Here are 72 books that Women of the Klan fans have personally recommended if you like
Women of the Klan.
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When I first moved to Portland, Oregon, I heard about the 1988 murder of an Ethiopian student by skinheads of the White AryanResistance. A famous trial subsequently bankrupted that white supremacist organization. When I began writing my trilogy, set in 1923, I learned about the strength of the Oregon KKK during the 1920s. I could see a direct line between the bigotry of that era and contemporary Portland. The more I studied the Klan of the 20s, the more I knew this information had to be part of my novels. Besides these book recommendations, I read numerous articles about Klan history. Everyone should learn this history.
As a writer, this book enabled me to get inside the mindset of Eastern Oregon Klan members in the 1920s. The heart of the book is the weekly meeting minutes of a local KKK chapter, which allowed me to see through the eyes of the men who made up this organization from May 1922 through April 1924. Their concerns included recruiting new members, supporting Klan-friendly political leaders at all levels of government, preventing Catholics from employment in teaching and other positions, and supporting a state bill that would ban Catholic schools. All this helped me create realistic characters with social and political views that are very different from my own.
This is an annotated collection of the minutes of a thriving Ku Klux Klan in La Grande, Oregon, between 1922 and 1924. The most complete set of Klan minutes ever uncovered, these documents illustrate the inner workings of a Klan chapter of more than 300 members at the time when the national membership reached into the millions and the Invisible Empire was at the peak of its power. Through an extensive introduction and conclusion as well as brief notes previewing each installment of the minutes, the author seeks to place these documents in historical perspective. The La Grande minutes demonstrate…
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…
When I first moved to Portland, Oregon, I heard about the 1988 murder of an Ethiopian student by skinheads of the White AryanResistance. A famous trial subsequently bankrupted that white supremacist organization. When I began writing my trilogy, set in 1923, I learned about the strength of the Oregon KKK during the 1920s. I could see a direct line between the bigotry of that era and contemporary Portland. The more I studied the Klan of the 20s, the more I knew this information had to be part of my novels. Besides these book recommendations, I read numerous articles about Klan history. Everyone should learn this history.
As a fiction writer trying to depict 1920s Portland, Oregon, I found limitless inspiration from this book. Chandler and Kennedy give the background leading up to Prohibition, chronicling the women’s temperance and suffrage movements; the establishment opposition to the International Workers of the World, the Wobblies; the organized crime in the city and police corruption; and the rise of the Ku Klux Klan. When George Baker became mayor in 1917, he took advantage of all these elements to control a system of corruption that kept him in power. While the book does not focus on the KKK, it offers important details about its powerful influence on this particular city at this time in history.
The 1917 election of Mayor George Luis Baker ushered a long era of unscrupulous greed into Portland government. While supposedly enforcing prohibition laws, Baker ordered police chief Leon Jenkins to control and profit from the bootlegging market. Baker filled city coffers and his friends' pockets with booze-soaked cash while sensational headlines like the 1929 affair between policeman Bill Breuning and informant Anna Schrader scandalized the city. Maligned in the press, Schrader executed a bitter campaign to recall the mayor. In 1933, a hired gunman murdered special investigator to the governor Frank Aiken a day before he would have filed a…
When I first moved to Portland, Oregon, I heard about the 1988 murder of an Ethiopian student by skinheads of the White AryanResistance. A famous trial subsequently bankrupted that white supremacist organization. When I began writing my trilogy, set in 1923, I learned about the strength of the Oregon KKK during the 1920s. I could see a direct line between the bigotry of that era and contemporary Portland. The more I studied the Klan of the 20s, the more I knew this information had to be part of my novels. Besides these book recommendations, I read numerous articles about Klan history. Everyone should learn this history.
I love Hill’s passion for elucidating our history in order to combat prejudice. She approaches the origins of fear and intolerance from diverse perspectives, starting with violent clashes between 1700s explorers and indigenous peoples of Oregon’s Pacific coast. She describes the long history of stealing Oregon land from natives, and how the US Civil War contributed to the exclusion of African Americans from Oregon in its state constitution. Later she shows how D. W. Griffith’s movie The Birth of a Nationwas instrumental in the re-emergence of the KKK in the 1920s, and WWI propaganda against Germans and fear of Bolshevism contributed to Klan hatred of immigrants. In later chapters Hill brings us up to the present summarizing anti-LGBTQ political initiatives and the Black Lives Matter movement.
At five years old, Kasiel was found with the pointed ends of his ears cut off. Despite that brutal start, he’s lived twelve peaceful years with the man who took him in. Keeping his hair long over his mutilated ears helps him hide the fact that he is Vanrian, a…
I’m a history professor, but I’m also a reader. I love books—fiction and nonfiction—that reveal a world, a character, an idea, or a political movement in ways that I didn’t previously fully understand. That make me see more deeply and think more clearly. I teach and write about the history of the United States, especially its history of radical or extreme political groups. Where did this interest come from? Well, I first visited the U.S. in 1980, when I was eleven years old, and truth be told, my fascination with the country and its people has not abated since.
I always love it when a work of history connects with and helps me understand the present, and Linda Gordon’s book certainly does that.
Not only does she provide a riveting account of the revival of the Klan in the 1920s, she clearly demonstrates the tremendous impact the organization had on America during this period and long beyond, through its skillful use of demagoguery, its canny media strategy and its underlying politics of resentment.
Extraordinary national acclaim accompanied the publication of award-winning historian Linda Gordon's disturbing and markedly timely history of the reassembled Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s. Dramatically challenging our preconceptions of the hooded Klansmen responsible for establishing a Jim Crow racial hierarchy in the 1870s South, this "second Klan" spread in states principally above the Mason-Dixon line by courting xenophobic fears surrounding the flood of immigrant "hordes" landing on American shores. "Part cautionary tale, part expose" (Washington Post), The Second Coming of the KKK "illuminates the surprising scope of the movement" (The New Yorker); the Klan attracted four-to-six-million members through secret…
Currently, I am a lecturer at Indiana University’s Kelley School of Business, teaching speech and writing at a perennial top ten business school in America. I also teach speech to business students as an adjunct professor at Butler University in Indianapolis. Before teaching became my calling and my fulltime vocation, I spent thirteen years working for the State of Indiana, and twenty years as a contract lobbyist in the Indiana Statehouse.
I love this book because it is a classic example of how movements based on hate and evil can quickly take hold and spread. The parallels from 1920s Indiana to modern-day America jump out of this story about the rise of the Ku Klux Klan.
Egan’s meticulous research and storytelling paints a vivid picture of the moment and the surroundings of one of our nation’s darkest periods. It explains so many shortcomings about modern-day middle America that the eerily true account almost seems made up.
"With narrative elan, Egan gives us a riveting saga of how a predatory con man became one of the most powerful people in 1920s America, Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan, with a plan to rule the country—and how a grisly murder of a woman brought him down. Compelling and chillingly resonant with our own time." —Erik Larson, author of The Splendid and the Vile
“Riveting…Egan is a brilliant researcher and lucid writer.” —Minneapolis Star Tribune
A historical thriller by the Pulitzer and National Book Award-winning author that tells the riveting story of…
When I was in school, I often struggled to figure out where I “fit”. Yeah, I know that’s a common struggle among angsty teens. But as a biracial, bisexual kid who loved basketball and books, I didn’t feel totally at home in any of the stereotypical Breakfast Club-style categories that showed up even in many of the books I read: jock, nerd, prep, etc. Now, as a dad, coach, and writer, I know those boxes aren’t real. I’m passionate about giving kids stories that challenge old ideas about what boys are “supposed” to be and help them explore the full range of who they can be.
Rahul Kapoor isn’t sure where he belongs as he starts seventh grade as one of the few Indian American kids in his midwestern town, but he latches onto his grandfather’s advice to figure out what he’s “the best” at… with sometimes disastrous results. This sweet, funny novel tackles relatable issues like facing anxiety and discovering your passion, all with a delightful cast. Rahul’s aunties are a force to behold!
From award-winning actor Maulik Pancholy comes a hilarious and heartfelt middle grade debut about a gay Indian American boy coming into his own. One of Time Out's “LGBTQ+ books for kids to read during Pride Month,” this is perfect for fans of Tim Federle’s Nate series. A Stonewall Honor Book!
Rahul Kapoor is heading into seventh grade in a small town in Indiana. The start of middle school is making him feel increasingly anxious, so his favorite person in the whole world, his grandfather, Bhai, gives him some well-meaning advice: Find one thing you’re really good at and become the…
Resonant Blue and Other Stories
by
Mary Vensel White,
The first collection of award-winning short fiction from the author of Bellflower and Things to See in Arizona, whose writing reflects “how we can endure and overcome our personal histories, better understand our ancestral ones, and accept the unknown future ahead.”
Raised when unsupervised kids roamed freely in the woods, my friends and I became adept at finding fun. My 20s were spent in New York in the 1980's zeitgeist of exploration and excess. A lifelong fan of comedy, I worked at the Comedy Cellar, where I booked and watched countless standup comics. Later, I left NYC’s glamor for Vermont’s nature. Since then, my Vermont newspaper column, "Upper Valley Girl," has amused and astonished (and possibly appalled) readers with humor and candor. Ever adventurous to the point of risk, making awful mistakes, and enduring impossible people, I learned limits the hard way. I advise young people not to do the same.
A captivating memoir that I could not put down. The mesmerizing cover! The story of a happy child growing up in a happy family in the Midwest that is somehow riveting! I was hooked from the get-go.
As someone who used to book comics in NYC, I admire anyone who can do brilliant clean humor. I wouldn’t call her a humor writer. She’s just a fantastic writer. I do not re-read books, but I do re-read this gem to feel sane and awed and to laugh. It reminds me of simpler times and that there are good, genuine people in this messy world.
When Haven Kimmel was born in 1965 in Mooreland, Indiana, was a sleepy little hamlet of three hundred people. Nicknamed "Zippy" for the way she would bolt around the house, this small girl was possessed of big eyes and even bigger ears. In this witty and lovingly told memoir, Kimmel takes readers back to a time when small-town America was caught in the amber of the innocent postwar period--people helped their neighbors, went to church on Sunday, and kept barnyard animals in their backyards.
To three-year-old Zippy, it made perfect sense to strike a bargain with her father to keep…
As a writer, I’ve always been drawn to exploring the teenage experience. Maybe that’s because my experiences in high school and college were rife with the highest of highs and the lowest of lows—everything was intensely beautiful and painful at once. That tension played a major role in my self-discovery process, and story-wise, it makes for a compelling character. But in a lot of literature, I find the depiction of teenage characters to be either sensationalized or infantilizing, melodramatic, or unconvincingly flat. When writing my own adolescent subjects in The Wayside, I turned often toward the rich, complex characters in the stories here.
Along with Anthropology of an American Girl, this is one of the books that made me want to become a writer. More specifically, it opened my eyes to what a writer can do with a teenage subject.
The story follows a prep-school student, Lee, but Sittenfeld handles her experience with all the nuance of “adult” subjects. I also admire how Sittenfeld captures the labyrinthine social politics of an elite boarding school and comments on class and race hierarchies without ever feeling didactic.
I think people mistake this book as YA—I certainly did when I first picked it up as a thirteen-year-old—but don’t be fooled by that candy-colored ribbon belt on the cover. This is as complex a novel as they come.
An insightful, achingly funny coming-of-age story as well as a brilliant dissection of class, race, and gender in a hothouse of adolescent angst and ambition.
Lee Fiora is an intelligent, observant fourteen-year-old when her father drops her off in front of her dorm at the prestigious Ault School in Massachusetts. She leaves her animated, affectionate family in South Bend, Indiana, at least in part because of the boarding school’s glossy brochure, in which boys in sweaters chat in front of old brick buildings, girls in kilts hold lacrosse sticks on pristinely mown athletic fields, and everyone sings hymns in chapel.…
I’m a storyteller and jack of all trades who grew up on a family farm in Indiana. I can operate a combine, analyze data, or edit a book. Writing about sports can create great stories, but the true beauty lies in the people and circumstances, not the stats and game highlights. Most of my works are nonfiction—personal interest, sports, history, and sports history. I enjoy unearthing untold stories, especially when they involve equal rights, underdogs, hidden history, and non-famous people. Everyone has a story to tell.
Mike Roos did a great job telling this true story of Indiana high school basketball. Roos’s father was the high school principal that hired that crazy coach referenced in the title. He used extensive interviews and years of rewrites to recreate meetings, locker room pep talks, and dialogue. Not only is this a good story, but Roos showed readers what is wonderful about creative nonfiction. It reads like a novel, but it’s genuine nonfiction.
In the summer of 1962, the peripatetic and irrepressible Pete Gill was hired on a whim to coach basketball at tiny Ireland High School. There he would accomplish, against enormous odds, one of the great small-town feats in Indiana basketball history. With no starters taller than 5'10", few wins were predicted for the Spuds. Yet, after inflicting brutal preseason conditioning, employing a variety of unconventional motivational tactics, and overcoming fierce opposition, Gill molded the Spuds into a winning team that brought home the town's first and only sectional and regional titles. Relying on narrative strategies of creative nonfiction rather than…
After her mother is killed in a rare Northern Michigan tornado, Sadie Wixom is left with only her father and grandfather to guide her through young adulthood. Miles away in western Saskatchewan, Stefan Montegrand and his Indigenous family are displaced from their land by multinational energy companies. They are taken…
I read my first crime thriller at the age of 12, and since then I’ve always had a passion to write my own stories. Although I’ve never worked as a police officer, I spent close to 10 years working as an IT consultant to multiple police forces in Australia before retiring to write full-time. The time spent working closely with law enforcement gave me a ‘feel’ for how police forces operate and helped me gravitate towards the police procedural genre. A book that moved at the pace of most police investigations would never sell and I love the challenge of making the stories authentic but still moving at a pace to keep the reader captivated.
The Jack Reacher character is arguably the best-known protagonist in the mystery thriller genre. In most novels I’ve ever read, the main character has a character arc where the protagonist learns from his adventures, trials, and tribulations and becomes a better person (or in some cases the opposite). Whatever the trajectory, the character changes over time, but in Lee Childs’ books, the Jack Reacher character never changes. Reacher is your quintessential flat line – nothing phases him and nothing ever changes him. He's a drifter, who walks the USA with a toothbrush in one pocket and an ATM card in the other. Reacher likes to stay out of trouble, but he’s not afraid to confront it either when it finds him. It's very hard not to like Jack Reacher and it's even harder not to like Lee Childs books (he's written 27 so far). I always read a Jack Reacher…
A heartland city thrown into terror. But within hours the cops have it solved. A slam-dunk case. Apart from one thing. The accused gunman refuses to talk except for a single phrase:
Get Jack Reacher for me.
Reacher lives off the grid. He's not looking for trouble. But sometimes trouble looks for him. What could connect the noble Reacher to this psychopathic killer?
_________
Although the Jack Reacher can be read in any order, One Shot is the 9th in the series.
And be sure not to miss Reacher's newest adventure, no.27, No Plan B! ***OUT…
