Books like The Green Glass Sea — picked by fans

Weatherford depicts a vibrant and thriving Black Wall Street in Tulsa until one elevator ride brings it all crashing down.

Unspeakable has received numerous starred reviews and awards—all richly deserved for shining a light on this horrifying history and reminding us at the book’s conclusion that it is the responsibility of us all to reject hatred and choose hope. It’s a stunning work from a powerhouse author and illustrator team.

Don’t let its picture book format keep you from sharing this important book with teens and adults. The format makes the difficult subject both more accessible and more relatable.  

At the age of eleven I had never heard of internment camps in my own state of California until I came across this book, and I remember being astonished such a thing happened in the United States.

Though this title has been around for many years, Wakatsuki Houston’s autobiography book is still relevant and gently but factually introduces young readers to the unjust discrimination inflicted on innocent civilians/citizens. She tells of her family’s life before Manzanar, at the camp, and her pre-teen/teen struggle to fit in at school when returning from internment.  

Ever since I was a teenager, I have been interested in the story of Sallie, a bullterrier who became the mascot of the 11th Pennsylvania Infantry. (I have an ancestor who fought with the 11th Pennsylvania, which is how I first became aware of Sallie’s story.)

The illustrations in this book are delightful as the author tells the story of when Sallie first joined the 11th until she was killed in battle in Virginia several years later. Today, she is memorialized at Gettysburg National Military Park. Visitors often leave dog biscuits at her statue.

This nonfiction book is not only dear to my heart, I can also honestly say it changed my life.

It’s about the only Federal Emergency School ever created. Built for the children of farm workers displaced by the Dust Bowl in 1940, it tells of School Superintendent Leo B. Hart’s ingenuity and steadfast devotion to children who faced seemingly insurmountable hardships and discrimination as occupants of the migrant camp outside Bakersfield, California that inspired John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath.

I taught at this school, now known as Sunset, for many years, and I kept a note in my lesson planner that read What would Leo B. Hart do? 

It is no surprise this book won a Pulitzer Prize. Particularly compelling is how, through a deeply personal and beautifully crafted story of a complex life and mind, it offers profound insight into the uneasy relationship among politics, science, war, and morality.

Oppenheimer, one of the greatest and most influential physicists of the 20th century, spearheaded not only the invention of the atomic bomb but also the quantum theory that made it possible and the policies governing its use and development. A left-wing thinker and sometimes communist sympathizer in his youth, and driven throughout his life by strong humanistic impulses, his work on the atomic bomb was motivated by a desire to defeat fascism in Europe.

Yet, in his work thereafter – which included opposing the development of the much more powerful hydrogen bomb – he was tragically undone by another authoritarian force: McCarthyism. The multiple Oscar-award winning film based… show more.

This is a collection of Oppenheimer’s essays and speeches, a good thing to read to get a sense of the man himself, how he thinks, how he handles language.

How he struggles to suggest how civilization might begin to cope with the reality that new weapons now exist capable of annihilating civilization... “unless we show,” he says, ”urged by our own example and conviction, that we regard nuclear armament as a transitory, dangerous and degrading phase of the world’s history.”

He said that forty years ago, and counting.

I was so taken by the first handsome volume of Soldiers’ Stories that I submitted stories for this one. The Wilson family story is laid out so well across eleven pages of this treasure. Five brothers served. Only two came home.

There are stories of men and women from every branch of the service, some who survived, some who did not. The memoirs are written by the veterans themselves, by family members, or interested friends.

There are stories about the Manhattan Project, Red Cross workers, Rosie the Riveter, men who have adopted the overseas graves of American fallen, even one who found dog tags in Belgium and did the research to find family members. One veteran is honored by memories of his 12-year-old great-grandson. Michelle Obama's grandfather's service is also documented.

Most readers interested in the story of the atomic bomb don’t realize that the weapon was primarily an engineering project, not a scientific one. (Why it was called the Manhattan Engineer District). 

The man who built the bomb was really Groves, not Oppenheimer, who only helped design it. Norris’s book is fascinating for portraying Groves as a human being, not just a chubby general. Readers will recognize that Matt Damon was actually a pretty good choice to play Groves in the movie “Oppenheimer.”

The story of the youngest physicist at Los Alamos, Ted Hall, who volunteered to spy for the KGB and provided vital atomic secrets to the Soviet Union. Although Hall’s treachery was discovered by American counter-intelligence, he was never prosecuted to avoid alerting the Soviets that the United States had decrypted their top-secret WWII cables. Albright and Kunstel tell the story of an idealistic, naïve and arrogant spy.

This is one of the best books ever written! It won a Pulitzer Prize in Nonfiction, the National Book, and the National Book Critics Circle Awards. It traces the history of nuclear weapons from the discovery of nuclear fission through the Manhattan Project.

This epic (i.e., very long!) work describes the science, people, and politics that led to the research, development, demonstration, and deployment of the first nuclear weapon. The book reads like an H.G. Wells novel, writing about the actors in this chronicle of the scientists who enhanced quantum theory and applied it to thermonuclear fission, including Bohr, Fermi, Lawrence, Oppenheimer, Planck, Szilard, Teller, and von Neumann: the characters in the Oppenheimer film. Even if you do not finish it, you must start it!