Here are 80 books that 1974 fans have personally recommended if you like
1974.
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As someone who lived through the very interesting and tumultuous 1960s and 70s, I am fascinated by details of other’s experiences of the same time frame. I inhabited the early 70s fully, going to so many once-in-a-lifetime cultural events: poetry readings, music performances, avant-garde theater, and ‘be-ins’ or ‘happenings.’ With a Masters degree in Creative Writing, I have been an observer of culture and art for several decades. I am the author of three collections of poetry, a book of short fiction, a novel, and a book for writers.
A nonfiction book that reads like a novel; I loved this book because it gave context to one of San Francisco’s darkest days. On November 27, 1978, California suffered a terrible blow as its beloved mayor, George Moscone, and its first openly gay Supervisor, Harvey Milk, were assassinated.
With its infamous ‘Twinkie defense,” the assailant, Dan White, attempted to convince the city that he was temporarily insane. I loved learning about the behind-the-scenes politics.
The critically acclaimed, San Francisco Chronicle bestseller—a gripping story of the strife and tragedy that led to San Francisco’s ultimate rebirth and triumph.
Salon founder David Talbot chronicles the cultural history of San Francisco and from the late 1960s to the early 1980s when figures such as Harvey Milk, Janis Joplin, Jim Jones, and Bill Walsh helped usher from backwater city to thriving metropolis.
As someone who lived through the very interesting and tumultuous 1960s and 70s, I am fascinated by details of other’s experiences of the same time frame. I inhabited the early 70s fully, going to so many once-in-a-lifetime cultural events: poetry readings, music performances, avant-garde theater, and ‘be-ins’ or ‘happenings.’ With a Masters degree in Creative Writing, I have been an observer of culture and art for several decades. I am the author of three collections of poetry, a book of short fiction, a novel, and a book for writers.
I loved this book because Patti Smith paints a true portrait of a young woman burning with passion to become a poet and artist. The book shows the struggles of committing to a life with no assurances in a city teeming with aspiring artists and writers.
What I love the most is showing the years it took, the alliances she made, the risks she took, the hunger she felt, and the desperate circumstances she faced and overcame. When her lucky break came, I was rooting for her! She had paid her dues, and she rose to the occasion when a band put her poetry to music, and she broke out to become a sensation.
“Reading rocker Smith’s account of her relationship with photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, it’s hard not to believe in fate. How else to explain the chance encounter that threw them together, allowing both to blossom? Quirky and spellbinding.” -- People
It was the summer Coltrane died, the summer of love and riots, and the summer when a chance encounter in Brooklyn led two young people on a path of art, devotion, and initiation.
Patti Smith would evolve as a poet and performer, and Robert Mapplethorpe would direct his highly provocative style toward photography. Bound in innocence…
As someone who lived through the very interesting and tumultuous 1960s and 70s, I am fascinated by details of other’s experiences of the same time frame. I inhabited the early 70s fully, going to so many once-in-a-lifetime cultural events: poetry readings, music performances, avant-garde theater, and ‘be-ins’ or ‘happenings.’ With a Masters degree in Creative Writing, I have been an observer of culture and art for several decades. I am the author of three collections of poetry, a book of short fiction, a novel, and a book for writers.
“Telegraph Avenue” captures both the seediness and joy of South Berkeley in the early 1970s. Peopled with compelling characters, this book gives readers a backstage look at the soul music, soul food, and soul of a neighborhood on the verge of change.
Home to simple, working-class folks, South Berkeley provided a safe haven for creative innovation and experimentation, as well as social change and community activists.
“A genuinely moving story about race and class, parenting and marriage. . . Chabon is inarguably one of the greatest prose stylists of all time." — Benjamin Percy, Esquire
New York Times bestselling, Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Michael Chabon has transported readers to wonderful places: to New York City during the Golden Age of comic books (The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay); to an imaginary Jewish homeland in Sitka, Alaska (The Yiddish Policemen’s Union); to discover The Mysteries of Pittsburgh. Now he takes us to Telegraph Avenue in a big-hearted and exhilarating novel that explores the…
As someone who lived through the very interesting and tumultuous 1960s and 70s, I am fascinated by details of other’s experiences of the same time frame. I inhabited the early 70s fully, going to so many once-in-a-lifetime cultural events: poetry readings, music performances, avant-garde theater, and ‘be-ins’ or ‘happenings.’ With a Masters degree in Creative Writing, I have been an observer of culture and art for several decades. I am the author of three collections of poetry, a book of short fiction, a novel, and a book for writers.
I love this book because it describes a closed world; an underground scene that was glamorous and edgy. The world of Andy Warhol attracted writers, artists, models, fashion designers, and other ‘beautiful people.’ Warhol helped many of his minions achieve great fame.
I love that the author is a budding writer and also, for all intents and purposes, fatherless. Many of his experiences resonated deeply with my own. This book has the detailed descriptions and self-reflection of a great memoir.
An evocative coming-of-age memoir—the story of the education of a wayward wild child and acidhead who, searching for meaning and purpose, found refuge in the demimonde of the ruined but magical metropolis that was New York City in the 1970s.
“In his beautiful memoir, Do Something, Guy Trebay paints a picture of a vanished, pre-AIDS Gotham that’s both gritty and dazzling.” —The New York Times Book Review
Born in the Bronx, Guy Trebay was raised in an atmosphere of privilege on Long Island’s North Shore after his entrepreneurial father struck business gold with Hawaiian Surf, a wildly successful cologne company…
My research permitted amazing conversations with some of McNamara’s former colleagues and their children, including Daniel Ellsberg. Ellsberg informed the direction of my research and shared my excitement about the sources I was looking for, especially the secret diaries of his former (and beloved) boss, John McNaughton. He is both a window into and a foil to McNamara. On substance, they were in basic agreement on most issues (from Vietnam to nuclear issues), but they chose very different paths to address their moral qualms. I think the questions they asked–including on the moral responsibility of public officials–are as urgent today as they were in the 1960s.
A collection of essays that show that Ellsberg’s decision to reveal the Pentagon Papers was not an emotional impulse but a rational culminating point.
He went to Vietnam on several occasions, including as an advisor on pacification programs, and devoured official documents: he was the first–possibly only–person to read the full set of the Pentagon Papers at least once. It was on the basis of this new evidence that he revised his thinking, concluding that the war was “first… a problem; then… a stalemate; then… a crime.” Also, he trained as an economist, and there’s a kind of game theory logic that plays out in these essays. As his reading of the war incrementally changes, he understands that “optimal” outcomes require a different response from him.
In his second public contribution to ending the American intervention in Vietnam, Daniel Ellsberg brings together and revises his papers that best explain US policy and strategies during the war.
Drawing upon his virtually unique range of experience as a participant, field observer, analyst, and critic, Papers on the War shares a selection of Daniel Ellsberg's writings as he critiques the presence of US policies in Vietnam.
With the major contribution of a greatly expanded and redefined version of his crucial study "The Quagmire Myth and the Stalemate Machine," Ellsberg reveals consistent patterns of decision-making with respect to Indo-china that…
Throughout my career, I’ve always been passionate about leveling the playing field for women. I do this through my writing, speaking, and investing. Much of my current work is informed by the 20 years I spent in corporate as both an executive and a mentor to hundreds of women. The books I’ve chosen for this list are written by women I admire and who espouse similar approaches to the way I lead and show up at work. I hope you enjoy these books as much as I have!
Personal History is Katharine Graham’s memoir. She became the first female Fortune 500 CEO when she took over at The Washington Post. From having Warren Buffet as a mentor to presiding over The Washington Post during Watergate, her life was absolutely fascinating. There is so much to learn about leading, women’s empowerment, and how we show up at work through Graham’s journey. What makes this book unique, though, is that in addition to being a classic in the women’s leadership genre, it’s as juicy and riveting as your best suspense novel.
As seen in the new movie The Post, directed by Steven Spielberg and starring Meryl Streep, here is the captivating, inside story of the woman who piloted the Washington Post during one of the most turbulent periods in the history of American media.
In this bestselling and widely acclaimed memoir, Katharine Graham, the woman who piloted the Washington Post through the scandals of the Pentagon Papers and Watergate, tells her story - one that is extraordinary both for the events it encompasses and for the courage, candour and dignity of its telling.
My research permitted amazing conversations with some of McNamara’s former colleagues and their children, including Daniel Ellsberg. Ellsberg informed the direction of my research and shared my excitement about the sources I was looking for, especially the secret diaries of his former (and beloved) boss, John McNaughton. He is both a window into and a foil to McNamara. On substance, they were in basic agreement on most issues (from Vietnam to nuclear issues), but they chose very different paths to address their moral qualms. I think the questions they asked–including on the moral responsibility of public officials–are as urgent today as they were in the 1960s.
This book is not McNamara’s most famous nor original–it essentially weaves together his speeches to provide reflections about war and nuclear weapons–but is arguably his most compelling.
The shadow of Ellsberg and his colleagues who wrote many of these speeches is present and shows a distinct subculture that existed around McNamara, who was far more refined than the warmonger stereotype suggests and also dedicated to educating the American people about national security. It shows a man sitting atop the world’s most powerful defense establishment, grappling with important moral dilemmas, including its enormous capacity for human destruction and institutional pressures toward war.
Published shortly after leaving the Pentagon, the author discusses various aspects of his tenure and position on basic national security issues; including policy statements from the author's public addresses and reports to Congress during his tenure as Secretary of Defense.
Growing up in what was becoming Silicon Valley, I escaped to San Francisco on weekends and, through it, fell in love with what other great cities have to offer. However, as an environmental writer and TV producer there in the 1980s, I became aware of how cities exploit the territories on which they rely. A winter sojourn in the most lovely, fragile, and ingenious of all towns—Venice—in 1985 focused my too-diffuse thought on what might otherwise seem a contradiction.The lagoon cityis, as John Ruskin said, the finest book humanity has ever written; I owe it my life and the book it inspired.
Like so much else Mumford wrote, this book is a volcano of provocative ideas that I found revelatory when I first read it and still do. Published in 1970, it summarizes much of Mumford’s thinking about the largely invisible and growing power structure he calls the Megamachine that threatens humanity and life on planet Earth.
His earlier writing, including The City in History (1961) and his essay The Natural History of Urbanization (1956), was formative for my own thinking about urban parasitism and aggression. Although a lover of cities, as am I, Mumford was well aware of the consequences of their depredations.
In this concluding volume of The Myth of the Machine, Mumford brings to a head his radical revisions of the stale popular conceptions of human and technological progress. Far from being an attack on science and technics, The Pentagon of Power seeks to establish a more organic social order based on technological resources. Index; photographs.
I’m an English nonfiction writer who is, I suppose, best-known for Members Only, my biography of the London strip club owner, theatre impresario, property magnate, and porn baron Paul Raymond, which was adapted into a big-budget movie called The Look of Love. Like many of my books, Members Only strayed into true crime, a genre that has, for all sorts of reasons, been attractive to me as a writer. Probably the most important of those is that it provides the opportunity to tell inherently dramatic stories and to convey a vivid picture of the past, thanks to the wealth of documentation associated with major crimes.
The extreme length ofFall and Rise put me off until my agent Matthew Hamilton persuaded me to take the plunge.
Just as he’d promised, I found myself deeply engaged in the lives and ultimate fates of Mitchell Zuckoff’s large cast of real-life characters, whose personalities, back-stories, and ambitions are rendered with impressive immediacy.
Of course we already know the outcome of this tragic story, yet the book possesses remarkable narrative dynamism. Hovering over most of its pages is the unnerving question, “Which of these people will survive?”
'The farewell calls from the planes... the mounting terror of air traffic control... the mothers who knew they were witnessing their loved ones perish... From an author who's spent 5 years reconstructing its horror, never has the story been told with such devastating, human force' Daily Mail
This is a 9/11 book like no other. Masterfully weaving together multiple strands of the events in New York, at the Pentagon, and in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, Fall and Rise is a mesmerising, minute-by-minute account of that terrible day.
In the days and months after 9/11, Mitchell Zuckoff, then…
Life is an adventure! Part of the adventure is exploring this fascinating world – from the Mississippi River of Mark Twain to the Mesopotamian valley in my book, Searching for Eden. But an even more exciting adventure is the exploration of self these books are about. I continue to be challenged by that adventure. I have explored my “dark side” during times of divorce and financial crisis, and I have explored my brighter, giving side as I have served as a Christian minister throughout the U.S. and Haiti, an AmeriCorps volunteer teaching ESL classes, and as a teacher of chess to young people. I continue to enjoy this exciting adventure!
What I especially liked about Devolutionis that some spy novels portray the protagonist as a larger-than-life superhero who knows more than everyone else and is never beset by personal uncertainty and struggle. John Casey, however, has created a character in Michael Dolan who has been wounded by a past trauma, and shows his humanity. I found myself identifying with him. I have never been able to identify with seemingly invulnerable superheroes. John Wayne or 007, I am not, nor will I ever be. Still, in Devolution, Michael Dolan is a man who is committed to the truth and fighting for what is right. Confronting truths about himself helps him to do that powerfully.
Michael Dolan is a stoic perfectionist and former special operations pilot working a staff job at the Pentagon when he is approached by the CIA with an improbable request, to help prevent impending terrorist attacks in Europe. As his deep-cover role in OPERATION EXCISE evolves, Dolan finds that of all the demons he must prevail against, the most terrible are from within...
Fans of Robert Ludlum's The Bourne Identity will appreciate the internecine struggle and cryptic complexity of the protagonist, Michael Dolan, as will fans of Tom Clancy's Patriot Games who savor a page-turner about an unlikely spy thrust into…
