Here are 100 books that A Man Without a Country fans have personally recommended if you like
A Man Without a Country.
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In my first career as an actress, I often got cast as the “comic relief” in more serious films and plays. I cut my acting chops on improv comedy before getting my BFA in drama from NYU and performing in everything from Shakespeare to Seinfeld. I wrote and performed in stage shows at Disneyland and Disney World and screamed myself hoarse in B-horror films. As an author, I like to write about serious topics but I just can’t help being funny. I received my MFA from Antioch University and have had over 30 short stories and essays published. While I read voraciously (and genre-indiscriminately), my favorite books are often “darkly comedic” or “funny yet poignant.”
Although Moore is one of my favorite authors, most of his books are not exactly about austere topics. His brand of absurdism features outlandish characters such as demons, vampires, stupid angels, tricksters, and lustful sea beasts. Yet Moore writes with a superlative intelligence that never disappoints me. This novel was an easy pick for my list. In it, Moore retells the story of Christ with a paradoxically reverent irreverence. It’s well-researched and details facts about Eastern religious traditions and Roman history as well Biblical events. I’ve recommended this book to so many people. And only a few of them were deeply offended. :-)
The birth of Jesus has been well chronicled, as have his glorious teachings, acts, and divine sacrifice after his thirtieth birthday. But no one knows about the early life of the Son of God, the missing years - except Biff, the Messiah's best bud, who has been resurrected to tell the story in this divinely hilarious, yet heartfelt work 'reminiscent of Vonnegut and Douglas Adams' (Philadelphia Inquirer). Verily, the story Biff has to tell is a miraculous one, filled with remarkable journeys, magic, healings, kung fu, corpse reanimations, demons, and hot babes, Even the considerable wiles and devotion of the…
I’ve always been a science fiction nerd, but detective novels were my first love. When the two blend together well, I’m hooked. I’ve had the privilege of working for a game company where I got to flex my story telling muscles. Writing novels is an overlapping passion of mine where meticulous plots and rich characters are given breath and purpose. When I get to place these inside a science fiction universe, my hope is to draw in my readers and give them the same satisfaction I enjoy when writing.
I loved the thought of the world ending while a cop decides to spend his final hours solving a mystery. The plot kept me hooked from the get-go, and I enjoyed the contrast of society falling apart around the protagonist while he doggedly pursues the murderer.
The sense of frustration and isolation made this a page-turner.
In THE LAST POLICEMAN, Edgar Award winner and New York Times bestselling author Ben H. Winters, offers readers something they've never seen before: A police procedural set on the brink of an apocalypse. What's the point in solving murders when we're going to die soon, anyway? Hank Palace, a homicide detective in Concord, New Hampshire, asks this question every day. Most people have stopped doing whatever it is they did before the asteroid 2011L47J hovered into view. Stopped selling real estate; stopped working at hospitals; stopped slinging hash or driving cabs or trading high-yield securities. A lot of folks spend…
I’ve always been a child of the woods. I preferred to leave my home and wade a creek or explore a hillside. Nothing compared to the sight of a black snake or the feel of a mud puppy. School was a torture until an English teacher introduced me to Richard Brautigan and then read my first serious story to the class. Since then, this dyslexic nature lover has become a dream fisher and history miner with a Ph.D. in English Literature and Cultural Studies. Retired from forty-one years of teaching, I now write and publish cultural fiction.
I love Tom Robbins. I love his preposterous plots. I love his audacious metaphors. I love the never-ending details of one world crashing into another.
Like an 8th C King as well as a 20th C “genius waitress,” an aging “Queen of Good Smells,” and the skyscraper-housed “LeFever Parfumarie.” Spanning 13 centuries, bouncing from Bohemia to India to Paris to Seattle to New Orleans, Jitterbug Perfume wonders if Christianity will kill Pan and whether immortality is all it’s cracked up to be.
But, you ask, what about the beets? Yes, through all this Tomfoolery, Mr. Robbins loves him some natural world, and it is through the humble yet enigmatic beet that we learn to “hold onto your divine blush, your innate rosy magic, or end brown.” I, for one, want to stay rosy, and you, for one, should read Jitterbug Perfume.
Jitterbug Perfume is an epic. Which is to say, it begins in the forests of ancient Bohemia and doesn't conclude until nine o'clock tonight [Paris time]. It is a saga, as well. A saga must have a hero, and the hero of this one is a janitor with a missing bottle. The bottle is blue, very, very old, and embossed with the image of a goat-horned god. If the liquid in the bottle is actually the secret essence of the universe, as some folks seem to think, it had better be discovered soon because it is leaking and there is…
Maximilian Tundra is about to have an existential crisis of cosmic proportions.
When a physical duplicate of him appears in his living room, wearing a tight-fitting silver lamé unitard and speaking with an English accent, Max knows something bad is about to happen. Bad doesn’t cover it. Max discovers he’s the only human being who can prevent the end of the world, and not just on his planet! In the multiverse, infinite Earths will be destroyed.
★★★★★ "Funny, yet deep, this is definitely worth venturing into the multiverse for."
Amazing Stories says: "Snarky as Pratchet, insightful as Stephenson, as full of scathing social commentary as Swift or Voltaire, and weirdly reminiscent of LeGuin, Alpha Max is the only multiverse novel you need this month, or maybe ever."
Maximilian Tundra is about to have an existential crisis of cosmic proportions.
When a physical duplicate of him appears in his living room, wearing a tight-fitting silver lamé unitard and speaking with an English accent, Max knows something bad is about to happen. Bad doesn’t cover it. Max discovers…
In the years since I was 15, I have been writing and publishing books. After graduating from Florida Virtual School in 2014, I am currently pursuing a liberal arts degree with a focus on disabilities education. I'm passionate about literature, and I've dedicated myself to educating others about disabilities through my love of literature. Furthermore, I own a radio station and produce several podcasts related to disability. I contribute to seven different sites, including the mighty thought catalog and unwritten, where I talk about my life as a 27-year-old with a disability. I am also an advocate for disability rights, as well as a writer and author for disability issues.
My recommendation for this book stems from its message about conquering obstacles and challenges along the way, but don't let those obstacles and challenges define you. You shouldn't allow others to tell you that you can achieve things because the message behind Forrest Gump is that while the character may seem odd to some people, he has a good heart and a positive message to spread.
DISCOVER THE BESTSELLING NOVEL THAT INSPIRED THE CLASSIC OSCAR-WINNING FILM
It's Forrest Gump as you've never seen him before, but just as lovable as ever.
At 6'6", 240 pounds, Forrest Gump is a difficult man to ignore, so follow Forrest from the football dynasties of Bear Bryant to the Vietnam War, from encounters with Presidents Johnson and Nixon to powwows with Chairman Mao. Go with Forrest to Harvard University, to a Hollywood movie set, on a professional wrestling tour, and into space on the oddest NASA mission ever.
The wonderfully warm, savagely barbed, and hilariously funny novel that inspired the…
I’ve been doing research on polarization for most of my career as an economist and have focused on affective polarization in US politics since 2015. As a behavioral economist, I’m interested in how false and biased beliefs contribute to affective polarization. As a microeconomist I’m also generally interested in economy—not “the economy,” but the efficient use of resources—and affective polarization leads to a lot of wasted time and resources. This happens in politics at all levels, and in relationships of all types—neighbors, colleagues, spouses, siblings—as we all know from experience. So, I’m hoping to try to understand this bias better and cut down on it where we can.
Preventing Polarization is, as the title implies, a guide for educators on how to reduce polarization in the next generation. So, it’s unlikely to lead to immediate progress with polarization—but who knows, maybe some adults in positions of power might take some lessons from it as well.
Anyway, I love the premise here as I do think that education is probably crucial for long-term progress with this difficult part of human nature. Just as we must teach our kids to be tolerant and kind toward those from different racial and religious backgrounds or are different from ourselves in any number of ways—we must teach our kids to not be excessively effective polarized!
Are you ready to break down conflict and build consensus on polarizing topics?
Ideally, education equips students to care about the world and helps them shape their futures. In an era that has become incredibly polarized, we can help our students learn how to come together despite differences.
Michelle Blanchet and Brian Deters show how all educators can equip our youth with skills to become active and engaged citizens. A one-off course on civics is not enough.
Preventing Polarization offers basic strategies that every teacher can use. You will create experiences to help students break down barriers through activities and…
I knew I was an anti-authoritarian before I had words for it, and my education in social justice has been long and slow. I have been researching and writing about anarchism for the better part of three decades, and am now a board member of the Institute for Anarchist Studies. Anarchy is a subject that engages me both at the level of intellectual passion, what lights up my mind, and on a visceral level, in my revulsion at the inequalities and iniquities in this world and my yearning for a fully emancipated way of life.
Reading Anarcho-Blackness as a white cismale reader was an experience of discombobulation—a certain disorientation followed by a surprising re-orientation. Bey’s Black anarchism, “indebted to... Black queer and trans feminisms” dramatically reorganizes the priorities of an anarchist tradition that is sometimes still too indebted to hollow universalisms and pinched humanisms that don’t sufficiently include everyone. This is an anarchism specifically for Black queer and trans people which ends up—in a sense that is only “paradoxical” for those of us not paying enough attention—being for everyone. The prose is both philosophical and playful, inviting us to imagine a life that is by turns “ungovernable,” “unpropertied,” “uncouth,” “unhinged,” and “uncontrolled.”
Anarcho-Blackness seeks to define the shape of a Black anarchism. Classical anarchism tended to avoid questions of race—specifically Blackness—as well as the intersections of race and gender. Bey addresses this lack, not by constructing a new cannon of Black anarchists but by outlining how anarchism and Blackness already share a certain subjective relationship to power, a way of understanding and inhabiting the world. Through the lens of Black feminist and transgender theory, he explores what we can learn by making this kinship explicit, including how anarchism itself is transformed by the encounter. If the state is predicated on a racialized…
My friend Lou Cannon, the great reporter and Reagan biographer, once told me, “if you want to really learn about a subject, write a book about it.” As a political journalist and author of several books about current and past politics, wanted to learn more about the Founding Fathers, and as a map buff I tried to understand how they understood a continent most of which was not accurately mapped and how they envisioned the geographic limits and reach of a new republic more extensive in size than most nations in Europe. The book is my attempt to share what I learned with readers, and to invite them to read more about these extraordinary leaders.
This is an extended and intensive history of twelve years in the birth and growth of the Republic established under the Constitution, a period of intense political strive in which the leaders who endorsed the Constitution feared, for plausible reasons, that their new republic might be torn apart.
I have found that American historians, for all their distance from their subjects and marvelous expertise, tend to take partisan sides, and Elkins and McKittrick clearly lean to the Federalists (as did I while reading their account).
When Thomas Jefferson took the oath of office for the presidency in 1801, America had just passed through twelve critical years, years dominated by some of the towering figures of our history and by the challenge of having to do everything for the first time. Washington, Hamilton, Madison, Adams, and Jefferson himself each had a share in shaping that remarkable era--an era that is brilliantly captured in The Age of Federalism. Written by esteemed historians Stanley Elkins and Eric McKitrick, The Age of Federalism gives us a reflective, deeply informed analytical survey of this extraordinary period. Ranging over the widest…
I love writing historical fiction. I enjoy the research and creating long-lost worlds filled with little-known historical accuracies that intrigue my readers. It is no surprise then that I enjoy reading about the future - the other side of the coin. I always find it interesting to see how writers create a post-apocalyptic society. What was the catastrophic event? (TCE) What caused it and how do the different characters react to adversity when their old world is taken away from them? Inevitably they have to survive in the new system but will they have learned their lesson or will they return to their old ways?
What happens when you take the meritocracy to extremes and you can only access the best of food and housing etc when your Q is the highest? Dalcher creates an interesting future world, damning of social engineering and genetic manipulation, and reminds us that it was less than a hundred years ago that certain war-hungry fellas (and a few women) salivated over thoughts of a perfect Aryan race. A great page-turner but with a few ‘Deus ex Machina' plot twists with which I’m still struggling. Nevertheless a very worthy read.
**CHRISTINA DALCHER'S GRIPPING NEW THRILLER FEMLANDIA IS AVAILABLE TO PRE-ORDER NOW!**
'Terrifyingly plausible' Louise Candlish
'Devastating and brilliant' Woman & Home
'Thought-provoking' Alice Feeney
'Shocking . . . A powerful tale' Cosmopolitan
'Timely' Kia Abdullah
IN THIS WORLD, PERFECTION IS EVERYTHING.
It begins as a way to make things fairer. An education system that will benefit everyone. It's all in the name of progress.
This is what Elena Fairchild believes. As a teacher in one of the government's elite schools for children with high 'Q' scores, she witnesses the advantages first-hand.
But when Elena's own daughter scores lower than expected,…
Arriving in the UK to pursue my PhD after a career in Journalism in my native country Lebanon, a few days before September 11, 2001, set me on a journey to put right the way my region and its people are represented in British and international media. The Middle East, the Arab region, Islam, and Muslims became the focal point of coverage for many years that followed. Most of that coverage had been tainted with negative stereotypes that do not speak true to who we are and what we stand for. Achieving fair representation and portrayal of ethnic and religious minorities have become one of my life passions.
The late Fred Halliday addressed in his book the most circulated myths of the Middle East and its people. It is an easy read and it sets straight many of the daily myths that we have picked up from western popular culture (mainly Hollywood) and Anglo-American media representation including news on the culture and religion of the people of the Middle East.
Much ink has been spilled in recent years about the Middle East. At the same time, no other region has been as misunderstood, nor framed in so many cliches and mistakenly held beliefs. In this much-needed and enlightening book, Fred Halliday debunks one hundred of the most commonly misconstrued 'facts' concerning the Middle East - in the political, cultural, social, and historical spheres. In a straightforward and simple way that illuminates the issues without compromising their underlying complexities he gets to the core of each matter. The Israel-Palestine crisis, the Iran-Iraq war, the U.S.-led Gulf invasions, the Afghan-Soviet conflict, and…
British by birth, American by naturalization, Simon Henderson started in journalism as a trainee at the BBC before becoming its correspondent in Pakistan. Joining the Financial Times a year later, he was promptly sent to Iran to cover the 1979 Islamic revolution and went back again for the U.S. embassy hostage crisis.
He now analyzes the Gulf states, energy, and the nuclear programs of Iran and Pakistan as the Baker fellow and director of the Bernstein Program on Gulf and Energy Policy at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.
The assiduous New York Times reporter digs deeply into the persona of the Saudi crown prince, and is rewarded with many anecdotes. Unsurprisingly, most are anonymous. A revealing one is: “One foreign official recalled that the prince’s leg never stopped bouncing during their meeting, making him wonder if the prince was nervous or on some sort of stimulant.”
The gripping, untold story of how Saudi Arabia's secretive and mercurial new ruler rose to power.
Even in his youth as a prince among thousands of princes, Mohammed bin Salman nurtured sweeping ambitions. He wanted power - enough of it to reshape his hyper-conservative, insular Islamic kingdom.
When his elderly father took the throne in 2015, MBS got his chance. As the hands-on-ruler, he made seismic changes, working doggedly to overhaul the kingdom's economy, loosen its strict Islamic social codes and…
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