Books like Girls Don't — picked by fans

What if you got hit by lightning? What if the lightning came from inside your body? What if you are such an obsessive writer and researcher that you then had to trace the supply chain of the failed medical device that did that to you?

KS does body writing as a research quest, taking her battered heart back and forth across the Atlantic in pursuit of answers to the question of what, exactly, she’d been carrying around in it. The sense of vulnerability—medical, economic, and otherwise—that she creates within the narrative is so felt that I couldn’t shake it when I was done reading.

As a woman, I have experienced my share of sexism but it dims in comparison to what Lester faced in the 1950s and 1960s. When applying for a job at a bookstore, a young Lester is told the store can’t hire girls because they only have one toilet. Her plucky response—she could use the same toilet as the men—is one reason I enjoyed this book so much. 

Lester is repeatedly pushed to the sidelines even as she takes up the fight for civil rights, devoting herself to bettering the lives of others while setting aside her own dreams—for a time. Luckily Lester never completely loses her nerve. Her second act is a fun adventure to follow for those who have faced their own setbacks, no matter their gender.

I have a fascination with countries that don’t fully exist and have visited a few myself. So when I learned that Chude-Sokei was from a country that really no longer exists, I was hooked. The country in question was not one I recognized. Biafra was a short-lived African state that declared independence from Nigeria in 1967. 

What kept me reading the book though was the humor Chude-Sokei uses to describe his unique situation as the “first son of the first son” of a leader of a country that was “killed” in 1970, as his mother puts it. Chude-Sokei’s tales of growing up an African in Jamaica followed by his yearning to become a Black American in Inglewood, Los Angeles will resonate with anyone who ever struggled with their identity.

When I was 10 I disappeared from my life for a while. I left school, home, and my family to live in a hospital for several months. This break in my own childhood narrative is what got me into the Busby story. Cylin Busby was nine years old when her dad, John, a police officer, was shot. Her father survives, but the family is forced to disappear for their own protection. 

While the book is written by a father and daughter, it is Cylin’s young nine-year-old voice that pulled me in, reminding me what it is like to be a child and powerless as the world around you falls apart. That sounds dark, but children have a way of finding hope. This story has a happy(ish) ending.

This riveting memoir will take you into the world of a young non-communist nationalist, Nguyen Cong Luan, whose father joined Ho Chi Minh in 1945 to fight the French colonialists despite distrusting Ho’s communist core.

Luan’s father dies in a communist prison shortly thereafter, leaving his son to grow up largely on his own in dangerous areas contested by the French, the communists, and the non-communists. What makes Luan’s account so eye-opening is that he shows that the communists led by Ho Chi Minh were not the only nationalists to fight during some thirty years of war. The non-communists did, too, as his own journey into adulthood and the army of South Vietnam reveals.

At a deeper level, Nguyen Cong Luan reminds us that though the struggle for Vietnam was a French and American one, at its core, it was a civil war among the Vietnamese. 

The Vietnam War cannot be understood without understanding two opposing groups of historians of it: the orthodox and the revisionist. This is the most concise, balanced, and objective analysis of those contradictory versions of the war. The leftist version is an anti-war, anti-U.S. military, anti-South Vietnamese government interpretation that sees the war as unwinnable and morally shameful U.S. imperialism. It rejects all revisionist arguments to the contrary, such as the difference between the U.S. political failure in America and the U.S. military success in Vietnam, as "conservative counterfactual speculation".

Elaine Shepard wrote Doom Pussy in 1967 and explained in her introduction that only the pilots who flew on missions at night to North Vietnam were entitled to wear the Doom Pussy patch on their left shoulders. On the patch was a cat with an eye patch eating an airplane, and in Vietnamese were the words “Trong miệng của con mèo của định mạng” and literally translated means, “I have flown into the jaws of the cat of death.” Most American fliers just said, “I have seen the Doom Pussy.” This was another one of those amazing stories about a woman that competes with distinction in what was then considered a man’s world, journalism. She flew into combat on a Huey slick with Lieutenant Colonel Chuck Honour. Col. Honour was killed three months after Ms. Shepard flew with him. She has chronicled her exploits and those of the pilots she… show more.

As a Vietnam veteran, teacher of war literature, and writer, I am disappointed that I never interviewed Michael Herr. I can only imagine what such an encounter might have been like with this larger-than-life figure, at least the persona (adrenaline junky, reporter on drugs) found in this fragmented collection of war reportage. With its New Journalistic style and content, the sensory-overload writing might be best described as a collection of literary illumination rounds (their underlying message—war is hell and addictive). As a freelance journalist, Herr arrived in Vietnam wanting to reveal the large ugly truths about the war, which he succeeds in doing, but I find the soldiers’ personal war stories more gripping and truthful. For me and even Herr, the real surprise is that this book ultimately chronicles the author’s own war story of innocence lost: the anti-war reporter becomes just as addicted to war as some of his… show more.

As a child, I lived in abject poverty on a little farm in northern Minnesota. By ten years old I was trapping raccoons and shooting squirrels to help put food on our table. When I was in Vietnam, I felt a deep empathy for the Vietnamese fishermen and farmers who lived in poverty complicated by the vicious war. Years later when I began reading Dang Thuy Tram’s diary, I couldn’t put it down. The loss and waste and love for her comrades struck close to home and made me feel guilty for my participation in the war. In her writing, Dang brings to life so many of her Vietnamese comrades who were killed—making one stop to consider the cost of war. In a way the book reminds me of All Quiet on the Western Front written by a German soldier—the loss and waste.

This short book depicts the actions of Vietnamese Marine Corps Advisor, John Ripley, and his heroic actions to stop the onslaught of the NVA tank invasion during the 1972 Easter Offensive. It provides a shining example of how one person can affect the outcome of a battle and to never, ever give up.