Books like Roberta Cowell's Story — picked by fans

Janet Guthrie completely changed the name of the game for women in motorsport here in America.

She was the first woman to compete in iconic races like the Indianapolis 500, and circuits even had to change their rules to allow women into the garage area because of her.

With a physics degree and a pilot's license under her belt, Guthrie changed the name of the game for women in motorsport—but her career fell short thanks to the restrictive nature of the 1970s.

Her autobiography sheds light on the pain and heartache she felt alongside all of her successes.

Hellé Nice had lived a full life before she ever sat behind the wheel.

A career as a model and dancer in Paris enabled her to live a life of luxury in the 1920s, but when she injured her knee skiing in 1929, she turned to a new career: Motor racing.

She went on to compete in races around Europe, setting world records behind the wheel of her bright blue Bugatti.

A freak accident nearly killed her in 1936, and the onset of World War II brought racing to an end. Nice's lush lifestyle saw her accused of being a Nazi collaborator, and records of her accomplishments were scrubbed from the racing world.

Miranda Seymour tracks down Nice's complex legacy and reports it in vivid fashion.

The setting is interwar Europe.

The players are René Dreyfus, a Jewish racing driver, and Lucy Schell, a racing driver and American heiress.

As antisemitism crept through the continent, Dreyfus' successful racing career was choked out by the might of state-funded German engineering—at least, until Schell came along.

With her ample fortune and a home in Paris, Schell began funding her own racing team and immediately signed Dreyfus. Later, when the pressures of Nazi ideology threatened Dreyfus' life, Schell funded a "trip" to the Indianapolis 500 in America in order to help him start a new life.

Faster highlights the complex ways that politics, religion, money, and motorsport intertwine, told so compellingly that you won't want to put this book down.

Back when AAA sanctioned auto racing events in the 1920s, Black men were barred from racing at the highest competitive levels and were subjected to scathing remarks and racism at smaller local venues.

The Brown Bullet tells the story of Rajo Jack, one of the first Black drivers in America who broke down barriers just for a chance to show up at the track.

Even today, Black racers face undue prejudice when attempting to enter a predominately white sport; this book sheds light on the origins of that entrenched discrimination.

Nobody has done more than Stryker to document the modern history of trans people or to fashion trans studies into an academic field. Transgender History is a work of substantial scholarship and also an accessible introduction to the field and the issues on which it’s centered. Each chapter of this short-ish book is really valuable, whether it’s the opening that explains important terms and concepts or the final one assessing what Time declared the “transgender tipping point” in 2014. Stryker is a historian of twentieth-century America, so that’s the focus of her central chapter documenting a century of trans history. Understanding that early history is crucial for the liberatory gains and backlashes that follow, and Transgender History concludes with resources that can help turn its readers into informed and committed activists.

James Jones's brilliant debut novel must have had a great effect on me because I admit, in many ways, my book covers the same ground – how does a man maintain honor and dignity when constrained to live his life by the choices of other, and much more powerful men? I suppose the difference between our two themes is that the question in my book is about those same choices but wrapped in the question of race. Jones’s characters, while in the military, were dealing with personal issues. My Corporal Buck is dealing with an issue about which all of America is on fire.

From Here to Eternity is 70 years old. I read it in 1969, an eternity ago and it has lasted with me from there to here. When I was in the Marine Corps I knew everything that was happening to me. But I didn’t know what… show more.

Todd Bowden, a middle-class boy, has everything good going for him until he meets Kurt Dussander, a man who was the pure embodiment of evil during Hitler’s Nazi regime, now living in America under the assumed name, Arthur Denker. Todd figures out who “Arthur Denker” is from crime magazines his father had kept in a trunk in the garage.

Todd’s curiosity for violence rises to the surface. He is increasingly drawn down into darkness, blackmailing Mr. Dussander to tell him what went on in the concentration camps.

An unforgettable collection of linked stories, Heirlooms follows one Jewish family escaping Holocaust-era St. Malo, France through to present-day America and Israel. Hall depicts with masterful, exquisite prose just what it means to be a refugee, to rebuild a life outside one’s own country, to survive and endure. I recently taught Heirlooms to a class of fiction writing students who deeply appreciated this stunning collection and what they could learn from it about storytelling, and about resilience.

Technically about World War II, this work covers Chim’s work depicting culture, politics, and life before and after the war, so the circumstances leading to conflict and its aftermath. Chim was the co-founder of Magnum Photos, so his contribution to photojournalism is immense, and his photos are beautifully lit and composed even as they capture fleeting moments: Polish school children waiting for a bus in the rain, a baby reaching for bread at a displaced person’s camp or a boy playing in the ruins of a bombed building. The book also includes later photos of celebrities and movie stars, which, when seen alongside his earlier work creates an interesting narrative of a world putting itself back together and once again seeking out joy and beauty.

This book takes the lives of very ordinary Canadians and throws them into the maelstrom of war. I love that it carefully sets up a world few know about—Toronto in the 1930s—and shows the ambiguity of the times, how anti-Semitism was at home as well as across the water in Europe.

I so enjoyed the Romeo and Juliet love affair at the novel's heart, and I was moved by the trials love is subjected to—as well as shocked by excellent descriptions of war's brutality.