Here are 100 books that The Empress and the English Doctor fans have personally recommended if you like
The Empress and the English Doctor.
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I am a journalist and author who has been lucky enough to follow my curiosity wherever it led – from politics and presidents to climate change and crime. Most of my books explore a theme that fascinates me – the tension between science and religion, faith and reason, that is a defining challenge of our era. I have a deep respect for science, but, like most, an amateur’s understanding of it. The global pandemic has confirmed the need for accessible science writing to help us bring our understanding in line with what’s going on in the labs.
Most of us can’t even pronounce the names of the childhood diseases vaccines have almost eradicated, nor can we imagine the parental grief, and childhood suffering, that those diseases routinely inflicted on families until well into the 20th Century. This comprehensive history reminds us that the development of vaccines was always a see-saw between life-saving advances, and terrible mistakes and failures.
Vaccine juxtaposes the stories of brilliant scientists with the industry's struggle to produce safe, effective, and profitable vaccines. It focuses on the role of military and medical authority in the introduction of vaccines and looks at why some parents have resisted this authority. Political and social intrigue have often accompanied vaccination-from the divisive introduction of smallpox inoculation in colonial Boston to the 9,000 lawsuits recently filed by parents convinced that vaccines caused their children's autism. With narrative grace and investigative journalism, Arthur Allen reveals a history illuminated by hope and shrouded by controversy, and he sheds new light on changing…
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…
I live in Dublin, Ireland and am the author of eleven novels, many of them Irish bestsellers, all of them translated into foreign languages, most of them also published in the US by St Martin’s Press. A lawyer by profession, I gave up my law practice to concentrate on writing fiction, beginning with an historical novel Whispers in the Wind which was a No. 1 Irish bestseller. History is my passion.
This is a little historical gem. The author was the wife of the British consul to Constantinople in 1718 and wrote copious letters home detailing her travels and her life in the Ottoman Empire’s capital. She describes the exoticism, the requirement that women be veiled in public (which she saw as freeing), the sumptuous jewels and wealth, the admiration of pregnant women (and the pressure to be pregnant to prove you were still young).
Her description of smallpox ‘parties’ is particularly interesting. These gatherings were held annually to inoculate children by using a tiny amount of smallpox pus scratched into the forearm. A survivor of smallpox herself, Mary had her own small son successfully inoculated and brought the knowledge back with her to England, but it was not until Edward Jenner introduced a vaccine later in the century that a treatment became more widely known.
The critical and biographical introduction tells of Lady Wortley Montagu's travels through Europe to Turkey in 1716, where her husband had been appointed Ambassador. Her lively letters offer insights into the paradoxical freedoms conferred on Muslim women by the veil, the value of experimental work by Turkish doctors on inoculation, and the beauty of Arab poetry and culture.
The ability to study another culture according to its own values and to see herself through the eyes of others makes Lady Mary one of the most fascinating of early travel writers and commentators
In my everyday world of responsibilities, I’m a writer, retired veterinarian, and freelance English editor for academic writing. But in my inner world of curiosity and obsessions, I’m forever a child with a profound longing to understand what the world is and how it works. Always searching on behalf of this forever child, I’ve read many a dull book about science, history, and writing. Despite having fascinating content, authors often flatten these subjects into featureless recitations. Happily, I’ve also found authors who express enthusiasm, expertise, or concern for their topic in prose that is as interesting in voice as it is in content.
I can’t describe this book better than the author describes it: “While the American Revolution may have defined the era for history, epidemic smallpox nevertheless defined it for many of the Americans who lived and died in that time” (p. 273, 275).
Most of what I thought I knew about the Revolutionary War period ended up adjusted after reading this book. In straightforward prose that still manages to be poetic, Pox Americana forced me to examine both my educational history and the ways I had ingested and processed my education.
The astonishing, hitherto unknown truths about a disease that transformed the United States at its birth
A horrifying epidemic of smallpox was sweeping across the Americas when the American Revolution began, and yet we know almost nothing about it. Elizabeth A. Fenn is the first historian to reveal how deeply variola affected the outcome of the war in every colony and the lives of everyone in North America.
By 1776, when military action and political ferment increased the movement of people and microbes, the epidemic worsened. Fenn's remarkable research shows us how smallpox devastated the American troops at Québec and…
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…
As an optimistic citizen of the world, I travelled the globe to witness famine in Africa and seaweed farming in Asia. Having worked on food systems for twenty-five years and being the father of three children, I was looking for solutions to feed the coming generation with hopes instead of fears! That’s how I ended up working for a visionary charity (Lloyd’s Register Foundation) and leading a “Seaweed Revolution” for United Nations Global Compact as well as writing book to spread the gospel of neglected Ocean Based Solutions. The books I have recommended here all give hope through examples from the past and present and provide readers with practical toolkits for creating positive change.
This book is an optimistic narration about one of the most amazing and important achievements in medical history.
It is written by Donald Henderson, the doctor who led the eradication campaign against the arguably most severe and incurable disease in history. Smallpox killed or disabled hundreds of millions of people and remains so far the only virus to have been deliberately eradicated globally.
This story is an ode to the unlimited power of science, education, and multilateralism. It shows how, led by a few people and a lot of positive stamina, the world got together and overcame all hurdles despite technical challenges and political division in a highly fragmented post-war world.
Echoing recent events with Covid – and hopefully providing a blueprint for tackling climate change – it shows how we can stand together when circumstances require it and achieve what seemed for ages completely impossible. An inspiring example for…
For more than 3000 years, hundreds of millions of people have died or been left permanently scarred or blind by the relentless, incurable disease called smallpox. In 1967, Dr. D.A. Henderson became director of a worldwide campaign to eliminate this disease from the face of the earth.
This spellbinding book is Dr. Henderson's personal story of how he led the World Health Organization's campaign to eradicate smallpox-the only disease in history to have been deliberately eliminated. Some have called this feat "the greatest scientific and humanitarian achievement of the past century."
In a lively, engrossing narrative, Dr. Henderson makes it…
I’m a former psychology professor, and I find that in both my reading and writing, I wonder about individuals’ backgrounds and motivations for their actions. I particularly enjoy novels that take a deep dive into what makes individuals behave as they do. And criminal behavior, with its violations of norms and laws, offers an especially rich opportunity for writers to delve into the reasons people resort to criminality. This is why I was drawn to the characters Celia and Ed Cooney and decided to write a novel about their crime spree.
I enjoy stories about unsolved crimes, and Emma Donoghue starts with a murder in 1876 San Francisco and builds a story around a character trying to solve the crime.
The main characters, Burlesque dancer Blanche and frog catcher Jenny, quickly drew me into the story. When Jenny is murdered, Blanche believes she knows who murdered Jenny—and thinks she is responsible. I loved how Donoghue captured the rough and gritty San Francisco of the times.
I’m a great fan of author’s notes at the end of historical novels, and Donoghue’s lengthy afterword reveals much about what parts of the novel are based on fact and which imagined—and how she went about researching the story.
Inspired by a true unsolved crime, Frog Music is a gripping historical novel by Emma Donoghue, author of the multi-million-copy bestseller Room.
San Francisco, 1876: a stifling heat wave and smallpox epidemic have engulfed the City.
Deep in the streets of Chinatown live three former stars of the Parisian circus: Blanche, now an exotic dancer at the House of Mirrors, her lover Arthur and his companion Ernest.
When an eccentric outsider joins their little circle, secrets unravel, changing everything - and leaving one of them dead.
A New York Times bestseller, Frog Music is a dark and compelling story of…
When I was growing up, I had no idea that New York State had 200 years of slavery. And when I realized that my Dutch American ancestors had been some of the most fervent enslavers, I knew I had to know more. It wasn’t until I met Eleanor Mire, a woman who is descended from the very people that my family enslaved, that my story became fuller. We realized that, through rape, we shared ancestors, which makes us “linked descendants.” Rather than turning away from the upsetting history, we became friends who knew we needed to keep learning and tell the stories of those who had been lost.
Reading just one newspaper advertisement for a runaway slave makes New York slavery real. Reading an entire book filled with more than 750 advertisements haunted me, especially when I found notices written by my own Dutch ancestors, like Coxsackie’s Hendrick Hoeghtelen, who in 1761 advertised for a man named Anthony, who spoke good Spanish, had one eye, and was marked with smallpox. Whatever became of Anthony? I wish I knew.
The combination of actual copies of the ads alongside transcription added to the power of the book. I come back to its pages again and again.
In Defiance documents 607 fugitives from slavery in the 18th and 19th-century Hudson River Valley region of New York State through the reproduction and transcription of 512 archival newspaper notices for runaway slaves placed by their enslavers or agents. Also included are notices advertising slaves captured, notices advertising slaves for sale, notices offering to purchase slaves, and selected runaway notices from outside the Hudson River Valley region. Nine tables analyze the data in the 512 notices for runaways from Hudson Valley enslavers, and the book includes a glossary, indexes of names, locations, and subjects, 36 illustrations, 5 maps from the…
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 am an anthropological archaeologist specializing in the Indigenous cultures of the Northeastern United States. My research intersects archaeology, anthropology, history, and Native American and Indigenous Studies to explore settler colonialism, landscape and memory, and Indigenous survivance. I’ve always been interested in cities, maybe because I’m city-born and raised and have spent my academic career at an Ivy League university in Providence. I read these books because I’m fascinated by place-based stories of Indigenous survivance in cities and elsewhere that challenge omissions and misconceptions about their colonial experiences in the popular historical imagination. I hope you enjoy these books as much as I have!
This evocative book addresses the conundrum of writing about an Indigenous place barely mentioned in narratives foundational to U.S. history. For Fenn, this was the ancestral homeland of the Mandan of the Northern Plains, once a flourishing hub of Native life.
This is history-writing at its finest, expertly braided from threads of archaeological, climatic, geological, epidemiological, and ethnographic evidence and enriched by Fenn’s eye-opening journey to North Dakota. Neither denying the impacts of European-American settler expansion nor portraying the Mandan merely as passive victims, the book led me on a journey of discovery that revealed complex interrelationships of colonialism, geography, and Indigenous persistence.
Encounters at the Heart of the World concerns the Mandan Indians, iconic plains people whose teeming, busy towns on the upper Missouri River were for centuries at the centre of the North American universe. We know of them mostly because Lewis and Clark spent the winter of 1804-1805 with them, but why don't we know more? Who were they, really? In this extraordinary book, Elizabeth A. Fenn retrieves their history by piecing together important new discoveries in archaeology, anthropology, geology, climatology, epidemiology, and nutritional science. Her boldly original interpretation of these diverse research findings offers us a new perspective on…
I am an Associate Lecturer and Adjunct in the Faculty of Arts at the University of Alberta. After being a piano teacher, working in communications for an NGO, and heading up the children’s department at a public library, I returned to university. While in graduate school, I underwent treatments for breast cancer, leading me into researching and teaching medical narratives, while focusing on works by breast cancer survivors. Introduced to graphic literature by a colleague, I began exploring a whole new world of literature. I now teach courses on graphic literature: memoirs, histories, speculative fiction, and the occasional comic.
This 4-volume serialized graphic novel tells the story of an Indigenous family across centuries and generations, stretching from Indigenous history before colonialism to ongoing colonial violence in Residential Schools until the present world of a Cree youth in existential crisis as he attempts to take his own life. His mother then guides him on a path of personal healing from his intergenerational trauma through stories about their history and traditions; Edwin’s journey takes him into the heart of ceremony and connection with his culture and history. He discovers his own strength to heal and then offers his father the opportunity to find his own healing path.
In this graphic novel, we are educated about Indigenous history through stories of struggle, resilience, and resurgence across the centuries. As Edwin, guided by his mother, meets with Elders, embraces his Cree identity, and pursues a path of healing through traditional teachings and practices,…
Illustrated in vivid colour, 7 Generations: A Plains Cree Saga is an epic story that follows one Indigenous family over three centuries and seven generations. This compiled edition was originally published as a series of four graphic novels: Stone, Scars, Ends/Begins, and The Pact.
Stone introduces Edwin, a young man who must discover his family's past if he is to have any future. Edwin learns of his ancestor, Stone, a Plains Cree warrior who came of age in the early 19th century. When Stone's older brother is tragically killed during a Blackfoot raid, he must overcome his grief to avenge…
I did not use to believe in human progress, but thought there must have been good old days behind us – until I studied history and understood that my ancestors did not live ecologically, they died ecologically, at an early age. Since then I’ve been obsessed with progress, what makes it possible and how we can spread it to more people. I am a historian of ideas from Sweden, the host of a video series on innovations in history, New and Improved, and the writer of many books on intellectual history and global economics, translated into more than 25 languages.
This 1974 book, by the founder of one of the world’s great picture libraries, was a real eye-opener to me when I first read it. We are all nostalgic and look at the past through rose-tinted glasses, and so do I. But then we forget about the hunger and the crime, tuberculosis, smallpox and heaps of trash on the streets, the child labor, and the despair of the aged. This richly illustrated book, with its multitude of stories, set me straight. For instance, did you know that New York had 150,000 horses in 1900, each producing around 20 pounds of manure a day? The past stank. It makes you deeply grateful for science, technology, and economic growth.
The Good Old Days—were they really good? On the surface they appear to be so—especially the period to which this term is most often applied, the years from the end of the Civil War to the early 1900’s. This period of history has receded into a benevolent haze, leaving us with the image of an ebullient, carefree America, the fun and charm of the Gilded Age, the Gay Nineties.
But this gaiety was only a brittle veneer that covered widespread turmoil and suffering. The good old days were good for but the privileged few. For the farmer, the laborer, the…
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…
I have been enamored with archaeology and evolutions since childhood when my parents handed me my first book on these subjects: Ruth Moore's Man, Time and Fossils, and The Testimony of the Spade by Geoffrey Bibby. These themes have guided my study and teaching. I retired as a University Distinguished Professor of Anthropology in the SUNY system. I am the author or editor of eight books in areas related to this interest. My focus on archaeology and cultural evolution and my counter-intuitive conclusion that workload and illness often increased with the evolution of civilization were stimulated by the works of Lee and Boserup.
This book is an eminently readable classic of historical writing that analyzes human historical behavior as it is causally intertwined with human health and disease evolution.
It inspired me to add health and disease as variables in my interpretation of cultural evolution, effectively completing the definition of my maturing model of scholarship.
Upon its original publication, Plagues and Peoples was an immediate critical and popular success, offering a radically new interpretation of world history as seen through the extraordinary impact--political, demographic, ecological, and psychological--of disease on cultures. From the conquest of Mexico by smallpox as much as by the Spanish, to the bubonic plague in China, to the typhoid epidemic in Europe, the history of disease is the history of humankind. With the identification of AIDS in the early 1980s, another chapter has been added to this chronicle of events, which William McNeill explores in his new introduction to this updated editon.…
