100 Books Like The Silent Majority

Historians rightly stress that social movements and broad forces, often decades in the making, shape history, but Weisbrot and Mackenzie note that many of the monumental reforms of the 1960s that continue to define our society today resulted primarily from decisions made by liberal presidents, members of Congress, and the Supreme Court. 

They vividly convey the confidence in government as a force for good that lay at the core of liberal thinking. They are sympathetic to much of the liberals’ efforts, yet they also acknowledge their shortcomings.    

Presidents matter, but they do not have magical powers.

Zelizer persuasively recounts how the Great Society reforms of the 1960s would not have been passed without the work of legislators whose names are largely forgotten today. Democrats achieved many of their goals, but Zelizer also surveys how they faced stern resistance from Republicans on Capitol Hill. A window of opportunity to transform the nation opened in the mid-1960s, and then soon closed.

Critchlow offers compelling portraits of four men (Richard Nixon, Nelson Rockefeller, Barry Goldwater, and Ronald Reagan) who sought to define the direction of the Republican Party during the 1960s, an era when the Democrats were firmly entrenched as the nation’s majority party.

This book reminds us of the role of contingency as we seek to explain the past. Critchlow stresses that although ideas are important, politics more often involves various figures responding pragmatically to shifting circumstances. The Republican Party of the 1960s was more ideologically diverse than it has been in recent decades.  

On May 8, 1970, just days after the killing of four college students at Kent State University, construction workers in New York City violently attacked a group that had gathered to protest the Vietnam War.

Kuhn offers a riveting account of the events (dubbed the “Hardhat Riot” by some and “Workers’ Woodstock” by others), but he also situates them into a broader story of how the war and other developments of the 1960s exacerbated divisions within the Democratic Party between white, heavily unionized blue-collar workers in the urban North and an emerging class of college-educated professionals. 

Nixon successfully courted many of the blue-collar workers on the way to his landslide victory in 1972. Kuhn is no apologist for the workers, but he also avoids facile stereotypes about the white working class, some of which persist to this day.  

Joel Garreau, a longtime reporter for The Washington Post, was one of the first people to take the sprawling suburbs, the collections of malls, subdivisions, and office parks seriously. He was one of the first people to call them cities. After publishing his book, academics, and professional urban planners began discussing “edge cities.”

Garreau gives many specifics because he is a reporter, which is how he works. He travels the country looking at different edge cities, starting with the one in his own backyard, Tyson’s Corner, outside Washington, D.C.

Flannery O’Connor’s saturnine stories of the American South are jewels of American literature.

They are laced with humor and violence but are at the same time deeply spiritual. In fact, the Catholic Church banned her work until it was discovered that her stories were written to show Grace in the lives of her parochial characters.

In Everything That Rises Must Converge, a story from A Good Man is Hard to Find and Other Stories published in 1955, O'Connor writes about Julian, a young college-educated writer who lives with his mother in a decadent neighborhood that lost its prominence as the Old South faded.

His mother who believes she must uphold the dignity of her family's antebellum name insists on "keeping up appearances." For instance, she likes to tell folks that Jason's first job as a writer "selling typewriters" was a good sign because "Rome wasn't built in a day."

She… show more.

I love a book rich with flawed characters; this one is full of them. Perrotta’s peek into the mundane life of a stay-at-home mother at war with her lot in life is delicious. Sarah once coined herself a feminist, and now, she’s wiping noses. It’s a struggle many mothers of little children face, and while most don’t go to the lengths Perrotta’s characters explore, it’s a valiant example of losing oneself for the sake of a higher calling: motherhood. 

I first read this book at graduate school, with two babies at home. Perrotta taught me that exploring the human condition is necessary for connecting with readers. I’ve received many letters from readers citing that they connected with Veronica on the pages of Trespassing, and that’s the best accolade.

I love smart thrillers like The Practice of Deceit—thrillers that keep me turning the pages even if my alarm is going off early the next morning; thrillers that don’t rely on violence to propel the story forward but rather on interesting, richly drawn, complex characters who are not portrayed in black and white.

Charming bachelor Eric Lavender, a psychotherapist, falls for Colleen O’Brien Golden, a lawyer, but when a conflict of interest with Colleen’s client implodes Eric’s idyllic suburban life as a husband and father to an adorable stepdaughter and a newborn, he learns the dark truth about Colleen’s past. Eric’s flaw is, to me, the one that makes a character most sympathetic—being blinded by love and desire. I love that this book is in the male point of view, and it’s done so well that when Colleen tries to destroy Eric, it is a gut punch.

This book is engaging because it shows how the base of the Democratic party has changed since Franklin Roosevelt first assembled the New Deal political coalition in the 1930s. 

Today, it is increasingly the party of college-educated suburban voters and reflects their cultural and political priorities. From the Great Depression until the 1960s, however, working-class urban voters formed the heart of the party. Geismer uses metropolitan Boston as a template to depict this important transition, which helped produce suburban candidates such as Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis, whose political career emerged from and was shaped by his life in Brookline, MA.  

This book brings together economics, education, and urban development by showing how our public policies advantaged wealthy suburbanites over less wealthy urban dwellers after World War II. Many people think there is a natural migration to the suburbs after couples have children. Jackson does a masterful job of showing why that is not the natural order of things. It is the result of specific policy choices such as how we fund infrastructure, what tax incentives we provide, who has access to credit, and how we draw political boundaries. His insights offer a blueprint for a more equitable society.