Books like Storm Lake — picked by fans

This is the story that made me want to be either a reporter or a whistleblower. The trail of this episode from the moments the break-in occurred at Watergate to the resignation of President Nixon show how complex corruption often is. “Getting to the bottom of it” is often never fully achieved in conspiracies, not only as large and sweeping as this one, but of countless others that are much smaller in scale.

Additionally, this is a great example of how the original decision to commit the first corrupt act leads to more and more of it until corruption defines the existence of men and women who started out with good intentions. 

I recommended this book as it shows the mistakes that were made in the conduct of the Vietnam War from a military perspective and strategy. While I served in Vietnam, I could not understand some of the things we were asked and told to do.

This book shed new light on those orders and how those orders contributed to the end results of the war. I found it amazing that one man had the answers and yet was ignored by so many. I found it disturbing common sense threatened senior officers egos and the results were a war that America would be saddled with for ten years and countless lost lives. 

This memoir tells the true story of a literature professor in Iran who invited a small group of her former female students to secretly meet at her home and discuss banned Western books. Nafisi shares how, in a country where personal freedom was disappearing, these stories became a way for them to hold on to their voices and identities.

The book blends their real lives with the novels they read—like Lolita and The Great Gatsby—showing how fiction can offer hope and resistance, even in the darkest times. It's both a sharp look at life under an oppressive regime and a moving reminder of how powerful books can be.

Washington Post staff writer Casey Parks, whose career has focused on stories about the LGBTQ+ community and other marginalized groups, has penned an extraordinary book about growing up a lesbian in a Louisiana community where anyone who was LGBTQ+ was reviled and anyone identifying as such had to keep it a secret, with the resulting negative repercussions on self.

Diary of a Misfit took years to report and write, and it opens a stunning window into the past – and present, when LGBTQ+ individuals in many regions are discriminated against, the subject of hate-filled laws (“Don’t say gay”), and worse.

This is the first book that credits Donald Trump as “author,” and it may well be one of the few books he has ever read. The actual “writing” was performed by Tony Schwartz, with one hand on the keyboard and the other holding his nose. This is the sacred text that introduced the term “truthful hyperbole” (lying) which later metastasized into the Big Lie, as the author slithered inexorably from real estate conman (six bankruptcies) to reality show host to, naturally, leader of the formerly free world. Tony Schwartz’s decades of mea culpas can’t erase the hideous trajectory launched by The Art of the Deal, which author Trump called his second favorite book after The Bible, and set him on his course toward overthrowing American democracy. 

I loved this book because it made me laugh…a lot!

Comedian Dave Barry wasn’t someone whose work I was that familiar with previously. I couldn’t put this book down despite the fact that it poked some fun at how to personal finance books like mine, which Barry clearly had read.

His quiz for assessing your current financial situation included questions like this:

How do you plan to finance your retirement?

1. Savings.

2. Social security.

3. Sale of kidneys.

The author also reads this audiobook with professional polish making it a very pleasurable experience. Actually comforting as I would tune in often during the day doing the chores, with the iPhone in the back pocket. 

Maggie Haberman, currently a New York Times reporter with previous positions at the Post and Daily News, makes her account of the man “formidable” – to use a word from the New York Times review. But for me it was continually fascinating to hear the stories of Trump’s early years. For example, one of Haberman’s talking points is that Trump’s orientation to the world is one of hospitality, of course. This explains his charm to voters where I see none. 

It’s a long book, but I loved Haberman reading her story to me, as sad as it is, but as the saying goes, “knowledge is power,” and I feel stronger for knowing the human… show more.

I like that this book dares to touch a raw nerve that is usually avoided in politically correct environments. This book is certainly polemical.

Basically, the claim is that North American pragmatic values have substituted classical intellectual European ones, contributing to the present-day degeneracy of science and culture and society in general, with special emphasis on the history of physics of the last century.

I think there are some truths among the ideas presented in this book. However, Unzicker’s hope is to “Make Physics Great Again,” mimicking the discourse of Donald Trump (replacing the word “America” with “Physics”), and I cannot see a future in which America or physics will be the same as they were in the past. 

In the 2024 American Presidential election, Kamala Harris faced stultifying criticism of her intellect, her motives, and her integrity, but she never gave in to it. She used her voice.

In this book, she chronicles the 107 days that lead to the election. I love her honesty in this diarized journey to what was ultimately a defeat. She writes so compellingly about the pain of losing and the humility required to face that defeat. I felt her pain and her shock at the outcome.

But I also admired the resonating power of her dignity. Few women have experienced such public condemnation based on lies and schoolyard bullying, but she showed me in this book that one can, and always should, rise above it, stay true to oneself, and keep one’s voice.

This is another readable book—and it’s really important because these authors don’t just focus on the norms that Trump violated and that get so much attention, but actually offer an interesting analysis of the things he did administratively that weakened the office of the presidency and the national government. People tend to think Trump was a poor administrator, and in many ways, of course, he was, but his actions have consequences that we don’t always see and this book tells us about them.