Here are 100 books that Republic of Detours fans have personally recommended if you like
Republic of Detours.
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I’ve had a passion for poetry since my early childhood, when I fondly remember listening to my elders recite—specifically, my teachers reading rhymes by Shel Silverstein and Dr. Seuss. As I grew into my adolescence and adulthood, my interest in literature only amplified with my introduction to works by Maya Angelou, R.H. Sin, and Rupi Kaur. Now, as a self-published poet and self-proclaimed enthusiast of the genre, I continue to spend my time browsing shelves, attending readings, and supporting writers/artists debuting work into the world. I hope you enjoy the books on my list.
I love this book for many reasons, but to start, I love that the title is a poetic metaphor, I love that the story is almost a hundred years old but still speaks to the rebellious spirit alive within young readers, and I love that the book is loosely based on Zora’s real life and the real place of Eatonville, Florida.
I love that readers get to experience the past and can envision their own future while reading this book. I laughed, cried, and found pieces of myself within the quotes snitched to this story.
Cover design by Harlem renaissance artist Lois Mailou Jones
When Janie, at sixteen, is caught kissing shiftless Johnny Taylor, her grandmother swiftly marries her off to an old man with sixty acres. Janie endures two stifling marriages before meeting the man of her dreams, who offers not diamonds, but a packet of flowering seeds ...
'For me, THEIR EYES WERE WATCHING GOD is one of the very greatest American novels of the 20th century. It is so lyrical it should be sentimental; it is so passionate it should be overwrought, but it is instead a rigorous, convincing and dazzling piece…
Magical realism meets the magic of Christmas in this mix of Jewish, New Testament, and Santa stories–all reenacted in an urban psychiatric hospital!
On locked ward 5C4, Josh, a patient with many similarities to Jesus, is hospitalized concurrently with Nick, a patient with many similarities to Santa. The two argue…
While writing Never a Lovely so Real, I fell into many traps. The Federal Writers Project was one of the deepest. Nelson Algren’s time at the project in Chicago saved him from personal and professional ruin. And I became a bit obsessed with the idea that, during the Great Depression, there had been a government program that hired writers by the hundreds and brought them together to work toward a common goal; one that helped shape a literary generation. As I say though, it was a pitfall. Most of what I learned wouldn’t fit in my book, but I’m grateful for all of the writing my research introduced me to.
Never Come Morning is Nelson Algren’s second novel and his first great book. He wrote it during his time with the Federal Writers’ Project in Chicago, between working on a cookbook, a travel guide, and sundry other assignments. In some ways, this book feels of a piece with his first. In some ways, this book feels like a piece with his first. Both books center on alienated young men; both are coming-of-age stories (after a manner). But this novel was a leap forward for Algren. The psychological portrait of its protagonist is fully realized, and the prose sings. Algren had the project to thank for both developments. He used the access his job afforded him to conduct interviews, portions of which made their way into the novel verbatim. And with the projects’ financial support, he was able to revise for months, and months – folding nuance, insight, and poetry into…
Never Come Morning is unique among the novels of Algren. The author's only romance, the novel concerns Brun Bicek, a would-be pub from Chicago's Northwest side, and Steffi, the woman who shares his dream while living his nightmare. "It is an unusual and brilliant book," said The New York Times. "A bold scribbling upon the wall for comfortable Americans to ponder and digest." This new edition features an introduction by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. and an interview with Nelson Algren by H.E.F. Donohue.
I grew up as a fundamentalist Christian in the rural South of the United States. Gradually, I began to see the good and the bad in the church community and social community I loved as a child (and still love). My realizations led to tension in my heart, and that led to the creation of stories, both fiction and non-fiction. My list of five books is a kind of cornerstone (or touchstone?) of some of my present notions about our lives on earth before we each join the Majority.
This book, about racism, among other matters, helped open my eyes to the humanity of all people and showed me, in particular, the ways that cruelty and racism exist in our cultures and subcultures. When I read this book, I was fresh out of five years in the Air Force (1971) and had just experienced the caste system of military life.
Prior to that, I'd lived, as a child and teenager, in a community in which racism and fundamentalist religion were taken for granted as givens of the universe. When I read this book, I realized the power of literature to open a person to meanings previously absent in their life.
Reissued to mark the 80th anniversary of Native Son's publication - discover Richard Wright's brutal and gripping masterpiece this black history month.
'[Native Son] possesses an artistry, penetration of thought, and sheer emotional power that places it into the front rank of American fiction' Ralph Ellison
Reckless, angry and adrift, Bigger Thomas has grown up trapped in a life of poverty in the slums of Chicago. But a job with the affluent Dalton family provides the setting for a catastrophic collision between his world and theirs. Hunted by citizen and police alike, and baited by prejudiced officials, Bigger finds himself…
Trapped in our world, the fae are dying from drugs, contaminants, and hopelessness. Kicked out of the dark fae court for tainting his body and magic, Riasg only wants one thing: to die a bit faster. It’s already the end of his world, after all.
I spent my early childhood in a rural, isolated, multi-generational household. During summers we rarely saw anyone unrelated to us. My twin sister and I spent our days reading, hiding, and naming our menagerie of barn cats (final count: 36). In my career as a lifestyle journalist, I’ve gotten to interview famous eccentrics ranging from Loretta Lynn to David Sedaris. I live in the North Carolina mountains with my husband, our teenage son, and my aforementioned twin sister. This past summer, a black bear walked the 22 steps up to our front porch and stared in the window, raising his huge paws high in exasperation.
Unlike Welty’s works featuring honorable or broadly comic characters, this dense story cycle was never excerpted in anthologies. It’s a trickier cast: consider Jinny Love Stark and Virgie Rainey, who cut through the languor of Depression-era Mississippi with stone-cold intention. Jinny Love plays croquet with her lover to enrage her volatile husband; she encourages her daughter to wear lizards as earrings to offend the propriety of her own controlling mother. Impoverished piano prodigy Virgie flouts her gift merely to watch her teacher go mad. Later, she trims her dead mother’s yard with sewing scissors while neighbors do the real work of laying out the body and receiving mourners. The heat presses forward. What day is it? What hour? This is weird, experimental Welty, and the payoff is sweet.
First published in 1949, THE GOLDEN APPLES is an acutely observed, richly atmospheric portrayal of small town life in Morgana, Mississippi. There's Snowdie, who has to bring up her twin boys alone after her husband, King Maclain, disappears one day, discarding his hat on the banks of the Big Black. There's Loch Morrison, convalescing with malaria, who watches from his bedroom window as wayward Virgie Rainey meets a sailor in the vacant house opposite. Meanwhile, Miss Eckhart the piano teacher, grieving the loss of her most promising pupil, tries her hand at arson.
My sister once remarked that listening to our mother’s stories about living during World War II made it sound like we missed something really exciting. That is what history has always been for me–something I missed out on, for better or worse. What would it really have been like? Could I have survived? Family genealogies bring history to me on a personal level; archaeology and paleontology extend that wonder much deeper into the past. During the time I taught anatomy and human evolution at the University of Indianapolis, I tried to be as interdisciplinary as possible, both in study and teaching. I continue this in my retirement.
After reading David Hackett’s book, I cannot think of American society in the same way again. The United States is touted as the great melting pot, but we all know that cultural nuggets may refuse to mix thoroughly with the rest. What I learned from this book is that even within white Angle-America, behavior patterns that differentiated Englishmen hundreds of years ago persist in America today. This book is not about red states and blue states, but it is impossible to read it and not see the connections.
Hackett traces the colonial immigration of four populations who settled the colonies–New England Puritans, Quakers and others of the Middle Colonies, Cavaliers of the South, and the Scotch-Irish of the Appalachian back-country. They differed significantly in geographic origins, speech, architecture, family structure and values, gender roles, food, dress, work patterns, and the concept of freedom.
Eighty percent of Americans have no British ancestors. According to David Hackett Fischer, however, their day-to-day lives are profoundly influenced by folkways transplanted from Britain to the New World with the first settlers. Residual, yet persistent, aspects of these 17th Century folkways are indentifiable, Fischer argues, in areas as divers as politics, education, and attitudes towards gender, sexuality, age, and child-raising. Making use of both traditional and revisionist scholarship, this ground-breaking work documents how each successive wave of early emigration-Puritans to the North-East; Royalist aristocrats to the South; the Friends to the Delaware Valley; Irish and North Britons to the…
As a teenager, I visited my uncle, who farmed rice in southern Haiti. I met a community that helped me understand that food is not just about dollars and cents—it’s about belonging, it’s about identity. This experience inspired me to become an aid worker. For the last 20+ years, I have worked to mend broken food systems all over the world. If we don’t get food right, hunger will threaten the social fabric.
I found this book to be well-written and well-documented. While it does not focus solely on food systems, it does explain how a lack of food contributed to the demise of the societies explored in this book, such as the Greenland Norse and Easter Island. Diamond offers a stark warning about how a weak food system can undermine an entire civilization.
From the author of Guns, Germs and Steel, Jared Diamond's Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive is a visionary study of the mysterious downfall of past civilizations.
Now in a revised edition with a new afterword, Jared Diamond's Collapse uncovers the secret behind why some societies flourish, while others founder - and what this means for our future.
What happened to the people who made the forlorn long-abandoned statues of Easter Island? What happened to the architects of the crumbling Maya pyramids? Will we go the same way, our skyscrapers one day standing derelict and overgrown like the…
Everyday Medical Miracles
by
Joseph S. Sanfilippo (editor),
Frontiers of Women from the healthcare perspective. A compilation of 60 true short stories written by an extensive array of healthcare providers, physicians, and advanced practice providers.
All designed to give you, the reader, a glimpse into the day-to-day activities of all of us who provide your health care. Come…
I am a chemist (PhD University of Leuven, Belgium). This explains my preference for a rational approach. I was also an assessor for the European EFQM organization. This European Management Model allows an organization or company to achieve excellent results for all its stakeholders. One of the methods used is the Best Practice method. Finally, at the end of my career, I asked myself the question: How do we know that our country is well managed? There is no management model for this yet. That is why I developed a new model: the SAC model. Together with my colleague Grace L. Duffy, we have described this model in several papers.
The author starts with the question: “Are you smarter than my chimpanzee?” When you finished the book, you’ll be so humble to say: I am not!
While reading the book, I was several times surprised by how adults (including myself) have a distorted perception of reality. For example, eighty percent of children worldwide are vaccinated. This means that almost all human beings alive today have some access to basic modern health care. However, on average, just 13 percent of people get the right answer.
Don’t forget that you can only make correct decisions based on accurate data. For this, you can rely on (the many) reliable databases that are available via the internet.
It was for me the first book that convinced me to think and work more with facts and data, i.e., evidence-based management
'A hopeful book about the potential for human progress when we work off facts rather than our inherent biases.' BARACK OBAMA
'One of the most important books I've ever read - an indispensable guide to thinking clearly about the world.' BILL GATES
*#1 Sunday Times bestseller * New York Times bestseller * Observer 'best brainy book of the decade' * Irish Times bestseller * Guardian bestseller * audiobook bestseller *
Factfulness: The stress-reducing habit of only carrying opinions for which you have strong supporting facts.
When asked simple questions about global trends - why the world's population is increasing; how…
I did not use to believe in human progress, but thought there must have been good old days behind us – until I studied history and understood that my ancestors did not live ecologically, they died ecologically, at an early age. Since then I’ve been obsessed with progress, what makes it possible and how we can spread it to more people. I am a historian of ideas from Sweden, the host of a video series on innovations in history, New and Improved, and the writer of many books on intellectual history and global economics, translated into more than 25 languages.
This 1974 book, by the founder of one of the world’s great picture libraries, was a real eye-opener to me when I first read it. We are all nostalgic and look at the past through rose-tinted glasses, and so do I. But then we forget about the hunger and the crime, tuberculosis, smallpox and heaps of trash on the streets, the child labor, and the despair of the aged. This richly illustrated book, with its multitude of stories, set me straight. For instance, did you know that New York had 150,000 horses in 1900, each producing around 20 pounds of manure a day? The past stank. It makes you deeply grateful for science, technology, and economic growth.
The Good Old Days—were they really good? On the surface they appear to be so—especially the period to which this term is most often applied, the years from the end of the Civil War to the early 1900’s. This period of history has receded into a benevolent haze, leaving us with the image of an ebullient, carefree America, the fun and charm of the Gilded Age, the Gay Nineties.
But this gaiety was only a brittle veneer that covered widespread turmoil and suffering. The good old days were good for but the privileged few. For the farmer, the laborer, the…
Like most people, I started to think about the end of the world during the COVID-19 pandemic. Instead of learning how to bake sourdough bread, I read stories and made art about the apocalypse. The true and catastrophic experiences of people throughout history interested me so much that the project turned into a book. My background in printmaking and illustration has formed my approach to visualizing narrative scenes using crisp black and white linocut prints. My current position as a studio art professor has given me practice in providing information concisely. I try to entertain as much as inform.
Dan Carlin is here to get the facts straight. The wildly intelligent and passionate historian released this book while I was working on mine, and it was a great resource for me. I’d recommend it to anyone looking to educate themselves on how civilizations fail. Hint: We keep making the same mistakes again. Read this and break the pattern!
A journey back in time that explores what happened-and what could have happened-from creator of the wildly-popular podcast Hardcore History and 2019 winner of the iHeartRadio Best History Podcast Award.
Dan Carlin has created a new way to think about the past. His mega-hit podcast, Hardcore History, is revered for its unique blend of high drama, enthralling narration, and Twilight Zone-style twists. Carlin humanizes the past, wondering about things that didn't happen but might have, and compels his listeners to "walk a mile in that other guy's historical moccasins." A political commentator, Carlin approaches history like a magician, employing completely…
Karl's War is a coming-of-age-meets-thriller set in Germany on the eve of Hitler coming to power. Karl – a reluctant poster boy for the Nazis – meets Jewish Ben and his world is up-turned.
Ben and his family flee to France. Karl joins the German army but deserts and finds…
Michael Corballis is a psychologist and brain scientist. His interests lie in how the mind works, how it maps onto the brain, and how it evolved. Much of his work is published in books and scientific articles, but he has also written books aimed at a general readership. These include Pieces of Mind, The Lopsided Ape,The Recursive Mind, The Wandering Mind, and The Truth about Language.
Much of what we do and think comes from imagination, generated by our minds rather than by the physical world. This includes art, literature, music, religion, even science. Our dreams are spontaneous acts of creativity, and even memory itself can be distorted by the restless mind. Fernandez-Armesto argues that many animals have better memories than we do, because the human system produces spontaneously creative thoughts at the expense of fidelity. That’s why memories are often false. The author is a historian with an interest in how the mind works, and his book is an amazingly comprehensive history of the human imagination.
To imagine-to see what is not there-is the startling ability that has fueled human development and innovation through the centuries. As a species we stand alone in our remarkable capacity to refashion the world after the picture in our minds.
Traversing the realms of science, politics, religion, culture, philosophy and history, Felipe Fernandez-Armesto reveals the thrilling and disquieting tales of our imaginative leaps-from the first Homo sapiens to the present day. Through groundbreaking insights in cognitive science, Fernandez-Armesto explores how and why we have ideas in the first place, providing a tantalizing glimpse into who we are and what we…
