9 Books Like Devil Makes Three

The contrast between the serene, almost stately structure of its sentences and paragraphs and its short chapters kept me engaged, and both undercut and bolstered the sentiment and complexity of its subject matter.

While the team of scientists assembled by J. Robert Oppenheimer races to create the atom bomb at Los Alamos, their families find themselves in a sequestered world in the desert, cut off from everyone and everything they know. Vromen invents a brilliant cast of wives, teenage girls, technicians and physicists, who we come to love. The nature of their husbands’ work is strictly secret. Family life outside the labs is intense and conflicted, a world simmering and bubbling as it threatens to boil over. Even casual correspondence is so heavily censored that family members can barely communicate with friends and relatives back home. Oppenheimer and his team members are portrayed with compassion and wit, as all of Vromen’s characters battle their demons while the world is reinvented.

His first novel, There There, made a strong impression on me. This one is more powerful still. Even if you have learned about the Sand Creek Massacre, the forced assimilation of Native Americans including the horrors at Indian boarding schools, and even if you’re familiar with the concept of intergenerational trauma, such “knowledge” hardly prepares you for the emotional wallop of this novel.

Orange offers vitally alive characters, starting with 19th-century Cheyenne survivor Jude Star and continuing to his present day descendants of the Red Feather/Bear Shield families as they persist through disaster, resilience, joy, and bafflement.

Through the author’s language and vision the reader can recognize the wounds of culture loss and dislocation while the characters themselves often struggle to understand where the hurt lies. Orange illuminates what could be abstract concepts, like identity, but his poetic prose and in-depth characterizations make the book sing and breathe.

One nonfiction book makes my list because Markham’s work moved me while giving me so much to think about. Here in the US, immigration and asylum are among the most contentious issues. This book offers another perspective – sometimes familiar, sometimes less so - by moving the debate to Greece.
Markham not only reports on how residents on the island of Lesbos have responded to migrants (and the miscarriage of justice after a deadly fire) but also about how her heritage as the granddaughter of Greek immigrants to the US is a significant part of her identity.
What was amazing to me here was how her own emotions and experiences lead to a meditation on national and personal identity. For example, how the image of Greece has been constructed by English speakers valorizing Ancient Greece and how this image has been embraced by the present day nation and the West… show more.

A superb and gripping account of the hold that American Football has over a small town in the USA. In telling the story of a season, Bissinger captures the glory, tragedy, and futility of sport, and its connection to racial politics, ambition, local rivalries, and a passionate fan base. Led to a brilliant TV series. Elegiac and path-breaking.

I read this book nearly every year, and I also assign it to my novel-writing students. Reading it (even for the fifth time), you feel your heart grow.

It’s a novel about football and war—my two least favorite subjects—and yet Billy and his soldier cohort of brave and vulnerable goofs got into my heart.

They are so out of their league, being paraded around as heroes at a Dallas Cowboys football game on Thanksgiving Day, and they are trying their best while observing some deeply disturbing things about the country they are risking their lives to defend. 

I originally read this as research for my own novel and I’m so glad I did. Not all of it is about scandal, in fact my favorite parts highlighted how sports can be used to bring out the best in us. In fact, that’s what sports did for me. I loved that it also sheds light on the machinations we don’t see that are used to drive the sport. And, yes, I was horrified by some of the stories: horrified by the sexual assaults and furthermore by the rationalizations and the coverups. The feeling I had reading The System: we all want to dress ourselves in virtue, but all we really want is to win and for some, there is no price that’s too high.

I’m conflicted, two of my three kids went to Florida State and this book holds nothing back about the crimes and sins that have taken place at FSU. I felt like I was witness to a crime scene; the crimes were academic, cultural, and truly criminal. I completely believe that our higher education system is critical to our country, yet what takes place at these schools is an outrage. This is a book written by a talented journalist who took me on an objective tour of the hypocrisy we are willing to allow for our tribe to dominate.

Back to fiction. I loved how everyone, including the adorable young woman from a hardscrabble background, Charlotte, took their own big bite of hypocrisy pie. Everyone, except for one character, did it and I’m not going to spoil it for you (it was the star basketball player.) I think I’ve read everything Tom Wolfe had ever written and this is his finest work. This novel took me on a ride, I was there, the emotions I felt reading it were visceral and real. At the end, the feeling I had was—what the hell is college all about? And then I answered myself: it’s four years of summer camp and I can’t wait until my youngest graduates.