Here are 7 books that When Two Feathers Fell from the Sky fans have personally recommended if you like
When Two Feathers Fell from the Sky.
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I love how the different time periods work, all connected to the real stallion Lexington and Jarrett, the slave who’s with him since the day he foaled (and named him Darley). Insights on slavery from slaves’ POV, the Civil War and Reconstruction, horse racing and the owners and plantations, horse art and a Smithsonian search—and more. Beautifully written.
"Brooks' chronological and cross-disciplinary leaps are thrilling." -The New York Times Book Review
"Horse isn't just an animal story-it's a moving narrative about race and art." -TIME
A discarded painting in a junk pile, a skeleton in an attic, and the greatest racehorse in American history: from these strands, a Pulitzer Prize winner braids a sweeping story of spirit, obsession, and injustice across American history
Kentucky, 1850. An enslaved groom named Jarret and a bay foal forge a bond of understanding that will carry the horse to record-setting victories across the South. When the nation erupts in civil war, an…
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…
The setting of 1950 Bombay is a time and place I knew little about, and I found it fascinating. I love mysteries, and this one was complex and sophisticated.
In the fourth rip-roaring thriller in the award-winning Malabar House series, Persis and Archie travel to the old colonial capital of Calcutta, where they collide head-on with the prejudices and bloody politics of an era engulfed in flame.
'A sumptuous, brutal, heart-stopping thriller. Vaseem Khan writes with charm and wit, and an eye for detail that transports the reader entirely. I couldn't love this series more' CHRIS WHITAKER
Can a white man receive justice in post-colonial India? Bombay, 1950
James Whitby, sentenced to death for the murder of prominent lawyer and former Quit India activist Fareed Mazumdar, is less than…
I began gathering stories about pregnancy and its avoidance in Mexican archives twenty-five years ago when I was working on my dissertation on religious history. This topic fascinated me because it was central to the preoccupations of so many women I knew, and it seemed to present a link to past generations. But as I researched, I also realized that radical differences existed between the experiences and attitudes of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Mexican women and the concerns, practices, and understandings of my own period that I had assumed were timeless and unchanging. For me, this was a liberating discovery.
This book is one of the reasons why I became a historian.
Ulrich uncovered the nearly illegible diary of an eighteenth-century midwife in Maine and included excerpts of the original at the start of each chapter. When I read the excerpts, I thought: How could these possibly be significant and what do they mean, anyway?
And then, like a detective, a gifted mind-reader, and a learned botanist all rolled into one, Ulrich unpacked each entry, weaving each snippet into the fabric of a wide textile of social history that includes reproductive history, gender and marital relations, local economies, political conflicts, and religion.
Abortion and abortifacients play a marginal role in the story Ulrich tells, but the history of midwifery and reproductive health are central to it.
PULITZER PRIZE WINNER • Drawing on the diaries of one woman in eighteenth-century Maine, "A truly talented historian unravels the fascinating life of a community that is so foreign, and yet so similar to our own" (The New York Times Book Review).
Between 1785 and 1812 a midwife and healer named Martha Ballard kept a diary that recorded her arduous work (in 27 years she attended 816 births) as well as her domestic life in Hallowell, Maine. On the basis of that diary, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich gives us an intimate and densely imagined portrait, not only of the industrious and…
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…
Growing up as a bi-racial Malay Filipina in a country that only recognizes my Malay-Muslim heritage, I have always inadvertently never quite met the standards of what constitutes a “good Malay Muslim woman.” My circumstances have meant I am always drawn to stories of women who strain against the confines of their societies and desire more for themselves than what is considered acceptable by polite society. Whether they achieve their goals by coloring within the lines or straying outside them, their journeys are what continue to inspire me to live my own life as authentically as possible.
This is hands-down a standout for me in its unique portrayal of the Asian-American immigrant story. Set during the California Gold Rush, the novel tells the tale of Lucy, a young, orphaned Chinese-American woman, and the adventure she and her sister embark on to carve a new, secure future for themselves.
It is at once an unforgettable adventure and an unflinching exploration of sisterhood that made me consider how the female bildungsroman is often not so much about a woman growing up but rather growing into the self she wants to be, despite the confines of the society in which she lives. Plus, Zhang’s original, gleaming prose is just a delight to read.
I have always been a devoted reader of fiction, and I especially enjoy novels and short stories that delve into characters’ interior lives and motivations. I find people fascinating, both in books and in real life, and I am always trying to figure out why people do or say certain things. I should probably have become a psychologist or a detective instead of a musicologist. I am passionate about doing as much of that kind of sleuthing as a scholar as possible.
I listened to this audiobook about motherhood while pushing my newborn second child in a stroller. Sarah Knott takes the reader through the stages of becoming a mother–conception, miscarriage, pregnancy, birth, newborn care, childcare, and resuming work–and then doing it again with a second child.
Throughout, Knott contrasts her own experiences with those of women in the past, especially in North America and Britain. The differences are striking, not just in healthcare but also in social support. I thought about the women I'd written about who had many children and how important familial support was.
As a fellow professor, I was heartened to read about Knott's experience returning to work and re-finding her academic mind. She writes poignantly about how motherhood is a constant interruption. It is so true!
Mothering is as old as human existence. But how has this most essential experience changed over time and cultures? What is the history of maternity―the history of pregnancy, birth, the encounter with an infant? Can one capture the historical trail of mothers? How?
In Mother Is a Verb, the historian Sarah Knott creates a genre all her own in order to craft a new kind of historical interpretation. Blending memoir and history and building from anecdote, her book brings the past and the present viscerally alive. It is at once intimate…
As a historian of race and gender in European women’s history, “misbehaving” women confound me! I am rendered speechless when women negate their own humanity in the drive toward the same power structures that subjugate them. Vulnerable women who were often in the clutches of those same women–and yet are unrelenting in their determination to survive within systems to which others have relegated them–inspire me. These books and their stories take women’s lives–their oft-horrible choices, their scandalous mistakes, and their demands for autonomy–seriously. I hope you find their stories as compelling as I do!
This book astonishes me every time I open its pages, and I return to these stories again and again. Taking the 18th-century urban city of Bridgetown, Barbados, as its canvas, Fuentes uncovers, often using fragmentary sources, the lives of Black enslaved and free women of color, narrating their violent stories of survival in ways that broke my heart.
Equally important, the power of Fuentes’ writing forces me to interrogate how histories of vulnerable women are produced while they are alive and how to reckon with how archives produce and reinscribe violence on their disfigured bodies after death. It is impossible not to feel the full weight of my responsibility as a scholar after reading this book.
It is the first book I hand to students who want to write about Black women, regardless of their geographic interests.
In the eighteenth century, Bridgetown, Barbados, was heavily populated by both enslaved and free women. Marisa J. Fuentes creates a portrait of urban Caribbean slavery in this colonial town from the perspective of these women whose stories appear only briefly in historical records. Fuentes takes us through the streets of Bridgetown with an enslaved runaway; inside a brothel run by a freed woman of color; in the midst of a white urban household in sexual chaos; to the gallows where enslaved people were executed; and within violent scenes of enslaved women's punishments. In the process, Fuentes interrogates the archive and…
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 always been a devoted reader of fiction, and I especially enjoy novels and short stories that delve into characters’ interior lives and motivations. I find people fascinating, both in books and in real life, and I am always trying to figure out why people do or say certain things. I should probably have become a psychologist or a detective instead of a musicologist. I am passionate about doing as much of that kind of sleuthing as a scholar as possible.
I love an epic family novel, and this fits the bill. It’s set in 1875 in the Cherokee Nation and centers largely on a Cherokee matriarch as she cares for her dying husband, who is white while raising her sons and managing a substantial farm.
It’s also about her neighbors and employees, and there’s a bit of a mystery, too. I’m recommending this book because it shows just how complex family can be and how kinship can be a powerful force for protection, but also, in U.S. legal contexts, it can be used against Native American people.
From the author of the Pulitzer Prize finalist Maud’s Line, an epic novel that follows a web of complex family alliances and culture clashes in the Cherokee Nation during the aftermath of the Civil War, and the unforgettable woman at its center.
Winner of the Western Writers of America Spur Award (Best Western Traditional Novel)
It’s the early spring of 1875 in the Cherokee Nation West. A baby, a black hired hand, a bay horse, a gun, a gold stash, and a preacher have all gone missing. Cherokee America Singer, known as “Check,” a wealthy farmer, mother of five boys,…
