Here are 100 books that The Soul of America fans have personally recommended if you like
The Soul of America.
Shepherd is a community of 12,000+ authors and super readers sharing their favorite books with the world.
I’ve felt like a fish out of water for most of my life. My mom’s English and my dad’s from Pennsylvania, so growing up it was always difficult to figure out who I was, where was “home.” So I always felt uneasy and self-conscious about not fitting in, wherever I happened to be. I always felt vaguely homesick for somewhere else. Reading was one way I could escape, travel was another, more literal way. Which is how I ended up in South Africa, where I eventually got my master's in journalism/international politics. (And my adventures there, of course, led to my book.)
I love that this book does such a great job of capturing the many incongruities and quirks of life in South Africa, a country with such a complex, troubled history that it is still struggling to reconcile.
It’s a country of immense diversity (racially, politically, and culturally), which leads to some absurd situations. Some funny, some tragic. And it’s set against an incredibly unique and beautiful natural backdrop, and it’s at the bottom of the world, literally representing the global south/periphery. So there’s a ton of dramatic tension inherent.
I also relate with Noah’s story just in terms of the cross-cultural element; growing up with parents from different places and never quite fitting in. And yet he tackles these very serious, very bleak situations and experiences, at both the micro and macro levels, with humor.
The compelling, inspiring, (often comic) coming-of-age story of Trevor Noah, set during the twilight of apartheid and the tumultuous days of freedom that followed.
One of the comedy world's brightest new voices, Trevor Noah is a light-footed but sharp-minded observer of the absurdities of politics, race and identity, sharing jokes and insights drawn from the wealth of experience acquired in his relatively young life. As host of the US hit show The Daily Show with Trevor Noah, he provides viewers around the globe with their nightly dose of biting satire, but here Noah turns his…
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’m Mindy Vail, and with over 25 years in education and change management, I’ve spent my career as a leadership consultant and keynote speaker. My passion for the book list I’ve put together comes from my work in guiding individuals and organizations through transformation and my dedication to helping others find their joy. Each book reflects my commitment to embracing change, nurturing leadership, and unlocking potential. My insights come from hands-on experience and a deep understanding of psychology, leadership, and personal growth, and I believe we are all ever-evolving in our journeys.
I appreciate this book for how authentically Dave Grohl opens up about his life. His reflections on creativity, passion, and overcoming challenges with Nirvana and Foo Fighters feel surprisingly relatable, especially in the context of my own personal journey. Recent events in Grohl's life remind us that we all make human errors in judgment, and it's important not to judge or dehumanize those in the public eye. Celebrities, just like the rest of us, are on their own journeys, facing struggles and moments of self-discovery.
Grohl’s stories highlight the importance of staying true to yourself and learning from both success and failure—showing that even failure has its benefits. Reading his book reminds me of the power of sharing our experiences and the value of resilience. Despite their fame, it reinforces that even those who seem larger than life are navigating their own paths and that growth and transformation are within…
Having entertained the idea for years, and even offered a few questionable opportunities ('It's a piece of cake! Just do four hours of interviews, find someone else to write it, put your face on the cover, and voila!'), I have decided to write these stories just as I have always done, in my own hand. The joy that I have felt from chronicling these tales is not unlike listening back to a song that I've recorded and can't wait to share with the world, or reading a primitive journal entry from a stained notebook, or…
I’ve always been fascinated by group dynamics, large and small. Why things functioned well, why they didn’t. It’s possible my ability to empathize and use humor as a consensus-builder is the reason I was elected president of a homeowners association, a music production association, and even an agricultural group. Books were not particularly involved in this fascination! But in recent years, experiencing the breakdown of civility and trust in our political and cultural discourse, I’ve taken a more analytical view of the dynamics. These books, in their very different ways, have taught me lessons about life, understanding those with different beliefs, and finding ways to connect and move forward.
This book was like a light bulb switched on suddenly in my brain. Free-floating feelings of uncertainty and anxiety about the decisions I was making and the inexplicable state of our world were literally keeping me up at night. Questions I’d been asking of myself, and of no one in particular, amounted to general complaints: ‘Why is this happening?’ ‘Where is all the anger coming from?’ ‘When will things get better?’
What I learned was the importance of going deeper and asking questions that might actually lead to answers. Or at least to gain an understanding of someone else’s perspective. And definitely to have a clearer insight into my own beliefs and motivations. I learned that asking more resulted in replacing my perpetual sense of uncertainty with something more useful and actionable.
What hidden skill links successful people in all walks of life--across cultures, industries, generations . . . all of time? The answer is surprisingly simple: they know how to ask the right questions at the right time. Questions help us break down barriers, discover secrets, solve puzzles, and imagine new ways of doing things. The right question can provide for us not only the answer we need right then but also the ones we'll need tomorrow. Emmy award-winning journalist and media expert Frank Sesno wants to teach you how to question others in a methodical, intentional way so that you…
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 always been fascinated by group dynamics, large and small. Why things functioned well, why they didn’t. It’s possible my ability to empathize and use humor as a consensus-builder is the reason I was elected president of a homeowners association, a music production association, and even an agricultural group. Books were not particularly involved in this fascination! But in recent years, experiencing the breakdown of civility and trust in our political and cultural discourse, I’ve taken a more analytical view of the dynamics. These books, in their very different ways, have taught me lessons about life, understanding those with different beliefs, and finding ways to connect and move forward.
This book takes me to a part of the country I never wanted to see, introducing me to people I never wanted to meet. I’d probably shake my head driving by their trailers and shacks. But rendered in these pages, without judgment, the author has made it impossible for me not to “see” these folks who’ve chosen to live off the grid and to empathize with the choices and circumstances that have brought them here.
I’ve driven across the country several times before, on northern routes and southern routes, generally moving from one historic destination to the next. In this remarkable chronicle of American outsiders, I’m happy to have been shown something entirely unexpected: a very different picture of “America the Beautiful.”
From Pulitzer Prize finalist and National Book Critics Circle Award–winning author of Newjack, a passage through an America lived wild and off the grid, where along with independence and stunning views come fierce winds, neighbors with criminal pasts, and minimal government and medical services
“In these dispatches, [Conover] invites readers to ride shotgun along an unraveling edge of the American West, where sepia-toned myths about making a fresh start collide with modern modes of alienation, volatility, and exile.... In a nation whose edges have come to define its center, this is essential reading.”—Jessica Bruder, author of Nomadland: Surviving America in…
By ten years old, I had lived in four countries and endured the repercussions of revolution, exile, military coup d’état, and emigration. That explains my life-long passion for history. I pursued a Ph.D. in Latin American history to make sense of the forces that shaped my and my family’s lives. My seven previous books explored diverse topics in Caribbean history within its broader Atlantic context. Momentous domestic and global events, starting with the COVID-19 pandemic and an explosion of racial and political violence in the U.S. pushed me to broaden my scholarly attention and become a Creators Syndicate’s weekly columnist, and publish a collection of columns with the title When the World Turned Upside Down.
American readers and news watchers are deeply segregated: those on the left reading and watching news produced by liberals, and those on the right consuming words and images from conservative authors and broadcasts. And then there is Washington Post columnist George Will, a conservative, who reads voraciously across the political spectrum and offers commentary that reasonable Americans must recognize as honest and insightful. American Happiness and Its Discontents is a collection of thoroughly researched, thought-provoking, exquisitely-written columns written by Will from 2008 to 2020. He offers insightful commentary on a wide range of political, social, and cultural topics and tackles subjects deemed taboo by the left such as the wave of nonsense that has flooded higher education.
George F. Will has been one of this country's leading columnists since 1974. He won the Pulitzer Prize for it in 1977. The Wall Street Journal once called him "perhaps the most powerful journalist in America." In this new collection, he examines a remarkably unsettling thirteen years in our nation's experience, from 2008 to 2020. Included are a number of columns about court cases, mostly from the Supreme Court, that illuminate why the composition of the federal judiciary has become such a contentious subject.
Other topics addressed include the American Revolutionary War, historical figures from Frederick Douglass to JFK, as…
I’m a law professor who, among other things, writes about the culture and law of secrecy. I’ve written two books: Conspiracy Theories: Secrecy and Power in American Culture, the second edition of which was published in 2008, and The Transparency Fix: Secrets, Leaks, and Uncontrollable Government Information (2017). I hold a J.D. from Yale Law School and a Ph.D. from the Institute of Communications Research at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and I teach at the University of Florida.
Hofstadter’s Paranoid Style is more a work of historiography than history and attempted to explain the rise of a right-wing “paranoia” to a liberal intellectual audience in the early 1960s. By contrast, Jesse Walker’s book offers a more detailed, engaging, and sympathetic history of U.S. conspiracy theories and the individuals and groups who have made and circulated them. It’s funny and deadpan, with a keen eye for subcultural details and the singular American oddballs that have traveled from the margins to the mainstream. As Walker demonstrates, Qanon is not the first example of a bizarre, syncretic set of beliefs that has attracted a surprisingly large number of adherents.
The United States of Paranoia is a history of America's demons. Conspiracy theories, Walker explains, aren't just a feature of the fringe: They've been a potent force across the political spectrum, in the center as well as the extremes, from the colonial era to the present. Walker argues that conspiracy stories need to be read not just as claims to be either believed or debunked but as folklore. When a tale takes hold, it says something true about the anxieties and experiences of the people who believe and repeat it, even if it says nothing true about the objects of…
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 have been interested in understanding the realities of American social and political life throughout my career as a historian. I have written about the aftermath of populism, a biography of a New Dealer who went to prison for stuffing ballot boxes, the hidden history behind the Gateway Arch, and the year after Pearl Harbor. More than ever, I find that candid assessments of who we have been are necessary to understand where we are today.
Mettler and Lieberman place our current challenges within the broader context of other democratic crises in American history.
Readers will find it helpful to understand that democracy has been a contested part of our past, from the early days of the Republic to Watergate. Mettler and Lieberman remind us that protecting and enhancing democracy is an ongoing task.
While many Americans despair of the current state of U.S. politics, most assume that our system of government and democracy itself are invulnerable to decay. Yet when we examine the past, we find that the United States has undergone repeated crises of democracy, from the earliest days of the republic to the present.
In Four Threats, Suzanne Mettler and Robert C. Lieberman explore five moments in history when democracy in the U.S. was under siege: the 1790s, the Civil War, the Gilded Age, the Depression, and Watergate. These episodes risked profound - even fatal - damage to the American democratic…
I’m a history professor, but I’m also a reader. I love books—fiction and nonfiction—that reveal a world, a character, an idea, or a political movement in ways that I didn’t previously fully understand. That make me see more deeply and think more clearly. I teach and write about the history of the United States, especially its history of radical or extreme political groups. Where did this interest come from? Well, I first visited the U.S. in 1980, when I was eleven years old, and truth be told, my fascination with the country and its people has not abated since.
Faced with the deluge of modern events, I rely on intrepid authors like Mogelson to help me make sense of the world.
The book is his report back from spending a year traveling across the U.S. from the spring of 2020 to the winner of 2021, from Covid-lockdown protests in Michigan to the insurrection of January 6 in Washington, D.C. I found it both insightful and heartbreaking.
The New Yorker's award-winning war correspondent returns to his own country to chronicle a story of mounting civic breakdown and violent disorder, in a vivid eyewitness narrative of revelatory explanatory power.
'This is a searing book, exquisitely reported, lyrically told, and so vivid it will make your heart stop-a dark journey into what ails America' Patrick Radden Keefe
On the morning of January 6, a gallows was erected on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. A little after noon, as thousands of Trump supporters marched past the structure, some paused to climb its wooden steps and take pictures of the…
As a historian of the U.S. presidency, I have long been fascinated by the ways in which aspirants for the White House energize and harness popular support for their candidacy. Tracing the development of electioneering practices from the early 1800s to today has been fascinating. Is there a connection between the hickory sprigs worn by Andrew Jackson’s supporters and the MAGA hats worn by Donald Trump’s supporters? Between the political rallies of William Henry Harrison and those of every modern presidential candidate? Between the derision leveled at politically active women in the 1830s and that directed at Sarah Palin and Hilary Rodham Clinton in the twenty-first century? You betcha!
This collection set me on the road of thinking about how politics consisted of more than just voting and holding office. Essays by Nancy Isenberg (on Aaron Burr and sexual politics), Jeff Pasley (on Thomas Jefferson and blocks of cheese), Andrew Robertson (on electioneering rituals), and Rosemarie Zagarri (on women and political parties) have been particularly influential in shaping my thinking about the interaction between traditional politics and cultural politics.
In pursuit of a more sophisticated and inclusive American history, the contributors to Beyond the Founders propose new directions for the study of the political history of the republic before 1830. In ways formal and informal, symbolic and tactile, this political world encompassed blacks, women, entrepreneurs, and Native Americans, as well as the Adamses, Jeffersons, and Jacksons, all struggling in their own ways to shape the new nation and express their ideas of American democracy. Taking inspiration from the new cultural and social histories, these political historians show that the early history of the United States was not just 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…
In the summer of 2017 I went to see the Mer de Glace, the longest glacier in France and a tourist spot for over 200 years. But this dramatic and overwhelming glacier had all but melted away and I found myself in a dry valley a mile across and half a mile deep – concrete evidence of global warming. It was one of the most disturbing experiences I have ever had. As a philosopher and historian of science, I dedicated myself to discovering how and why people were accusing reputable scientists of dishonesty, incompetence, and aloofness while staring at the evidence. The answer is not simple, and requires a lot of telling and hearing stories.
Why do democracies seem particularly vulnerable to populist movements that promote conspiracies and science denial? It’s as old as democracy itself, argues Sophia Rosenfeld, who points to seeds of our current predicament planted at the birth of our republic. Social and technological stratification encourages groups, in the name of “the people” to reject advice and decrees of leaders, and seek political action based on their gut feelings.
"Fake news," wild conspiracy theories, misleading claims, doctored photos, lies peddled as facts, facts dismissed as lies-citizens of democracies increasingly inhabit a public sphere teeming with competing claims and counterclaims, with no institution or person possessing the authority to settle basic disputes in a definitive way.
The problem may be novel in some of its details-including the role of today's political leaders, along with broadcast and digital media, in intensifying the epistemic anarchy-but the challenge of determining truth in a democratic world has a backstory. In this lively and illuminating book, historian Sophia Rosenfeld explores a longstanding and largely unspoken…
