Books like Brown Tide Rising — picked by fans

In 1881, a reporter described Texas as a “vast wilderness” that was “infested by roaming Mexicans, rattlesnakes, and braying jackasses.”

In other words, it was a land calling for white people to settle, civilize, and supplant the “indolent” Mexican. I was jolted by this and other visceral literary snippets, which De Leon drew from nineteenth-century travelogues, letters, and newspaper articles.

The book exposes the power of the printed word in forming and perpetuating early Euro-American stereotypes claiming Mexican Americans in Texas were unpatriotic, mixed blood, lazy, immoral, and cruel. Writing in 1983, De Leon concluded that these attitudes had shifted into subtler modern racism.

Yet the lynching of Mexican Americans persists in the nation’s second-largest state, with more than 23 massacred in a white supremacist attack at an El Paso Walmart in 2019.

Chavez modernizes the Mexican miscreant myth, explaining how vivid TV news scenes of immigrants inspire visceral reactions.

He argues that the emotions inspired by media coverage of vigilante groups rounding up immigrants are a potent part of “the spectacle” that plays out on the news. Chavez also gives the xenophobic storytelling of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century an updated name: The Latino Threat Narrative.

The book powerfully picks apart ideas posited by the late Harvard Professor Samuel Huntington, among others, that suggest that Mexican Americans won’t assimilate, making them perennial “others” who threaten American democracy. Another thing I like about this book is that it includes a chapter on Latinas and how media coverage of Latina fertility and sexuality plays into racist stereotyping.

Lee & Low, the book’s publisher, describes Shame the Stars as a YA Romeo & Juliet story. This piece of historical fiction is so much more.

It draws on true stories of how Texas Rangers lynched and pillaged Mexican Americans in South Texas. These are stories that my parents heard growing up in San Antonio, Texas, and that were often orally passed on in families, though not so often in the history books of that era.

This novel is on my list because it flips the camera angle on images of Mexican Americans in media, with characters taking to the printing press to assert their rights and tell their stories. One such journalist/protagonist is the father of the character Juliet/Dulceña, who illuminates the misdeeds of the Rangers in his news accounts.

Without giving too much away, I’ll merely hint that the book draws inspiration from the long overlooked crusading Mexican… show more.

During a period when Mexican American women were seen as having only three possible roles in life, either as hypersexualized figures, maids, or beauty queens, this stirring biography uncovers how one Latina, Adela Sloss-Vento, broke the mold.

She had only a high school education—and one belatedly received at that, but Sloss-Vento became a public intellectual and a vital, though hidden figure in the emerging Mexican American Civil Rights Movement. Reading this stimulating biography, I found it easy to see Sloss-Vento (1901-1998), sitting at her kitchen table writing spirited columns and letters in defense of Mexican Americans to English and Spanish Texas newspaper editors.

Though Mexican American women didn’t begin entering into mainstream journalism jobs in any sizeable numbers until the 1980s, Sloss-Vento’s story shows how at least one Latina beat back the barriers and made her own way into print.

Since John Hersey’s Hiroshima is my top book pick about the Hiroshima bombing, it makes sense that Fallout is another favorite.

Blume uses her journalistic talents to take the reader on a thrilling journey through the U.S. Government's attempts to cover up the horrific effects of the blast and its aftermath and the efforts to keep secret Hersey’s necessary article about Hiroshima right up to its publication.

Many believe the lessons in Hiroshima served as a deterrent that has kept the atomic warfare genie in its bottle for all these many years. Fallout tells the story of just how difficult it was to pull that off. Buckle up.

This is a book I wish I had written, far and away the best book about coverage of the Second World War in Europe. 

It is based on a wealth of archival research and features both celebrated reporters like Ernie Pyle and Edward R. Murrow, and less well-known ones like Homer Bigart and Don Whitehead. Although award-winning scholarship, Casey’s work is accessible to any curious reader. Casey is English but understands well the American military, the American press, and American culture generally.

Casey explores the war in the Pacific theater in a subsequent book, The War Beat, Pacific: The American Media at War Against Japan.

This is a now-classic essay that explores the ways mainstream news media (and subsequent academic studies) downplayed and/or misrepresented the revolutionary nature of the Spanish Civil War. Although the war began as a result of a failed military coup d’etat against a legally-elected republican government, it came to be seen simply as a battle between communists (identified with the government) and supporters of order (who were actually the fascist rebels!). Drawing parallels with the ways U.S. media represented the revolutionary forces in Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War, Chomsky makes clear just how significant that misrepresentation became—not just at the time, but in the continuing historiography of the Spanish Civil War.

This book was a lifesaver for me as I began to explore media-military relations about a decade ago.

Briefly but authoritatively Sweeney charts the relationship between the American military and the media from the Revolutionary War to the early twenty-first century. Sweeney, a former journalist himself, also writes well and this is a joy to read.

The subtitle suggests Sweeney’s take on the subject, and Sweeney’s work generally has been invaluable to me and this book would be the place to start for anyone interested in the subject.  

Moseley was the Chief European Correspondent for The Chicago Tribune for the last forty years of the twentieth century and although published by a university press is more a work of journalism than original scholarship. 

It is based largely on the memoirs of an extraordinary number of reporters, many American but many more not. The real virtue of this book is how wide-ranging it is, covering the entire war and reporters from all of the combatant countries.

Readers get a vivid sense of how World War II was just that—a war that raged across the globe. 

I first encountered Ed Kennedy while doing research in the AP archives and have spent the better part of a decade untangling what proved to be the biggest controversy over press coverage of the war—Kennedy’s scoop of the German surrender.

No American war correspondent was more experienced than Kennedy, who reported for the Associated Press from the Spanish Civil War until the end of World War II.

Given that Kennedy acted as an AP bureau chief in both North Africa and Paris, his memoir, written in the late 1940s but not published for sixty years, is the best insider account we have at how American reporters interacted with army public relations and censorship officials during the war.