Here are 12 books that Contaminated Country fans have personally recommended if you like
Contaminated Country.
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Given how big an issue forced migration and political refugees are in our contemporary world, this novel is highly educational. While I knew that many people have been forced to flee their countries due to persecution, this semi-autobiographical story gave me new insight. It also gave me new respect for Britain's track record of accepting such immigrants despite the bureaucratic abuse the story entails. The central character is wonderfully complex. And I learned about so many things -- Islam; the history of Zanzibar; historic maritime trade along the east coast of Africa; and political and economic conditions in newly independent eastern Africa.
**By the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature 2021**
LONGLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE 2002
'One scarcely dares breathe while reading it for fear of breaking the enchantment' The Times _______________
On a late November afternoon Saleh Omar arrives at Gatwick Airport from Zanzibar, a far away island in the Indian Ocean. With him he has a small bag in which lies his most precious possession - a mahogany box containing incense. He used to own a furniture shop, have a house and be a husband and father. Now he is an asylum seeker from paradise; silence his only…
It is April 1st, 2038. Day 60 of China's blockade of the rebel island of Taiwan.
The US government has agreed to provide Taiwan with a weapons system so advanced that it can disrupt the balance of power in the region. But what pilot would be crazy enough to run…
This beautiful novel is rare in that -- while British imperial contexts are not unusual -- the early 20th century colonial Malaysia setting is strikingly different and absorbing. Not only is it a gripping read, the history and culture of British Penang are richly evoked -- from the social life to the urban and natural environments and the food. Tan Twan Eng has evidently conducted a good deal of historical research on both Somerset Maugham and Sun Yat Sen, who feature as major players based on their actual visits to Penang. Indeed, the author seems to have channelled Somerset Maugham in both the plot and in his writing style. I especially appreciated the feminist sensibility that shone through.
LONGLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE 2023 LONGLISTED FOR THE WALTER SCOTT PRIZE FOR HISTORICAL FICTION A SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER A FINANCIAL TIMES, NEW STATESMAN, NEW YORKER AND WASHINGTON POST BOOK OF THE YEAR
Willie Somerset Maugham is one of the greatest writers of the early twentieth century. But in 1921 he is beleaguered by an unhappy marriage, ill-health and business interests that have gone badly awry. He is also struggling to write.
His friend Robert Hamlyn offers an escape in the Straits Settlements of Penang, where Robert's steely wife Lesley learns to see Willie as he is - a man…
The natural world has been my solace and passion for my entire life. I also suffer from an insatiable curiosity as to how it came to be. While I am fascinated by natural history, my deficient math and analytical skills precluded a career in science, and so I turned to environmental history to explore how humans and nature have interacted over time.
While I’ve always known about John Muir, this book explores how he was a product of his evangelical Christian upbringing, and while Muir rejected much of that, he channeled his religious fervor into protecting nature. This is something that I never really thought about—how our background culture can have such a profound influence.
Donald Worster's A Passion for Nature is the most complete account of the great conservationist and founder of the Sierra Club ever written. It is the first to be based on Muir's full private correspondence and to meet modern scholarly standards, yet it is also full of rich detail and personal anecdote, uncovering the complex inner life behind the legend of the solitary mountain man. It traces Muir from his boyhood in Scotland and frontier Wisconsin to his adult life in California right after the Civil War up to his death on the eve of World War I. It explores…
A Duke with rigid opinions, a Lady whose beliefs conflict with his, a long disputed parcel of land, a conniving neighbour, a desperate collaboration, a failure of trust, a love found despite it all.
Alexander Cavendish, Duke of Ravensworth, returned from war to find that his father and brother had…
Monuments and memorials pepper our public landscape. Many walk right by them, uncurious about who or what’s being honored. I can’t. I’m a historian. I’m driven to learn the substance of the American past, but I also want to know how history itself is constructed, not just by professionals but by common people. I’m fascinated by how “public memory” is interpreted and advanced through monuments. I often love the artistry of these memorial features, but they’re not mere decoration; they mutely speak, saying simple things meant to be conclusive. But as times change previous conclusions can unravel. I’ve long been intrigued by this phenomenon, writing and teaching about it for thirty years.
I was transfixed by Kelman’s story, masterfully, sympathetically narrated. It’s populated by few monuments, and the one squatting at the Sand Creek Massacre National Historic Site is modest and understated. Here even the place of those dark events was in dispute.
Blending history with a gripping account of the struggle over public memory, and centering Native people, Kelman chronicles the modern search for the site (and meaning) of one of the most gruesome acts of government violence in American history, at Sand Creek, where U.S. troops slaughtered more than 150 peaceful Southern Cheyenne and Arapaho campers (mostly women and children) in November 1864.
The Colorado Pioneer Association commemorated (and glorified) the sordid event in 1909 with a Denver monument cataloging Sand Creek as a Civil War battle. But a search for truth and reconciliation would challenge and remake this public memory, and Kelman is an unrivaled guide in that process.
In the early morning of November 29, 1864, with the fate of the Union still uncertain, part of the First Colorado and nearly all of the Third Colorado volunteer regiments, commanded by Colonel John Chivington, surprised hundreds of Cheyenne and Arapaho people camped on the banks of Sand Creek in southeastern Colorado Territory. More than 150 Native Americans were slaughtered, the vast majority of them women, children, and the elderly, making it one of the most infamous cases of state-sponsored violence in U.S. history. A Misplaced Massacre examines the ways in which generations of Americans have struggled to come to…
I grew up a farm kid and then worked as a park ranger fresh out of college. This background draws me to the history of American preservation, where so much that seems natural also has deep cultural roots. I find the American South—with its combination of irony and tragedy, beauty, and flaws—the most fascinating place on earth to study. Or maybe I’m just pulling for the home team.
An acclaimed historian of the Civil War, Nelson’s newest book connects the nation’s Reconstruction struggles with its impulse to set aside dramatic western landscapes as national parks. The compelling narrative follows not only western scientist-adventurers like Ferdinand Hayden, but also weaves the preservation of Yellowstone into the Indian Wars and the violence against freedpeople in the American South. At a time when Americans sought healing in the aftermath of a divisive war, they turned to magnificent western landscapes like Yellowstone, only to find they were also contested ground.
From historian and critically acclaimed author of The Three-Cornered War comes the captivating story of how Yellowstone became the world’s first national park in the years after the Civil War, offering “a fresh, provocative study…departing from well-trodden narratives about conservation and public recreation” (Booklist, starred review).
Each year nearly four million people visit Yellowstone National Park—one of the most popular of all national parks—but few know the fascinating and complex historical context in which it was established. In late July 1871, the geologist-explorer Ferdinand Hayden led a team of scientists through a narrow canyon into Yellowstone Basin, entering one of…
I grew up a farm kid and then worked as a park ranger fresh out of college. This background draws me to the history of American preservation, where so much that seems natural also has deep cultural roots. I find the American South—with its combination of irony and tragedy, beauty, and flaws—the most fascinating place on earth to study. Or maybe I’m just pulling for the home team.
This history of Providence Canyon in southwestern Georgia explores a seemingly ironic state park: one dedicated to preserving a network of massive erosion gullies formed by poor cotton farming. But Providence Canyon is so much more than ironic, as this book beautifully illustrates. Yes, improvident farming harmed the land—as was the case across much of the South—but the spectacular gullies of Stewart County came from the intersection of human abuse and terrifyingly fragile soil structures. And they are somehow sublimely beautiful, despite their grim past. The park is perhaps the perfect place to witness the way in which human and natural actions are always tied together. Come for the gullies, stay for the lessons!
Providence Canyon State Park, also known as Georgia's "Little Grand Canyon," preserves a network of massive erosion gullies allegedly caused by poor farming practices during the nineteenth century. It is a park that protects the scenic results of an environmental disaster. While little known today, Providence Canyon enjoyed a modicum of fame in the 1930s. During that decade, local boosters attempted to have Providence Canyon protected as a national park, insisting that it was natural. At the same time, national and international soil experts and other environmental reformers used Providence Canyon as the apotheosis of human, and particularly southern, land…
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…
As a kid I loved visiting the local history museum, wandering through the dusty displays of taxidermy buffalo and medieval helmets. I enjoyed the creepy feeling I’d get when I stood next to the wax figures and looked at their frozen faces and not-quite-right hair. As I grew older, I became more interested in seeking out weird and unusual history, and it became a passion throughout my teenage years and into adulthood. Now, I’m able to combine my love of the creepy and occult with historical research. I teach U.S. history at SUNY Brockport, I co-produced Dig: A History Podcast, and I am the co-author of my new book (below).
I really love this book because I have been known to go on a “haunted” history tour now and again and I love a good ghost story. However, I realize that sometimes the true stories from our past are more scary than the fantastic ones.
This book particularly hit home because it covers quite a few ghost stories from New Orleans that I am very familiar with. However, those “spooky” ghost stories become truly frightening when contextualized by Miles.
In this book Tiya Miles explores the popular yet troubling phenomenon of ""ghost tours,"" frequently promoted and experienced at plantations, urban manor homes, and cemeteries throughout the South. As a staple of the tours, guides entertain paying customers by routinely relying on stories of enslaved black specters. But who are these ghosts? Examining popular sites and stories from these tours, Miles shows that haunted tales routinely appropriate and skew African American history to produce representations of slavery for commercial gain. ""Dark tourism"" often highlights the most sensationalist and macabre aspects of slavery, from salacious sexual ties between white masters and…
I’ve been fascinated by the park for years, ever since I started visiting it daily to do shinrin-yoku, or Japanese “forest-bathing,” there. I wanted to learn everything about it through first-hand experiences, through guides on its flora and fauna, and through historical sources. The park is the heart of Manhattan, and I wanted to learn what makes it beat. After living, breathing, and studying the park for a good long while, the diary I had started taking on my experiences there eventually grew into a book-length poem about it. That book would never have happened without inspiration from and the information in the books on this list.
This book grounded my knowledge of the park in the lives that have interacted with it for the past 175 years.
Blackmar and Rosenzweig dig deep into the people behind the creation of the park—the businessmen who spearheaded the project; the immigrant and African-American property-owners displaced through eminent domain; the politicians and artists who worked together on its design; the German and Irish laborers who built it; the New Yorkers to whom Central Park has been a refuge; and the tourists to whom it is a marvel.
Those personal histories have stayed with me and become as much a part of the park for me as the flora and fauna.
This "exemplary social history" (Kirkus Reviews) is the first full-scale account of Central Park ever published. Elizabeth Blackmar and Roy Rosenzweig tell the story of Central Park's people-the merchants and landowners who launched the project; the immigrant and African-American residents who were displaced by the park; the politicians, gentlemen, and artists who disputed its design and operation; the German gardeners, Irish laborers, and Yankee engineers who built it; and the generations of New Yorkers for whom Central Park was their only backyard. In tracing the park's history, Blackmar and Rosenzweig give us the history of New York, and bring to…
I grew up in rural Virginia on farms and in the forests where we used fire as a tool, and I loved it. In college, I become a wildland firefighter and squad boss for the US Forest Service, as well as “studying” the topic to augment my practical experience. This followed me into my current academic career that now includes research and teaching in several areas of wildland fire science and management: fire history and ecology, fuels management, ecological restoration, prescribed fire, and post-fire recovery and land management. My career now spans the timeline and societal change covered in several of these books, and I yearn to see a transition.
I found this book amazing in how it blends the story of a singular (historic) fire conflagration in 1910 with the formulation of land management practices and wildfire suppression policies that, in many ways, remain at the heart of the US Forest Service mission today.
I enjoyed this historian’s interweaving of those tales, including his take on the personal relationship between Gifford Pinchot, a wealthy conservationist and father of forestry in the United States, and President Teddy Roosevelt. I use the book as an assignment in one of my classes since it has plenty of narrative and action to keep college-level readers engaged while providing perspective on forest management and wildfire policy.
On the afternoon of August 20, 1910, a battering ram of wind moved through the drought-stricken national forests of Washington, Idaho, and Montana, whipping the hundreds of small blazes burning across the forest floor into a roaring inferno. Forest rangers had assembled nearly ten thousand men - college boys, day workers, immigrants from mining camps - to fight the fire. But no living person had seen anything like those flames, and neither the rangers nor anyone else knew how to subdue them. Egan narrates the struggles of the overmatched rangers against the implacable fire with unstoppable dramatic force. Equally dramatic…
This book follows the journey of a writer in search of wisdom as he narrates encounters with 12 distinguished American men over 80, including Paul Volcker, the former head of the Federal Reserve, and Denton Cooley, the world’s most famous heart surgeon.
In these and other intimate conversations, the book…
The natural world has been my solace and passion for my entire life. I also suffer from an insatiable curiosity as to how it came to be. While I am fascinated by natural history, my deficient math and analytical skills precluded a career in science, and so I turned to environmental history to explore how humans and nature have interacted over time.
This short book completely changed how I think about nature and our place in it. This book provides a new framework for thinking about how modern Americans might be able to work with the natural world instead of against it. I also loved the concise but thought-provoking insights that Richard White provides.
The Hill and Wang Critical Issues Series: concise, affordable works on pivotal topics in American history, society, and politics.
In this pioneering study, White explores the relationship between the natural history of the Columbia River and the human history of the Pacific Northwest for both whites and Native Americans. He concentrates on what brings humans and the river together: not only the physical space of the region but also, and primarily, energy and work. For working with the river has been central to Pacific Northwesterners' competing ways of life. It is in this way that White comes to view the…
