Here are 100 books that Love and Theft fans have personally recommended if you like
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I am a former network television executive who is fascinated by the history of mass media and have authored or co-authored nine books and many articles on the subject. These include The Complete Directory to Primetime Network and Cable TV Shows, 1946-Present and Lost Sounds: Blacks and the Birth of the Recording Industry, 1890-1919. I’m particularly drawn to subjects that are underexplored, or which seem to be greatly misunderstood today. I quickly learned that you are not likely to earn a living from writing, so I decided to write about subjects I cared about, and hopefully add something to our knowledge of cultural history. I became more aware of what the professional minstrel show was really like while researching Lost Sounds, based on original accounts, recordings, and films.
A unique and insightful look at how three groups fought back against their widespread stereotyping in the media of the early 20th century, and how two of them largely succeeded in changing these portrayals. The reasons why African-Americans were much less successful than Irish and Jews in fighting stereotypes are complex and fascinating, and hold lessons for us today.
A drunken Irish maid slips and falls. A greedy Jewish pawnbroker lures his female employee into prostitution. An African American man leers at a white woman. These and other, similar images appeared widely on stages and screens across America during the early twentieth century. In this provocative study, M. Alison Kibler uncovers, for the first time, powerful and concurrent campaigns by Irish, Jewish and African Americans against racial ridicule in popular culture at the turn of the twentieth century. Censoring Racial Ridicule explores how Irish, Jewish, and African American groups of the era resisted harmful representations in popular culture by…
A moving story of love, betrayal, and the enduring power of hope in the face of darkness.
German pianist Hedda Schlagel's world collapsed when her fiancé, Fritz, vanished after being sent to an enemy alien camp in the United States during the Great War. Fifteen years later, in 1932, Hedda…
I am a former network television executive who is fascinated by the history of mass media and have authored or co-authored nine books and many articles on the subject. These include The Complete Directory to Primetime Network and Cable TV Shows, 1946-Present and Lost Sounds: Blacks and the Birth of the Recording Industry, 1890-1919. I’m particularly drawn to subjects that are underexplored, or which seem to be greatly misunderstood today. I quickly learned that you are not likely to earn a living from writing, so I decided to write about subjects I cared about, and hopefully add something to our knowledge of cultural history. I became more aware of what the professional minstrel show was really like while researching Lost Sounds, based on original accounts, recordings, and films.
Published almost half a century ago (1974), but still the best introduction to the minstrel show as it emerged in America in the 1840s. Describes the various elements of a minstrel show, how it was originally received, and how it materially evolved in the late 1800s, but stops at the end of the century. A good, readable overview of this highly popular form of entertainment as it was originally performed on stage.
I am a former network television executive who is fascinated by the history of mass media and have authored or co-authored nine books and many articles on the subject. These include The Complete Directory to Primetime Network and Cable TV Shows, 1946-Present and Lost Sounds: Blacks and the Birth of the Recording Industry, 1890-1919. I’m particularly drawn to subjects that are underexplored, or which seem to be greatly misunderstood today. I quickly learned that you are not likely to earn a living from writing, so I decided to write about subjects I cared about, and hopefully add something to our knowledge of cultural history. I became more aware of what the professional minstrel show was really like while researching Lost Sounds, based on original accounts, recordings, and films.
Americans and Brits alike will be amazed to learn how pervasive the minstrel show was in Britain in both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Originally experienced as an import, Britain developed its own minstrel troupes and stars and continued to embrace the format long after it was deemed unacceptable in the U.S.A. BBC television’s highly popular Black and White Minstrel Show lasted—are you ready for this?—until 1978. The troupe even performed for the royal family at the annual Royal Variety Charity Performances, although modern editors have tried to scrub that fact from the historical record.
Blackface minstrelsy is associated particularly with popular culture in the United States and Britain, yet despite the continual two-way flow of performers, troupes and companies across the Atlantic, there is little in Britain to match the scholarship of blackface studies in the States. This book concentrates on the distinctively British trajectory of minstrelsy. The historical study and cultural analysis of minstrelsy is important because of the significant role it played in Britain as a form of song, music and theatrical entertainment. Minstrelsy had a marked impact on popular music, dance and other aspects of popular culture, both in Britain and…
Delve into this internationally best-selling series, now complete! A fast paced laugh-out-loud mix of Urban Fantasy and Mystery.
I can tell when you’re lying. Every. Single. Time. I’m Jinx, a PI hired to find a missing university student, I hope to find her propped up at a bar–yet my gut…
I am a former network television executive who is fascinated by the history of mass media and have authored or co-authored nine books and many articles on the subject. These include The Complete Directory to Primetime Network and Cable TV Shows, 1946-Present and Lost Sounds: Blacks and the Birth of the Recording Industry, 1890-1919. I’m particularly drawn to subjects that are underexplored, or which seem to be greatly misunderstood today. I quickly learned that you are not likely to earn a living from writing, so I decided to write about subjects I cared about, and hopefully add something to our knowledge of cultural history. I became more aware of what the professional minstrel show was really like while researching Lost Sounds, based on original accounts, recordings, and films.
A collection of essays by leading scholars in the field exploring various aspects of the minstrel show in the 1800s, including its portrayal of women, social commentary, its music, and the prominent participation of African-Americans who staged their own minstrel shows. Good, concise treatment of many elements of the genre.
As the blackface minstrel show evolved from its beginnings in the American Revolution to its peak during the late 1800s, its frenetic dances, low-brow humor, and lively music provided more than mere entertainment. Indeed, these imitations and parodies shaped society's perceptions of African Americans-and of women-as well as made their mark on national identity, policymaking decisions, and other entertainment forms such as vaudeville, burlesque, the revue, and, eventually, film, radio, and television. Gathered here are rare primary materials-including firsthand accounts of minstrel shows, minstrelsy guides, jokes, sketches, and sheet music-and the best of contemporary scholarship on minstrelsy.
Life well-being has many domains beyond finances, including family, friends, health, work, education, religion, and more. I know that financial well-being is necessary for life well being but it is not sufficient. Our older daughter lives with bipolar illness. Our life well-being was decimated years ago when my daughter’s illness was diagnosed. But we’ve learned to alleviate well-being injuries in one domain from well-being medicine from the same domain and from other domains. Our younger daughter loves her sister and cares for her, and our ample finances domain lets us support our older daughter without constraining our own budget.
Members of the elite are different from the members of the working class in terms of college degrees and high incomes. I am a member of the elite. Marianne Cooper’s book helped me understand the lives of members of the working class as it places their financial and life well-being next to those of the elite.
Family is central to the life well-being of the working class. A working-class woman described her grandmother to her children as a woman who worked hard her whole life, and when she was old, she lived with her daughter and got a small amount of money from Social Security. But she would give the grandkids little amounts of money and say, “Here’s a little bit of Gran to take with you.”
In contrast, Cooper quotes the sad words of a child in an elite family whose father, a college graduate, earns high income as…
Cut Adrift makes an important and original contribution to the national conversation about inequality and risk in American society. Set against the backdrop of rising economic insecurity and rolled-up safety nets, Marianne Cooper's probing analysis explores what keeps Americans up at night. Through poignant case studies, she reveals what families are concerned about, how they manage their anxiety, whose job it is to worry, and how social class shapes all of these dynamics, including what is even worth worrying about in the first place. This powerful study is packed with intriguing discoveries ranging from the surprising anxieties of the rich…
Though I was born in the U.S., I didn’t wind up living here full-time till I was almost 10. The result? I have always been curious about what it means to be an American. In one way or another, the books on my list explore that question. More than that, all (well, nearly all) insist that black history is inextricably intertwined with American history and that American culture is a mulatto culture, a fusion of black and white. After years of making my living as a journalist, editor, and book reviewer, I left newspapers to write fiction and non-fiction, exploring these and other questions.
I still remember reading James Alan McPherson’s book for the first time. I was a senior in high school, one of a handful of black students in what had been an all-white private school. I closed the book, thinking, “Finally. Somebody understands.”
Like me, McPherson had gone from an all-black school, college in his case, to a majority-white school, in his case, Harvard Law. He began to write fiction there. It was the mid-1960s, but instead of hewing to familiar tropes of the time, black student unrest, black self-segregation, and black victimhood, McPherson cast an unflinching eye on blacks and whites interacting for the first time as equals.
He also depicted blacks in their own world lovingly but without sentimentality. I knew these people. McPherson taught me to see and appreciate them afresh.
The classic debut collection from Pulitzer Prize winner James Alan McPherson
Hue and Cry is the remarkably mature and agile debut story collection from James Alan McPherson, one of America’s most venerated and most original writers. McPherson’s characters -- gritty, authentic, and pristinely rendered -- give voice to unheard struggles along the dividing lines of race and poverty in subtle, fluid prose that bears no trace of sentimentality, agenda, or apology.
First published in 1968, this collection includes the Atlantic Prize-winning story “Gold Coast” (selected by John Updike for the collection Best American Short Stories of the Century). Now with…
On the morning of December 26, 2004, an undersea earthquake struck off the coast of Sumatra in the Indian Ocean. The resulting tsunami killed an estimated 230,000 people across fourteen countries, from Indonesia to Sri Lanka to Thailand to the Maldives to India and all the way to East Africa.…
As a kid I loved visiting the local history museum, wandering through the dusty displays of taxidermy buffalo and medieval helmets. I enjoyed the creepy feeling I’d get when I stood next to the wax figures and looked at their frozen faces and not-quite-right hair. As I grew older, I became more interested in seeking out weird and unusual history, and it became a passion throughout my teenage years and into adulthood. Now, I’m able to combine my love of the creepy and occult with historical research. I teach U.S. history at SUNY Brockport, I co-produced Dig: A History Podcast, and I am the co-author of my new book (below).
This book wrecked me; it’s such a deep dive into the lives of the woman brutally murdered by Jack the Ripper. Rubenhold reconstructs their lives with great empathy, bringing them to the forefront of the story. The five were real women who felt love, pain, and hope—not faceless victims of sensationalized murder.
These women are often portrayed as “five prostitutes” in pop culture, but Rubenhold shows that there is no evidence of sex work for most of the women. This book pulls back the curtain on the tension, violence, poverty, and heartbreak in Victorian London. This book brought me to absolute tears.
THE #1 SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER WINNER OF THE BAILLIE GIFFORD PRIZE FOR NONFICTION 2019 'An angry and important work of historical detection, calling time on the misogyny that has fed the Ripper myth. Powerful and shaming' GUARDIAN
Polly, Annie, Elizabeth, Catherine and Mary-Jane are famous for the same thing, though they never met. They came from Fleet Street, Knightsbridge, Wolverhampton, Sweden and Wales. They wrote ballads, ran coffee houses, lived on country estates, they breathed ink-dust from printing presses and escaped people-traffickers.
What they had in common was the year of their murders: 1888.
I’m a sociologist who studies American family life. About 20 years ago, I began to see signs of the weakening of family life (such as more single-parent families) among high-school educated Americans. These are the people we often call the “working class.” It seemed likely that this weakening reflected the decline of factory jobs as globalization and automation have proceeded. So I decided to learn as much as I could about the rise and decline of working-class families. The books I am recommending help us to understand what happened in the past and what’s happening now.
LeMasters hung out at a tavern in Wisconsin from 1967 to 1972, talking to factory workers who held well-paying, unionized jobs in the heyday of American industrial production. Working-class lives are so different now that I wish I could enter a time machine and travel back to the 1960s and talk to working-class men then. LeMasters’s book is as close as one can get to doing that. He describes the outlook of the tavern regulars on their work, their families, and the world around them. Despite their prosperity, they express attitudes about public life that, in some respects, would not sound out of place in a focus group of working-class adults today.
“LeMasters’ book is a valuable and popularly written source of information on the attitudes of working class men and women. Highly recommended.”—Library Journal
Blue-Collar Aristocrats is a major statement about a group of Americans too little understood and too long ignored by by the country's decision- and policy-makers. Thanks to the work of E. E. LeMasters, we now have a rare and human insight into the lives, feelings, attitudes, and problems of America's blue-collar aristocrats—one that has the potential both to add to our knowledge and to contribute toward solutions to some of our nation's broadest social problems.
My father’s side of our family is from North Carolina, and I’ve always felt the magic of these mountains, especially within the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. I yearned to understand how the people lived and raised children, created an entire community, lived off the land, and handled sickness, despair, and celebrations. I wanted to bring their stories to life and honor and preserve their unique history. We can all learn something from these brave men and women who staked out the land, built, grew, and hunted everything they needed, and created a community full of family, resilience, and perseverance. I proudly honor their stories within my historical fiction novels.
I especially loved this book on Appalachia because it told the truth. Sure, it was from one man’s perspective, but it resonated with me because it made sense.
This book also reminded me of my previous recommendation, Demon Copperhead. I like choosing a subject–say, Appalachia–and then reading multiple books about said subject.
This book was about choices, but it also rang true because the author’s own background, growing up amongst poverty and minimal options, lent credibility to the words, which I really liked.
THE INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER Coming November 2020 as a major motion picture from Netflix starring Amy Adams and Glenn Close
'The political book of the year' Sunday Times
'A frank, unsentimental, harrowing memoir ... A superb book' New York Post
'I bought this to try to better understand Trump's appeal ... but the memoir is so much more than that. A gripping, unputdownable page-turner' India Knight, Evening Standard
J. D. Vance grew up in the hills of Kentucky. His family and friends were the people most of the world calls rednecks, hillbillies or white trash.
Nelson West, a former Chicago homicide detective, is hired by wealthy heir Lionel Bing to discreetly help “fix” scandals and legal problems for his father’s wealthy friends.
Bing, a brilliant but troubled investigator, suffers from PTSD symptoms as a result of being kidnapped and witnessing the murder of his mother…
I'm an English writer now living in the wilds of Tasmania, Australia. My love of books began at school. I devoured the classics and couldn’t wait to audition for the lead in the next school play. Both my father and brother were in the military and I saw firsthand their love and duty for country, and family often with great cost to their mental health and wellbeing. I write stories about heroes like them and the women who win their hearts. Love takes courage.
This collection of short stories has a special place in my heart.
Stories written about people living in the early sixties in working-class London. The colloquial language rings true in my ears, and the stories belong in that special place held dear by my teenage self. Laugh or cry, I pick the book up when I am at most in need of, no place like home, comfort.
Ken Loach made a film based on the book and followed it up with another one of her books. Poor Cow. Dog-eared and well-worn, the books remain on my shelf.
'Her art is ignited by voice, as you hear it, is unquestionable' ALI SMITH, GUARDIAN
'Distinctive, pared-down style' DAVID EVANS, INDEPENDENT
'Unflinching look at the lives of working-class women' DAILY MAIL
Nell Dunn's scenes of London life, as it was lived in the early Sixties in the industrial slums of Battersea, have few parallels in contemporary writing. The exuberant, uninhibited, disparate world she found in the tired old streets and under the railway arches is recaptured in these closely linked sketches; and the result is pure alchemy.
