100 Books Like Crabgrass Frontier

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.

This eye-opening book was a revelation to me as a young student of architecture. It provided the keys to how cities really work. Its observations are as relevant and fresh today as they were when it was published in 1961. For me and many in my generation, it helped us to see and appreciate the organic, human-centered dynamics of neighborhoods, introducing the powerful concept of “organized complexity,” which made sense of things we saw but failed to understand.

I met Jane in Toronto in 1968 where she became a lifelong friend and mentor until her death in 2006. It remains a foundational text for me in understanding urban life and my life’s work. 

This is the first of four book recommendations that may not be as inspirational as The Grapes of Wrath, but which make up for that by providing real-world information that can be useful to people trying to improve our world. This book shows how fresh thinking about economics can help solve some of the world’s most intractable problems. Innovative research, careful observation, and plain common sense enable these two Nobel Prize-winning MIT economists to upend a lot of conventional wisdom and develop interesting and compelling policy proposals, which they discuss in a particularly accessible way.

I believe education (what economists call “human capital”) is the key to a more productive, equitable, and happier society. After all, many rich nations, like Switzerland, Japan, and Israel, have almost no natural resources but do have well-educated populations, and many poor nations, like the Congo, Venezuela, and Nigeria, have extremely valuable natural resources but do not have well-educated populations. Therefore, I am concerned about the state of education in America and am particularly troubled that our best universities may not be achieving as much for our society as they could. This book is a searing critique of their role and makes the case that we should expect so much more from them, given their huge resources.

A stunning novel that represents the true beating heart of Australia I grew up with cultures that represent all the different waves of migration in Australia.

Divaroren has created such distinct voices for each of her characters which is a feat as each perspective is written in first person, from seven-year-old Sam who is terrorised by his father, to 70-year-old Mr. Bailey who is a Vietnam vet and struggling with the changing face of Australia.

I fell in love with the characters and loved that there was so much reality and heart, but most importantly hope in this beautiful novel that celebrates multiculturalism and belonging. 

This book is engaging because it shows how the base of the Democratic party has changed since Franklin Roosevelt first assembled the New Deal political coalition in the 1930s. 

Today, it is increasingly the party of college-educated suburban voters and reflects their cultural and political priorities. From the Great Depression until the 1960s, however, working-class urban voters formed the heart of the party. Geismer uses metropolitan Boston as a template to depict this important transition, which helped produce suburban candidates such as Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis, whose political career emerged from and was shaped by his life in Brookline, MA.  

I love a book rich with flawed characters; this one is full of them. Perrotta’s peek into the mundane life of a stay-at-home mother at war with her lot in life is delicious. Sarah once coined herself a feminist, and now, she’s wiping noses. It’s a struggle many mothers of little children face, and while most don’t go to the lengths Perrotta’s characters explore, it’s a valiant example of losing oneself for the sake of a higher calling: motherhood. 

I first read this book at graduate school, with two babies at home. Perrotta taught me that exploring the human condition is necessary for connecting with readers. I’ve received many letters from readers citing that they connected with Veronica on the pages of Trespassing, and that’s the best accolade.

Alice, Corvus, and Annabel, children without mothers, traverse air-conditioned buildings and desert landscapes, strewn with symbols and signs of mortality—from the preservation of those teetering on the brink of death at a nursing home to a wildlife museum full of taxidermies; and these teenagers are orbited by agitated, confused adults who seem wholly unaware of the strangeness—and messages—defining their lives. Joy Williams is a master at dark humor in literary fiction, and The Quick and the Dead is one of her finest achievements.

Lassiter presents a nuanced examination of how social and political conflicts in Richmond, Atlanta, and Charlotte during enabled Richard Nixon and other Republicans to resurrect the GOP from its 1964 electoral disaster through reliance, not on a “southern strategy,” as many pundits have long claimed, but rather on a suburban strategy that involved the complex interplay of race, class, and other factors. 

The messages that enabled the GOP to gain traction in the suburban South, Lassiter emphasizes, worked across the nation. The South was not as different as many observers have long claimed. Lassiter also chronicles how these conflicts reshaped the Democratic Party in the South, as by the early 1970s more moderate figures such Jimmy Carter had supplanted the staunch segregationists of decades past.

I love smart thrillers like The Practice of Deceit—thrillers that keep me turning the pages even if my alarm is going off early the next morning; thrillers that don’t rely on violence to propel the story forward but rather on interesting, richly drawn, complex characters who are not portrayed in black and white.

Charming bachelor Eric Lavender, a psychotherapist, falls for Colleen O’Brien Golden, a lawyer, but when a conflict of interest with Colleen’s client implodes Eric’s idyllic suburban life as a husband and father to an adorable stepdaughter and a newborn, he learns the dark truth about Colleen’s past. Eric’s flaw is, to me, the one that makes a character most sympathetic—being blinded by love and desire. I love that this book is in the male point of view, and it’s done so well that when Colleen tries to destroy Eric, it is a gut punch.