Here are 100 books that Author Unknown fans have personally recommended if you like
Author Unknown.
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I am passionate about bringing back to life persons from the past who have been forgotten, misunderstood, or even deliberately mischaracterized. In order to get to the truth, there are a host of myths that must be shattered or discarded. Most of the histories that I have written have done precisely this–showing the fallacy of familiar myths and discovering the hidden truths about people and events that have been distorted, often by some of the most popular literature. In order to achieve these results, I have had to spend years in “boring” archives in order to reveal people and events that are never boring.
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.
Now part of the HBO docuseries Exterminate All the Brutes, written and directed by Raoul Peck
The 20th anniversary edition of a pioneering classic that explores the contexts in which history is produced—now with a new foreword by renowned scholar Hazel Carby
Placing the West’s failure to acknowledge the Haitian Revolution—the most successful slave revolt in history—alongside denials of the Holocaust and the debate over the Alamo, Michel-Rolph Trouillot offers a stunning meditation on how power operates in the making and recording of history.
This modern classic resides at the intersection of history, anthropology, Caribbean, African-American, and post-colonial studies,…
A moving story of love, betrayal, and the enduring power of hope in the face of darkness.
German pianist Hedda Schlagel's world collapsed when her fiancé, Fritz, vanished after being sent to an enemy alien camp in the United States during the Great War. Fifteen years later, in 1932, Hedda…
I am passionate about bringing back to life persons from the past who have been forgotten, misunderstood, or even deliberately mischaracterized. In order to get to the truth, there are a host of myths that must be shattered or discarded. Most of the histories that I have written have done precisely this–showing the fallacy of familiar myths and discovering the hidden truths about people and events that have been distorted, often by some of the most popular literature. In order to achieve these results, I have had to spend years in “boring” archives in order to reveal people and events that are never boring.
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.
The unforgettable saga of one enslaved woman's fight for justice--and reparations
Born into slavery, Henrietta Wood was taken to Cincinnati and legally freed in 1848. In 1853, a Kentucky deputy sheriff named Zebulon Ward colluded with Wood's employer, abducted her, and sold her back into bondage. She remained enslaved throughout the Civil War, giving birth to a son in Mississippi and never forgetting who had put her in this position.
By 1869, Wood had obtained her freedom for a second time and returned to Cincinnati, where she sued Ward for damages in 1870. Astonishingly, after eight years of litigation, Wood…
I am passionate about bringing back to life persons from the past who have been forgotten, misunderstood, or even deliberately mischaracterized. In order to get to the truth, there are a host of myths that must be shattered or discarded. Most of the histories that I have written have done precisely this–showing the fallacy of familiar myths and discovering the hidden truths about people and events that have been distorted, often by some of the most popular literature. In order to achieve these results, I have had to spend years in “boring” archives in order to reveal people and events that are never boring.
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.
In December 1860, along a creek in northwest Texas, a group of U.S. Cavalry under Sgt. John Spangler and Texas Rangers led by Sul Ross raided a Comanche hunting camp, killed several Indians, and took three prisoners. One was the woman they would identify as Cynthia Ann Parker, taken captive from her white family as a child a quarter century before. The reports of these events had implications far and near. For Ross, they helped make a political career. For Parker, they separated her permanently and fatally from her Comanche husband and two of her children. For Texas, they became…
This book is an elegiac meditation on the will to survive. Tor, a beluga whaler, and his wife, Astrid, a botanist specializing in Arctic flora, are stranded during the dark season of 1937-38 at his remote whaling station in the Svalbard archipelago when they misjudge ice conditions and fail to…
I am passionate about bringing back to life persons from the past who have been forgotten, misunderstood, or even deliberately mischaracterized. In order to get to the truth, there are a host of myths that must be shattered or discarded. Most of the histories that I have written have done precisely this–showing the fallacy of familiar myths and discovering the hidden truths about people and events that have been distorted, often by some of the most popular literature. In order to achieve these results, I have had to spend years in “boring” archives in order to reveal people and events that are never boring.
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.
What is history and why should we study it? Is there such a thing as historical truth? Is history a science? One of the most accomplished historians at work today, John Lewis Gaddis, answers these and other questions in this short, witty, and humane book. The Landscape of History provides a searching look at the historian's craft, as well as a strong argument for why a historical consciousness should matter to us today. Gaddis points out that while the historical method is more sophisticated than most historians realize, it doesn't require unintelligible prose to explain. Like cartographers mapping landscapes, historians…
As a writer and historian, I’m all about rabbit holes. When something I’ve never heard about before catches my interest, I have to find out more—and sometimes I end up writing whole books on the subject! I have a head full of bizarre little nuggets of information, and I love reading books, like the ones here, that tell me something new and change my way of thinking.
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 ofJulius Caesarfrom 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.”
From the #1 international bestselling author of The Etymologicon and The Horologicon comes an education in the art of articulation, from the King James Bible to Katy Perry…
From classic poetry to pop lyrics, from Charles Dickens to Dolly Parton, even from Jesus to James Bond, Mark Forsyth explains the secrets that make a phrase—such as “O Captain! My Captain!” or “To be or not to be”—memorable.
In his inimitably entertaining and wonderfully witty style, he takes apart famous phrases and shows how you too can write like Shakespeare or quip like Oscar Wilde. Whether you’re aiming to achieve literary…
I love playing music and games, helping others in therapy, being a father and husband, among other things. It’s taken me some time to figure out how to not only stay on top of them all, but to enjoy myself along the way. The answer to doing so is about finding and guiding play in work. Picasso's statement rings true: "Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up." Mastery and feelings of success flow when work is imbued with play. As a psychoanalyst and now as a writer, I work with both clients and readers to help them find meaning and mastery in the day-to-day.
Ahrens opened up my eyes to a method of building on, diving into, and creating notes without them getting lost. I love feeling productive whether I agree or disagree with something. I now have a way to connect my ideas together and gather them when creating articles, books, and courses. It didn't use to be fun to take notes, but now it is since I know I can get back to and update things for however long I like without ever feeling obligated to them.
This is the second, revised and expanded edition. The first edition was published under the slightly longer title "How to Take Smart Notes. One Simple Technique to Boost Writing, Learning and Thinking - for Students, Academics and Nonfiction Book Writers".
The key to good and efficient writing lies in the intelligent organisation of ideas and notes. This book helps students, academics and other knowledge workers to get more done, write intelligent texts and learn for the long run. It teaches you how to take smart notes and ensure they bring you and your projects forward. The Take Smart Notes principle…
Tina Edwards loved her childhood and creating fairy houses, a passion shared with her father, a world-renowned architect. But at nine years old, she found him dead at his desk and is haunted by this memory. Tina's mother abruptly moved away, leaving Tina with feelings of abandonment and suspicion.
I studied statistics and data science for years before anyone ever suggested to me that these topics might have an ethical dimension, or that my numerical tools were products of human beings with motivations specific to their time and place. I’ve since written about the history and philosophy of mathematical probability and statistics, and I’ve come to understand just how important that historical background is and how critically important it is that the next generation of data scientists understand where these ideas come from and their potential to do harm. I hope anyone who reads these books avoids getting blinkered by the ideas that data = objectivity and that science is morally neutral.
If you’ve never thought of “intersectional feminism” or “the gender binary” as essentially data-scientific terms, please allow this book to correct that. Data science is a locus of power, and that power can be wielded in the service of oppression or liberation. This book raises essential questions about the predominantly white, male, technocratic interests served by the traditional narratives of data analysis and what feminism and data science have to offer each other. Bottom line: the data doesn’t speak for itself, never has, and never will.
A new way of thinking about data science and data ethics that is informed by the ideas of intersectional feminism.
Today, data science is a form of power. It has been used to expose injustice, improve health outcomes, and topple governments. But it has also been used to discriminate, police, and surveil. This potential for good, on the one hand, and harm, on the other, makes it essential to ask: Data science by whom? Data science for whom? Data science with whose interests in mind? The narratives around big data and data science are overwhelmingly white, male, and techno-heroic. In…
I taught philosophy (in particular critical reasoning!) for the colleges of Oxford University between 1987 and 2021. But, aged 15, I was thrown out of school (for truancy and disruption). Between the ages of 18 and 23 I travelled the world, hitch-hiking through Asia, living in Australasia, then travelling back through Africa. By the time I got home, starved of intellectual stimulation, I started an Open University Course and discovered logic. It was the hardest thing I had ever done. But also the most enjoyable. I loved getting to grips with difficult distinctions and concepts and having to use them precisely. Getting the answers right felt like an achievement. Getting them wrong, a challenge. I’ve loved logic ever since!
As with any other academic discipline, philosophy has its own language. This is not jargon (or it shouldn’t be!). It is a technical terminology. To look at something very closely, as any academic discipline does, is to record distinctions that might otherwise have gone unnoticed. Immediately two names are needed where only one was needed before. This book will talk you through the most important of these distinctions. The book also looks at the methodology of philosophy, the most important of which, of course, is logic.
A new edition of the bestselling guide to the study of philosophy: the ideal intellectual 'toolkit' for sharpening analytical skills and building philosophical acuity
Whether used as a guide to basic principles or a resource for key concepts and methods, The Philosopher's Toolkit equips readers with all the intellectual 'tools' necessary for engaging closely with philosophical argument and developing fluency in the methods and language of philosophical inquiry. Featuring accessible explanations, practical examples, and expert guidance, this text empowers readers to understand traditional philosophical thinking and to engage with new ideas.
Focuses on the practical methods and concepts necessary…
I almost became a scientist. But something about my undergraduate physics labs—could it be that none of my measurements came out right?—didn't quite grab me, and I found myself, by the time I earned my degree, an observer of science instead. I was just as fascinated with fundamental particles, the origin of life, and artificial intelligence as before, but now I was doing the philosophy, history, and sociology of science. You might even call it the science of science. So perhaps I became a scientist after all, but one intent on the question of how science works and why it works so well.
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.
This highly original work presents laboratory science in a deliberately skeptical way: as an anthropological approach to the culture of the scientist. Drawing on recent work in literary criticism, the authors study how the social world of the laboratory produces papers and other "texts,"' and how the scientific vision of reality becomes that set of statements considered, for the time being, too expensive to change. The book is based on field work done by Bruno Latour in Roger Guillemin's laboratory at the Salk Institute and provides an important link between the sociology of modern sciences and laboratory studies in the…
The Duke's Christmas Redemption
by
Arietta Richmond,
A Duke who has rejected love, a Lady who dreams of a love match, an arranged marriage, a house full of secrets, a most unneighborly neighbor, a plot to destroy reputations, an unexpected love that redeems it all.
Lady Charlotte Wyndham, given in an arranged marriage to a man she…
I’m Mariah Avery, a clinic owner, adjunct professor, and Board Certified Behavior Analyst® (BCBA®). When I was a new BCBA I felt like I had been thrown out of the frying pan into the fire. Even worse, the fire kept judging me for not knowing things and telling me I didn’t work quickly enough. These books are, in part, what got me through that time and helped me back on my feet—I hope they do the same for you.
This book is to improve your "craft," so to speak. Bailey and Burch offer practical, step-by-step strategies for sharpening your professional skills. I especially love how the “just say no” chapter is immediately followed up by a chapter on how to professionally say no.
The structure of the book flows as well as the content. This was mandatory reading for me in graduate school, but I have kept returning to it repeatedly.
This second edition of Bailey and Burch's best-selling 25 Essential Skills for the Successful Behavior Analyst is an invaluable guide to the professional skills required in the rapidly growing field of applied behavior analysis.
The demands on professional behavior analysts, BCBAs and BCBA-Ds, are constantly increasing such that several new skills are required to keep up with new developments. Each chapter has been thoroughly updated and seven new chapters address recognizing the need to understand client advocacy, cultural responsiveness, and the movement toward diversity, equity, and inclusion in the field.
The authors present five basic skills and strategy areas which…
