Here are 100 books that The Company He Keeps fans have personally recommended if you like
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In 2011, I was a newly minted college professor who was trying to support my students’ interests (Greek life) in hopes that they would return the favor and support mine (medieval literature). Never in a million years would I have guessed that accepting an invitation to attend a Greek event on campus would snowball into receiving a bid to join a National Panhellenic Conference sorority and serve as its faculty advisor. Somewhere along the way, I realized that my perspective uniquely positioned me to shed new light on the longstanding controversies plaguing these organizations and provide a new lens through which to view their impact not only on campus culture but society at large.
I’ve long had a professional crush on sociologist Lisa Wade as her work is a deadly combination of brilliant and compulsively readable.
Her study was published while I was writing my book and serves as a companion piece to understanding how hookup culture operates on American college campuses. As de facto speakeasies, fraternity houses serve as the campus party and, by extension, hookup headquarters.
This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it’s not always a good thing either.
The hookup is now part of college life. Yet the drunken encounter we always hear about tells only a fraction of the story. Lisa Wade offers the definitive account of this new sexual culture and demonstrates that the truth is both more heartening and disturbing than we thought. Offering invaluable insights for parents, educators and students, Wade situates hookup culture within the history of sexuality, the evolution of higher education and the unfinished feminist revolution. Using new research, she maps out a challenging emotional landscape marked by unequal pleasures, competition for status and sexual violence. Accessible and open-minded, compassionate and…
The Victorian mansion, Evenmere, is the mechanism that runs the universe.
The lamps must be lit, or the stars die. The clocks must be wound, or Time ceases. The Balance between Order and Chaos must be preserved, or Existence crumbles.
Appointed the Steward of Evenmere, Carter Anderson must learn the…
In 2011, I was a newly minted college professor who was trying to support my students’ interests (Greek life) in hopes that they would return the favor and support mine (medieval literature). Never in a million years would I have guessed that accepting an invitation to attend a Greek event on campus would snowball into receiving a bid to join a National Panhellenic Conference sorority and serve as its faculty advisor. Somewhere along the way, I realized that my perspective uniquely positioned me to shed new light on the longstanding controversies plaguing these organizations and provide a new lens through which to view their impact not only on campus culture but society at large.
There aren’t a lot of scholarly studies of fraternities and sororities in part because, until recently, academia didn’t see the topic as worthy of serious study.
Turk’s groundbreaking study dives deep into the archives to tell the origin story of the oldest Panhellenic sorority, and in the process, reveals a dramatic shift in organizational culture between its early years and second and third generations.
You’ll have to read the book to find of what happened and why…
A look at the intricate history of collegiate women's support networks-otherwise known as sororities
Sororities are often thought of as exclusive clubs for socially inclined college students, but Bound by a Mighty Vow, a history of the women's Greek system, demonstrates that these organizations have always served more serious purposes. Diana Turk explores the founding and development of the earliest sororities (then called women's fraternities) and explains how these groups served as support networks to help the first female collegians succeed in the hostile world of nineteenth century higher education.
Turk goes on to look at how and in what…
In 2011, I was a newly minted college professor who was trying to support my students’ interests (Greek life) in hopes that they would return the favor and support mine (medieval literature). Never in a million years would I have guessed that accepting an invitation to attend a Greek event on campus would snowball into receiving a bid to join a National Panhellenic Conference sorority and serve as its faculty advisor. Somewhere along the way, I realized that my perspective uniquely positioned me to shed new light on the longstanding controversies plaguing these organizations and provide a new lens through which to view their impact not only on campus culture but society at large.
I’m a self-professed history junkie, and this recent contribution to the history of white Greek life picks up more or less where Turk left off.
The most fascinating and important argument that this book makes is that white southern sororities fundamentally influenced the definition of femininity in the South in the mid-twentieth century.
Understanding how and why southern sororities constructed womanhood before the advent of social media goes a long way in explaining why sorority women at universities in Oregon and Minnesota look and act eerily like sorority women at Ole Miss and the University of Alabama.
Women of Discriminating Taste examines the role of historically white sororities in the shaping of white womanhood in the twentieth century. As national women’s organizations, sororities have long held power on college campuses and in American life. Yet the groups also have always been conservative in nature and inherently discriminatory, selecting new members on the basis of social class, religion, race, or physical attractiveness. In the early twentieth century, sororities filled a niche on campuses as they purported to prepare college women for “ladyhood.” Sorority training led members to comport themselves as hyperfeminine, heterosocially inclined, traditionally minded women following a…
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…
In 2011, I was a newly minted college professor who was trying to support my students’ interests (Greek life) in hopes that they would return the favor and support mine (medieval literature). Never in a million years would I have guessed that accepting an invitation to attend a Greek event on campus would snowball into receiving a bid to join a National Panhellenic Conference sorority and serve as its faculty advisor. Somewhere along the way, I realized that my perspective uniquely positioned me to shed new light on the longstanding controversies plaguing these organizations and provide a new lens through which to view their impact not only on campus culture but society at large.
The ‘sorority girl’ is a stock character in most novels set on American college campuses, and you’ll be hard pressed to find one who isn’t portrayed as beautiful but vapid and one misstep away from the twin horrors of having a bad hair day and witnessing their ex leave a party with their best friend.
Patton’s novel self-consciously leans into the stereotypes of white Greek culture at a big southern university, which makes its critique of that culture and its broader cast of characters both funny in their exaggeration and horrifying in their appeal.
This is exactly the kind of sorority-themed novel you would expect from the genre but also, because of a couple of unexpected twists, the one you never saw coming.
Bestselling author Lisa Patton digs into exciting new territory with Rush, a story about mothers and daughters, sisterhood, tradition, and doing the right thing, now in trade paperback with a new epilogue!
Experience the phenomenon from a front row seat...
It’s move-in day for college freshmen on the Ole Miss campus. Nobody wants to fit in more than Cali, a bright, small town girl with family secrets too scandalous for the well-to-do to imagine. Sorority rush is weeks away and without a pedigree, Cali doesn’t have much of a chance at membership. Her dorm room alone is as plain as…
I find the archaeology of here to be just as interesting and enlightening as any faraway land. For those of us at universities, that means that the campus itself is worthy of historical, archaeological, and anthropological study. I have been San Diego State’s University History Curator for decades and never tire of uncovering new insights into an institution with a 125-year history, nearly 500,000 alumni, and a bevy of bizarre tales. Whether it be hidden student murals, supernatural claims from the gridiron, or disputed dinosaur footprints, the immediate landscape of our workplace is often full of historical treasures.
Laurie Wilkie uses multiple lines of evidence, including recently uncovered archaeological artifacts, oral histories, old photographs, and the campus landscape, to examine daily life at UC Berkeley’s first fraternity. Her intriguing study offers insights into the notion of the early modern university as well as changing definitions of masculinity during the early 20th century.
"The Lost Boys of Zeta Psi" takes us inside the secret, amusing, and sometimes mundane world of a California fraternity around 1900. Gleaning history from recent archaeological excavations and from such intriguing sources as oral histories, architecture, and photographs, Laurie A. Wilkie uncovers details of everyday life in the first fraternity at the University of California, Berkeley, and sets this story into the rich social and historical context of West Coast America at the turn of the last century. In particular, Wilkie examines men's coming-of-age experiences in a period when gender roles and relations were undergoing dramatic changes. Her innovative…
I am a historian of twentieth-century Argentina and a professor of modern Latin American history currently teaching at the University of Houston. Born and raised in Argentina, I completed my undergraduate studies at the National University of Rosario and moved to the United States in 2000 to continue my education. I received my M.A. in history from New York University and my Ph.D. in history from Indiana University, Bloomington. I have written extensively about gender, working-class history, consumer culture, and sexuality in Argentina. I am the author of Workers Go Shopping in Argentina: The Rise of Popular Consumer Culture and Destape! Sex, Democracy, and Freedom in Postdictatorial Argentina.
This is a solid edited volume that has contributions from leading scholars of Mexican history exploring straight and gay sexualities from the nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century in different parts of the country. The chapters examine a wide range of interesting topics including cinema and movie going, public bathhouses, prostitution, elopement, and mariachi culture to untangle how masculinities are historically constructed and to interrogate the concepts of macho and machismo.
In Masculinity and Sexuality in Modern Mexico, historians and anthropologists explain how evolving notions of the meaning and practice of manhood have shaped Mexican history. In essays that range from Texas to Oaxaca and from the 1880s to the present, contributors write about file clerks and movie stars, wealthy world travelers and ordinary people whose adventures were confined to a bar in the middle of town. The Mexicans we meet in these essays lived out their identities through extraordinary events--committing terrible crimes, writing world-famous songs, and ruling the nation--but also in everyday activities like falling in love, raising families, getting…
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…
I've been teaching and writing in the field of the history of technology for over six decades, and it's not too much to say that the field and my professional career grew up together. The Society for the History of Technology began in 1958, and its journal, Technology and Culture, first appeared the following year. I've watched, and helped encourage, a broadening of the subject from a rather internal concentration on machines and engineering to a widening interest in technology as a social activity with cultural and political, as well as economic, outcomes. In my classes I always assigned not only original documents and scholarly monographs but also memoirs, literature, and films.
As the eminent American author Willa Cather herself admitted, Alexander’s Bridge“is not the story of a bridge and how it was built, but of a man who built bridges.” And significantly, an Americanman. Early in the novel we are introduced to an English acquaintance of Bartley Alexander who liked him “because he was an engineer. He had preconceived ideas about everything, and his idea about Americans was that they should be engineers or mechanics.” This can be read therefore as a judgment on American masculinity—this was Cather’s first novel in 1912 and in light of her later writings, was uncharacteristic in having a male protagonist. Alexander’s professional success as a bridge engineer was not matched by his personal life. He could span rivers but not the gulf between his marriage in Boston and his affair with an Irish actress in London. Because of insufficient resources his greatest bridge,…
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I have been a pioneer in both the women’s and men’s movement. I was elected three times to the Board of the National Organization for Women in NYC and was called by GQ “The Martin Luther King of the men’s movement”. I advocate for a “Gender Liberation Movement, freeing both sexes from the rigid roles of the past toward more flexible roles for their future”. I realized that boys worldwide are struggling in ways we’ve barely begun to address. I’ve presented my research for The Boy Crisis worldwide, from the White House to the Norwegian Parliament, and it has inspired bipartisan fatherhood legislation in Florida.
I’m recommending this book because it gave me a deeper understanding of what boys need to thrive. Gurian’s insights into the biological and neurological differences between boys and girls fascinated me and reinforced what I had observed in my own research. I found myself nodding along as he described how modern society often misunderstands boys, leaving them struggling with their emotions, education, and sense of purpose.
What I love most about this book is how it combines science with heart. Gurian doesn’t just diagnose the problem—he offers real, practical solutions that parents and educators can use immediately. I walked away from this book feeling even more committed to helping boys find their way, and I believe anyone who cares about boys will feel the same.
Boys and their communities are challenged today in ways they have not been before. Dr. Michael Gurian has studied and served children and their families for thirty years. His The Wonder of Boys (1996), is credited with sparking the "boys' movement." In Saving Our Sons, he features the latest research in male emotional intelligence, male motivation development, neurotoxicity and the male brain, and electronics and videogame use. Linking practical solutions with strategic new policies based on twenty years of field work through the Gurian Institute, Dr. Gurian provides a seven-stage model for the journey to manhood in the new millennium.…
Michael Kimmel is one of the world’s leading experts on men and masculinities. He was the SUNY Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Sociology and Gender Studies at Stony Brook University. Among his many books are Manhood in America, Angry White Men, The Politics of Manhood, The Gendered Society, and the best seller Guyland: The Perilous World Where Boys Become Men. With funding from the MacArthur Foundation, he founded the Center for the Study of Men and Masculinities at Stony Brook in 2013.
I’ve rarely read a book that explores the pain of the white working class better. If you’ve ever wondered about the lives of those grizzled gas station attendants with their faded baseball hats, this book is a small masterpiece.
The story of the descent into violence of ordinary man. The narrator looks at the struggle between decency and brutality in his brother, whose early promise as an athlete and student was crushed by his father's fists. By the author of "Continental Drift".
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…
Based on my experiences as a single parent and worker in traditionally male fields (journalism and law, back when newsrooms and law firms resembled men's clubs), I believe that each person contains both “feminine” and “masculine” behaviors and feelings. Yet socially constructed gender norms discourage people from exhibiting this full range of being. Ben Koehler’s troubling and tragic story presented a way to explore the origins of 20th-century American gender norms while trying to solve the mystery of Ben’s guilt or innocence. A bonus was the opportunity to write about Plum Island, an environmental treasure with a fascinating history that many people, including myself, are seeking to preserve and open to the public.
Pettegrew, a historian, also portrays Roosevelt as brute-in-chief at the turn of the 20th century, but he zooms out and describes other social forces in the United States that contributed to the emergence of the militaristic definition of manhood. These include the mythologizing of the Civil War as a noble display of male honor, divorcing the war from its roots in slavery and mistreatment of Blacks. He shows how the advocates for stronger men—and dependent women—“self-consciously used Darwinian biology to classify brutishness as an essential and natural male trait.” The book provides a fascinating and comprehensive look at the complicated ways in which gender stereotypes have been created and perpetuated in America.
Are men truly predisposed to violence and aggression? Is it the biological fate of males to struggle for domination over women and vie against one another endlessly? These and related queries have long vexed philosophers, social scientists, and other students of human behavior. In Brutes in Suits, historian John Pettegrew examines theoretical writings and cultural traditions in the United States to find that, Darwinian arguments to the contrary, masculine aggression can be interpreted as a modern strategy for taking power. Drawing ideas from varied and at times seemingly contradictory sources, Pettegrew argues that traditionally held beliefs about masculinity developed largely…
