoundly new perspective on the American West, on the foundational myths that too often limit the way we see ourselves and the realities with which we must grapple instead, and on Indigenous communities as an essential part of the American story at every stage.

Revisionist Westerns are one of my very favorite genres, and this is the best one I know.  

My favorite American novel is at once the most righteously angry and the most beautifully optimistic book I’ve ever read. 

Historical fiction urgently responding to the present, an intimate family saga that creates an entire community—Chesnutt’s masterpiece is a book I’ve taught almost every year of my career, and I find something new in it each time I read it.

No book reminds me more potently of the worst of our history, and no book inspires me to fight for our best more passionately. 

There have been Asian Americans for as long as there’s been an America, and indeed in places like California Asian communities were there before the United States was.

That’s just one of the countless surprising and crucial lessons that I first learned from Takaki’s sweeping and magisterial history of the U.S., and every time I dip back into this book, I learn something new about where we’ve been, who we are, and what we can be if we better remember all of our communities and stories.

I am inspired every day by what Takaki accomplished and shared and what his book helps us understand.

The best 21st-century American literature builds on all that has come before but at the same time offers us something profoundly new, and I don’t know any book that does both those crucial things better than Henríquez’s novel.

I love that this intimate story of one undocumented family turns a mirror to our collective community, that it is defined by 2014 contexts but reveals timeless truths about love and loss, and that every time I return to it, Henríquez both rips my heart out and heals me.

The worst and best of us are here on every bracing and moving page.

I recommend this book because it is a rare diary of a 12-14-year-old young girl living in the sugar plantations of Hawaii in the 1920s. As one of the few females in the predominantly Filipino male population in racially segregated America, which had anti-miscegenation laws, she confides that she has many suitors of men in their 20s.

She wrote: ‘Gosh, and I am only 12 years old—and already somebody is telling me about love’ (p. 45). I was surprised to read Angela discovers her mother had a lover, although this attests to women’s power because they are a minority. But I was horrified to read Angela’s very detailed account of the domestic violence her father inflicts on her mother when he catches the lovers.

The standing men are the Filipino undocumented migrants to Japan who work as construction workers on a day-to-day basis. They stand on the Kotobuki sidewalk hoping to get selected by a sacho to get a job for the day. 

The book is an in-depth look at their lives—how the men who are considered the underclass in the host country struggle, find love (some of them have second families in Japan), experience leisure, and fulfill masculine ideals of breadwinner in a foreign country.

It is a rare glimpse at the life of an undocumented migrant. This book can be read with Rey Ventura’s Underground in Japan (Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 1992).

This book is a collection of many life stories of Filipino migrant domestic workers, mostly in Singapore. Since the authors of the accounts use pseudonyms, they are all insightful revelations of how these women cope with the issues of loneliness and separation from families.

The most interesting revelation is that some of these women have affairs (which they call ‘one day stands’ since they only have a day off and not the whole 24 hours) with South Asian men. I was surprised by this radical act—radical because Filipino constructions of the feminine idealise the ‘chaste wife’, and while men’s infidelity is tolerated in the homeland, women’s infidelity is not.

Finally, the book also testifies to these migrants’ strength, hard work, courage, and survival skills. 

This is an autobiography of Peter Jamero, who is a second generation Filipino American capturing what life was like growing up in a Filipino American farmworkers camp in California in the 1940s.

I was particularly struck by his comment “before I went to school my world consisted of Filipinos. Everyone else was a foreigner “ (p. 19) since he did not speak English until he went to grade school. I was moved when he said: “I looked at my image in the mirror and tried to wash my brown color away. But no matter how hard I scrubbed, the color was still there.” (p. 91).

He joins the US Navy and the Civil Rights Movement. I interviewed him in 2012, and he passed away in 2024 at the age of 94.

Sometimes I read a book and wish I’d written it. With Insurrecto, I cheered and gave thanks that Gina Apostol did write it. Decades ago, I became obsessed with the US conquest of the Philippines after the Spanish American War and how the people of the islands fought back to liberate their country. I knew Mark Twain protested the occupation. I found military histories of the war against Spain. At that time, I couldn’t find anything from the Filipino perspective. Where were books to challenge the American belief we’ve never had colonies? Apostol brings this lost history brilliantly to life with a contemporary filmmaker and a translator who create dueling narratives while trying to make a movie about a 1901 massacre. Insurrecto is a remarkable work, complex enough to repay rereading.

The first half of this book is a deep immersion into the shockingly bleak living conditions of 1930s working-class families in the impoverished industrial north of England, then in the grip of the Great Depression. As an Irish person – and given the historic nature of the relationship between the two countries, in which Britain has always been the dominant and powerful one – it was genuinely eye-opening to me to understand how hard life was for ordinary English people.

Orwell’s writing was undertaken from the vantage point of his own experience. He spent months living with families in Lancashire and Yorkshire, and his descriptions of their lives are detailed and very vivid. The second half is an essay about the development of his own political conscience – interesting, but not essential in the way the first half is.