Here are 100 books that The Use of Photography fans have personally recommended if you like
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I’m Alex Behr, a writer and musician. When I was little, I thought the Partridge Family lived in the TV set. I soon joined the Partridge Family Fan Club, entranced with the puppy-dog beauty of David Cassidy. Although he appealed to teenyboppers, he could write dark songs. Check out “I Think I Love You”: “Before I go insane, I hold my pillow to my head / … Screaming out the words I dread.” Eventually, I left David behind but continued being a fangirl of both intense musicians and fictional characters. Reading about obsessions is a vicarious pleasure that crosses genres from rock memoirs to literary fiction.
This memoir is written to the man Terese Marie Mailhot has an affair with, which began “in a small booth at Village Inn.”
He was her fiction teacher, a potent taboo, and she describes his shaking hands and smoke-encrusted hoodie. The book pulses with her desire for him and her resistance, knowing he was ruining her. I found the book addictive.
Mailhot describes her upbringing as a member of the Seabird Island Band in the Pacific Northwest. I learned how she manifests stories to save herself. She is diagnosed with bipolar II disorder and PTSD, leading to hospitalization. Her crafting of this memoir is a love story, ultimately, to her resilience.
A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER Winner of the Whiting Award for Non-Fiction Selected by Emma Watson as an Our Shared Shelf Book Club Pick
'I loved it' Kate Tempest 'Astounding' Roxane Gay 'A sledgehammer' New York Times
Heart Berries is a powerful, poetic memoir of a woman's coming of age on an Indian Reservation in the Pacific Northwest. Having survived a profoundly dysfunctional upbringing only to find herself hospitalised and facing a dual diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder and bipolar II disorder, Terese Marie Mailhot is given a notebook and begins to write her way out of trauma.
A moving story of love, betrayal, and the enduring power of hope in the face of darkness.
German pianist Hedda Schlagel's world collapsed when her fiancé, Fritz, vanished after being sent to an enemy alien camp in the United States during the Great War. Fifteen years later, in 1932, Hedda…
I’m Alex Behr, a writer and musician. When I was little, I thought the Partridge Family lived in the TV set. I soon joined the Partridge Family Fan Club, entranced with the puppy-dog beauty of David Cassidy. Although he appealed to teenyboppers, he could write dark songs. Check out “I Think I Love You”: “Before I go insane, I hold my pillow to my head / … Screaming out the words I dread.” Eventually, I left David behind but continued being a fangirl of both intense musicians and fictional characters. Reading about obsessions is a vicarious pleasure that crosses genres from rock memoirs to literary fiction.
Startling, quick-witted attention to story pervades this collection, but I’m especially entranced with “Bog Girl: A Romance.”
Tell me another story in which a young man named Cillian falls in love with a girl dug out from peat, a teen who is two thousand years old. Karen Russell makes me root for this love affair and believe completely that Cillian rises “with the Bog Girl in his arms, nuzzling her blue neck.”
The haunting lingers as I read the other compelling stories, too, including a story in which a mother makes a pact with the devil.
'I loved Orange World... a collection of short stories in which demons live in drains, bog women come back from the dead and trees can grow inside the human body' Daisy Johnson, New Statesman BOOK OF THE YEAR
'A rare combination of literary brilliance and unbridled entertainment' Mark Haddon
These exuberant, unforgettable stories showcase Karen Russell's comedic and imaginative talent for creating outlandish predicaments that uncannily mirror our inner lives. In 'The Bad Graft', a couple on a road trip stop in Joshua Tree National Park, where the spirit of a giant tree accidentally infects the young woman, their fates…
I’m Alex Behr, a writer and musician. When I was little, I thought the Partridge Family lived in the TV set. I soon joined the Partridge Family Fan Club, entranced with the puppy-dog beauty of David Cassidy. Although he appealed to teenyboppers, he could write dark songs. Check out “I Think I Love You”: “Before I go insane, I hold my pillow to my head / … Screaming out the words I dread.” Eventually, I left David behind but continued being a fangirl of both intense musicians and fictional characters. Reading about obsessions is a vicarious pleasure that crosses genres from rock memoirs to literary fiction.
The obsession of Isabel, or Isa, revolves at first around possessions in her uncle’s house.
She and her brothers moved there during World War II, but when the story begins, only Isa is left. The objects take on the weight of loss after her mother’s death, and Isa fears the caretaker is stealing from her. When Eva, the girlfriend of Isa’s brother arrives, she disrupts Isa’s static isolation. Objects disappear—or do they? And the pull between Isa and Eva becomes electric.
Yael van der Wouden subtly layers red herrings and shifts my understanding of Isa and her family, ultimately revealing that the house, so carefully maintained, has a dark history rooted in the war. Isa’s paranoia and lust build to a devastating betrayal.
Longlisted for the 2025 Aspen Words Literary Prize • A Best Book of 2024: Time, Kirkus Reviews, BookPage, The Sunday Times (London)
“Remarkable…Compelling…Fine and taut…Indelible.” —The New York Times • “Moving, unnerving, and deeply sexy.” —Tracy Chevalier, author of Girl with the Pearl Earring • “A brilliant debut, as multi-faceted as a gem.” —Kirkus Reviews
A “razor-sharp, perfectly plotted” (The Sunday Times, London) tale of desire, suspicion, and obsession between two women staying in the same house in the Dutch countryside during the summer of 1961—a powerful exploration of…
Detective Kate Bowen is out of time—and out of options.
A surveillance operation on the Irish border goes cock-eyed. Detective Kate Bowen is left red-faced when her target vanishes into the mists of the Irish Sea. She must work smart to figure out where he’s headed and what he’s plotting.
I’m Alex Behr, a writer and musician. When I was little, I thought the Partridge Family lived in the TV set. I soon joined the Partridge Family Fan Club, entranced with the puppy-dog beauty of David Cassidy. Although he appealed to teenyboppers, he could write dark songs. Check out “I Think I Love You”: “Before I go insane, I hold my pillow to my head / … Screaming out the words I dread.” Eventually, I left David behind but continued being a fangirl of both intense musicians and fictional characters. Reading about obsessions is a vicarious pleasure that crosses genres from rock memoirs to literary fiction.
I have a weakness for rock biographies and oral histories, so this leapt to the list because of Darby Crash’s dangerous and self-debased fans.
At Crash’s experimental high school in southern California, the pedagogy mixed Scientology and est with algebra and social studies, creating a template for Crash when he became an early punk. Crash had violent female groupies, though he was queer, and they—and other fans—would extinguish lit cigarettes on their wrists to show their devotion.
The cast of characters in the book are vibrant and debased, just teenagers and young adults when they slam-danced and slammed drugs in squalid clubs.
"Lexicon Devil is, pure and simple, the finest volume on punk to have seen the light of print. (Yes, folks: that includes Please Kill Me.) Great book!"—Richard Meltzer
Production has started on the documentary feature based on the book.
I am a philosopher, neuroscientist, geostrategist, and futurologist. My work at the Geneva Centre for Security Policy, St. Antony’s College, and the World Economic Forum (as a member of the Global Future Council on the Future of Complex Risks) focuses on transdisciplinarity, with an emphasis on the interplay between philosophy, neuroscience, strategic culture, applied history, technology, and global security. I am particularly interested in the exponential growth of disruptive technologies, and how they have the potential to both foster and hinder the progress of human civilization. My mission is rooted in finding transdisciplinary solutions to identify, predict and manage frontier risks, both here on earth and in Outer Space.
Despite having been published 70 years ago, this eloquent book still has enduring appeal as it provides an intellectually stimulating way of approaching big ideas.
It teaches us how to think both deeply and pragmatically about the monumental challenges facing humanity. In his unique way, Berlin, a Fellow of All Souls College in Oxford and one of the most important thinkers of the twentieth century, gives us prescient philosophical insights into human behaviour.
"The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing." This ancient Greek aphorism, preserved in a fragment from the poet Archilochus, describes the central thesis of Isaiah Berlin's masterly essay on Leo Tolstoy and the philosophy of history, the subject of the epilogue to War and Peace. Although there have been many interpretations of the adage, Berlin uses it to mark a fundamental distinction between human beings who are fascinated by the infinite variety of things and those who relate everything to a central, all-embracing system. Applied to Tolstoy, the saying illuminates a paradox that helps explain…
I’m a science researcher and writer living in London. My research field is astrobiology and the possibility of life on other planets – it brings together lots of different areas of science with engineering and space exploration and so is deeply ‘interdisciplinary’. And as a science writer, I try to bring this same broad perspective and unifying approach to other profound questions. My fascination with understanding our own origins was sparked by my childhood growing up in East Africa, the cradle of humanity. In Origins I explored different ways that planet Earth has influenced our human story across the millennia - it’s an example of ‘Big History’.
Few thinkers have done more to advance and popularize the discipline of Big History in recent years than David Christian. He coined the term and has worked with Bill Gates to deliver Big History teaching to high school students around the world. The book I’ve picked out here is a little more academic and detailed than the others, and provides a really solid overview of this approach to integrating large-scale history from the Big Bang to the present.
An introduction to a new way of looking at history, from a perspective that stretches from the beginning of time to the present day, "Maps of Time" is world history on an unprecedented scale. Beginning with the Big Bang, David Christian views the interaction of the natural world with the more recent arrivals in flora and fauna, including human beings. Cosmology, geology, archeology, and population and environmental studies - all figure in David Christian's account, which is an ambitious overview of the emerging field of 'Big History.' "Maps of Time" opens with the origins of the universe, the stars and…
A charming cozy mystery with a delightful twist: The detectives are three kittens with magical powers, determined to solve a most purr-plexing case.
Precocious kittens Bippity, Boppity, and Boop are exceedingly loyal to their human, the twenty-eight-year-old up-and-coming magician Mila. She saved them from starving to death in a dingy…
Foreign policy has been my passion since I was a child. My father was a civil servant and growing up in India, I always wanted to follow in his footsteps but instead of working on domestic issues, I wanted to work on international affairs. History was another passion of mine and I wanted to combine the two of them in such a way that I studied the past in order to explain the present and help the future. This passion led me to enroll in a PhD program in the United States and then work at a think tank. I have written three books, two of which focus exclusively on foreign policy. I hope you enjoy reading the books I have listed and read my book.
This classic, written by the authors of the 11-volume The Story of Civilization, is a must-read for those who want to understand everything, from history to economics, from foreign policy to politics. I have read and re-read this book multiple times as it is my go-to book for when I rethink issues and problems. This short collection of essays offers simple yet critical lessons on geography, biology, economics, religion, and government all of which help explain the foreign policies of empires and states.
In this illuminating and thoughtful book, Will and Ariel Durant have succeeded in distilling for the reader the accumulated store of knowledge and experience from their five decades of work on the eleven monumental volumes of The Story of Civilization. The result is a survey of human history, full of dazzling insights into the nature of human experience, the evolution of civilization, and the culture of man. With the completion of their life's work, they look back and ask what history has to say about the nature, the conduct and the prospects of man, seeking in the great lives, the…
I’ve been fascinated by languages since my teenage years, when I learned English, French, Spanish, Latin, Hebrew, and Esperanto—in addition to my native Russian. But it was in college that I decided to pursue linguistics as a profession! After spending 25 years conducting scientific research and teaching linguistics at various universities, I shifted my focus toward sharing linguistic science with a broader audience of lifelong learners. Whether or not these books inspire you to pursue linguistics as a career, I hope you find these books as enjoyable and rewarding as I have.
A whirlwind tour of what state-of-the-art linguistic science has to offer!
Even after 25 years of working in the field, I discovered fascinating new insights, ranging from how deaf children acquire sign languages to experimental efforts teaching human language to apes.
But what was especially fun for me was a behind-the-scenes glimpse into how Adger designed an alien language for a TV show. It truly inspired me to reflect on how I would have done it differently and how our personal experiences shape our work as scientists.
Language Unlimited explores the many mysteries about our capacity for language and reveals the source of its endless creativity.
All humans, but no other species, have the capacity to create and understand language. It provides structure to our thoughts, allowing us to plan, communicate, and create new ideas, without limit. Yet we have only finite experiences, and our languages have finite stores of words. Where does our linguistic creativity come from? How does the endless scope of language emerge from our limited selves?
Drawing on research from neuroscience, psychology, and linguistics, David Adger takes the reader on a journey to…
I'm an artist, activist, and social entrepreneur. Latino bilingüe and history nerd. I’m the Founder of Resilient Coders, a free and stipended nonprofit coding bootcamp that trains people of color for careers as software engineers. I built that organization for the same reason I write: I care about the economic wellness of Black and Latinx people. I want my neighbors to have the purchasing power to keep my local bodega open. They carry my coffee. Whole Foods doesn’t.
In Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Freire makes claims so bold, and so revolutionary, that the book was banned in much of the Global South during the era of dictatorships in the 70s.
One of the central ideas was this: The oppressed are as capable and as intelligent as their oppressors. They need not be treated as requiring “help” or “guidance,” which are dynamics that can lend themselves to inequitable power constructs.
This worldview, in which one group of people is needed in order to “save” another group of people, is the intellectual foundation from which we’ve built systems of oppression throughout history. If one person’s liberation is dependent on another person’s choice, they can never be equals.
This is the book upon which we built Resilient Coders.
First published in Portuguese in 1968, Pedagogy of the Oppressed was translated and published in English in 1970. Paulo Freire's work has helped to empower countless people throughout the world and has taken on special urgency in the United States and Western Europe, where the creation of a permanent underclass among the underprivileged and minorities in cities and urban centers is ongoing. This 50th anniversary edition includes an updated introduction by Donaldo Macedo, a new afterword by Ira Shor and interviews with Marina Aparicio Barberan, Noam Chomsky, Ramon Flecha, Gustavo Fischman, Ronald David Glass, Valerie Kinloch, Peter Mayo, Peter McLaren…
PI David Randall is not a fan of singer Sherry White, but when he learns she has received threatening letters, he agrees to help with security for her concerts in Parkland.
When Sherry’s personal psychic quits, Randall enlists Camden to help Sherry deal with her stage fright. Randall’s investigation is…
There are so many different ways of thinking and writing about history. I first noticed this while studying at university, when I saw just how different economic history looked from other kinds of history. I later learned that all kinds of historical writing are forms of literature, only they are rarely recognized as such. I am now a university professor and this is my area of expertise: the overlap between the philosophy of history and economics. The books on this list are great examples of unusual or ‘weird’ works on history that challenge some of our deepest assumptions about what history is and how best to think or write about it.
Most people think that history and religion are two completely opposed registers, much like science and religion. Lowith upends that idea in this book, which shows how all modern historical thinking and writing is theological. Besides this, another great thing about the book is the way it is organised. Instead of running forward, in chronological order, from the Bible through to Hegel, Marx, and Burckhardt, it begins with these thinkers and works its way backward. It’s a really simple but effective way of getting his point across.
Modern man sees with one eye of faith and one eye of reason. Consequently, his view of history is confused. For centuries, the history of the Western world has been viewed from the Christian or classical standpoint-from a deep faith in the Kingdom of God or a belief in recurrent and eternal life-cycles. The modern mind, however, is neither Christian nor pagan-and its interpretations of history are Christian in derivation and anti-Christian in result. To develop this theory, Karl Loewith-beginning with the more accessible philosophies of history in the nineteenth and eighteenth centuries and working back to the Bible-analyzes the…
