An old friend asked me on Facebook if I could recommend some nonfiction books, so I put together a list of the ones I've liked most in two and a half years of retirement:
Isabel Wilkinson, Caste; Ron Chernow, Grant; Matthew Gabrielle and David M. Perry, The Bright Ages; Erik Larson, The Splendid and the Vile; Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project; Baynard Woods, Inheritance: An Autobiography of Whiteness; Jess McHugh, Americanon; Stacy Schiff, The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams; Dahlia Lithwick, Lady Justice; Stacy Schiff, A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France, and the Birth of America; Kevin Kruse and Julian E. Zelizer, Myth America; Joel Richard Paul: Indivisible: Daniel Webster and the Birth of American Nationalism; Richard Miles, Carthage Must Be Destroyed; Joel Richard Paul, Without Precedent: John Marshall and His Times; Timothy Egan, A Fever in the Heartland; Joseph Ellis, American Dialogue; Rick Perlstein, Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus.
I was tempted to recommend The New Roman Empire: A History of Byzantium by Anthony Kaldellis, but at roughly a thousand pages, 900 text and 100 apparatus, it is something to take on.
Maybe you would like some fiction recommendations.
I have been reading “The Dawn of Everything,” a doorstop-sized but eminently approachable review of the origins of what we now think of as civilization. At the halfway point, all I can say is that the authors have knocked down most of the conventional theories.
ReplyDeleteThe Dawn of Everything is wonderful.
DeleteThat’s an extraordinarily US-centric list!
ReplyDeleteSeriously? We're policing other people's reading lists now?
DeleteFor what it's worth, I left of Blake's Disraeli, Goldsworthy's Caesar, and a handful of others.
ReplyDeleteJohn, your list is very politically oriented. I lean more to "A Brief History of Time" by Stephen Hawking and other books about science or "Black Elk Speaks" by John Niedhardt (sp) but not books that are directly political. Somewhere I have a copy of Cellini's autobiography, which is a riot. For fiction, nothing compares to "The Lord of the Rings" and anything by John D. MacDonald is worth reading.
ReplyDelete