100 Books Like Mary Bridgette

What I love most about The Stage Driver’s Daughter is that it’s inspired by the true story of Charley Parkhurst, a woman who disguised herself as a man to make a living as a rancher and stagecoach driver. The book digresses from real events, but the author effectively evokes the experience through vivid description and dialogue. I could smell, see, and hear what it was like to navigate the rutted and treacherous roads of the Old West. I was later than most learning to drive, and I have a poor sense of direction so driving to new places can be challenging and somewhat frightening for me. I admired Winnie’s fearlessness and try to remember her bravery when I am on my own in the car headed into unfamiliar territory.

I love a book that teaches me something, and A Brides Portrait of Dodge City, Kansas taught me a lot, from photography (complete with technical descriptions that somehow weren’t too dry!) during the late 1800s/early 1900s to laws about women (they differed by territory). I appreciated that although Adeline was a strong protagonist, she wasn’t “modern” or behaved in ways that didn’t fit with her time period. There was an element of mystery to the story when her shop is vandalized, and I enjoyed trying to solve the whodunit. I have read this book multiple times.

This is a collection of four novellas that feature pack horse librarians, a project of the Works Progress Administration that delivered books to remote regions in the Appalachian Mountains between 1935 and 1943. I knew nothing about the program and was captivated by these brave women who traveled deep into the mountains by themselves to bring reading and education to the poor (As someone who loses her car in a mall parking lot I can’t imagine doing this). What I loved most about the stories is the impetus it created for me to dig deeper into the program and the women themselves. Being a book lover and former library trustee, what these women did moved me on a deeply emotional level.

Having worked for a jewelry designer in the Washington, DC area, The Gem Thief caught my eye. The story took me back to my days in the shop (good memories!), and the author has obviously done her research, because her accuracy is impeccable. I liked all of the characters, but I bonded with one of the secondary characters so much that I felt we could be friends in “real life.” I’ve been to New York City often, so I also enjoyed revisiting the city. The book was both comfortable because of all the associations to “past lives,” and exciting as I turned pages wondering what would happen next.

There are a handful of books that, upon finishing, I remark with absolute admiration, “I wish I would have written that.” This is one of these select, extraordinary books. Yergin presents an eye-opening, at times uncomfortably shocking, journey through petroleum geopolitics, challenging conventional notions about historical events, the modern world order, and how it came to pass.

I was riveted by this revisionist history of how America got into World War I and changed American society and politics. He shows how much of American collective memory about why WWI was fought, and the perception of Germany in America was fashioned, to a large extent, by British propaganda. He also shows why Germany had no choice but to engage in unrestricted submarine warfare, which eventually brought the United States into the war.

Had the British modified the naval blockade on Germany, which starved the German population in a horrific manner, the United States might never have become involved. But Great Britain was determined to make sure Germany would never again pose a threat to its colonial overseas empire. President Wilson at first understood that American neutrality was the means by which he could have brokered peace, but British and French recalcitrance, and eventually the deaths of relatively few… show more.

Successful amphibious operations are hard to pull off. The Allies failure at Gallipoli is well known.

This book tells the story of Operation Albion, the successful German seizure of the Russian islands in the Baltic. A large part of the German Fleet was involved and had to overcome stubborn resistance by the battleships, cruisers, and destroyers of the Russian Fleet to break into the Gulf of Riga.

The Baltic is a little-known theatre of naval operations. The book draws on both Russian and German sources to show how the German Fleet and Army worked hand in hand to achieve a decisive victory in this theatre of the naval war.

I’ve included Ana, Jan, and María’s book on my list not because it is entirely about neutrality and war (although that theme plays a major part in the book) but because it pushed me to appreciate the effects of the First World War at a more global level. 

The modern name of the war, of course, includes the word ‘world’ in it, but the fighting was primarily European-focused. This book shows, however, that the war had a much wider reach–influencing China, Japan, South America, Mexico, and Africa, amongst other places. For example, the book shows that there was a clash of Empires in Africa–between neutral Portugal and belligerent Germany; and in neutral Argentina, Mexico, and Spain, societies were split down the middle between the rival camps supporting the Allies and the Germans.

I found the book to be a really important demonstration that we need to think differently about wars–the… show more.

There are many different vantage points from which to view the road to war in 1914, but an essential one is that which focuses on the ethos, politics, and strategy of one of the constellations of European Great Powers. In the 1980s, Macmillan published a series of books focusing on each of these, written by acknowledged experts (Zara Steiner on Britain, John Keiger on France, Dominic Lieven on Russia, Volker Berghahn on Germany, Richard Bosworth on Italy). The last in the series appeared in 1990, when Samuel Williamson published his study of Austria-Hungary.

It was well worth the wait. Comprehensive in its structure, balanced in its judgments, meticulous in its research, Williamson established a new standard for studies of the Great Powers. His conclusion – that Austria-Hungary was largely responsible for initiating the July Crisis and, ultimately, the war itself – is persuasively argued and the story compellingly told.

This is a collection of a dozen essays allowing us to feel the fun, the drama, the craziness of travel, and the effect it can have on both our personalities and views after the journey. In other words, this book teaches us to feel these stories, which show us the more you risk the more rewards you will gain from your travel adventures.

It also reminds us to worry or at least be concerned for whom you are traveling with. After reading this, I believe it is not what we accomplish by traveling but what we take away from traveling.