17 Books Like Time's Arrow, Time's Cycle

As much as the current attacks on DEI may feel new or recent, the use of education and schooling to colonize and assimilate goes all the way back to the founding myths of this country and the aims of stealing land from Indigenous peoples and labor from enslaved Black communities.

This book highlights those histories across time as motivated not by personal malice or differences in cultural beliefs but by settler-colonial economic gain. Those moves were rationalized by the notion of European “civilization” as superior and enforced through violence to erase Native people, cultures, and sovereignty.

The final chapter reminds us that “the past is present” in the fights over who gets to tell the histories and what narratives get valorized or erased; the grab for land, resources, and economic power that underlies the current attacks; and in the ongoing resistance and creativity of Indigenous nations and other minoritized communities… show more.

I read this book as a college student while on a spur-of-the-moment trip to Athens, Greece. As I sat reading while intermittently gazing at the view of the Acropolis from my hotel balcony, a frappe at my side, the book captivated me.

Written by a world-renowned historian in response to his son’s question, “What is history?”, this book opened vistas of reflection about our connections with past cultures and why we do history.

In a present where we are often being pushed to look forward, to innovate, and move on, The Historian’s Craft helped me to better articulate the value of understanding history. Surrounded by the rich cultural heritage of ancient Greece, this book just made perfect sense.

I liked that Jahren told the unvarnished truth of her experience in academia; like Zimmerman, she also shares how academia treats pregnant people. 

She talks about training the next generation of scientists, which is one of the main goals of the scientific enterprise.

Though I wasn’t impressed with the hazing ritual she and her lab manager had for new students in the lab, I did appreciate the excellent writing and well-paced narrative. Jahren is a stunning writer, and her book is neatly separated into sections about a tree, followed by a chapter about life mimicking that tree. 

I think this is a brilliant and, for me, unforgettable novel. It took an aspect of Ottoman history that I knew about as dry fact and imprinted it on my heart. I was fascinated by the daily lives of varied peoples in one small Ottoman town, how intertwined they were, even writing one language in the alphabet of another.

They tell their own stories of love and ambition, family and friendship, and how the Great War and its aftermath tore them apart. It reads like an epic unfolding through the eyes and voices of ordinary people, humane, evocative, humorous and brutal. 

This gorgeously illustrated coffee-table volume draws on Black’s expertise in science writing and paleontology. She begins with the Big Bang that created the universe 13.8 billion years ago, then moves in short chapters through milestones of the rise of life on Earth. Prehistoric plants harden into coal in the Carboniferous Period, 359 million years ago; dinosaurs roam the Morrison Formation of the western US, 156 million years ago; and small blobs of molten glass from Laos reveal a powerful meteorite impact 790,000 years ago. You’ll never see the timeline of life the same way again. 

I love the way this book brings perspective to modern issues by emphasizing the idea of “deep time” – that we are part of a long history that makes our current existence possible.

By thinking in this way, we also realize that our current predicament is one that we have the tools to address, and that by doing so, we would be honoring the miracles of nature that lie behind everything we are and do. Along the way, this book also helped me understand – and teach about – a variety of important geological processes.

This book expanded how I thought about time and about the landscape we take for granted.

It opened up the prehistoric world from a contemporary perspective, showing how a sense of deep geological time can help us understand our own place in the world better today.

Gordon explains why categories of things can be useful in deepening our understanding of a place: as she says, ‘a named landscape thickens.’

I also found this book so useful in working out how to cram 100,000 years of history into one volume for my book!

This is the classic book on the deep history of the Earth. Hutton is known as the father of modern geology, because he understood that today’s rocks represent the accumulation of changes over incredibly long geologic epochs. In publishing his ideas he went against the then-popular notion of catastrophism, which held that sudden, violent events such as floods had shaped most of the Earth’s surface. Hutton instead argued for slow changes over time — a concept known as uniformitarianism — and, crucially, recognized that two rock types at Siccar Point, Scotland, had formed at different times separated by many millions of years. “The mind seemed to grow giddy by looking so far into the abyss of time,” one of Hutton’s companions said. That realization set the stage for future scientists to explore the ramifications of a deep geologic past.

This fascinating, nail-biter of a tale has all the elements of a novel: quirky characters, chance encounters, a determined female curator, chase scenes, mystery, and hunt for something that scientists believed existed only in the fossil record. The story begins in 1938 in South Africa on the deck of a trawler, with young Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer picking through a pile of sharks, starfish, and ratfish—to uncover a beautiful, five-foot-long fish with hard iridescent scales and limb-like fins. Weinberg brings the story, and the coelacanth, to life, weaving a narrative as breathtaking as the fish itself. I enjoyed this book immensely!

I found this book to be a fascinating journey into realms of the world below the surface I had never thought about or even known existed. Cave diving is my worst nightmare, so one particular section stands out about the wild, terrifying, and utterly unrelatable passion of cave divers and the perils one faces when stuck very, very underground.

The mixture of purely natural environments and human-created ones, such as underground tunnels and cities, all held my attention as pieces of information I had read very little about in the past, all collected into one unifying theme. Having such a broad but specific topic all in one read was a fun, dynamic journey.