As a child, I was drawn to the silences in family stories and as a young adult, the gaps in official records. Now Iām a former English professor turned full-time writer who is fascinated with who gets written out of history, and why. I love exploring overlooked lives, especially womenās livesāfrom Stalinās female relatives to nineteenth-century shopgirls, and most recently, a pair of early medieval queens.
I love books that teach me something new about something I had always assumed to be true, like the āfactā that Jack the Ripper preyed on prostitutes. Rubenhold turns this narrative on its head to give Ripperās canonical victims āthat which was so brutally taken away with their lives: their dignity.ā These exhaustively researched biographies show how sickness, trauma, and addiction intersected with the indifference of employers, husbands, and public officials to force each woman out onto the streets of Whitechapel.The Fiveis not just an impassioned indictment of middle-class Victorian society, but of any society that decides working-class women donāt matter.
THE #1 SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER WINNER OF THE BAILLIE GIFFORD PRIZE FOR NONFICTION 2019 'An angry and important work of historical detection, calling time on the misogyny that has fed the Ripper myth. Powerful and shaming' GUARDIAN
Polly, Annie, Elizabeth, Catherine and Mary-Jane are famous for the same thing, though they never met. They came from Fleet Street, Knightsbridge, Wolverhampton, Sweden and Wales. They wrote ballads, ran coffee houses, lived on country estates, they breathed ink-dust from printing presses and escaped people-traffickers.
What they had in common was the year of their murders: 1888.
If youāve ever found yourself obsessed with a family mystery, youāll be captivated by The Lost. Mendelsohn had always wondered what happened to his great-uncle and aunt, and their four daughters, during the Holocaust. His search starts with ordinary genealogical curiosity but quickly spirals into an epic quest. I admire Mendelsohnās elegant, lyrical prose and was swept up in his ruminations on what we owe the past. His discoveries are heartbreaking but they also spark hopeāby rescuing one ordinary family from oblivion.
A writer's search for his family's tragic past in World War II becomes a remarkably original and riveting epic, brilliantly exploring the nature of time and memory.
'The Lost' begins as the story of a boy who grew up in a family haunted by the disappearance of six relatives during the Holocaust - an unmentionable subject that gripped his imagination from earliest childhood. Decades later, spurred by the discovery of a cache of desperate letters written to his grandfather in 1939, Daniel Mendelsohn sets out to find the remaining eyewitnesses to his relative's fates. The quest takes him to aā¦
Benghazi! A New History of the Fiasco that Pushed America and its World to the Brink
by
Ethan Chorin,
Benghazi: A New History is a look back at the enigmatic 2012 attack on the US mission in Benghazi, Libya, its long-tail causes, and devastating (and largely unexamined) consequences for US domestic politics and foreign policy. It contains information not found elsewhere, and is backed up by 40 pages ofā¦
In Women Warriors, the footnotes are every bit as informative and bitingly funny as the text itself. Toler travels across many cultures and eras, from ancient times up until the 20th century, to show that, like it or not, āwomen have always gone to war.ā She covers some women youāve likely heard of beforeālike Boudica, Hua Mulan, and Joan of Arcāas well as many others you probably havenātālike Tomyris, Artemisia II, and Lakshmi Bai. These mini-biographies, taken together, provide an eye-opening and unforgettable corrective about women and warfare.
Who says women donāt go to war? From Vikings and African queens to cross-dressing military doctors and WWII Russian fighter pilots, these are the stories of women for whom battle was not a metaphor.
The woman warrior is always cast as an anomalyāJoan of Arc, not GI Jane. But women, it turns out, have always gone to war. In this fascinating and lively world history, Pamela Toler not only introduces us to women who took up arms, she also shows why they did it and what happened when they stepped out of their traditional female roles to take on otherā¦
I donāt often read graphic novels, but I found myself entranced by this one about a particular sort of women warrior. Wake recounts Dr. Hallās search for the enslaved women who rebelled during the Middle Passage and in colonial America. Dr. Hall writes, āif you believe something doesnāt exist, you donāt go looking for it. Worse, if you stumble upon it, you still canāt see it.ā By approaching old material with fresh eyes, Hall is able to uncover and reimagine these womenās stories, showing how the past haunts us whether we choose to acknowledge it or not. I was moved by Hallās insights and by the resolution of the women she portrays.
'A must-read graphic history. . . an inspired and inspiring defence of heroic women whose struggles could be fuel for a more just future' Guardian
'Not only a riveting tale of Black women's leadership of slave revolts but an equally dramatic story of the engaged scholarship that enabled its discovery' Angela Y. Davis
Women warriors planned and led slave revolts on slave ships during the passage across the Atlantic. They fought their enslavers throughout the Americas. And then they were erased from history.
In Wake Rebecca Hall, a historian, a granddaughter of slaves, and a woman haunted by the legacyā¦
Known more for his books on Mayas, Aztecs, and Spanish conquistadors, historian Matthew Restall's latest book takes his deepest dive yet into the history of pop music.
In the late-1970s, three music-obsessed, suburban London teenagers set out to make their own kind of pop music: after years of struggle, successā¦
I love gorgeous sentences alongside a good mystery, and Wroe expertly crafts both. A decade after the Princes in the Tower were presumed murdered, a charismatic young man appeared, claiming to be the younger of the two princesāRichard, Duke of York. His enemies, though, said he was a boatmanās son named Perkin Warbeck. So who was he really? Wroeās meditation on appearance and identity has even more resonance in the Instagram-era than it did when it was first published. What does it mean to ālook the partā? And what matters mostāwho we think we are, or who others think we might be?
In 1491, as Machiavelli advised popes and princes and Leonardo da Vinci astonished the art world, a young man boarded a ship in Portugal bound for Ireland. He would be greeted upon arrival as the rightful heir to the throne of England. The trouble was, England already had a king.
The most intriguing and ambitious pretender in history, this elegant young man was celebrated throughout Europe as the prince he claimed to be: Richard, Duke of York, the younger of the āPrinces in the Towerā who were presumed to have been murdered almost a decade earlier. Handsome, well-mannered, and charismatic,ā¦
The remarkable, little-known story of two trailblazing women in the Early Middle Ages who wielded immense power, only to be vilified for daring to rule. Brunhild was a foreign princess, raised to be married off. Her sister-in-law Fredegund started out as a lowly palace slave. And yet-in sixth-century Merovingian France, where women were excluded from noble succession these two iron-willed strategists reigned over vast realms. Yet after the queens' deathsāone gentle, the other horrificātheir stories were rewritten.
The Dark Queens sets the record straight, resurrecting two very real women in all their complexity, painting a richly detailed portrait of an unfamiliar time and striking at the roots of some of our culture's stubbornest myths about female power. The Dark Queens offers proof that the relationships between women can transform the world.
Desperate to honor his fatherās dying wish, Layken Martin vows to do whatever it takes to save the family farm. Once the Army discharges him following World War II, Layken returns to Missouri to find his legacy in shambles and in jeopardy. A foreclosureā¦
The Hunt for the Peggy C is best described as Casablanca meets Das Boot. It is about an American smuggler who struggles to rescue a Jewish family on his rusty cargo ship, outraging his mutinous crew of misfits and provoking a hair-raising chase by a brutal Nazi U-boat captainā¦