Here are 100 books that Slacks and Calluses fans have personally recommended if you like
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When I covered the White House as a young reporter I was always more interested in understanding what was happening in the upstairs residence than in what briefings we were getting from the president’s advisers in the Roosevelt Room. I was raised with the understanding that in the end everyone is equal and that no one, no matter how powerful they are, gets out of the human experience. I think that’s what makes me interested in iconic women, from Elizabeth Taylor to Betty Ford. There’s nothing I like better than reading their letters and trying to understand what made them tick, and how they navigated their complicated and very public lives.
My friend Denise Kiernan shines a light on the thousands of women who worked on the Manhattan Project.
If you’ve seen Oppenheimer and you’re interested in the story behind the development of the atomic bomb, then this book will help you understand the hidden figures behind its creation. What I love the most about Denise’s writing is the way that she brings the mysterious origins of Oak Ridge, a Tennessee town created to house the people working on the bomb, to life.
At a time when the stakes couldn’t have been higher, women were at the center of the story.
The New York Times bestseller, now available in paperback—an incredible true story of the top-secret World War II town of Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and the young women brought there unknowingly to help build the atomic bomb.
“The best kind of nonfiction: marvelously reported, fluidly written, and a remarkable story...As meticulous and brilliant as it is compulsively readable.” —Karen Abbott, author of Sin in the Second City
At the height of World War II, Oak Ridge, Tennessee, was home to 75,000 residents, and consumed more electricity than New York City, yet it was shrouded in such secrecy that it did not…
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…
After teaching high school English for thirty-one years, I retired and began my second career in writing. I have published five novels and one collection of poetry. When I met Jane Tucker in 1974, she became a good friend, fellow church member, and my dental hygienist. I had no idea she had worked as a welder on Liberty Ships during World War II when she was only sixteen years old. After I learned this in 2012, I began my journey into learning all about the Rosies during World War II and writing my fourth novel Becoming Jestina. Jane’s story is an amazing one, and I still talk to her regularly.
I recommend this book because it gives a broader picture of the women who changed the way women participate in society forever. It wasn’t just building bombs, liberty ships, and planes that women had a part in. It was everything! When I’ve talked to women who lived during that time, and when I read this book, I realized how many ways women changed during that period of history.
Our Mothers' War is a stunning and unprecedented portrait of women during World War II, a war that forever transformed the way women participate in American society.
Never before has the vast range of women's experiences during this pivotal era been brought together in one book. Now, Our Mothers' War re-creates what American women from all walks of life were doing and thinking, on the home front and abroad. These heartwarming and sometimes heartbreaking accounts of the women we have known as mothers, aunts, and grandmothers reveal facets of their lives that have usually remained unmentioned and unappreciated.
After teaching high school English for thirty-one years, I retired and began my second career in writing. I have published five novels and one collection of poetry. When I met Jane Tucker in 1974, she became a good friend, fellow church member, and my dental hygienist. I had no idea she had worked as a welder on Liberty Ships during World War II when she was only sixteen years old. After I learned this in 2012, I began my journey into learning all about the Rosies during World War II and writing my fourth novel Becoming Jestina. Jane’s story is an amazing one, and I still talk to her regularly.
I recommend this book because it not only helped me understand the role of women during the war, but also the whole culture of Savannah, Georgia, during that time. Tony Cope was a young child in Savannah during World War II and was very familiar with the Southeastern Shipyards. When he returned as an adult and realized that most people in the city did not even know the shipyards had existed, he was determined to make sure that part of Savannah’s history wasn’t lost. His interviews with those who had worked in the shipyards are fascinating and enlightening.
During World War II eighty-eight of the almost three thousand Liberty ships built in America were launched in Savannah, Georgia. Without Liberty ships, the Battle of the Atlantic might have been lost.
Few remember the Liberty ships today; fewer remember the shipyard or that the Southeastern Shipbuilding Corporation was the largest industry ever located there. The land on which this shipyard stood is now derelict. Thousands drive by it every day and have no idea of the great contribution to the war effort that was made on that site.
This social history tells the story of the men and women…
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…
After teaching high school English for thirty-one years, I retired and began my second career in writing. I have published five novels and one collection of poetry. When I met Jane Tucker in 1974, she became a good friend, fellow church member, and my dental hygienist. I had no idea she had worked as a welder on Liberty Ships during World War II when she was only sixteen years old. After I learned this in 2012, I began my journey into learning all about the Rosies during World War II and writing my fourth novel Becoming Jestina. Jane’s story is an amazing one, and I still talk to her regularly.
No list of books about women’s work during World War II would be complete without Penny Coleman’s book. If you just want an overall picture of how eighteen million women, many of whom had never before held a job, entered the workforce in 1942-45 to help the US fight World War II, then this is the book for you! The book is illustrated with black and white photographs. It is an ALA Best Book for Young Adults.
Illustrated with black-and-white photographs. When America's men went off to war in 1942, millions of women were recruited, through posters and other propaganda, to work at non-traditional jobs. In defense plants, factories, offices, and everywhere else workers were needed, they were--for the first time--well paid and financially independent. But eventually the war ended, and the government and industries that had once persuaded them to work for the war effort now instructed them to return home and take care of their husbands and children. Based on interviews and original research by noted historian Penny Colman, Rosie the Riveter shows young readers…
By ten years old, I had lived in four countries and endured the repercussions of revolution, exile, military coup d’état, and emigration. That explains my life-long passion for history. I pursued a Ph.D. in Latin American history to make sense of the forces that shaped my and my family’s lives. My seven previous books explored diverse topics in Caribbean history within its broader Atlantic context. Momentous domestic and global events, starting with the COVID-19 pandemic and an explosion of racial and political violence in the U.S. pushed me to broaden my scholarly attention and become a Creators Syndicate’s weekly columnist, and publish a collection of columns with the title When the World Turned Upside Down.
American readers and news watchers are deeply segregated: those on the left reading and watching news produced by liberals, and those on the right consuming words and images from conservative authors and broadcasts. And then there is Washington Post columnist George Will, a conservative, who reads voraciously across the political spectrum and offers commentary that reasonable Americans must recognize as honest and insightful. American Happiness and Its Discontents is a collection of thoroughly researched, thought-provoking, exquisitely-written columns written by Will from 2008 to 2020. He offers insightful commentary on a wide range of political, social, and cultural topics and tackles subjects deemed taboo by the left such as the wave of nonsense that has flooded higher education.
George F. Will has been one of this country's leading columnists since 1974. He won the Pulitzer Prize for it in 1977. The Wall Street Journal once called him "perhaps the most powerful journalist in America." In this new collection, he examines a remarkably unsettling thirteen years in our nation's experience, from 2008 to 2020. Included are a number of columns about court cases, mostly from the Supreme Court, that illuminate why the composition of the federal judiciary has become such a contentious subject.
Other topics addressed include the American Revolutionary War, historical figures from Frederick Douglass to JFK, as…
I was a happy child until I went to school. When my teacher turned her back, I ran home. My mom sent me back. The umbilical cord broken, I held a grudge. That enmity remained until my ninth-grade English teacher read us Richard Brautigan’s post-apocalyptic, proto-hippie fantasy In Watermelon Sugar. There was much to imagine: a multicolored sun, an infinite garbage dump, and mathematical, parent-eating tigers. Like the narrator, I wanted to live in a shack, not have a regular name, and hook up with a proto-hippie, hot cake-making artist girlfriend who made “a long and slow love” possible. Since then, I have devoured fiction, poetry, art, film, you name it.
I saw my first raven near Mount Rainier. The bird looked me in the eye, hopped to the left, sized me up, and continued his business. The advancing Russian army drove Bernd Heinrich and his family into the forest near Hahnheide, Germany, where they lived in a small hut for five years.
There, he began his lifelong quest to connect with insects (especially bees), owls, trees, antelope (he runs ultramarathons), geese...and ravens. The mind of the Raven is a deep, scientific meditation on the intersection between being human and raven. It concludes that “ultimately [our differences are] less a matter of consciousness than of culture” (342).
I wonder how culture has dulled my imagination, a struggle Heinrich clearly has fought more successfully than I have.
Heinrich involves us in his quest to get inside the mind of the raven. But as animals can only be spied on by getting quite close, Heinrich adopts ravens, thereby becoming a "raven father," as well as observing them in their natural habitat. He studies their daily routines, and in the process, paints a vivid picture of the ravens' world. At the heart of this book are Heinrich's love and respect for these complex and engaging creatures, and through his keen observation and analysis, we become their intimates too.
Heinrich's passion for ravens has led him around the world in…
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 have often spoken with the animals that I meet: from migrating ducks to street cats, woodchucks to chickadees. Mostly quietly—and always as if they not only could hear and understand, but also could reply. As our children grew, the replies became louder and more insistent. When our daughter was old enough to feel fearful of travel—particularly the crossing of open water in small boats—I began to tell her stories featuring these talking animals. Because the animals also were sometimes afraid, the stories helped to distract her from the perils of our own adventures and then, eventually, to enjoy them as well.
Although not nearly as well-known as Richard Adams’ Watership Down (an epic tale, with voyages and battles on the scale of Homer’s Odyssey), this book was published decades earlier and could be seen as a quiet precursor to that far more violent story.
The gardeners among you will immediately recognize both the fear and the excitement that the animals feel when contemplating unfamiliar humans. My wife and I, who have moved dozens of times in our long careers, often quote a line from Little Georgie: “New folks coming, oh my!”
It has been a while since Folks lived in the Big House, and an even longer time has passed since there has been a garden at the House. All the animals of the Hill are very excited about the new Folks moving in, and they wonder how things are going to change. It’s only a matter of time before the animals of the Hill find out just who is moving in, and they may be a little bit surprised when they do.
I retired from the Metropolitan Police Department in Washington, DC, as a detective assigned to the Major Crimes Unit, but I’ve always been a writer at heart and an avid reader. I graduated from California State University in Long Beach, CA, with a major in Film. I am the author of six crime fiction books, three of which involve retired detective turned PI Frank Marr. This trilogy was critically acclaimed.
Platinga is a sergeant with the San Francisco police department. I love his book because so many of the stories are similar to ones that I experienced as a cop. It brought back some good and some not-so-good memories.
You don’t have to be a cop or a former cop to love the read, though. It’s not only a great reference book for crime writers who want to learn and add authenticity to what they’re writing but also a wonderful read for those who want to take a wild ride inside a cop’s head during the course of their tour of duty.
"The new bible for crime writers." ―The Wall Street Journal
How does it feel to be in a high-speed car chase? What is it like to shoot someone? What do cops really think about the citizens they serve? Nearly everyone has wondered what it's like to be a police officer, but no civilian really understands what happens on the job. 400 Things Cops Know shows police work on the inside, from the viewpoint of the regular cop on the beat―a profession that can range from rewarding to bizarre to terrifying, all within the course of an eight-hour shift. Written by…
I am a creature of habitat. I can’t help but connect with my environment in every possible way. It’s physical, emotional. I spent the first 23 years of my life in Mexico City. Leaving was heart-wrenching, but the promise to fulfill a dream drew me to Los Angeles. During the next four decades I became a student of Los Angeles and the Latino community that populates it. I agree with Randy Newman: I love L.A.
If You Lived Here You’d Be Famous By Nowis a debut novel by Via Bleidner, a young writer who reports her experiences living in the L.A./San Fernando Valley enclave of Calabasas, attending the Calabasas High School. Calabasas, for those who have missed this essential chapter of contemporary lunacy, is home to the Kardashians. Bleidner writes about the world she has inhabited as a reporter. She participates, but she also is able to maintain a certain writer's detachment describing the shenanigans the natives engage in: lip surgery, social media, and dog celebrities. But there is humor in this slice of the L.A. experience. Bleidner not only describes, but also tries to understand and reflect.
If You Lived Here You'd Be Famous by Now is an insider's collection of funny and warmhearted stories about coming of age in the Los Angeles suburb famed for birthing the Kardashian-Jenners and the Bling Ring.
For Via Bleidner, transferring to Calabasas High from the private Catholic school she's attended since second grade is a culture shock, not to mention absolutely lonely. Suddenly thrust into an unfamiliar world of celebrities, affluenza, and McMansions, Via takes a page from Cameron Crowe and pretends she's on a journalism assignment, taking notes on her classmates and jotting down bits of overheard gossip.
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…
Food has always been my existential retreat from the world. Whether eating solo or with people, countless meals have been the best hyperbolic time chambers for strengthening relationships with others and with myself. And I’ve always wanted to write, to participate in ageless forums of subject and technique in this great literary tradition of ours. I guess these two art forms and obsessions were bound to lock horns in my aesthetic makeup. In my world, good reading is good eating. It’s that simple. No other qualifications are needed. I inhaled the following books and was made full every time – to eventually take a stab at a couple of recipes also.
If Cooking Gene is the rallying cry, Food: A Love Story is the marching time music.
Gaffigan expands the food observations and shenanigans from his standup routines and this memoir is just as funny as watching the family man on stage. Gaffigan’s food writing maintains a golden dynamic of being approachable and personal at the same time.
It was full of personality and gave me valuable insight into how to shape my character’s food habits as the focal point of literary scrutiny.
“What are my qualifications to write this book? None really. So why should you read it? Here’s why: I’m a little fat. If a thin guy were to write about a love of food and eating I’d highly recommend that you do not read his book.”
Bacon. McDonalds. Cinnabon. Hot Pockets. Kale. Stand-up comedian and author Jim Gaffigan has made his career rhapsodizing over the most treasured dishes of the American diet (“choking on bacon is like getting murdered by your lover”) and decrying the worst offenders (“kale is the early morning of foods”). Fans flocked to his New York…
