Here are 100 books that People Love Dead Jews fans have personally recommended if you like
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Born in Budapest, Hungary, Susan Rubin Suleiman emigrated to the U.S. as a child with her parents. She has had a distinguished career as a professor of French and comparative literature at Harvard, publishing more than a dozen books and over 100 scholarly articles. Her acclaimed memoir about returning to Budapest, Budapest Diary: In Search of the Motherbook, appeared in 1996; in 2023, she published Daughter of History: Traces of an Immigrant Girlhood, a memoir of immigration which was a finalist for a 2024 National Jewish Book Award. She has been awarded many honors, including the Radcliffe Medal for Distinguished Achievement in 1990 and France’s highest honor, the Légion d’Honneur, in 2018.
This is another classic, published in 1999. Novick shows how the memory of the Holocaust evolved in the U.S. to the point where, in his opinion, it has come to dominate public consciousness in a way that may prevent people from paying attention to present problems. I think things have changed since he wrote his book, but he presents an argument that remains challenging.
Prize-winning historian Peter Novick illuminates the reasons Americans ignored the Holocaust for so long -- how dwelling on German crimes interfered with Cold War mobilization; how American Jews, not wanting to be thought of as victims, avoided the subject. He explores in absorbing detail the decisions that later moved the Holocaust to the center of American life: Jewish leaders invoking its memory to muster support for Israel and to come out on top in a sordid competition over what group had suffered most; politicians using it to score points with Jewish voters. With insight and sensitivity, Novick raises searching questions…
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…
Also known as “Margaret Mead among the Starfleet,” I’m a Princeton professor who has been embedded with NASA missions for two decades as a social scientist. I’ve observed missions to Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Pluto, and beyond; consulted with NASA as a sociological expert; and written two books, with a third on the way. Growing up, I always loved science and technology, but not just for the ideas: for the people behind the findings, the passion they bring to their work, and the ways in which culture and politics play a role in how science gets done. Writing about this, I hope to humanize science and make it accessible for everyday readers.
“A rat done bit my sister Nell, but Whitey’s on the moon,” quipped Gil Scott Heron in 1970.
As the Apollo missions blasted into space one by one, they took off from an America rocked by the Vietnam War, a growing environmentalist lobby, and the transformative civil rights movement. We often forget about this overlap, but historian Maher recovers what was a rich exchange between members of these social movements and NASA.
After reading this book, I can’t think about JFK’s famous moonshot without thinking about the 1960’s culture wars and how this vibrant backdrop also brought America to the moon.
Winner of the Eugene M. Emme Astronautical Literature Award A Bloomberg View Must-Read Book of the Year A Choice Outstanding Academic Title of the Year
"A substance-rich, original on every page exploration of how the space program interacted with the environmental movement, and also with the peace and 'Whole Earth' movements of the 1960s." -Tyler Cowen, Marginal Revolution
The summer of 1969 saw astronauts land on the moon for the first time and hippie hordes descend on Woodstock. This lively and original account of the space race makes the case that the conjunction of these two era-defining events was not…
I started my career teaching high school. I attended amazing professional development institutes, where scholars showed me how the stories I’d learned and then taught to my own students were so oversimplified that they had become factually incorrect. I was hooked. I kept wondering what else I’d gotten wrong. I earned a Ph.D. in modern US History with specialties in women’s and gender history and war and society, and now I’m an Associate Professor of History at Iowa State University and the Coordinator of ISU’s Social Studies Education Program. I focus on historical complexity and human motivations because they are the key to understanding change.
This book is probably the first scholarly book that blew my mind and pushed me to want to know what else I had always gotten wrong.
Where, like most people I know, I had always thought that the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor was just a thing that happened because of “war,” this book made it clear why it happened.
The US and Japan, both diplomats and everyday people, did not choose to understand each other. Different world views, different assumptions, and plain old racism led the US and Japan into a horrific, bloody conflict with long-lasting consequences.
WINNER OF THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD • AN AMERICAN BOOK AWARD FINALIST • A monumental history that has been hailed by The New York Times as “one of the most original and important books to be written about the war between Japan and the United States.”
In this monumental history, Professor John Dower reveals a hidden, explosive dimension of the Pacific War—race—while writing what John Toland has called “a landmark book ... a powerful, moving, and evenhanded history that is sorely needed in both America and Japan.”
Drawing on American and Japanese songs, slogans, cartoons, propaganda films, secret…
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…
Monuments and memorials pepper our public landscape. Many walk right by them, uncurious about who or what’s being honored. I can’t. I’m a historian. I’m driven to learn the substance of the American past, but I also want to know how history itself is constructed, not just by professionals but by common people. I’m fascinated by how “public memory” is interpreted and advanced through monuments. I often love the artistry of these memorial features, but they’re not mere decoration; they mutely speak, saying simple things meant to be conclusive. But as times change previous conclusions can unravel. I’ve long been intrigued by this phenomenon, writing and teaching about it for thirty years.
Civil War statues have long been the gold standard for America’s monumental public landscape.
They are the public sculptures and architectural features we are now rediscovering, sometimes with horror, and arguing over, after years of mute service as park furniture and pigeon roosts. Brown’s book is a definitive history of these classic, heroic monuments.
Beautifully written, perceptive, and illuminating, it explains their history, offering readers an engaging and invaluable background and context for understanding how and why they were erected, and how they’ve not only reflected American culture but have propelled it, particularly (as the title suggests) towards militarization and the affirmation of racial and class hierarchies.
Reading Civil War Monuments focuses our view on monumental things all around us that we’ve never really seen.
This sweeping new assessment of Civil War monuments unveiled in the United States between the 1860s and 1930s argues that they were pivotal to a national embrace of military values. Americans' wariness of standing armies limited construction of war memorials in the early republic, Thomas J. Brown explains, and continued to influence commemoration after the Civil War. As large cities and small towns across the North and South installed an astonishing range of statues, memorial halls, and other sculptural and architectural tributes to Civil War heroes, communities debated the relationship of military service to civilian life through fund-raising campaigns, artistic…
As both an author and a teacher, I’ve been using Howard Zinn’s iconic book for over 20 years. I have found it to be an effective counterweight to more orthodox texts, as well as a credible platform for stimulating discussion. In writing my own “guide” to U.S. history, I always kept Zinn in mind. While we may not always agree, the dissonance is something I’m certain Howard Zinn would appreciate. He was unafraid to "engage" with his subject matter and his readers. This is an inspiration.
Coates’s semi-autobiographical examination of life for black men in American society, and more broadly in American history, is an education. Like Zinn, Coates calls America on the hypocrisy inherent in its highest ideals and its most cherished conceits.
As Coates himself later said about Zinn, "He knocked me on my ass." The two - while not always on the same page in their critical examinations of the American experiment, are clearly kindred spirits. They both want America to do better and clearly believe it can do better if it is honest about itself - but will it be? This is the question left ominously dangling by both Zinn and Coates.
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER • NAMED ONE OF TIME’S TEN BEST NONFICTION BOOKS OF THE DECADE • PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST • NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FINALIST • ONE OF OPRAH’S “BOOKS THAT HELP ME THROUGH” • NOW AN HBO ORIGINAL SPECIAL EVENT
Hailed by Toni Morrison as “required reading,” a bold and personal literary exploration of America’s racial history by “the most important essayist in a generation and a writer who changed the national political conversation about race” (Rolling Stone)
NAMED ONE OF THE MOST INFLUENTIAL BOOKS OF THE DECADE BY CNN •…
One of the reasons I love my job as a Space History Curator at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum is that I am fascinated to learn how people think about space, the cosmos, and their human connection with the universe. I am always eager to get beyond questions of what we know and how we know it and ask: Why do we ask the questions we ask in the first place? The books I’ve listed here all explore our relationship with space and how we engage personally or collectively with space exploration.
In the 20th and 21st centuries, science fiction has been a major force in defining our collective imagination of what spaceflight is and why it is significant. This book puts the history of space science fiction in the context of the American space program, charting the reality of spaceflight against expectations set in popular culture.
Telling these parallel stories of real space accomplishments and fictional space exploits allows Weitekamp to reveal stories of spaceflight as inseparable from broad cultural concerns such as American identity, the frontier, race, gender, and sexuality. Weitekamp has spent her career curating the social and cultural history of spaceflight collection at the National Air and Space Museum, and her argument is built upon her expert analysis of popular culture objects from the collection.
A space historian's tour through astounding spaceflight history and the Smithsonian's collection of space and science fiction memorabilia
Winner of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics' 2024 Gardner-Lasser Aerospace History Literature Award
Spanning from the 1929 debut of the futuristic Buck Rogers to present-day privatization of spaceflight, Space Craze celebrates America's endless enthusiasm for space exploration. Author Margaret Weitekamp, curator at the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum, writes with warmth and personal experience to guide readers through extraordinary spaceflight history while highlighting objects from the Smithsonian's spaceflight collection.
Featuring historical milestones in space exploration, films and TV shows,…
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 am a Professor of English at the University of Sussex. I have worked on a wide range of subjects over the years, mainly about the English Renaissance. I have a long-standing interest in travel and colonial writing, the ways in which the English interacted with other peoples and other places, which started with my interest in Ireland where I studied and which was the subject of my early books. I have broadened my perspective as I have read more on the Americas, Africa, Europe, and Asia, over the years and am committed to uncovering the truth of the uncomfortable, challenging, and fascinating history of the early British Empire.
A brilliant and incisive reading of European-Caribbean relations from the first encounters on Christopher Columbus’s voyages.
Peter Hulme shows how central the Caribbean was to English and European thinking about the world and how the region defined English approaches to the rest of the world in the first age of the British Empire.
Europe encountered America in 1492, a meeting of cultures graphically described in the log-book kept by Christopher Columbus. His stories of peaceful savages and cruel "cannibals" have formed the matrix for all subsequent descriptions of that native Caribbean society. The encounter itself has obsesssed colonialist writing. It reappears in the early 17th century in the story of John Smith and Pocahontas, and on the Jacobean stage in the figures of Prospero and Caliban. In the 18th century, over two hundred years after the European discovery of the Caribbean, the idea of a pristine encounter still permeated European literature through Robinson…
Ever since I first visited a prison during college and was shocked by its horrific conditions, I’ve been fascinated with America’s punitiveness—our tolerance for harsh, dehumanizing punishments. I pursued a Ph.D. in criminology in order to better understand the politics of crime and justice. I am constantly searching for “political space” within which to pursue meaningful criminal justice reform without provoking a punitive backlash. I was previously an associate professor of sociology at the University of Massachusetts Boston, and I am now a lecturer in criminology at the National University of Ireland Maynooth.
I love The Government-Citizen Disconnect because it examines the relationship between social policy and politics.
Mettler demonstrates that over 90% of Americans receive financial benefits from the government, but most of these are submerged in the tax code (like the home mortgage interest deduction). People who only receive submerged benefits believe that the government does little to improve their personal lives. In contrast, the more antipathy they feel toward people who receive visible government benefits (like food stamps), the more they also express cynical, negative attitudes toward government in general.
Since White Americans are more likely to receive submerged benefits than Americans of color, this pattern fuels racialized “us vs. them” attitudes when, in fact, the government financially buffers most Americans from the full costs of the free market in a variety of ways.
Americans’ relationship to the federal government is paradoxical. Polls show that public opinion regarding the government has plummeted to all-time lows, with only one in five saying they trust the government or believe that it operates in their interest. Yet, at the same time, more Americans than ever benefit from some form of government social provision. Political scientist Suzanne Mettler calls this growing gulf between people’s perceptions of government and the actual role it plays in their lives the "government-citizen disconnect." In The Government-Citizen Disconnect, she explores the rise of this phenomenon and its implications for policymaking and politics.
Monuments and memorials pepper our public landscape. Many walk right by them, uncurious about who or what’s being honored. I can’t. I’m a historian. I’m driven to learn the substance of the American past, but I also want to know how history itself is constructed, not just by professionals but by common people. I’m fascinated by how “public memory” is interpreted and advanced through monuments. I often love the artistry of these memorial features, but they’re not mere decoration; they mutely speak, saying simple things meant to be conclusive. But as times change previous conclusions can unravel. I’ve long been intrigued by this phenomenon, writing and teaching about it for thirty years.
Iconoclasm isn’t new. The word means, literally, “image destroying.”
History is littered with instances going back to Antiquity. But something fresh is happening right now in the United States.
Smashing Monumentsis a lively, bracing, much-needed account of the iconoclasm roiling contemporary America’s public landscape, particularly in the wake of the white supremacists’ murderous march in Charlottesville in 2017 and George Floyd’s killing by Minneapolis police in 2020.
Captivating reportage and historically informed analysis, from the unique perspective of a scholar of art history and law, propels our reconsideration of American public icons, their origins, their sometimes-sordid purposes, their standing, and what might replace them.
Thompson doesn’t fully answer this last question, but she rouses us to rethink U.S. public history, commemoration, and the form and function of monuments themselves.
An urgent and fractious national debate over public monuments has erupted in America. Some people risk imprisonment to tear down long-ignored hunks of marble; others form armed patrols to defend them. Why do we care so much about statues? And who gets to decide which ones should stay up and which should come down?
Erin L. Thompson, the country's leading expert in the tangled aesthetic, legal, political and social issues involved in such battles brings much-needed clarity in Smashing Statues. She traces the turbulent history of American monuments and its abundant ironies, starting with the enslaved man who helped make…
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…
I’m a philosopher by training and professor of economics, ethics, and public policy at Georgetown University’s business school. My work often begins by noting that philosophy debates often take certain empirical claims for granted, claims which turn out to be false or mistaken. Once we realize this mistake, this clears the ground and helps us do better work. I focus on issues in immigration, resistance to state injustice, taboo markets, theories of ideal justice, and democratic theory. I’m also a native New Englander now living near DC, a husband and father, and the guitarist and vocalist in a 70s-80s hard rock cover band.
Political scientists and economists have long argued that voters are rationally ignorant.
On this theory, people tend to acquire and retain information only if the expected benefits exceed the expected costs. This explains why students cram material to pass a test but let themselves forget it afterward, why Americans who speak English at home don’t usually bother to learn a foreign language but so many people learn English, or why you don’t bother attempt to memorize your local phonebook.
It also explains why voters know so little. Since individual votes make so little difference, individual voters can afford to remain ignorant. Political information is a collective action problem: what we know matters, but what any one of us knows does not.
Caplan adds an innovation. This point also applies to how we think, not just what we know. Political psychologists have long found that voters process what little information they…
The greatest obstacle to sound economic policy is not entrenched special interests or rampant lobbying, but the popular misconceptions, irrational beliefs, and personal biases held by ordinary voters. This is economist Bryan Caplan's sobering assessment in this provocative and eye-opening book. Caplan argues that voters continually elect politicians who either share their biases or else pretend to, resulting in bad policies winning again and again by popular demand. Boldly calling into question our most basic assumptions about American politics, Caplan contends that democracy fails precisely because it does what voters want. Through an analysis of Americans' voting behavior and opinions…
