Here are 97 books that Whose Names Are Unknown fans have personally recommended if you like
Whose Names Are Unknown.
Book DNA is a community of 12,000+ authors and super readers sharing their favorite books with the world.
I come from a family of eaters. Food was often at the center of family stories and celebrations. I first became fascinated with apples while I was working on my Ph.D. in history, and my interest has since expanded to include all things related to food history. I’ve taught classes on food history, and a few years ago, I started collecting cookbooks. I blog about my cookbook collection and other historical food oddities on my website.
The family stories in this book bring history to life on a personal level. The five families are connected by their immigrant experience, but they approached food in different ways, from family-oriented German biergartens to kosher delis to imported olive oil. Each new wave of immigrants brought their own unique traditions to America, and the neighborhood evolved as each successive group brought something new to the metaphorical table.
I find the tension between maintaining food traditions and adapting them to a new nation fascinating. It also made me think about how much each group contributed to the American diet.
“Social history is, most elementally, food history. Jane Ziegelman had the great idea to zero in on one Lower East Side tenement building, and through it she has crafted a unique and aromatic narrative of New York’s immigrant culture: with bread in the oven, steam rising from pots, and the family gathering round.” — Russell Shorto, author of The Island at the Center of the World
97 Orchard is a richly detailed investigation of the lives and culinary habits—shopping, cooking, and eating—of five families of various ethnicities living at the turn of the twentieth century in one tenement on the…
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 come from a family of eaters. Food was often at the center of family stories and celebrations. I first became fascinated with apples while I was working on my Ph.D. in history, and my interest has since expanded to include all things related to food history. I’ve taught classes on food history, and a few years ago, I started collecting cookbooks. I blog about my cookbook collection and other historical food oddities on my website.
This book made me want to pour a glass of cider. Diane Flynt writes about her hunt for heirloom apples as the owner of Foggy Ridge Ciders in Virginia. Along the way, she shares the rich history of apples in the South.
Her writing is poetic. I could almost taste the apples and smell the evening air in the orchards as she checked on her trees. Flynt makes a strong case for why we need agricultural diversity and how the terroir of place is important for the food we produce.
My only regret in reading this book is that Flynt is retired, so I’ll never be able to taste her fine ciders.
For anyone who's ever picked an apple fresh from the tree or enjoyed a glass of cider, writer and orchardist Diane Flynt offers a new history of the apple and how it changed the South and the nation. Showing how southerners cultivated over 2,000 apple varieties from Virginia to Mississippi, Flynt shares surprising stories of a fruit that was central to the region for over 200 years. Colorful characters abound in this history, including aristocratic Belgian immigrants, South Carolina plantation owners, and multiple presidents, each group changing the course of southern orchards. She shows how southern apples, ranging from northern…
I come from a family of eaters. Food was often at the center of family stories and celebrations. I first became fascinated with apples while I was working on my Ph.D. in history, and my interest has since expanded to include all things related to food history. I’ve taught classes on food history, and a few years ago, I started collecting cookbooks. I blog about my cookbook collection and other historical food oddities on my website.
I love books that challenge our accepted knowledge of the past. For over 100 years, textbooks have told children that Cyrus McCormick invented the mechanical reaper. Spoiler alert—it turns out the textbooks were all wrong.
Ott takes us through the whole story—how the reaper was actually invented, how the McCormick family created a monopoly on farm equipment, and how they eventually created a monopoly on history. I especially enjoyed the final section of the book, which explains exactly how historians preserved and manipulated history to serve the McCormick company’s ends.
Harvesting History explores how the highly contentious claim of Cyrus McCormick's 1831 invention of the reaper came to be incorporated into the American historical canon as a fact. Spanning the late 1870s to the 1930s, Daniel P. Ott reveals how the McCormick family and various affiliated businesses created a usable past about their departed patriarch, Cyrus McCormick, and his role in creating modern civilization through advertising and the emerging historical profession. The mythical invention narrative was widely peddled for decades by salesmen and in catalogs, as well as in corporate public education campaigns and eventually in history books, to justify…
Sine, a professor of creative writing, accompanies Sam, a neuroscientist, on a conference trip to a Hotel Castle. Sam wants to present a new device, the "monitor." Sine hopes to recover from tending to her mother who just passed away.
When they arrive, Sine is in a dream-like state. Real…
I come from a family of eaters. Food was often at the center of family stories and celebrations. I first became fascinated with apples while I was working on my Ph.D. in history, and my interest has since expanded to include all things related to food history. I’ve taught classes on food history, and a few years ago, I started collecting cookbooks. I blog about my cookbook collection and other historical food oddities on my website.
This book is delightful. Shapiro is one of my favorite food historians. I recommend all her books, but if you’ve never read her before, start here.
It’s full of surprising and unexpected stories. Eleanor Roosevelt extracts culinary revenge, Eva Braun drinks champagne while worrying about her weight, and Helen Gurley Brown binges on sugar-free gelatin. These stories left me thinking about my own relationship with food and what that says about the society we live in.
'If you find the subject of food to be both vexing and transfixing, you'll love What She Ate' Elle
Did you know that Eleanor Roosevelt dished up Eggs Mexican (a concoction of rice, fried eggs, and bananas) in the White House?
Or that Helen Gurley Brown's commitment to 'having it all' meant dining on supersized portions of diet gelatine?
In the irresistible What She Ate, Laura Shapiro examines the plates, recipe books and shopping trolleys of six extraordinary women, from Dorothy Wordsworth to Eva Braun. Delving into diaries, newspaper articles, cook books and more, Shapiro casts a different light on…
I’ve always liked to imagine how things might have been. In my thinking, a good historical novel is a story set inside the larger world of the time, like a nesting doll with a story inside a story. I look for accurate research, well-developed characters, a unique storyline, and dialogue that comes alive on the page. I expect the history to be a backdrop for a story of ordinary people living through extraordinary times. This is what I like to read and how I have written my novels set during the Civil War, Great Sioux Uprising of 1862, and the home front of World War 2.
I love well written historical fiction set in many different time periods. Death of a Rainmaker is a historical mystery set in 1930s Oklahoma during the height of the Dust Bowl days.
It includes fascinating information about rainmaking scams, the Civilian Conservation Corps, severe climate changes, Depression politics, Government programs to aid citizens, and rural life during the 1930s. The main character is a small-town sheriff trying to do the right thing with limited resources. Supporting characters are diverse and well developed.
The mystery unfolds with delicious precision. Death of a Rainmaker meets my criteria for a great read.
Finalist for the 2019 Oklahoma Book Awards, Fiction
"The murder investigation allows Loewenstein to probe into the lives of proud people who would never expose their troubles to strangers. People like John Hodge, the town's most respected lawyer, who knocks his wife around, and kindhearted Etha Jennings, who surreptitiously delivers home-cooked meals to the hobo camp outside town because one of the young Civilian Conservation Corps workers reminds her of her dead son. Loewenstein's sensitive treatment of these dark days in the Dust Bowl era offers little humor but a whole lot of compassion." --New York Times Book Review
I grew up in the 1960s and 1970s in western Sonoma County, California, surrounded by forests, rivers, and the Pacific Ocean. Yet this idyllic setting was shaken by the assassinations of the Kennedy brothers and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.; the Vietnam War; civil rights riots; Nixon and Watergate; the Pentagon Papers; Weather Underground bombings; Patti Hearst with a machine gun; and four students killed at Kent State. These events led me to major in Politics at UC Santa Cruz and become an investigative journalist. I soon realized the U.S. is built not only on equal rights and freedom but also on systemic disparity, injustice, and violence.
Set within the greatest mass migration in American history, Steinbeck’s 1939 classic follows the Joad family as they join nearly three million others who escape the Dust Bowl of the American Midwest.
Usurious banks have foreclosed and crushed the bereft farmers. More than 200,000 refugees head for California, and the Joads join them in an ambling caravan of rattling jalopies. Young Rose of Sharon moves pregnant across the continent, emblematic of both the promise and the peril of the human condition. She’s surrounded by family and hangers-on who ford the wasted continent, only to face a glut of labor in the vast farms of California and the brutal exploitation of the owner classes. The Joads are slapped with the bitter understanding that the promise of California exists largely in myth. Yet always Steinbeck returns to the promises of human connection and even happiness that beckon from just over the next…
'I've done my damndest to rip a reader's nerves to rags, I don't want him satisfied.'
Shocking and controversial when it was first published, The Grapes of Wrath is Steinbeck's Pultizer Prize-winning epic of the Joad family, forced to travel west from Dust Bowl era Oklahoma in search of the promised land of California. Their story is one of false hopes, thwarted desires and powerlessness, yet out of their struggle Steinbeck created a drama that is both intensely human and majestic in its scale and moral vision.
In an age of splendor, a heretic king strips Egypt bare—forcing his queen to quell rebellion and plunging his children into a conspiracy against the crown.
Salvation in the Sun follows Nefertiti as she ascends the throne beside Pharaoh Amenhotep—soon to become Akhenaten—just as he declares war on Egypt’s ancient…
Neighbors. We’ve all got ‘em, right? We believe we’re the good ones, and we pray we don’t live next door to the bad ones… but sometimes it’s inevitable that we share our property lines with those ill-suited for neighborly behavior. Horror books about bad neighbors are the perfect window into our own communities. We can peer into the lives of others without worry of getting caught. We can tiptoe through their rooms and rummage through their drawers… Who knows what we might find. Are they witches? Serial killers? Devil worshippers? Only their dirty laundry will tell.
Samson’s one and only novel, The Auctioneer is a wonderfully unnerving tale of how a community can find itself completely hollowed out in a matter of a single devil’s bargain. Predating Stephen King’s Needful Things, this book is a literary garotte that slowly closes around the reader’s throat. The paranoia is palpable in these pages, believe me.
One of the finest and best-selling horror novels of the 1970s returns at last to chill a new generation of readers
In the isolated farming community of Harlowe, New Hampshire, where life has changed little over the past several decades, John Moore and his wife Mim work the land that has been in his family for generations. But from the moment the charismatic Perly Dunsmore arrives in town and starts soliciting donations for his auctions, things begin slowly and insidiously to change in Harlowe. As the auctioneer carries out his terrible, inscrutable plan, the Moores and their neighbors will find…
Fairy tales were my first love but I didn’t discover the true magic of children’s picture books until I left my 25-year career as an attorney to enter an MFA program. Wow, was I amazed. Picture books—books in which pictures tell an integral part of the story—not only create an instant connection between reader and little listener but stay with us into adulthood as memories. With this insight, I dove into the genre to discover what distinguishes picture books that are read and reread from those that fade. The answer turns out to be—tales that engender awe and wonder, yarns with heart, and narratives about friendship and kindness. Those are the stories that stay with us forever.
The Farmer and the Clown is my personal candidate for “best” wordless picture book. Author and two-time Caldecott Honor medalist Marla Frazee tells the story of a reluctant farmer who rescues a frightened baby clown separated from his circus family. With zero words and perfect pacing, Frazee steals our hearts as the farmer and the clown overcome their fears and learn to love each other. A testament to kindness and friendship, this book will appeal to grandparents, parents, and young readers alike. Once you read The Farmer and the Clown, you’ll want to acquire the other two books in this amazing trilogy:The Farmer and the Monkeyand The Farmer and the Circus.
A baby clown is separated from his family when he accidentally bounces off their circus train and lands in a lonely farmer's vast, empty field. The farmer reluctantly rescues the little clown, and over the course of one day together, the two of them make some surprising discoveries about themselves-and about life!
Sweet, funny, and moving, this wordless picture book from a master of the form and the creator of The Boss Baby speaks volumes and will delight story lovers of all ages.
As both a writer and a reader, I love romance novels set in the late 1800s because many of the problems people faced back then are similar to the problems encountered today. For example, we worry about losing jobs to AI. Back then, workers worried about mechanization. Also, while researching a book, I was fascinated to learn that meetings, dating sites, games, and “text” messages were just as prevalent then as they are today, thanks to the Victorian Internet (aka the telegraph). Another reason I’m fascinated with the Old West is because it caused women to challenge traditional roles and enter into professions previously dominated by males.
I have a particular fondness for stories involving mail-order brides, and this one stood out for me due to its unique twist. A well-intentioned neighbor takes it upon himself to order a mail-order bride for the protagonist without his knowledge. To complicate matters further, Evelyn arrives in town completely unaware that the hero has not been informed of her arrival or her reason for coming. Despite this rocky start, they enter into a marriage of convenience.
I found their humorous exchanges delightful as they navigated their emotional challenges while trying to make their marriage work. However, what truly captivated me was how friends and family play pivotal roles in guiding the couple onto their path toward love.
"Melissa Jagears is a stand-out talent! Her fresh new voice is strong, stylish, and makes A Bride for Keeps a page-turner for anyone who fancies a stirring love story." -Rosslyn Elliot, author of Fairer Than Morning and Sweeter Than Birdsong
"A Bride for Keeps treats readers to an engaging, prairie romance...delivering a heartwarming, satisfying read." -Maggie Brendan, CBA bestselling author of The Heart of the West and The Blue Willow Brides series.
"Melissa Jagears has penned a tender tale of a mail-order bride who takes both the groom--and herself--by surprise when love comes softly...quietly... to heal their broken hearts." -Julie…
Born the heir of a master woodcutter in a queendom defined by guilds and matrilineal inheritance, nonbinary Sorin can’t quite seem to find their place. At seventeen, an opportunity to attend an alchemical guild fair and secure an apprenticeship with the…
I grew up in rural Iowa in the 1950s and 60s, a place far removed from most of the world. Our town had no movie theater, no library, no anything except for a truly excellent baseball field. So we played – day, night, with full teams or three brothers or all by yourself. We also were tasked by our father with caring for the diamond, which was the home park for the local semi-pro team, the Cascade Reds. When I left town – fled would be a better description – I took my love of baseball with me. I played baseball in Vietnam, watched games in Hiroshima, Japan, Seoul, Korea, LA, Chicago, Seattle, Kansas City, and St. Louis. I could go on like this for a long time, but I think you get the picture.
This novel is less well-known, and much more accomplished, than the movie based on it – Field of Dreams. Where the movie is sappy, the book is lyrical and warmly nostalgic for a time and place – rural Iowa in the 1970s. There is a clear magical realism vibe to the whole thing. The plot structure of the novel is a very shaggy dog involving a baseball field in a corn field, the kidnapping of a famous novelist and numerous dead people coming back to life. The book is big-hearted and much of the writing is luminous.
The inspiration for the beloved film Field of Dreams, Shoeless Joe by W. P. Kinsella is the story about the beauty and history of baseball, and the power and endurance of a dream.
“A moonlit novel about baseball, dreams, family, the land, and literature."—Sports Illustrated
“If you build it, he will come.” These mysterious words, spoken by an Iowa baseball announcer, inspire Ray Kinsella to carve a baseball diamond in his cornfield in honor of his hero, the baseball legend Shoeless Joe Jackson. What follows is both a rich, nostalgic look at one of our most cherished national pastimes and…
