70 Books Like An American Genocide

Set within the greatest mass migration in American history, Steinbeck’s 1939 classic follows the Joad family as they join nearly three million others who escape the Dust Bowl of the American Midwest.

Usurious banks have foreclosed and crushed the bereft farmers. More than 200,000 refugees head for California, and the Joads join them in an ambling caravan of rattling jalopies. Young Rose of Sharon moves pregnant across the continent, emblematic of both the promise and the peril of the human condition. She’s surrounded by family and hangers-on who ford the wasted continent, only to face a glut of labor in the vast farms of California and the brutal exploitation of the owner classes. The Joads are slapped with the bitter understanding that the promise of California exists largely in myth. Yet always Steinbeck returns to the promises of human connection and even happiness that beckon from just over the next… show more.

Dwight D. Eisenhower served two terms as United States president, from 1952-1960. His administration is widely remembered for rapid economic growth and adept international diplomacy. Yet the pubic face of much of that growth and diplomacy masked Ike’s vehement prosecution of a brutal cold war—acts of attrition and deceit overseas that vastly expanded the US empire around the globe.

The brothers John Foster Dulles, Eisenhower’s secretary of state, and Allen Dulles, who was head of the Central Intelligence Agency, led the American rise to international preeminence. The Devil’s Chessboard focuses largely on Allen Dulles, who waged secret wars across the planet in service of American imperial objectives. Prior to World War Two, Dulles worked for an investment firm that had direct ties to Hitler’s Third Reich—Allen Dulles met with Hitler in 1933. During the war, Dulles joined the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the forerunner of the CIA, and was… show more.

Kendzior released Hiding in Plain Sight in 2020, just prior to the January 6, 2021 storming of the US Capitol by Trump followers. The book quickly became a bestseller and an essential reference for anyone wanting to make sense of the increasingly authoritarian strain of American politics in general, and the Trump administration in particular. 

In 2012, Kendzior earned her PhD by studying authoritarian regimes that grew out of the states of the former Soviet Union. She brought that knowledge home and, in 2016, applied it to predict Trump’s unlikely electoral victory. Hiding in Plain Sight tracks Trump’s ascent through the history of America’s consolidation of wealth and power into fewer and fewer hands and through the corruption inevitably associated with such inequity.

The book explores Trump’s tutelage under his reactionary mentor Roy Cohn, his rise in popularity through reality TV, his failed business dealings, and his ability to tap… show more.

Few writers dig as deeply or as diligently into the underbelly of the American empire more than Edwin Black. One of his earliest books, IBM and the Holocaust, documents how the pioneering computing company sold Hollerith tabulation machines and the required punch cards to Germany’s Nazi government throughout World War Two, allowing the regime to identify and exterminate Jews. 

Two years later, Black published something of a prequel, War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America’s Campaign to Create a Master Race. It’s an extensive and exhaustively documented account of American white supremacists and their bogus but widely accepted theories of “eugenics,” or “race science,” that maintained a surprising legitimacy in the US during the first half of the twentieth century.

Eugenic policies led to the marginalization and forced sterilization of human “defectives” in the United States. Not long thereafter, employing lessons learned in America, the Nazi Third Reich… show more.

I recall avidly skimming the text in the library soon after it came out. So many new ideas! I was especially excited with its presentation of the Indigenous management of plant habitats by the judicious use of fire.

From the Preface: “I hope that greater understanding of the stewardship legacy left us by California Indians will foster a paradigm shift in our thinking about the state’s past—particularly with regard to wildland fire.” Slowly, researchers across the Great Plains have begun to understand the complex relationship between climate, litter buildup, and human activity, and this book helped that understanding take root.

Like me, the author is a former lawyer, so I knew I had to read her book, and it did not disappoint. Judge pushes the boundaries of what we have traditionally seen from Indian American authors and tells a complex story of how a single day can forever change one’s path. Told from multiple perspectives, her characters break stereotypes and make some questionable decisions, but beneath it all are still rooted in love and loyalty to their family. Judge gracefully tackles topics like addiction, filial piety, and divorce, subjects that are not often discussed openly in the Indian community. This one was both heart-wrenching and hopeful.

Asha visits India every summer, filling her yellow suitcase with gifts for Grandma. When Asha returns to California, Grandma fills the suitcase with gifts for Asha. This summer, though, Grandma is gone, and the house isn’t the same without her there. Grandma’s final gift for Asha’s yellow suitcase—a quilt made from her saris that she created before she died—brings comfort to both Asha and the reader. 

This story allows readers to explore how a place feels without a special loved one there, and colorful illustrations bring brightness to this difficult subject. An author’s note shares that Sriram and her family also lost a grandparent and she used her family’s experiences as inspiration for this story in the hopes that it will bring comfort to others.

In this moving novel, the late great Oakley Hall took me back to World War II era San Diego. What I love about it is it paints a much fuller portrait of the lost city of old than he does in his first San Diego-based novel.

This book is filled with wonder, dread, love, and longing but what makes it noteworthy is its keen eye toward history and the darkness at the heart of the city’s streets and neighborhoods—and at the center of the war itself. 

Growing up in rural East Texas, some of my earliest memories center around the fire station where my father was a volunteer firefighter.

Although this book is set in Northern California, it manages to render the small town and its politics familiar enough that I can almost smell the smoke. Lex’s reluctance to return to where everyone else in her immediate family died is tempered by the romance igniting between her and an old flame, but everyone has secrets here—and some can be deadly.

Because of obvious limitations—space in the garden, sun, availability, and one’s responsibility to be a conscientious steward during a probably unending California drought—it’s impossible to grow as many roses as one would like. It’s not impossible, however, to content oneself with two or three plants for cutting flowers, and, instead, moon over this comprehensive collection of gorgeous photographs, descriptions of form, petal counts, habits, parentage, and scents. Keep 2,000 roses on the bookshelf. This book is a treasure.