Books like Hard Times — picked by fans

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.

Amazing how a picture, published in 1948 in an American Magazine, of four children with a sign saying they were for sale can lead to a book.

I loved the way the writer used it to take me to the States of the forties and fifties with its different classes and its deep poverty. For me, being a journalist, part of the attraction of the book is that the story involves old-fashioned journalists and newspapers. And fake news of the worst kind, long before it became a daily occurrence.

I’d always assumed that the Dust Bowl in the 1930s was a natural disaster. Nope. The scouring dust storms that destroyed thousands of lives and millions of farms in five states didn’t have to happen. They were the predictable—and predicted!—result of short-sighted human decisions, such as the government handing tracts of formerly Indian land to white settlers to tear out the nourishing native grasses and plant wheat instead.

The human hand behind extreme weather might seem obvious to us now, but it was eye-opening for me in 2006 when I read this riveting nonfiction drama of families trapped in a living nightmare. I have never forgotten its impact or its lessons.

The author is a sociologist who rode the rails, on and off, alongside homeless youth in the early 1930s. He did not disguise himself or pretend to be “one of them.” Instead, he chronicled their stories in oral histories that are intimate and thorough depictions of how young men and women existed on the road, what was important to them, what they yearned for, how they protected themselves, and each other. As a sociologist and chronicler of groups within society, the author remained true to his obligations as an academic not to glorify, white-wash, or romanticize what he saw. As a result, the experiential dimensions of this book are incredibly robust and meaningful.

This is a classic oral history of jobs in what older people call “the good old days.”  It is told from the perspective of the individuals doing the jobs they were talking about, and it reveals how interesting their day-to-day experience is.

The reminder for today, especially in our remote workplaces, is how important relationships with people at work are to our happiness and well-being. It’s also a reminder of how important it is for people to have some control over what they do and to feel invested in their work.

People want to do things well and take pride in what they do. We forget all this when we think of workers as widgets to be optimized. 

Overbay grew up at the epicenter of Melungeon settlement in Hancock County, Tennessee. She attended the Vardy school, built for Melungeon children (who as descendants of “free people of color” weren’t allowed to attend public schools) by Presbyterian missionaries. This state-of-the-art school far surpassed in its facilities and offerings those of the local public schools, and it turned out several generations of accomplished young people. This book includes riveting oral histories about daily life in a Melungeon community and about the educational theories that inspired those who directed the school.

This book is a celebration of experiences, told not by Hollywood, not by “the rich and famous,” but by people who might live next door to you and me. Pulled together from the massive archives of the highly esteemed StoryCorps project and edited by its Founder—Dave Isay, this book is dedicated to the power of true stories told by ordinary Americans.

I love the sheer variety offered in this collection. I did not expect this book to be a page-turner, but each story held such unpredictability and emotional range that I simply could not put it down! The book is a rich reminder that once we establish the time and space to listen deeply, people will offer stories that unfold like stunning flowers on a time-lapse video.

In this follow-up to Typhoon Of War, we focus on Micronesians’ memories of World War II—the stories they tell, the songs they sing, and their recollections of those years of trauma and excitement. The book includes many personal stories and describes how Islanders think about the way years, and how they pass on those memories to the next generation. The book reveals much about how Islanders lived through bombing, forced labor, family separation, displacement, invasion, and other stresses of war. The poignant and evocative stories and songs showcase Micronesian cultural themes and verbal artistry.

The authors explore why and how personal narratives should be used as evidence (in my case, in history), and the methods and pitfalls of their use. The authors stress the importance of recognizing that stories that people tell about their lives are never simply individual. Rather, they are told in historically specific times and settings and call on rules, models, and social experiences that govern how story elements link together in the process of self-narration. Stories show how individuals' motivations, emotions, and imaginations have been shaped by their cumulative life experiences. This book reveals in simple, jargon-free prose the understanding that takes place between narrators of personal narratives and their audience and enriches the results immeasurably.

Although the English are among the largest immigrant groups contributing to the development of modern Canada, their story remained, for the most part, untold until the publication of this book in 2015. In this carefully researched work of popular history, Marilyn Barber and Murray Watson recount the personal experiences of English immigrants who elected to come to Canada between the 1940s and 1970s, England’s last major wave of emigration. Most of these postwar English immigrants thought they were going to a country whose language and culture would be familiar. Instead, like other immigrants, they contended with separation from loved ones back home while adapting to a new landscape and culture. Moreover, although they did not appear visibly different from their neighbours, these newcomers were immediately labelled “foreigners” as soon as they started to speak.