Here are 100 books that Mahogany fans have personally recommended if you like
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As a child, I enjoyed a special relationship with an oak tree in my backyard. My father indulged my love of nature with backpacking trips in the mountains of California. In my teens, he published my booklet on edible wild plants. My maternal grandmother encouraged my interest in Indigenous uses of plants with books, field trips, and stories from her anthropology studies at UC Berkeley. My mother cultivated my creativity with ferocious intensity and supported my desire to earn a Ph.D. I landed my dream job at an alternative, interdisciplinary, small, public liberal arts college and have taught botany there for nearly 30 years. I love teaching plant-centric environmental history.
Langston tells a complex story about how the U.S. Forest Service, early in its history, demonized fire and developed a national policy of fire suppression, which has had profoundly negative ecological consequences, particularly in the West.
This case study centered on yellow pine forests illustrates how a poor understanding of forest history and ecology can result in management approaches that squander valuable timber resources.
Across the inland West, forests that once seemed like paradise have turned into an ecological nightmare. Fires, insect epidemics, and disease now threaten millions of acres of once-bountiful forests. Yet no one can agree what went wrong. Was it too much management-or not enough-that forced the forests of the inland West to the verge of collapse? Is the solution more logging, or no logging at all? In this gripping work of scientific and historical detection, Nancy Langston unravels the disturbing history of what went wrong with the western forests, despite the best intentions of those involved.
It is April 1st, 2038. Day 60 of China's blockade of the rebel island of Taiwan.
The US government has agreed to provide Taiwan with a weapons system so advanced that it can disrupt the balance of power in the region. But what pilot would be crazy enough to run…
As a child, I enjoyed a special relationship with an oak tree in my backyard. My father indulged my love of nature with backpacking trips in the mountains of California. In my teens, he published my booklet on edible wild plants. My maternal grandmother encouraged my interest in Indigenous uses of plants with books, field trips, and stories from her anthropology studies at UC Berkeley. My mother cultivated my creativity with ferocious intensity and supported my desire to earn a Ph.D. I landed my dream job at an alternative, interdisciplinary, small, public liberal arts college and have taught botany there for nearly 30 years. I love teaching plant-centric environmental history.
In this book, I love how Douglas Cazaux Sackman uses image analysis to develop his arguments about gender, race, and class in this historical account of California's iconic citrus tree.
He favors factual history inclusive of multiple perspectives and experiences including those of people often marginalized or disappeared entirely in master narratives. I value authors who challenge simplistic accounts of the past.
This innovative history of California opens up new vistas on the interrelationship among culture, nature, and society by focusing on the state's signature export - the orange. From the 1870s onward, California oranges were packaged in crates bearing colorful images of an Edenic landscape. This book demystifies those lush images, revealing the orange as a manufactured product of the state's orange industry. "Orange Empire" brings together for the first time the full story of the orange industry - how growers, scientists, and workers transformed the natural and social landscape of California, turning it into a factory for the production of…
As a child, I enjoyed a special relationship with an oak tree in my backyard. My father indulged my love of nature with backpacking trips in the mountains of California. In my teens, he published my booklet on edible wild plants. My maternal grandmother encouraged my interest in Indigenous uses of plants with books, field trips, and stories from her anthropology studies at UC Berkeley. My mother cultivated my creativity with ferocious intensity and supported my desire to earn a Ph.D. I landed my dream job at an alternative, interdisciplinary, small, public liberal arts college and have taught botany there for nearly 30 years. I love teaching plant-centric environmental history.
Jonathan E. Robins illustrates how a tree that provides vegetable oil aided colonialism and the rise of a global food system built on the exploitation of people and places. To weave an engaging narrative, he draws evidence from multiple disciplines, including agricultural science, economic botany, environmental history, and gender studies.
Backed by the evidence, his conclusion is compelling that trying to catalyze sustainable and socially just practices through responsible consumerism is a flawed strategy by itself. I appreciate how he tackles a complex history from a global perspective and addresses environmental justice concerns in a historically grounded way.
Oil palms are ubiquitous--grown in nearly every tropical country, they supply the world with more edible fat than any other plant and play a role in scores of packaged products, from lipstick and soap to margarine and cookies. And as Jonathan E. Robins shows, sweeping social transformations carried the plant around the planet. First brought to the global stage in the holds of slave ships, palm oil became a quintessential commodity in the Industrial Revolution. Imperialists hungry for cheap fat subjugated Africa's oil palm landscapes and the people who worked them. In the twentieth century, the World Bank promulgated oil…
A Duke with rigid opinions, a Lady whose beliefs conflict with his, a long disputed parcel of land, a conniving neighbour, a desperate collaboration, a failure of trust, a love found despite it all.
Alexander Cavendish, Duke of Ravensworth, returned from war to find that his father and brother had…
As a child, I enjoyed a special relationship with an oak tree in my backyard. My father indulged my love of nature with backpacking trips in the mountains of California. In my teens, he published my booklet on edible wild plants. My maternal grandmother encouraged my interest in Indigenous uses of plants with books, field trips, and stories from her anthropology studies at UC Berkeley. My mother cultivated my creativity with ferocious intensity and supported my desire to earn a Ph.D. I landed my dream job at an alternative, interdisciplinary, small, public liberal arts college and have taught botany there for nearly 30 years. I love teaching plant-centric environmental history.
Michael Williams’ nearly 600-page tome is a classic must-read for anyone seriously wanting to learn about American forest history. It's richly illustrated with 159 figures and plates, plus numerous tables.
I love how he uses historic photos and illustrations in addition to quantitative data to build a grounded understanding of Americans’ shifting relations with trees. The book spans roughly 400 years, with an emphasis on the 1800s and early 1900s.
I enjoyed learning about a wide variety of trees that have played important roles in U.S. history. I also appreciated how Williams explores the cultural influences on people’s attitudes and behaviors towards forests, including religion.
When Europeans first reached the land that would become the United States they were staggered by the breadth and density of the forest they found. The existence of that forest, and the effort either to use or subdue it, have been constant themes in American history, literature, economics, and geography up to the meaning of the forest in American history and culture, he describes and analyzes the clearing and use of the forest from pre-European times to the present, and he traces the subsequent regrowth of the forest since the middle of the twentieth century. Dr Williams begins by exploring…
I’m a fan of all things spooky! I especially love ghost stories, which is probably abundantly clear from my own novels. I’ve been known to frequent old graveyards, seek out haunted places, and sneak into abandoned buildings for inspiration—and the adrenaline rush! This fascination started when I was a young girl and my dad brought me a YA ghost mystery home from the library—every week, he would have the librarian help him pick out books for me, and I would devour the stack immediately, then re-read until the next library day! My favorite ghost stories have a mix similar to what I write—a tension-filled romance combined with a spooky, suspenseful haunting.
Jane-Emily is a YA classic, both a sweet romance and a spooky ghost mystery, set in the early 1900s.
It’s also the book I described in my introduction as the one that made me fall in love with this genre! I first read it when I was about ten, and I immediately recommended it to my best friend, who was also an avid reader. To this day, we are both still scared of those mirrored gazing balls people display in gardens.
When my own children were young, I bought an old paperback on eBay and read it to them, savoring the story that I’ve re-read so many times once again. Even after all these years, Emily’s ghost still delivers chills as she unleashes her wrath on the innocent nine-year-old Jane, and the romance developing between Jane’s young aunt and an old friend of the family plays a part.
Emily was a selfish, willful, hateful child who died before her thirteenth birthday. But that was a long time ago.
Jane is nine years old and an orphan when she and her young Aunt Louisa come to spend the summer at Jane's grandmother's house, a large, mysterious mansion in Massachusetts. Then one day . . . Jane stares into a reflecting ball in the garden—and the face that looks back at her is not her own.
Many years earlier, a child of rage and malevolence lived in this place. And she never left. Now Emily has dark plans for little…
Over the past several months, I have had the pleasure to work with amazing authors who, like me, have debut children's books that were released in 2021. These books range in topics, from overcoming your fears to transgender to history, to cute rats that will let your imagination run wild. Being a kid myself, my parents read every night to me. These are books that like mine, are filled
with representation that was lacking in those books that were read to me.
This book, that has an amazing feeling cover, tells an important part of not only American history, but more importantly, women's history. This story is beautifully illustrated using a great color pallet. Follow along on Anne’s journey to the new world and how she changed that world forever!
The inspiring story of a Puritan woman whose passion for writing poetry broke barriers.
Late at night, with her children tucked into bed and her husband away on business, Anne Dudley Bradstreet composed poems by candlelight. She let her thoughts from the day tumble out, memorizing each poem line by line before daring to shape the words onto scraps of scarce parchment. Puritan women in the 1600s weren't allowed to be writers. But when the world learned about Anne's poetry, even she was astonished by what happened next.
This charmingly illustrated picture book tells the inspiring story of how a…
The Duke's Christmas Redemption
by
Arietta Richmond,
A Duke who has rejected love, a Lady who dreams of a love match, an arranged marriage, a house full of secrets, a most unneighborly neighbor, a plot to destroy reputations, an unexpected love that redeems it all.
Lady Charlotte Wyndham, given in an arranged marriage to a man she…
I love books that entertain and uplift when characters learn and overcome. As a teenager, things happened that threw me into a painful tailspin, ending in a wilderness program for troubled kids. It taught me that I can do hard things and face challenges in life. I’ve lost loved ones, have a special needs child, divorced, been broke, earned my black belt, returned to school as a single mom for a degree, and co-founded a nonprofit to support literacy for kids. None of that was easy, but it increased my compassion and hope. Stories can be powerful reminders of human resilience, and that battle scars make someone more beautiful than before.
I first read this book as a kid, and it’s one of the reasons I became an avid reader. It's set in Puritan New England and features romance, intrigue, and suspense. It has great historical detail, a fun story, and well-written characters.
The protagonist, 16-year-old Kit from Barbados, arrives in the harsh world of early colonial Connecticut and doesn’t fit in—and society punishes her for it! I found myself angry and outraged for her–I just wanted everything to be fair. This story is a light-handed look at how life isn’t fair. Frustration comes from expecting or demanding it to be. There will always be circumstances and people making things difficult. Can it be endured? Yes!
I love the main characters, Kit and Nat (the son of the boat Captain who brought Kit to the colonies). They are cute together. This is still one of my favorite books.
In this Newbery Medal-winning novel, a girl faces prejudice and accusations of witchcraft in seventeenth-century Connecticut. A classic of historical fiction that continues to resonate across the generations.
Sixteen-year-old Kit Tyler is marked by suspicion and disapproval from the moment she arrives on the unfamiliar shores of colonial Connecticut in 1687. Alone and desperate, she has been forced to leave her beloved home on the island of Barbados and join a family she has never met.
Torn between her quest for belonging and her desire to be true to herself, Kit struggles to survive in a hostile place. Just when…
Many of my English ancestors came to New England during the so-called Great Migration of the 1630s. I also have Native American ancestors, and as I researched both groups I couldn’t escape the feeling that something important was missing from our contemporary understanding of the period. In the novel that became Will Poole’s Island, I was in a sense driven to recreate the age, or at least to complicate our received mythologies about it. A central theme of the book is the collision of two radically opposed worldviews that had in common a preoccupation with the visionary and the unseen; this is also a theme of the five narratives described below.
This novel, published in 2000 by the University Press of New England, has in my opinion never gained the readership it deserves. It’s a rich, funny, deeply humane captivity tale based on the true story of Nathan Blake, who was taken by Algonkian-speaking people from his home in Keene, New Hampshire, in 1746, and brought up to Canada, where he was held for three years as a slave. The novel weaves a defamiliarized but extremely plausible-feeling tapestry of early colonial America that complicates the stereotypes established by Cooper’s influential novel set in the same period, and Hebert’s main character, Caucus-Meteor—an elderly, multilingual Indian and the last survivor of his band—is by my lights one of the great characters in literature.
In 1746, Nathan Blake, the first frame house builder in Keene, New Hampshire, was abducted by Algonkians and held in Canada as a slave. Inspired by this dramatic slice of history, novelist Ernest Hebert has written a masterful new novel recreating those years of captivity.
Set in New England and Canada during the French and Indian Wars, The Old American is driven by its complex, vividly imagined title character, Caucus-Meteor. By turns shrewd and embittered, ambitious and despairing, inspired and tormented, he is the self-styled"king" of the remnants of the first native tribes that encountered the English. Displaced and ravaged…
I’ve always been fascinated by American history and have clear memories of celebrating America’s bicentennial as a child. I have twenty-two Revolutionary Patriots in my family history, and I am most proud of my 6x-great grandmother, Anna Asbury Stone, for her bravery and daring during the winter of 1778. I did extensive genealogical research to learn about her, her family, and her circumstances before writing Answering Liberty’s Call: Anna Stone’s Daring Ride to Valley Forge.
Bound is set in the years prior to the American Revolution, and highlights the difficulties faced by girls and women indentured servants. Alice and her family set out for America from England, but when her mother and brothers die during the voyage, Alice’s father decides he cannot keep her and sells her as an indentured servant upon reaching Boston. Alice should have had a middle-class upbringing, but instead, she becomes chattel. The scenes of abuse in this book are stark, but it helps to shed light on the sufferings of the disenfranchised and the helpless. Alice’s determination will inspire.
An indentured servant finds herself bound by law, society, and her own heart in this novel set in colonial Cape Cod from the author of acclaimed The Widow’s War.
Indentured servant Alice Cole barely remembers when she was not “bound”, first to the Morton family, then to their daughter Nabby—her companion since childhood—when she wed. But Nabby’s new marriage is not happy, and when Alice finds herself torn between her new master and her old friend, she runs away to Boston. There she meets a sympathetic widow named Lyddie Berry and her lawyer companion, Eben Freeman. Impulsively stowing away on…
This book follows the journey of a writer in search of wisdom as he narrates encounters with 12 distinguished American men over 80, including Paul Volcker, the former head of the Federal Reserve, and Denton Cooley, the world’s most famous heart surgeon.
In these and other intimate conversations, the book…
What can I say? I’m a hopeless romantic. There’s nothing better than a great romance novel set in the past when chivalry was not dead. I’m a published author of more than twenty-five novels, including a great pirate series. I grew up in Florida and fell in love with the tropics as I sat on the beach and dreamt of handsome pirates. Once I became a Christian, I started reading Christian romances but found many of them moved a little slow to my liking, so I decided to write one myself! I have a BA in Computer Science and have won several awards for my writing.
Reminiscent of the wildness, adventure, and romance of The Last of the Mohicans, Captive Heart sizzles on every page. This is Michelle Griep's best book yet and one that played out before my eyes like an epic movie I kept wanting to watch over and over. The romance is perfect, the adventure nonstop, and the characters really touch your heart.
The wild American wilderness is no place for an elegant English governess
On the run from a brute of an aristocratic employer, Eleanor Morgan escapes from England to America, the land of the free, for the opportunity to serve an upstanding Charles Town family. But freedom is hard to come by as an indentured servant, and downright impossible when she’s forced to agree to an even harsher contract—marriage to a man she’s never met.
Backwoodsman Samuel Heath doesn’t care what others think of him—but his young daughter’s upbringing matters very much. The life of a trapper in the Carolina backcountry…
