100 Books Like Grand Avenues

Jill Lepore is a Swiss-Army-Knife historian, capable of tackling any topic in American history with verve. Here she offers a biography of Jane Franklin Mecom, best known as Benjamin Franklin's younger sister. Jane's life gives us a wonderful foil for "Benny," who arose from obscurity in Boston to the center of the American stage. Lepore keeps the dual narratives moving briskly along while also opening a window on how biographies are assembled.

Along the way, the reader finds recipes for making soap, an assortment of maxims from Poor Richard and Silence Dogood, family gossip and tragedies, Jane's reactions to rising Revolutionary violence, her fear of dementia in old age, and the idiosyncrasies of Benjamin Franklin's earliest biographers. The chatter between the siblings, on matters large and small, is captivating. Lepore has to fill in many gaps in the source material to complete the life of Jane Mecom, but the pleasure… show more.

Isenberg’s complete biography of the notorious Aaron Burr brings the reader beyond the typical villainous frame set by earlier historians. There are plenty of engrossing elements to Burr’s life, involving war, sex, political maneuvering, the famous duel with Alexander Hamilton, risky finance, and accusations of treason.

Isenberg tackles them all, while humanizing her ambitious, prickly subject. But I found the real value of the book is in its capacity to show more familiar founders, such as Hamilton, George Washington, and Thomas Jefferson, from very different angles.

There is useful biographical material here on Thomas Jefferson, but the subject is more properly the English translation of the Qur’an that Jefferson acquired as a law student in 1765. That copy is now housed in the Library of Congress, and around it, Denise Spellberg weaves a fascinating story of its figurative role in Jefferson’s thinking as a Revolutionary and as president.

Both John Adams and Jefferson dealt with significant foreign policy engagements with Muslim states. In addition to those geopolitical concerns, Jefferson’s Qur’an also speaks to essential questions on the place of Christianity in America’s founding documents and policies. I also enjoyed the opportunity to read into Jefferson’s mind through one of his books.

A book on George Washington must be on this list. We can ask for no better than Levy’s highly entertaining study of Washington through the lens of archaeological discoveries made at all the sites of importance connected to the man, from Virginia to Barbados to the Ohio Valley to Philadelphia.

Through these sites and new discoveries, we meet the man in unusual ways. And Levy strikes the perfect balance between guarded cynicism and awe. I loved the final chapter on the relevance of it all to our world today.

Townscape is more than a book on how good cities are shaped. It is a book that describes generic qualities of space.

Cullens's way of understanding and analyzing urban structures with pen and paper has much to tell future architects. That the book has been around for more than sixty years is a compelling evidence of its outstanding capacity to educate generation after generation on how to create richness and avoid chaos.

Urban planners of today have much to learn from Cullen’s simple, but efficient, drawings and captions. 

I loved this book. It is the biography of one of my favorite cities, tracing its trajectory from the 17th century to becoming the world’s first modern city. Jean Dejean points out the critical moves, the urban innovations, that were game changers, from the broad boulevards and the social life they supported to bridges over the Seine to the introduction of streetlights, making the city safer at night.

I was particularly taken by how, through these innovations, the city came to foster a vibrant social and civic life in a newly conceived public sphere, making Paris a model for how, through design, my profession, urban beauty, functionality, and culture could fuse to create one of the world’s great cities.  

Hazan knows every nook and cranny of his city. He exults in the buildings and architecture, but his main subject is the people who wove the fabric of its diverse communities and their histories. He takes us on a historical journey that passes from the salons of the old aristocracy to the artisanal districts where popular, revolutionary activism was born. Hazan makes no attempt to conceal his left-wing sympathies, but he is equally at home admiring the Art Nouveau gems of the well-heeled 16th arrondissement as he is enjoying the vibrant, ethnically diverse northern districts of the city. Hazan’s love of the human life of Paris shines through.

Public City/Public Sex offers a provocative foray into the dance halls, brothels, and even the public urinals of nineteenth-century Paris. By centering sexuality conceptually and geographically, Ross advances the novel argument that public sex constituted public culture in the capital city. Vividly illuminating how urban clandestine and public sexual encounters (between men and women, men and men, and to a lesser extent, women and women) necessitated a new form of civic management, Ross cleverly demonstrates the intricate, intimate ways in which sex was implicated in, and developed alongside, the modern city.

A warm inn, and a stranger’s tale gather together a group of travelers as they become fascinated by the story of three gifted children that is sweeping the land. I loved the way this book brought the story of the people in the inn and the marvelous children together step by step. Peppered with real historical figures and legends this book is a must-read for the middle-grade medieval enthusiast. 

The go-to book about voluntary homelessness, I always appreciate George Orwell’s amazing writing. It’s hard to put down.

The first half is about his time as a lowly kitchen assistant in the basement of a Parisian restaurant in the 1930s. The brutal divide between the rich and the destitute is better depicted here than in anything else I’ve ever read. The second half describes his time back in England and provides a heart-rending understanding of why homeless people are referred to as tramps and the ultimate emptiness of church-organized aid.

Although Orwell always had the option to opt out, his study of the lived experience of homelessness and the skill with which he captured it afterwards stand out as a colossus of the genre.