Here are 100 books that World Made by Hand fans have personally recommended if you like
World Made by Hand.
Book DNA is a community of 12,000+ authors and super readers sharing their favorite books with the world.
In 1999, fresh out of Harvard, I moved to Zendik Farm—a neo-hippie cult with a radical take on sex and relationships. Since I left in 2004, I’ve been composting the experience into a source of fertility. I've explored not only what drew me to Zendik and kept me there but also how groups like Zendik feed on deficiencies in our cultural soil—and how common it is for us humans to get trapped inside stories. Even—especially—if we assume ourselves immune to cultism. That is, I’ve approached my cult experience with sincere curiosity. So have all the authors on this list. That’s why I love them.
In 1988, I watched a TV special marking the tenth anniversary of the massacre at Jonestown. Did the producers ask who the dead were? How they’d found the People’s Temple? What they’d hoped for when they’d joined? If so, the answers didn’t stick. Nothing stuck but the heaps of corpses in lurid Technicolor—scenes from a horror film misfiled in real life. No wonder I sealed that story and others like it in a pit marked “evil,” “madness,” “them.”
In this book, Scheeres shows that many entered the People’s Temple seeking what life outside had so far denied them: comfort, camaraderie, and the chance to serve what seemed a worthy cause. She shows how some fought to survive. She returns a throng of “them” to the ring of human understanding.
“A gripping account of how decent people can be taken in by a charismatic and crazed tyrant” (The New York Times Book Review).
In 1954, a past or named Jim Jones opened a church in Indianapolis called Peoples Temple Full Gospel Church. He was a charismatic preacher with idealistic beliefs, and he quickly filled his pews with an audience eager to hear his sermons on social justice. As Jones’s behavior became erratic and his message more ominous, his followers leaned on each other to recapture the sense of equality that had drawn them to his church. But even as 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…
In 1999, fresh out of Harvard, I moved to Zendik Farm—a neo-hippie cult with a radical take on sex and relationships. Since I left in 2004, I’ve been composting the experience into a source of fertility. I've explored not only what drew me to Zendik and kept me there but also how groups like Zendik feed on deficiencies in our cultural soil—and how common it is for us humans to get trapped inside stories. Even—especially—if we assume ourselves immune to cultism. That is, I’ve approached my cult experience with sincere curiosity. So have all the authors on this list. That’s why I love them.
Of the dozens of cult memoirs I’ve read, I like this one best. Why? Because Hollenbach turns her cult experience into a thing of sensual beauty. She skillfully evokes the scrubby yet lush feeling of the land near Taos, New Mexico, where she spent five life-changing months.
She also conveys the romance of throwing herself into a daring experiment and the longings her cult experience did and didn't satisfy. Finally, she shows how any intelligent adult might surrender her sovereignty to an egomaniac—then compost that detour into fertilizer for her next phase.
In 1970 Margaret Hollenbach, an idealistic twenty-five-year-old graduate school dropout, changed her name and gave up her possessions to join a commune known as The Family, located in Taos, New Mexico. The Family believed in 'group marriage' and practiced its own version of Gestalt therapy, sometimes coercively. Hollenbach spent only a few months in this intense environment, but the lessons she learned have shaped her life. She tells the story of the young woman she was then in a memoir unsparing in its recall of her own torment, joy, and anger.
In 1999, fresh out of Harvard, I moved to Zendik Farm—a neo-hippie cult with a radical take on sex and relationships. Since I left in 2004, I’ve been composting the experience into a source of fertility. I've explored not only what drew me to Zendik and kept me there but also how groups like Zendik feed on deficiencies in our cultural soil—and how common it is for us humans to get trapped inside stories. Even—especially—if we assume ourselves immune to cultism. That is, I’ve approached my cult experience with sincere curiosity. So have all the authors on this list. That’s why I love them.
After ten years in a political cult, Janja Lalich dove deep into research on Heaven's Gate. Then she set out to explain, in this book, how smart, driven people function under coercive control.
The gist? While they keep their intelligence and capacity for achievement, they shrink the range within which they act and think.
Lalich's perspective helped me understand why my fellow ex-Zendiks and I had acquiesced to so much dumb shit. We weren't stupid or brainwashed—just trapped by bounded choice.
Also, I was delighted by her account of her own cult's implosion, crystallized in the moment when the leader pulls out a cigarette and no one offers a light.
Heaven's Gate, a secretive group of celibate 'monks' awaiting pickup by a UFO, captured intense public attention in 1997 when its members committed collective suicide. As a way of understanding such perplexing events, many have seen those who join cults as needy, lost souls, unable to think for themselves. This book, a compelling look at the cult phenomenon written for a wide audience, dispels such simple formulations by explaining how normal, intelligent people can give up years of their lives - and sometimes their very lives - to groups and beliefs that appear bizarre and irrational. Looking closely at Heaven's…
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…
In 1999, fresh out of Harvard, I moved to Zendik Farm—a neo-hippie cult with a radical take on sex and relationships. Since I left in 2004, I’ve been composting the experience into a source of fertility. I've explored not only what drew me to Zendik and kept me there but also how groups like Zendik feed on deficiencies in our cultural soil—and how common it is for us humans to get trapped inside stories. Even—especially—if we assume ourselves immune to cultism. That is, I’ve approached my cult experience with sincere curiosity. So have all the authors on this list. That’s why I love them.
Fourteen months after leaving Zendik, still a true believer, I realized that I was not a fucked-up failure—Zendik was one fucked-up place. Then, reading Combatting Cult Mind Control, I saw how Zendik fit the cult pattern. How I'd fallen for yet another tired variation on an all too well-worn scheme.
In this book, Hassan adds to the foundation laid by his first book. Most notably, he lays out ways to approach cult members with curiosity, not judgment. Forget arguing and hole-poking, he says. Focus instead on offering unconditional love and letting them come to their own liberating conclusions at their own pace.
David DeKok became interested in environmental disasters in his native Michigan in 1974, when PBB, a fire-retardant chemical, was accidentally mixed with animal feed, entered the food chain, and then most people in the state, probably including himself. As a journalist in Pennsylvania, he wrote extensively about the Centralia mine fire and the aftermath of the Three Mile Island nuclear accident, and is the author of four books. He tends to write about small towns and small-town people in crisis.
Brown lays out some of the major crises that fueled modern environmentalism and in so doing helps the reader to understand the passions that drove the movement. I remember when Lois Gibbs, a leader of the Love Canal residents, came to Centralia to give a pep talk to residents there about fighting government inaction.
Recounts the dumping of toxic chemical wastes in the Love Canal area of Niagara Falls which led to an epidemic of grave medical problems and the permanent evacuation of nearby residents and documents other chemical-waste tragedies erupting throughout America
I was drawn to the topic because I love everything about New York City. But, I also loved how the topic seemed at odds with itself. New York City wildlife felt like a contradiction of terms. Sure, there might be some rats, pigeons, and cockroaches here, but that was it. Well I was very wrong. Learning about the city’s natural history and legacy of wildlife allowed me to learn about the city in a whole new way. It’s also a great comeback story and it has been so inspiring to learn – and see! – how effective a few short decades of environmental regulations have been in making this a greener city.
This book revealed a pastoral Manhattan few of us could imagine, including feral pigs that roamed the streets, and horses that transported everything and everyone around town. Set in the transformative 1800s when New York City underwent unprecedented urbanization, this book shows how farmers and other New Yorkers who worked the land were ultimately squeezed from Manhattan for more profitable tenants, and how Central Park, and other open spaces, sought to replicate all that recently displaced nature.
George Perkins Marsh Prize, American Society for Environmental History VSNY Book Award, New York Metropolitan Chapter of the Victorian Society in America Hornblower Award for a First Book, New York Society Library James Broussard Best First Book Prize, Society for Historians of the Early American Republic
With pigs roaming the streets and cows foraging in the Battery, antebellum Manhattan would have been unrecognizable to inhabitants of today's sprawling metropolis. Fruits and vegetables came from small market gardens in the city, and manure piled high on streets and docks was gold to nearby farmers. But as Catherine McNeur reveals in this…
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…
I grew up blocks from Hollywood Boulevard in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s and had something like a front-row seat to the greatest pop culture five-car pile-up in American history. At the Canteen on Hollywood and Vine, where my aunt would take me on summer weekdays for the “Extras for Extras Smorgasbord,” you’d rub shoulders with aging starlets, cowpokes, starry-eyed young hopefuls, and “leading men” in five-and-dime ascots who never had a leading role. Even Billy Barty, always of good cheer, would make the scene—he was so nice to me, and I had no idea he played my hero, Sigmund the Sea Monster!
Not usually considered a Hollywood novella per se, Bellow’s “small grey masterpiece” (V.S. Pritchett) tracks failed actor Tommy Wilhelm on a dark Manhattan day when his luck and his money run out.
This book is at once a tender portrait of failure and a searing indictment of the false promises America makes to the gullible. Along the way, Tommy recalls his one and only screen role—as a Hollywood extra, he briefly appeared barelegged in a kilt, pretending to blow bagpipes—just one more humiliation in a string of let-downs. By day’s end, Tommy goes face to face with humanity in a subway station and spirals toward “the heart’s ultimate need”—tears.
“What makes all of this so remarkable is not merely Bellow’s eye and ear for vital detail. Nor is it his talent for exposing the innards of character in a paragraph, a sentence, a phrase. It is Bellow’s vision, his uncanny ability to seize the moment and to see beyond it.” –Chicago Sun-Times
A Penguin Classic
Fading charmer Tommy Wilhelm has reached his day of reckoning and is scared. In his forties, he still retains a boyish impetuousness that has brought him to the brink of chaos: He is separated from his wife and children, at odds with his vain,…
By the late nineties, I had lost faith in the industry where I had made a living for twenty years. Deregulation on Wall St and in the City had left investment banking with a business model riddled with conflict of interest. The rewards spiralled out of control and the businesses became too complicated for the regulators to supervise. I have a doctorate in history and had been a top-ranked investment analyst in several sectors. I took an idea to Penguin and my first book, The Death of Gentlemanly Capitalism, was published in 2001. I've since written six more, and contributed regularly to the Financial Times and BBC.
Discrete, mysterious, and powerful, Wall St’s great financial institutions shaped corporate America in the 20th century and none more so than Lazard Freres. But towards the end of the century, as competitors scaled up, Lazard was distracted by a power struggle involving hard-charging Wall St bankers and an inscrutable French billionaire. Who really played the winning hand? This book reveals all!
A grand and revelatory portrait of Wall Street’s most storied investment bank
Wall Street investment banks move trillions of dollars a year, make billions in fees, pay their executives in the tens of millions of dollars. But even among the most powerful firms, Lazard Frères & Co. stood apart. Discretion, secrecy, and subtle strategy were its weapons of choice. For more than a century, the mystique and reputation of the "Great Men" who worked there allowed the firm to garner unimaginable profits, social cachet, and outsized influence in the halls of power. But in the mid-1980s, their titanic egos started…
I grew up in New York City on the corner of 16th Street and 7th Avenue in an apartment on the 11th floor. I loved the city’s pace, diversity, and freedom. So, I decided to study New York Jews, to learn about them from not just from census records and institutional reports but also from interviews. After publishing my first book, I followed New York Jews as they moved to other cities, especially Miami and Los Angeles. Recently, I’ve been intrigued by what is often called street photography and the ways photographs let you see all sorts of details that potentially tell a story.
Understanding New York Jews is key to understanding American Jews. There is no city like New York City and there are no Jews like New York Jews. In the middle of the 20th century, they made up around 30% of the total city population. This three-volume award-winning set uncovers aspects of the city’s history that even aficionados don’t know. Each volume can be purchased separately but together they paint an absorbing panorama across four centuries. I like to teach the volumes. They are fresh each time I read them, with lively prose and compelling vignettes. Reading them is like walking the streets of Gotham with a great guide.
Winner of the 2012 National Jewish Book Award, presented by the National Jewish Book Council
New York Jews, so visible and integral to the culture, economy and politics of America's greatest city, has eluded the grasp of historians for decades. Surprisingly, no comprehensive history of New York Jews has ever been written. City of Promises: A History of the Jews of New York, a three volume set of original research, pioneers a path-breaking interpretation of a Jewish urban community at once the largest in Jewish history and most important in the modern world.
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’m Professor of History at Colorado State University Pueblo and have published eight books, mostly about the history of food. After encountering Up in the Old Hotel for the first time during the early 1990s, I started reading New York City history in my spare time.The Fulton Fish Market: A History is my way to blend my expertise with my hobby. Each of these books are beautifully written, informative, and fun. If you’re interested in the history of New York City and you’re looking for something else to read, I hope you’ll find my book to be the same.
Joseph Mitchell was the city reporter for the New Yorker for about half a century. This is a collection of his magazine stories. Many of them involve the old Fulton Fish Market, but he also wrote about weird things like dime museums, gypsies, and stag banquets.
To me, every story in this collection is like a time capsule. This is the book that made me want to write about New York City because it suggests there is a history on every block there worth recording. If you don’t like a chapter or two, then skip to the next one, but I’ll vouch for 80% of this book being the best non-fiction writing that I have ever read (and I practically read for a living).
Saloon-keepers and street preachers, gypsies and steel-walking Mohawks, a bearded lady and a 93-year-old “seafoodetarian” who believes his specialized diet will keep him alive for another two decades. These are among the people that Joseph Mitchell immortalized in his reportage for The New Yorker and in four books—McSorley's Wonderful Saloon, Old Mr. Flood, The Bottom of the Harbor, and Joe Gould's Secret—that are still renowned for their precise, respectful observation, their graveyard humor, and their offhand perfection of style.
These masterpieces (along with several previously uncollected stories) are available in one volume, which presents an indelible collective portrait of an…
