Here are 100 books that This Is Not Who We Are fans have personally recommended if you like
This Is Not Who We Are.
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I am the youngest child in my family, which means I grew up with the sense that I had to catch up. Everyone else knew things that I didn’t know. This made me explore the world and try to understand it by reading books. I studied literature at university because I felt that it held some secrets of the universe, and then I became a journalist because I wanted to practice writing. But I also wanted a legitimate reason for probing, researching, and searching for answers. I love these books because they have deepened my sense of the past while making me see that it is still with us.
Paul Fussell was a soldier in World War II, and he was also a professor of literature. His great book examines the way the experience of war changed a generation. It also changed literature (and art). After the experience of war, poets could no longer write about the world in idealized and romantic ways. They had to find forms to express the experience of being alive in ways that were new and shocking.
I love how Fussell uses his own experience of both war and scholarship to explain why Western art took such a turn in the 20th century. It helped me to understand modernist literature and myself.
Winner of both the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award and named by the Modern Library one of the twentieth century's 100 Best Non-Fiction Books, Paul Fussell's The Great War and Modern Memory was universally acclaimed on publication in 1970. Today, Fussell's landmark study remains as original and gripping as ever: a literate, literary, and unapologetic account of the Great War, the war that changed a generation, ushered in the modern era, and revolutionized how we see the world.
This brilliant work illuminates the trauma and tragedy of modern warfare in fresh, revelatory ways. Exploring the…
The dragons of Yuro have been hunted to extinction.
On a small, isolated island, in a reclusive forest, lives bandit leader Marani and her brother Jacks. With their outlaw band they rob from the rich to feed themselves, raiding carriages and dodging the occasional vindictive…
I am the youngest child in my family, which means I grew up with the sense that I had to catch up. Everyone else knew things that I didn’t know. This made me explore the world and try to understand it by reading books. I studied literature at university because I felt that it held some secrets of the universe, and then I became a journalist because I wanted to practice writing. But I also wanted a legitimate reason for probing, researching, and searching for answers. I love these books because they have deepened my sense of the past while making me see that it is still with us.
My life is divided between before reading this book and after. Nothing has changed the way that I understand the world or altered how I experience art and reality like this book.
Eksteins is a historian with the gifts of an artist. He intertwines World War I with Njinsky’s inelegant movements and Stravinsky’s discordant sounds and somehow creates an interpretation, an understanding of the past that can only come through artful means. I’ve had to buy three copies of this book because I wore out the first two. I expect I’ll soon be needing a fourth copy.
Named "One of the 100 best books ever published in Canada" (Literary Review of Canada), Rites of Spring is a brilliant and captivating work of cultural history from the internationally acclaimed scholar and writer Modris Eksteins.
A rare and remarkable cultural history of World War I that unearths the roots of modernism.
Dazzling in its originality, Rites of Spring probes the origins, impact, and aftermath of World War I, from the premiere of Stravinsky's ballet The Rite of Spring in 1913 to the death of Hitler in 1945.
Recognizing that “[t]he Great War was the psychological turning point . .…
I am a Professor of modern European history at the University of San Francisco. I have written or co-edited three major books and many articles and reviews, as well as serving as a correspondent for a German newspaper. My areas of expertise are intellectual, political, military, and cultural history. I also work on the history of espionage and served as a consultant to the CIA on my last book about student radicals in Germany.
I was riveted by this revisionist history of how America got into World War I and changed American society and politics. He shows how much of American collective memory about why WWI was fought, and the perception of Germany in America was fashioned, to a large extent, by British propaganda. He also shows why Germany had no choice but to engage in unrestricted submarine warfare, which eventually brought the United States into the war.
Had the British modified the naval blockade on Germany, which starved the German population in a horrific manner, the United States might never have become involved. But Great Britain was determined to make sure Germany would never again pose a threat to its colonial overseas empire. President Wilson at first understood that American neutrality was the means by which he could have brokered peace, but British and French recalcitrance, and eventually the deaths of relatively few…
A bracing, indispensable account of America’s epoch-defining involvement in the Great War, rich with fresh insights into the key issues, events, and personalities of the period
After years of bitter debate, the United States declared war on Imperial Germany on April 6, 1917, plunging the country into the savage European conflict that would redraw the map of the continent—and the globe. The World Remade is an engrossing chronicle of America’s pivotal, still controversial intervention into World War I, encompassing the tumultuous politics and towering historical figures that defined the era and forged the future. When it declared war, the United…
Jake Sledge, a rugged ex-cop turned private eye, teams up with his colossal partner Bobo to navigate the gritty streets of River City.
A murdered lawyer drags them into a web of political intrigue, neo-Nazi thugs, and bloody showdowns. With sharp wit and hard-hitting action, Jake tackles scumbags the only…
I am a speaker, author, and academic. Originally from Rome, I now live in the Netherlands, where I lecture and do research on international and diplomatic history. My book examines the ethical and pragmatic dilemmas that characterized the making of the German-Israeli relationship after the Holocaust at the outset of the global Cold War. I value good reads and excellent conversations, and I held visiting fellowships in, among others, Berlin, Jerusalem, and Oxford. My work won a Dutch National Research Council grant, a major research grant from the Alfred Landecker Foundation, and the LNVH award for ‘Distinguished Women Scientists.’ These days, I divide my time between Rome, Berlin, and Utrecht.
This is a book on one of the most dramatic periods in international history. Why were political leaders and diplomats in the 1910s unable to stop the world’s descent into chaos and global conflict?
In addition to providing exceptional detail on key historical episodes, the book also highlights how easy it is for localized conflict to escalate and expand, with disastrous consequences.
In The Sleepwalkers acclaimed historian and author of Iron Kingdom, Christopher Clark, examines the causes of the First World War.
SUNDAY TIMES and INDEPENDENT BOOKS OF THE YEAR 2012
The moments that it took Gavrilo Princip to step forward to the stalled car and shoot dead Franz Ferdinand and his wife were perhaps the most fateful of the modern era. An act of terrorism of staggering efficiency, it fulfilled its every aim: it would liberate Bosnia from Habsburg rule and it created a powerful new Serbia, but it also brought down four great empires, killed millions of men and destroyed…
I am a history professor at Boston University, where I teach and write about modern American popular thought, political culture, trade, travel, and war especially in urban and transnational contexts. I enjoy histories that are based on deep and creative bodies of research and that push past timeworn myths and clichés about the American past.
There are lots of stories about spies, and there are great histories about American missionaries.
But Sutton brings them together in a refreshing way, revealing the moral and political conundrums that arose once the United States turned to (mostly) men of faith to do undercover wartime work, from showering North Africa with propaganda and rescuing Doolittle’s downed raiders from China to stealing secrets and plotting assassinations.
What makes a good missionary makes a good American spy, or so thought Office of Special Services (OSS) founder "Wild" Bill Donovan when he recruited religious activists into the first ranks of American espionage. Called upon to serve Uncle Sam, Donovan's recruits saw the war as a means of expanding their godly mission, believing an American victory would guarantee the safety of their fellow missionaries and their coreligionists abroad.
Drawing on never-before-seen archival materials, acclaimed historian Matthew Sutton shows how religious activists proved to be true believers in Franklin Roosevelt's crusade for global freedom of religion. Sutton focuses on William…
I’m a historian of modern Germany. As a teacher and a writer, I seek to get my students and readers to empathize with the people of the past, to think and even feel their way inside those people’s experiences. Because empathy is not sympathy, one can and should empathize with people one finds unsympathetic. We need to empathize with Nazis in order to understand how they and other Germans—human beings not unlike ourselves—could have committed the worst crimes in modern European history, not least the Holocaust.
This book is based on reports, reflections, and correspondence of prison chaplains who interacted with imprisoned Nazi perpetrators awaiting trial and, in some instances, execution.
What the prisoners confessed to the clergy and, even more, the criminal behavior they failed to acknowledge I find so revealing. The prisoners felt guilty for individual personal transgressions (like cheating on their wives). Here, they had chosen to sin. But they felt no guilt about their participation in genocide since they saw themselves as having acted perforce on behalf of the community of the “Volk.”
Kellenbach brings this astonishing fact home in a way that is simultaneously horrifying and empathic. After reading her book, I finally came to understand what Adolf Eichmann meant when he claimed that he was “the victim of a fallacy” at his trial in Jerusalem.
The Mark of Cain fleshes out a history of conversations that contributed to Germany's coming to terms with a guilty past. Katharina von Kellenbach draws on letters exchanged between clergy and Nazi perpetrators, written notes of prison chaplains, memoirs, sermons, and prison publications to illuminate the moral and spiritual struggles of perpetrators after the war. These documents provide intimate insights into the self-reflection and self-perception of perpetrators. As Germany looks back on more than sixty years of passionate debate about political, personal and legal guilt, its ongoing engagement with the legacy of perpetration has transformed its culture and politics.
Caroline Herschel has always lived in the shadows. Beholden to her wildly popular older brother, William, who rescued her from servitude, she's worked hard to build a life for herself – one where she can go unnoticed and repay the debt she believes she owes him. But when her brother…
I have been writing books on public art and memorials since the early 1990s and served on some major public commissions that select memorials and/or determine the fate of problematic memorials. These markers in our public spaces define who we are as a culture at a certain point in time, even though interpretations of them may evolve. They are our link to our history, express our present day values, and send a message to the future about who we are and what we value and believe in.
We rarely stop to think about memorials in terms of what emotion might have prompted them.
That is what Doss does here, covering a wide range of subjects and geographic sites. It is clear from her analysis that grief, fear, gratitude, shame, and anger have inspired a range of works representing a range of motivations for commemoration.
After reading this book you will never look at memorials in the same way. I had never thought of memorials in terms of emotional affect before and now consider it a major factor to be considered.
In the past few decades, thousands of new memorials to executed witches, victims of terrorism, and dead astronauts, along with those that pay tribute to civil rights, organ donors, and the end of communism, have dotted the American landscape. Equally ubiquitous, though until now, less the subject of serious inquiry, are temporary memorials: spontaneous offerings of flowers and candles that materialize at sites of tragic and traumatic death. In "Memorial Mania", Erika Doss argues that these memorials underscore our obsession with issues of memory and history, and the urgent desire to express - and claim - those issues in visibly…
Since a young age, I’ve been focused on how we can build a more just economy that restores and repairs versus extracts from our communities. My expertise is in the micro-economies of alternative, emerging economic solutions—in other words, how businesses and organizations can transform how they work to become pieces of an economy that works for all.
I have a long-loved copy with pages highlighted, corners bent, and margins full of my excited scribbles. The first time I read it, I felt like I had found a true friend in its pages. It reflected back my own developing understanding of the economy and offered language for things I had only sensed.
More than anything, it made me feel less alone and reminded me that others were asking similar questions about how our world could work differently. Gibson-Graham helps the reader understand that the economy is not some far-off concept, but rather all of us, and the choices we make together. Therefore, the book inspires us to see the ways we can change the economy from the ground up.
In the wake of economic crisis on a global scale, more and more people are reconsidering their role in the economy and wondering what they can do to make it work better for humanity and the planet. In this innovative book, J. K. Gibson-Graham, Jenny Cameron, and Stephen Healy contribute complex understandings of economics in practical terms: what can we do right now, in our own communities, to make a difference?
Full of exercises, thinking tools, and inspiring examples from around the world, Take Back the Economy shows how people can implement small-scale changes in their own lives to create…
I spent many a night growing up glued to the television, watching Ken Burns’ Civil War. But as I got older, I found my interests stretching beyond the battles and melancholic music on the screen. I decided to become a historian of abolitionism–the radical reform movement that fought to end the evils of slavery and racial prejudice. Through my research, I seek to explain the substantial influence of the abolitionist movement as well as its significant limitations. I received my Ph.D. from the University of Virginia in 2017, and have since held positions at such institutions as The New School, the University of Bonn, and the Massachusetts Historical Society.
This book does a fantastic job of illustrating something that I explore in my own work: pro-slavery (and anti-Black) white Americans were not the only obstacles facing abolitionists in the fight for racial equality.
The abolitionist movement itself was often divided along racial lines. Black abolitionists pushed for radical, egalitarian change in all aspects of American life. When push came to shove, however, many of their white counterparts had a limit as to how far they would go.
Bell shows how this dynamic played out at progressive colleges like Oberlin before, during, and after the Civil War. The implications of this book, however, stretch far beyond those campuses–and far beyond that time.
The abolitionist movement not only helped bring an end to slavery in the United States but also inspired the large-scale admission of African Americans to the country's colleges and universities. Oberlin College changed the face of American higher education in 1835 when it began enrolling students irrespective of race and sex. Camaraderie among races flourished at the Ohio institution and at two other leading abolitionist colleges, Berea in Kentucky and New York Central, where Black and white students allied in the fight for emancipation and civil rights. After Reconstruction, however, color lines emerged on even the most progressive campuses. For…
Rodney Bradford comes into Lindsay's restaurant, offers to buy her small house for double its value, eats her brownies, and drops dead on the sidewalk in front. Next, her almost-ex-husband offers to sign the divorce papers, but only if she'll give him her small,…
My name is Carl Rhodes, and I am a Professor of Management and Organization at the University of Technology Sydney. Like many others, in recent years I have become increasingly concerned, sometimes angry even, about how the organization of business and the economy is creating massive economic injustice. I am convinced that the economic system that has billionaires at its apex is deeply unfair, creating hardship, pain, and even death for too many people around the world. I am also convinced that we do not have to accept this gross injustice as being inevitable.
How do billionaires become so rich? One story is that it is all about hard work, initiative, and special talents. If you believe that story, then you might conclude that billionaires deserve their extreme wealth. What I found especially insightful about Chuck Collins book is that he painstakingly shows that this story is bogus.
Collins delves into the realities of what he calls the ‘agents of inequality’–the accountants and lawyers who ensure that the world’s richest people maintain and extend their wealth over generations. This fascinating book lifts the veil on how the rich use everything from cash hoarding to tax evasion to trust funds to ensure that the world’s economic system remains unequal.
For decades, a secret army of tax attorneys, accountants and wealth managers has been developing into the shadowy Wealth Defence Industry. These 'agents of inequality' are paid millions to hide trillions for the richest 0.01%.
In this book, inequality expert Chuck Collins, who himself inherited a fortune, interviews the leading players and gives a unique insider account of how this industry is doing everything it can to create and entrench hereditary dynasties of wealth and power. He exposes the inner workings of these "agents of inequality", showing how they deploy anonymous shell companies, family offices, offshore accounts, opaque trusts, and…
