100 Books Like Author Unknown

I was blown away by this book because it spoke to my own efforts to find voices from the past that had been silenced, sometimes for centuries, by those who did not want certain stories to be told. Sometimes, the silencing was by legal suppression or even outright murder.

We’ve all heard that history is written by the winners, but how often do we think about the libraries and archives that are created by the winners, and how often the losers’ stories are kept out of these repositories? Even when scattered evidence is found, it is usually ignored, not only by the historians who write the approved versions of the past but also by the readers who fail to recognize inconvenient truths when they are confronted by them.

This book told me a lot about both its heroine, Henrietta Wood, and its author, Caleb McDaniel. From an obscure 19th-century newspaper article mentioning a court case in Ohio, McDaniel learned of a female slave from Kentucky who had been freed in Cincinnati, kidnapped, and illegally sold back into slavery, and who, after the Civil War, returned to successfully sue for damages the men who had kidnapped and re-enslaved her.

Both the heroine and the author are untiring in their efforts to get to the truth and to convey that truth to a wider audience. I was impressed with McDaniel’s willingness to share with his readers his doubts and fears about recovering this story, and equally impressed by his efforts, successful in the end, to match the determination of Henrietta Wood.

I’ve been hearing about Cynthia Ann Parker since I was a child growing up in the part of northern Texas once ruled by her Comanche captors–and her Comanche compatriots! Captured as a child by Comanche raiders at the Parker family’s frontier compound at the time of the Texas Revolution, Cynthia Ann fully became a Comanche. She married a warrior, Peta Nocona, and together they had a son, “Quanah Parker,” who eventually became the most famous “Indian” in America.

I was amazed by the authors’ ability to penetrate the myths surrounding Cynthia’s recapture by Texas Rangers. Speaking virtually no English, she was desperate to return with her infant daughter to her Comanche family, but both of them died in captivity, being held now as sad, unwilling captives of the Texans.

When I recommended this book to a petroleum geologist, he later told me that it was probably the best book he had ever read–and he understood for the first time what historians actually do (and parenthetically, why the closest field to history in methodology is, in fact, geology).

I’ve also seen undergraduate students come alive intellectually by reading these lectures, given at Oxford by Gaddis as a visiting professor. They are full of remarkable insights into everything from human psychology to fractal geometry. Every chapter is an intellectual feast, showing the vast variety of the historian’s sources and methods.

This clever and funny book explains that there are specific techniques that make good writing sound good, or a pithy phrase stick in the mind, and tells you the long and difficult Greek (or slightly easier Latin) names for all these rules you kind of knew without actually knowing.

I can hardly retain any of the Greek labels, but I do remember the fun little examples, like why Oscar Wilde’s epigrams are so striking (antithesis) and how Shakespeare totally lifted part of Julius Caesar from a historian, but polished it up (alliteration). And whenever you hear a memorable three-part phrase, it was probably longer but everyone forgot the other bits (tricolon). 

This is not one for fans of utilitarian writing, but as Forsyth says, “To write for mere utility is as foolish as to dress for mere utility.”

Wylie’s philosophical journey over the past 22 years has mirrored (and in some senses helped to create) the landscape of contemporary archaeological philosophy.

Certainly Wylie’s commitment to developing an ethical and inclusive archaeology, where discussions of research agendas such as feminism should not be ruled out by the application of empiricism, has done a great deal to support the work of archaeologists also committed to those agendas. 

I was still seeking examples of creative, fun writing in archaeology that captured some of the heart and joy of archaeological fieldwork when I encountered this humorous murder mystery-cum-archaeological methods textbook.

Reading it, I learned a lot about research design, different decisions archaeologists make while working, and various social and financial pressures that might impact the pace and approach of a project. But it’s also packed with silliness and dad jokes.

I still text inside jokes with people I excavated with more than a decade ago; this book captures both the complexities of doing archaeology as well as the inevitable goofiness that arises out of living, digging, and sweating with a group of people for weeks or months.

I’m always talking to scientists, but I have never undertaken anything like Bruno Latour’s voyage of ethnographic discovery. He decided to figure out how science works by embedding himself in a scientific lab for two years and, discarding all preconceptions, recording what he saw there as though he were an anthropologist visiting a foreign culture.

It turns out to be an intensely political culture: rather than following prescribed laws of method and logic, scientists are making judgment calls and negotiating with one another to decide the significance of their data, making it up as they go along. Latour brings out the subjectivity of much low-level scientific decision-making, in contrast to Kuhn’s picture, in which the blueprint for thinking—the paradigm—rules over the enterprise like a catechism.

Ritchie was part of a team that attempted to replicate a famous study led by a prominent psychologist, Daryl Bem, claiming that people did better on a word memorization test if they studied the words after taking the test.

Ritchie and his co-authors attempted to replicate this study and found no evidence supporting Bem’s claim. This is but one example of a scientific crisis in that attempts to replicate influential studies published in top peer-reviewed journals fail nearly half the time. Ritchie explains and illustrates the reasons for the current replication crisis in science.

Charlotte Pennington eagerly started her PhD but became anxious and depressed when her experiments "didn’t work’" and were refused publication. She read about the replication crisis — many published studies won’t replicate—and Open Science. Soon, it was her passion to teach about Open Science and what’s needed to achieve efficient research and trustworthy research literature.

The result is A Student’s Guide to Open Science. It’s short, clear, and highly readable. She’s well-informed and covers the story in engaging detail. There are practical guides to using Open Science practices and numerous links to follow as you wish. Statistical issues are mentioned but are not her focus.