Here are 100 books that A Chain of Thunder fans have personally recommended if you like
A Chain of Thunder.
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I was born in Birmingham, Alabama, and raised in Virginia, so I am very familiar with America’s southern lands and culture. The South—also known as the Deep South—is a unique part of America’s tapestry of identities, and I love books set in this locale. Southern literature tends to focus on themes such as racial politics, one’s personal identity, and rebellion. When I wrote my book, I knew the story would have to take place in the southern states.
Here’s another book-to-movie entrant on the list. This book follows the exploits of a Confederate soldier who makes his way home to the mountains of North Carolina. It’s like the Odyssey—he has a series of memorable encounters and run-ins along his journey, and things are not as they seem when he eventually returns home. I love the novel's tension and the artfully crafted characters.
In 1997, Charles Frazier’s debut novel Cold Mountain made publishing history when it sailed to the top of The New York Times best-seller list for sixty-one weeks, won numerous literary awards, including the National Book Award, and went on to sell over three million copies. Now, the beloved American epic returns, reissued by Grove Press to coincide with the publication of Frazier’s eagerly-anticipated second novel, Thirteen Moons. Sorely wounded and fatally disillusioned in the fighting at Petersburg, a Confederate soldier named Inman decides to walk back to his home in the Blue Ridge mountains to Ada, the woman he loves.…
I am a lifelong lover of books. As a child, one of my most prized possessions was my library card. It gave me entrance to a world of untold wonders from the past, present, and future. My love of reading sparked my imagination and led me to my own fledgling writing efforts. I come from a family of storytellers, my mother being the chief example. She delighted us with stories from her childhood and her maturation in the rural South. She was an excellent mimic, which added realism and humor to every tale.
This book paints a vivid picture of the symbiotic relationship between 19th-century Southern slave masters and the people they enslaved. It also underscores the fact that for oppressed Black people, allies and enemies came in all colors.
The protagonist, Hiram Walker, is a child prodigy whose intellect and ambition make him poorly suited for a life of servitude. Significantly, Coates speaks to the obligation to “reach back” which those who have achieved a measure of physical, spiritual, or intellectual freedom owe to those who are still enslaved.
Harriet Tubman plays an important role in his narrative because she embodies that ideal.
'One of the best books I have ever read in my entire life. I haven't felt this way since I first read Beloved . . .' Oprah Winfrey
Lose yourself in the stunning debut novel everyone is talking about - the unmissable historical story of injustice and redemption that resonates powerfully today
Hiram Walker is a man with a secret, and a war to win. A war for the right to life, to family, to freedom.
Born into bondage on a Virginia plantation, he is also born gifted with a…
I am saddened and frustrated by polarization in American life today, and I believe that the Civil War has lessons to teach us about how we can avoid deeper divisions in our country. I grew up in Maryland, a border state, and have relatives that fought for the North, as well as relatives who fought for the South. In addition, I have Quaker ancestors who hated slavery and supported the Union, but who would not fight because they were pacifists. I am passionate about understanding the tensions that have always run through American life, and want to explore the topic deeply in my reading and writing.
I am in awe of Erik Larson, a writer of such carefully researched histories that he will not report that a person smiled unless the expression is documented in multiple sources.
This story of the attack on Fort Sumter reads like a novel, as it describes the people and events that led to the start of the Civil War. I found myself moving quickly through the multiple short chapters, anxious to understand the many forces that led to the division of our nation.
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The author of The Splendid and the Vile brings to life the pivotal five months between the election of Abraham Lincoln and the start of the Civil War in this “riveting reexamination of a nation in tumult” (Los Angeles Times).
“A feast of historical insight and narrative verve . . . This is Erik Larson at his best, enlivening even a thrice-told tale into an irresistible thriller.”—The Wall Street Journal
On November 6, 1860, Abraham Lincoln became the fluky victor in a tight race for president. The country was bitterly at odds; Southern extremists…
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 captain…
I am saddened and frustrated by polarization in American life today, and I believe that the Civil War has lessons to teach us about how we can avoid deeper divisions in our country. I grew up in Maryland, a border state, and have relatives that fought for the North, as well as relatives who fought for the South. In addition, I have Quaker ancestors who hated slavery and supported the Union, but who would not fight because they were pacifists. I am passionate about understanding the tensions that have always run through American life, and want to explore the topic deeply in my reading and writing.
I love that the author introduced me to Robert Smalls, whose story has rarely been told. An enslaved man in South Carolina, he stole a Confederate ship and sailed to freedom, later becoming a member of the US Congress.
I was angry that I had never known about Smalls, and this book has turned me into an evangelist for him. The author’s choice to tell his story in the first person was a risky move, but it paid off beautifully, allowing me to enter deeply into the life of a truly great man.
"Before this decisive night, I’d not fully appreciated the subtle line between inspiration and insanity. But now, with all our lives at risk, I found myself navigating that most perilous edge . . . "
Inspired by the life of an unsung American hero and slave, Trouble the Water navigates the rich tributaries of courage, betrayal, and redemption. In his inspiring journey, Robert Smalls witnesses great privilege and suffering alongside his owner’s daughter and the dangerous son of a firebrand secessionist. At the age of twelve, he’s sent to work in Charleston, where he loads ships and learns to pilot…
I am all the characters in this and every book I have written. I grew up in Rome, teach Roman art and architectural history, and am a practicing architect. My books are suffused with the things I love, from culture to cuisine, pace of life, love of consort, affection for children and animals, to the adventures I have been so fortunate to enjoy through my fifties. Reading has been a big part of my education. I have many interests and loves to share. These five book recommendations are but the tip of the iceberg. I became an author so I could write what remains unwritten and read the stories I wish to tell.
This author is the master of alternative history. I love where he takes me. I enjoy his humanization of characters often seen as wooden or stone.
He examines the “what-ifs?” of the historical record. I find the twists and turns remarkable. Small events could so easily have altered major social, political, and cultural evolutions. Imagine a South victorious in our civil war. Imagine if there were no Lincoln assassination. Imagine Robert E. Lee as the newly elected President of the Confederacy with a platform of ending slavery.
As a historian, I am well aware that the smallest alterations in the fabric of time can have huge consequences. I love how Turtledove presents these possibilities to me.
"It is absolutely unique--without question the most fascinating Civil War novel I have ever read." Professor James M. McPherson Pultizer Prize-winning BATTLE CRY OF FREEDOM January 1864--General Robert E. Lee faces defeat. The Army of Northern Virginia is ragged and ill-equpped. Gettysburg has broken the back of the Confederacy and decimated its manpower. Then, Andries Rhoodie, a strange man with an unplaceable accent, approaches Lee with an extraordinary offer. Rhoodie demonstrates an amazing rifle: Its rate of fire is incredible, its lethal efficiency breathtaking--and Rhoodie guarantees unlimited quantitites to the Confederates. The name of the weapon is the AK-47.... Selected…
I love learning about history, and the more I learn, the more I appreciate my place in this world. While military history, particularly from pre-WW1 to the end of WW2, was what made me first plant my nose in a book, I can geek out on pretty much any historical period: the rise of human civilization, Rome, the conquest of the New World, the development of airplanes. But it’s the personal element that most draws me in, and the fact that we humans remain fundamentally the same in how we cope with another through the ages. It’s through fiction that we see the past in a way that makes sense.
What I loved most about this book was the voice. Woodrell did a fantastic job presenting the period Biblical lyricism through the narrator, Jake Roedel, a reluctant Confederate soldier.
The scene is the largely overlooked Kansas-Missouri front of the US Civil War, where bloody vendettas were just as much of the fighting as were skirmishes between the blue and the gray. We ride with the young men, boys really, as they raid and pillage, hide and survive, and there’s nothing romantic about the loss and pointless savagery.
Set in the border states of Kansas and Missouri, Woe to Live On explores the nature of lawlessness and violence, friendship and loyalty, through the eyes of young recruit Jake Roedel. Where he and his fellow First Kansas Irregulars go, no one is safe, no one can be neutral. Roedel grows up fast, experiencing a brutal parody of war without standards or mercy. But as friends fall and families flee, he questions his loyalties and becomes an outsider even to those who have become outlaws.
I love to read and write historical fiction—seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, and feeling the past—revealing the thoughts and emotions of characters real and imagined through psychological insights. My mentor Fawn Brodie wrote non-fiction, specifically psychobiography. Her Thomas Jefferson: an Intimate History introduced the world to the enslaved Sally Hemings. The seeds of my first novel The Woman Who Loved John Wilkes Booth were sown in Fawn Brodie’s UCLA lecture hall. I can only imagine what her historical fiction might’ve been. Now I wait for novels from historians Imani Perry South to America and Isabel Wilkerson Caste. Meantime there are so many wonderful novelists writing history.
When recommending Geraldine Brooks’ multi-layered and intricately crafted March, another book must always be mentioned. Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women. March is the Pulitzer Prize-winning historical fiction rooted in Alcott’s classic novel that’s been read and loved for centuries. The March of the title is Jo March’s father in Little Women. In real life, his name was Amos Bronson Alcott. And he was the father of Louisa May Alcott. Brooks tells March’s fictitious story masterfully and with great historical acumen. Her depictions of Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson are truly historic. Geraldine Brooks is not a historian. Her husband Tony Horwitz was. In Brooks’ case it seems that to fall in love with a historian is to fall in love with history as well. March is the beautiful proof.
From the author of the acclaimed YEAR OF WONDERS, a historical novel and love story set during a time of catastrophe, on the front lines of the American Civil War. Set during the American Civil War, MARCH tells the story of John March, known to us as the father away from his family of girls in LITTLE WOMEN, Louisa May Alcott's classic American novel. In Brooks' telling, March emerges as an abolitionist and idealistic chaplain on the front lines of a war that tests his faith in himself and in the Union cause when he learns that his side, too,…
I’ve written ten books, four of them prize-winning best sellers, but this is my first book on the Civil War. Fortunately, it’s been generously received. The Wall Street Journal declared it “an epic story” and “rattling good history,” while Pulitzer Prize-winning James M. McPherson declared it “the fullest and best history of the Vicksburg campaign.“ Another Pulitzer receipient, David Blight, praised it for its “sizzling and persuasive prose. Miller has found the way,” he said, “to write both military and emancipation history in one profound package.”
The war’s greatest military historian takes on its greatest military figure in Bruce Catton’s spirited two-volume classic: Grant Moves South and Grant Takes Command. Written decades ago, these paired volumes remain the finest historical account of Grant’s triumphant Civil War career. In the opening volume, we meet the recently minted brigadier in September 1861 as he prepares to join his army at desolate Cairo, Illinois, having just recovered from a succession of crushing personal failures. In the concluding volume, we leave him at Petersburg Virginia in April 1865, after he demolishes R. E. Lee’s army in the climactic battle of the war. Wannabe revisionists think Catton is outdated. Don’t believe them.
This is the first part of the military biography of Ulysses S. Grant and follows Grant from the summer of 1861 when he takes on his first Civil War command through battles at Belmont, Fort Donelson, Shiloh, Corinth and Vicksburg to the summer of 1863. The author has used letters, diaries and despatches in order to provide a rounded picture of this general's personality. "Grant Takes Command" forms the second part of this biography.
I’ve been drawn to the Holocaust ever since a school project in the tenth grade. Later, as I worked to become a professional musician, the passion to learn more about the topic never left me. When I was first asked to perform some music of the Holocaust, the reaction of the audience (tears) and my own realization that through the power of this music, I could return a voice to so many who had their own voices so cruelly silenced changed my life. To date, I have interviewed multiple survivors of the Holocaust. Many became very dear friends, and my life has been infinitely enriched by knowing them.
I love this book because, long ago, it was one of the books that sparked my initial interest in the Second World War and the Holocaust. Through Wouk’s vivid and wonderful story of a fictional family living through the period, he also unexpectedly provided me with a terrific foundation of well-researched historical knowledge.
I had read the prequel a few years earlier and when I discovered this book was coming out (as a poor student, I couldn’t afford it), I eagerly asked for it for Christmas. When the big day arrived, I gleefully tore open the present and spent the next two days reading it nonstop, ignoring all else.
A masterpiece of historical fiction and "a journey of extraordinary riches" (New York Times Book Review), War and Remembrance stands as perhaps the great novel of America's "Greatest Generation."
These two classic works capture the tide of world events even as they unfold the compelling tale of a single American family drawn into the very center of the war's maelstrom.
The multimillion-copy bestsellers that capture all the drama, romance, heroism, and tragedy of the Second World War -- and that constitute Wouk's crowning achievement -- are available for the first time in trade paperback.
When I was very young, in our tiny hamlet on the Canadian prairies, I recall riding with other children in the Dominion Day parade. Each child was given a little flag to wave, but even then I noticed that while half were given the old dominion flag, the other half were waving the Union Jack. I couldn’t put it into words then, naturally, but later I recognized it as a feeling of being part of something grand – something far larger than myself or even my own country. Those were the dying days of the Empire and the world has moved on, but a fascination for our history lingers to this day.
Cornwell is a solid prose writer, and his research is every bit as meticulous as MacDonald Fraser’s. That this book takes place in the Peninsula Campaign is what caused me to pick it from the shelf and give it a read in the first place. Everything from the strategy and tactics of generals to the gruelling life of the ordinary foot soldier - right down to the loading procedure for the Baker rifle - is intricately interwoven with the plot. A must-read for any amateur student of the Napoleonic Wars.
Bernard Cornwell's action-packed series that captures the gritty texture of Napoleonic warfare--now beautifully repackaged
It's 1809, and Napoleon's army is sweeping across Spain. Lieutenant Richard Sharpe is newly in command of the demoralized, distrustful men of the 95th Rifles. He must lead them to safety--and the only way of escape is a treacherous trek through the enemy-infested mountains of Spain.
