Here are 100 books that American Breakdown fans have personally recommended if you like
American Breakdown.
Book DNA is a community of 13,000+ authors and super readers sharing their favorite books with the world.
I was born into the heart of American religious fundamentalism and spent years helping build the Religious Right before walking away from it. My book tells the story of that journey: from certainty to doubt, from dogma to paradox, from fear to love.
Iâve lived at the crossroads of faith, politics, family, and artâand these recommendations reflect the questions that still haunt me: How do we live with compassion in a divided world? How do we raise our children with tenderness in the absence of certainty? These books moved me because they donât preach. They search. They speak in the voice of those of us who are done with black-and-white thinking, but still believe in grace.
I found Timâs deep dive into American evangelicalism hauntingly familiar.
Itâs a rare book that manages to speak with empathy and honesty about a movement I know all too well. Tim doesnât just expose extremism; he reminds us of the messy, human hearts inside itâhearts that once belonged to me, too.
His work nudged me to remember that even in the shadows of dogma, love and beauty can still find a way to flourish.
The award-winning journalist and staff writer for The Atlantic follows up his New York Times bestseller American Carnage with this timely, rigorously reported, and deeply personal examination of the divisions that threaten to destroy the American evangelical movement.
Evangelical Christians are perhaps the most polarizingâand least understoodâpeople living in America today. In his seminal new book, The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory, journalist Tim Alberta, himself a practicing Christian and the son of an evangelical pastor, paints anâŚ
Magical realism meets the magic of Christmas in this mix of Jewish, New Testament, and Santa storiesâall reenacted in an urban psychiatric hospital!
On locked ward 5C4, Josh, a patient with many similarities to Jesus, is hospitalized concurrently with Nick, a patient with many similarities to Santa. The two argueâŚ
I was born into the heart of American religious fundamentalism and spent years helping build the Religious Right before walking away from it. My book tells the story of that journey: from certainty to doubt, from dogma to paradox, from fear to love.
Iâve lived at the crossroads of faith, politics, family, and artâand these recommendations reflect the questions that still haunt me: How do we live with compassion in a divided world? How do we raise our children with tenderness in the absence of certainty? These books moved me because they donât preach. They search. They speak in the voice of those of us who are done with black-and-white thinking, but still believe in grace.
Melanieâs memoir is a testament to how love and grief can live side by side.
Her story of grappling with faith, family, and loss resonated deeply with me, and her prose is simply luminousâelegant, honest, and profoundly moving. Like my own path, Melanieâs journey is about making peace with lifeâs messinessâfinding the courage to create beauty in the ruins and hold fast to love, even when faith itself is in doubt.
I came away reminded that doubt is not the opposite of faith, but the companion that keeps it real and tender.
"A profound and riveting journey through shame and grief, A Hard Silence is, quite simply, unforgettable." Monica Wood, author of When We Were the Kennedys
In the mid 1980s, Canada's worst public health disaster was unfolding. Catastrophic mismanagement of the country's blood supply allowed contaminated blood to be knowingly distributed nationwide, infecting close to two thousand Canadians with HIV. Among them was Melanie Brooks's surgeon father who, after receiving a blood transfusion during open-heart surgery in 1985, learned he was HIV positive.
At a time when HIV/AIDS was widely misunderstood and public perception was shaped by fear, prejudice, and homophobia,âŚ
I was born into the heart of American religious fundamentalism and spent years helping build the Religious Right before walking away from it. My book tells the story of that journey: from certainty to doubt, from dogma to paradox, from fear to love.
Iâve lived at the crossroads of faith, politics, family, and artâand these recommendations reflect the questions that still haunt me: How do we live with compassion in a divided world? How do we raise our children with tenderness in the absence of certainty? These books moved me because they donât preach. They search. They speak in the voice of those of us who are done with black-and-white thinking, but still believe in grace.
Christianâs book doesnât just chart the decline of faithâit asks the bigger question: what might remain?
Like me, he wrestles with the paradox of caring deeply about spiritual life while no longer buying into the old formulas.
Reading his work expanded my own sense that love, art, and simple acts of grace are the true spiritual inheritance we can still pass downâno matter how loudly the old structures crumble.
Traditional religion in the United States has suffered huge losses in recent decades. The number of Americans identifying as "not religious" has increased remarkably. Religious affiliation, service attendance, and belief in God have declined. More and more people claim to be "spiritual but not religious." Religious organizations have been reeling from revelations of sexual and financial scandals and cover-ups. Public trust in "organized religion" has declined significantly. Crucially, these religious losses are concentrated among younger generations. This means that, barring unlikely religious revivals among youth, the losses will continue and accelerate in time, as less-religiousâŚ
A poisonous maiden, a Daoist sex cult, and a violent insurgency.
The polyandrous Yan family in China's rural Shaanxi Province takes in two carpenter brothers. When one brother is convicted of murder after killing their neighbor in a dispute, a constable threatens to expose the family's rumored polyandry and extortsâŚ
I was born into the heart of American religious fundamentalism and spent years helping build the Religious Right before walking away from it. My book tells the story of that journey: from certainty to doubt, from dogma to paradox, from fear to love.
Iâve lived at the crossroads of faith, politics, family, and artâand these recommendations reflect the questions that still haunt me: How do we live with compassion in a divided world? How do we raise our children with tenderness in the absence of certainty? These books moved me because they donât preach. They search. They speak in the voice of those of us who are done with black-and-white thinking, but still believe in grace.
Ruthâs gentle, funny, and deeply wise reflections on raising boys struck a nerve in me as a father.
Itâs not just a parenting bookâitâs about nurturing tenderness and a sense of wonder in a world that too often demands toughness.Â
Ruth gave me fresh language for something Iâve long felt: that creating beauty and giving loveâespecially to the next generationâis the most radical kind of spirituality there is.
Combining painfully honest memoir, cultural analysis, and reporting, BoyMom is a humorous and heartbreaking deep dive into the complexities of raising boys in our fraught political moment.
âRapist, school-shooter, incel, man-child, interrupter, mansplainer, boob-starer, birthday forgetter, frat boy, dude-bro, homophobe, self-important stoner, emotional-labor abstainer, non-wiper of kitchen counters. Trying to raise good sons suddenly felt like a hopeless task.â   As the culture wars rage, and masculinity has been politicized from all sides, feminist writer and mother of three boys Ruth Whippman finds herself conflicted and scared. While the right pushes a dangerous vision of fantasy manhood, her feminist peersâŚ
There is more than one history of the human world and more than one high cultureâbut all those histories and cultures may contribute to a unified sense of being and human potential. We need to step outside our immediate world, history, culture, and sensibility to learnâas G.K. Chesterton remarkedâthat humanity can be great and even glorious under conditions and with beliefs and fancies far different from ours. Knowing this, we may also gain new insight into our familiar local world. We may end, in Kiplingâs words, by realizing that in the endless opposition of We and They, We ourselves are only a sort of They!
I first encountered Spenglerâs theories in work by science fiction writers such as A.E. Van Vogt and James Blish, who were enticed by Spenglerâs notion that there was no single history of human civilization. Instead, distinct âCulturesâ were born and slowly decayed into mere âCivilizationsâ by roughly predictable stages. Each Culture began with a fresh way of seeing and conceiving the world and our place in it, expressed in new art, politics, technology, and even mathematics.
The original inspiration was then lost and replaced by merely imitative and rule-governed art and society. Spengler certainly got a lot wrong, but I remain inspired by the notion that there are really different ways of being human and thatâeven if âthe Westâ is bound, as other writers of the time expected, to decayânew lives, new Cultures will still emerge and flourish.
âOut of the spent and unconsidered earth,â in the poet Kiplingâs words,âŚ
The first volume of Oswald Spenglerâs The Decline of the West is a classic milestone in the annals of historiography. However, it is not a history book in the traditional sense of recounting events in chronological order. Instead, it tries to explain the mechanisms that make different cultures tick. While classical culture had no concept of the past or future and was only fixated on the present, Western culture is focused on both the past as memory and the future as unconquered territory.
Like organisms that are born, mature and eventually die, cultures are the blossoming youth while civilizations usherâŚ
When I produced a recording of lost works by Alexander Zemlinsky with Riccardo Chailly for Decca Records in 1984, I soon realized that a wealth of music had been lost during the Nazi years that had never been recovered. After initiating and supervising the recording series Entartete Musik for Decca, the first retrospective of major works lost during the Nazi years, I headed research in this subject at London Universityâs Jewish Music Institute. I was a music curator at Viennaâs Jewish Museum. YUP published one of my books, and I am a co-founder of the Research Center and Archive âExilarteâ based at Viennaâs University of Music and Performing Arts.
There are so many histories of fin de siècle Vienna that this book is a welcome, long-awaited postlude. It explains how the cityâs creativity did not die with the fall of the Habsburgs but became the source of everything we think of today as âmodernâ, from shopping, to cooking, to economics, to housing, education and the interaction of state and society.
Berlin may have been livelier in the 1920s, but the new ideas that would take root across the world and shape modern society were still coming out of Vienna.Â
How can one European capital be responsible for most of the West's intellectual and cultural achievements in the twentieth century?
Viennese ideas saturate the modern world. From California architecture to Hollywood Westerns, modern advertising to shopping malls, orgasms to gender confirmation surgery, nuclear fission to fitted kitchens-every aspect of our history, science, and culture is in some way shaped by Vienna.
The city of Freud, Wittgenstein, Mahler, and Klimt was the melting pot at the heart of a vast metropolitan empire. But with the Second World War and the rise of fascism, the dazzling coteries of thinkers whoâŚ
Big Ideas... For Small Businesses
by
John Lamerton,
Big Ideas⌠for Small Businesses is a straight-talking, no-nonsense guide to growing a small business without sacrificing your lifestyle. Written by a former civil servant turned entrepreneur, the book challenges hustle culture and instead champions the idea of an "ambitious lifestyle business" - one that provides freedom and financial stability,âŚ
Iâm a historian who loves watching the Founding Fathers do not-so-Founding-Fatherish things, like John Adams and Thomas Jefferson bonding over how awful Alexander Hamilton was, James Madison reporting how the king of Spain liked to relieve himself daily by the same oak tree, and George Washington losing his temper, asking his cousin to look for the teeth he just knew heâd left in his desk drawer, or spinning out a conspiracy theory. Itâs details like this that reveal that even the most revealed figures were real people, like us but often very different. Figuring out how it all makes sense is a challenge I enjoy.
A classic statement of the mentality of the men who fought the American Revolution, A Revolutionary People at War documents how the enthusiasm of the warâs early days, the ârage militaireâ in Roysterâs memorable phrase, waxed and waned during the brutal conflict as soldiers and civilians settled into an uneasy relationship often in danger of collapsing into anarchy or a military despotism as everyone feared. Royster seems to have read every scrap a soldier or officer produced across the warâs 8 years, and researching the book in the 1970s, he someone kept track of everything, deploying a deft quote time after time, without the aid of a computer. How?
In this highly acclaimed book, Charles Royster explores the mental processes and emotional crises that Americans faced in their first national war. He ranges imaginatively outside the traditional techniques of analytical historical exposition to build his portrait of how individuals and a populace at large faced the Revolution and its implications. The book was originally published by UNC Press in 1980.
I was infuriated to learn how my government was misrepresenting the recent war in Syria. I learned of this deceit from Syrians who had fled their war-torn country and relayed a very different narrative from the one we're all hearing. From 2016-17 Baylor Universityâs Institute for Oral History sponsored and archived our collection of audio-recorded interviews of Syrian Christians. This book is the end result of their entrusting us with their harrowing testimonies. I'm a Senior Lecturer in History at Baylor University. I routinely teach, among other courses, the history of the United States from a Global Perspective in which I discuss with my students the same lessons I learned while writing Syria Crucified.
Before the Holy Roman Empire, there was Byzantium. Prior to better-known names like Charlemagne or Thomas Aquinas, there were men like Justinian, who codified Roman law for posterity, or Photius the Great, who gave concise theological treatises to eager audiences of the highly literate populace of Asia Minor. Wells explores the heart of Roman civilization in the Eastern Mediterranean where the flourishing Byzantine Empire preserved ancient learning. Sailing from Byzantium investigates the historical and geographic forces at play which eventually made Byzantium a "forgotten" empire, yet which todayâwhether it's acknowledged or notâhas left its indelible mark on the modern world in remarkable ways. This is not just a journey into history, but an intellectual pilgrimage into the time and setting of almost forgotten intellectual and spiritual giants.Â
A gripping intellectual adventure story, Sailing from Byzantium sweeps you from the deserts of Arabia to the dark forests of northern Russia, from the colourful towns of Renaissance Italy to the final moments of a millennial city under siege. Byzantium: the successor of Greece and Rome, this magnificent empire bridged the ancient and modern worlds for more than a thousand years. Without Byzantium, the works of Homer and Herodotus, Plato and Aristotle, Sophocles and Aeschylus, would never have survived. Yet very few of us have any idea of the enormous debt we owe them. The story of Byzantium is aâŚ
I did not use to believe in human progress, but thought there must have been good old days behind us â until I studied history and understood that my ancestors did not live ecologically, they died ecologically, at an early age. Since then Iâve been obsessed with progress, what makes it possible and how we can spread it to more people. I am a historian of ideas from Sweden, the host of a video series on innovations in history, New and Improved, and the writer of many books on intellectual history and global economics, translated into more than 25 languages.
This 1974 book, by the founder of one of the worldâs great picture libraries, was a real eye-opener to me when I first read it. We are all nostalgic and look at the past through rose-tinted glasses, and so do I. But then we forget about the hunger and the crime, tuberculosis, smallpox and heaps of trash on the streets, the child labor, and the despair of the aged. This richly illustrated book, with its multitude of stories, set me straight. For instance, did you know that New York had 150,000 horses in 1900, each producing around 20 pounds of manure a day? The past stank. It makes you deeply grateful for science, technology, and economic growth.
The Good Old Daysâwere they really good? On the surface they appear to be soâespecially the period to which this term is most often applied, the years from the end of the Civil War to the early 1900âs. This period of history has receded into a benevolent haze, leaving us with the image of an ebullient, carefree America, the fun and charm of the Gilded Age, the Gay Nineties.
But this gaiety was only a brittle veneer that covered widespread turmoil and suffering. The good old days were good for but the privileged few. For the farmer, the laborer, theâŚ
The problem is not with the actions young women take but with the toxic, sexist conditions they are responding to.
Tanenbaum found, based on six years of interviews with young people ages 14-30, that young women are navigating a culture littered with gendered dress codes, revenge porn, and sexually explicitâŚ
Iâve wanted to travel the world since I could look out a window. Itâs been an honor to spend my life exploring this planet, despite some of its inhabitants. I knew Iâd write books about it, even before I could write my own name. Itâs a joy to realize such a deep and early dream. My books are love letters to places Iâve lived and people Iâve met, plus some joking around in order not to scream or weep at some of whatâs out there. Iâve been a teacher, film editor, comedian, librarian, and now writer. Wherever you are, on whatever path: happy trails to you.Â
I always enjoy Bill Brysonâs stories, wherever he travels. Heâs like my favorite funny uncle, and I never tire of hearing from him.
After a couple of decades as a Yank in the UK, he was going to move back home. First, he takes us on one last meandering trip all around the nation, to pay homage, to enjoy good memories, and to get amusingly grumpy about inconveniences. His sense of humor is self-effacing, silly, bungling, and very entertaining. Â
I love his keen nose for the absurd differences between the two cultures, his collections of comedy place names, and the British slang phrases he never understood. I grew up in the USA but spent all my adult life in the UK, and this had me laughing out loud, frequently.Â
In 1995, before leaving his much-loved home in North Yorkshire to move back to the States for a few years with his family, Bill Bryson insisted on taking one last trip around Britain, a sort of valedictory tour of the green and kindly island that had so long been his home. His aim was to take stock of the nation's public face and private parts (as it were), and to analyse what precisely it was he loved so much about a country that had produced Marmite; a military hero whose dying wish was to be kissed by a fellow namedâŚ
