Books like The American Way of Empire — picked by fans

This is a sequel to the author’s famous The Robber Barons. His detailed primary research into campaigns and negotiations between politicians and their backers illuminates many subjects that later historians have too quickly passed over. Because he knew so much about the economy, Josephson also zeros in again and again on the driving forces that later work often dissolves into bromides about “concentrated wealth” and such. Josephson shows you the people and the institutions actually at work.

Readers looking to the past for inspiration about the possibilities of antitrust and progressive movements right now are being served a very weak and distorted account of what the most successful trust busters like Teddy Roosevelt or Woodrow Wilson were actually trying to do and what they really accomplished. Kolko was a leader in exploiting primary sources that upended traditional accounts of who did what to whom.

So-called “New Brandeis” antitrust champions in particular overlook the realities of trust busting in American history and have much to learn from this masterpiece. 

Weinstein’s, like Kolko’s book above, is a vital corrective to much starry-eyed contemporary writing about Progressivism and the real nature of movements supporting the “vital center.” His accounts of how major American businesses supported early twentieth-century reform movements, hoping to head off popular upsurges while also accomplishing changes they thought they needed, are indispensable in our time. Modern readers are not used to these sorts of things and so they have a hard time seeing through promises of reforms that are anything but what they appear to be. Like Kolko’s, Weinstein’s work is greatly strengthened by his study of primary sources. 

Younger Americans have no direct experience of the Cold War, McCarthyism, or the nineteen sixties. They rarely hear anyone suggest that the government is properly responsible for maintaining full employment. They also have little idea of what the American establishment was when Pax Americana shaped the world. This study conveys that world very well indeed. It benefits once again from a vast amount of primary research. Its depiction of how banks, lawyers, and American multinationals wielded power at the zenith of the “American Century” has few, if any rivals. It vividly shows how someone very few Americans ever heard of rose to the pinnacle of power, shaping not only the U.S., but western Europe (especially Germany), the Mideast, and many other parts of the world. The writing moves briskly along and is especially good at sketching complex situations that are intrinsically tough to convey concretely.

Racing away from Ground Zero, 16-year-old Kyle encounters a bizarre sight: an angel, clinging to the Brooklyn Bridge. Kyle stops to help and discovers the “angel” is a teenage girl, her wings a costume from a school play. But the girl doesn’t remember anything about who she is. Thus begins a quest that pulls Kyle in conflicting directions: to find his dad (a first responder), to care for his uncle (a disabled cop), and to help this girl find her way home.

I love that the book begins with an act of kindness to a stranger, something we saw often after 9/11. And while we sometimes say we’d love to forget an event like 9/11, Gae’s book bears witness to the need to remember.

Those of us who were alive on 9/11 remember exactly where we were and where we watched the endless TV coverage of the horrific attack on the World Trade Center, including the collapse of the Twin Towers. We all think we know what happened.

I was captivated by 101 Minutes because it documented what was going on within the Twin Towers before the collapse of the South and then the North Towers as those trapped above the fire floors and below desperately tried to find a way out. The two New York Times reporters who wrote the book – the late Jim Dwyer and Kevin Flynn - are former colleagues of mine at Newsday and at the NY Daily News, and they were the best in the business at the time of the attack.

There is no better history of the struggle to survive. They drew on years of experience… show more.

A book rarely brings me to tears. I didn’t know what to expect when I first picked up this one. The main thing I love about this book is that it takes you right into the head of the main character, who happens to be a very precocious nine-year-old boy. Outwardly, the main character is on an adventure to solve a mystery, but inwardly, he’s on a journey to come to terms with his father’s death.

The protagonist–who, on the surface, is nothing like me–made me feel and address things I had not come to terms with in my life. I felt myself struggling along with the character, and then I ultimately began to heal with him, too. It’s a powerful, tragic, yet absolutely hilarious story that allowed me to forget myself for a while before realizing that I was learning about myself the entire time I read it.

Allende loves her Chilean homeland with a longing, a tenderness, an exasperation derived from the country’s turbulent history and her long experience of exile and emigration in Venezuela and the United States.

This book made me fall in love all over again with the country, which I first visited a quarter century ago – and it will make you fall in love with it too, whether or not you’ve ever visited Chile.

With a novelist’s imaginative flare, Allende travels through time and across borders, searching her memory to tell the story of her lonely childhood, her remarkable family, the tumults that forced her abroad (including the death of her father’s cousin, President Salvador Allende), and a long life lived at a distance from the place she still calls home, regardless of decades of displacement.

The September 11th terrorist attack is a difficult history to introduce.

Picture books can be a good way to start the conversation, especially with 8 and 9-year-olds. In This Very Tree, Sean Rubin broaches the topic through a remarkable Callery pear tree in the Twin Towers plaza which survived the 9-11 terrorist attacks.

Rubin’s poignant artwork conveys both the destruction of that terrible day in New York City and the rebuilding efforts afterwards. Informative and lengthy back matter provides more information to complement the brief illustrated text. This picture book leaves the reader with an ultimately hopeful outlook of resilience and renewal. 

"Wow!" becomes an understatement in this story. I enjoyed the challenge this author issued to the investigators called to a murder scene where more than enough DNA evidence to convict the suspect shouts, “Collect me and solve the case.” Not so fast. Twenty years later, the case remains unsolved.

I liked this story’s multiple secrets, but how might Avery Mason, a TV show host in search of a ratings boost, find the killer when the person of interest died in one of the Twin Towers on 9/11? The answer: a twist of fate.