Why am I passionate about this?

All good books change the way we see the world, whether that’s in big, earth-shaking ways (The Origin of Species, The Communist Manifesto), or because they start a necessary conversation (The Jungle, Silent Spring), or simply because they give us a new language and framework with which to view our lives. As a journalist and author I’ve always loved stories and subjects that challenge the status quo. It’s why I wrote one book exploring the unique, deep-rooted flaws in America’s electoral democracy and another offering an eye-opening fresh account of the Oklahoma City bombing. The list that follows is of books that had a particular impact on me.


I wrote

Won’t Lose This Dream: How an Upstart Urban University Rewrote the Rules of a Broken System

By Andrew Gumbel,

Book cover of Won’t Lose This Dream: How an Upstart Urban University Rewrote the Rules of a Broken System

What is my book about?

Won’t Lose This Dream tells the astonishing story of a public university in downtown Atlanta, birthplace of the civil rights…

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The books I picked & why

Book cover of Black Skin, White Masks

Andrew Gumbel Why did I love this book?

Although not as well known as Fanon’s later critique of colonialism, The Wretched of the Earth, this book (first published in 1952) brilliantly captures the postwar turmoil when questions of race, oppression, national and personal identity were suddenly ripe for re-examination and reinvention – as, in many ways, they are again now. Fanon’s revolutionary call to resist being defined by others and determine our own destinies speaks directly to our Black Lives Matter moment. But it also speaks to anyone who has been displaced (as my family was during World War Two), or refuses to be pigeon-holed and characterized as others might want. A great book for anyone looking to push back against the rising global tide of illiberalism and forge a more hopeful and more understanding future. 

By Frantz Fanon, Richard Philcox (translator),

Why should I read it?

4 authors picked Black Skin, White Masks as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Few modern voices have had as profound an impact on the black identity and critical race theory as Frantz Fanon, and Black Skin, White Masks  represents some of his most important work. Fanon’s masterwork is now available in a new translation that updates its language for a new generation of readers.
A major influence on civil rights, anti-colonial, and black consciousness movements around the world, Black Skin, White Masks is the unsurpassed study of the black psyche in a white world. Hailed for its scientific analysis and poetic grace when it was first published in 1952, the book remains a…


Book cover of The Holocaust in American Life

Andrew Gumbel Why did I love this book?

A book that grapples with the complicated question of historical memory and subverts one assumption after another about the way the Holocaust has come to occupy a central place in our thinking. As Novick shows and as I know from my own family history, our collective memory has in fact zigzagged between willful forgetting, rewriting and mythologizing the past, overhasty moral judgment, and flat-out error. Novick’s is one of a number of brilliant books – Tony Judt’s Postwar is another; Timothy Snyder’s Bloodlands yet another – that go beyond the simple exhortation “never forget” and make us realize that if we don’t want to repeat the horrors of World War Two we need to know a lot better what it is we need to remember in the first place.

By Peter Novick,

Why should I read it?

2 authors picked The Holocaust in American Life as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Prize-winning historian Peter Novick illuminates the reasons Americans ignored the Holocaust for so long -- how dwelling on German crimes interfered with Cold War mobilization; how American Jews, not wanting to be thought of as victims, avoided the subject. He explores in absorbing detail the decisions that later moved the Holocaust to the center of American life: Jewish leaders invoking its memory to muster support for Israel and to come out on top in a sordid competition over what group had suffered most; politicians using it to score points with Jewish voters. With insight and sensitivity, Novick raises searching questions…


Book cover of Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland

Andrew Gumbel Why did I love this book?

Growing up in Britain in the 1970s, I knew bad things were happening in Northern Ireland and I had a sense that what we heard on the BBC was one-sided and not to be trusted. This book is a revelation, not only in making sense of the Troubles on both sides of the sectarian divide but also in telling the story from the inside, with an intimacy of detail to make you gasp over and over. It’s a real page-turner, full of unforgettable characters forced to navigate the daunting moral consequences of their own and others’ actions. By the end, their stories will break your heart in a hundred different ways.  

By Patrick Radden Keefe,

Why should I read it?

9 authors picked Say Nothing as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER •From the author of Empire of Pain—a stunning, intricate narrative about a notorious killing in Northern Ireland and its devastating repercussions

"Masked intruders dragged Jean McConville, a 38-year-old widow and mother of 10, from her Belfast home in 1972. In this meticulously reported book—as finely paced as a novel—Keefe uses McConville's murder as a prism to tell the history of the Troubles in Northern Ireland. Interviewing people on both sides of the conflict, he transforms the tragic damage and waste of the era into a searing, utterly gripping saga." —New York Times Book Review

Jean McConville's…


Book cover of Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America

Andrew Gumbel Why did I love this book?

Leovy takes a deep dive into Los Angeles, my adoptive hometown, and argues that much of the violence and mistrust of authority rocking our poorest Black neighborhoods is not – as is commonly assumed – the result of excessive law enforcement but rather the opposite. On the streets of South LA, the police are often glaringly absent, and as a result the worst crimes go unsolved, if they are investigated at all, and any semblance of community policing or trust-building becomes impossible. Leovy finds the most wrenching of narrative vehicles to drive her point home – an LAPD homicide detective and South LA resident who has to confront a tragedy in his own household.

By Jill Leovy,

Why should I read it?

3 authors picked Ghettoside as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • NAMED ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE, USA TODAY, AND CHICAGO TRIBUNE • A masterly work of literary journalism about a senseless murder, a relentless detective, and the great plague of homicide in America

NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FINALIST • NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The New York Times Book Review • The Washington Post • The Boston Globe • The Economist • The Globe and Mail • BookPage • Kirkus Reviews

On a warm spring evening in South Los Angeles, a…


Book cover of Madame Bovary

Andrew Gumbel Why did I love this book?

In my reading life, there is a clear before and after Flaubert’s masterpiece, because it challenged everything I thought I knew about reading itself. Although rooted in the realist tradition, Madame Bovary forces us to question everything – about the reliability of language, about tone, about the solidity of what and who is being described, about the very ground beneath our feet. Is Flaubert seducing us, or making fun of us, or both? Are we moved because the book is funny, or sad, or are we, the readers, merely ridiculous? Nothing reads quite the same way after Madame Bovary. And that’s a good thing, because while it makes readers warier and more self-aware, it also inspires them to love books more deeply.

By Gustave Flaubert, Geoffrey Wall (translator),

Why should I read it?

6 authors picked Madame Bovary as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

'A masterpiece' Julian Barnes

Flaubert's erotically charged and psychologically acute portrayal of a married woman's affair caused a moral outcry on its publication in 1857. Its heroine, Emma Bovary, is stifled by provincial life as the wife of a doctor. An ardent devourer of sentimental novels, she seeks escape in fantasies of high romance, in voracious spending and, eventually, in adultery. But even her affairs bring her disappointment, and when real life continues to fail to live up to her romantic expectations, the consequences are devastating. It was deemed so lifelike that many women claimed they were the model for…


Explore my book 😀

Won’t Lose This Dream: How an Upstart Urban University Rewrote the Rules of a Broken System

By Andrew Gumbel,

Book cover of Won’t Lose This Dream: How an Upstart Urban University Rewrote the Rules of a Broken System

What is my book about?

Won’t Lose This Dream tells the astonishing story of a public university in downtown Atlanta, birthplace of the civil rights movement, that has broken a lot of rules and transformed the prospects of its lower-income and first-generation students. Over the past decade Georgia State University has shown that Black and brown students from tough backgrounds are not doomed to fail in large numbers, as education leaders long assumed, but are most often undone by obstacles that universities themselves have put in their path. Georgia State has harnessed the power of big data to identify and remove those obstacles, to the point where students from mediocre high schools working two jobs to pay the bills are now just as likely to succeed as children of wealth and privilege.

Book cover of Black Skin, White Masks
Book cover of The Holocaust in American Life
Book cover of Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland

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In Human Shadow

By Gregory J. Glanz,

Book cover of In Human Shadow

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Why am I passionate about this?

It seems that all of the fictional main characters I create have anti-hero tendencies. There is always some voice in their head telling them to do right when they are expected to do wrong, or to do wrong when it is supposed they will do right. I find this flaw very compelling, and universal for those of us of flesh and blood. Do sneering, evil characters exist? Well, maybe, but they aren’t very interesting, and I think a weak trope.

Gregory's book list on anti-heroes of fantasy fiction

What is my book about?

Born the half-breed, bastard son of an orc chieftain, Wrank tries to survive life in OrcHome among ignorance and spite aimed at his human heritage even as he develops a Talent for folding shadow. When life is no longer viable among the clans, he escapes into the world of humans where he once again encounters intolerance from thieves, wizards, priests, and assassins.

With the eyes of imps, demons, miscreant gods, and a changeling upon him, can he survive In Human Shadow even though his future is foretold, his death foreseen?

In Human Shadow

By Gregory J. Glanz,

What is this book about?

Born the half-breed, bastard son of an orc chieftain, Wrank tries to survive life in OrcHome among ignorance and spite aimed at his human heritage even as he develops a Talent for folding shadow. When life is no longer viable among the clans, he escapes into the world of humans where he once again encounters intolerance from thieves, wizards, priests and assassins. With the eyes of imps, demons, miscreant gods, and a changeling upon him, can he survive In Human Shadow even though his future is foretold, his death foreseen?


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