10 books like A Fool's Errand

This is one of those stories about a career I would have never considered. After the Civil War, Captain Kidd travels to Texas doing live readings of newspapers. He is tasked with caring for an orphan who is reluctantly being transported to a family she does not remember. This tells a story of an individual, Joanne, lost between two cultures as a bond is created with the elderly and honorable Kidd. This holds a vivid description of the place and time.

I taught this book years ago while an assistant professor at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Written like a novel, although a serious work of history, it is not your usual book on Reconstruction. In compelling prose, Evans details the struggles of the Lowry Band of Lumbee Indians who clashed with Confederate officials in southeastern North Carolina during the Civil War. Henry Berry Lowry managed to escape after killing a rebel official. He took to the swamps, eluding capture with the help of local African Americans and Native Americans. It is a little-known story among people outside of that region and shows the complicated nature of putting the country back together again after a Civil War. I had never heard of this tribe until encountering the book and found the story unlike anything else in Reconstruction literature.

I know the author personally and had a chance to read portions of the manuscript before it went to press. It is by far the best account of the occupation of the former Confederacy by the U.S. Army during Reconstruction. Meticulously researched, it gives readers a firm sense of where the military was and when, as well as how it was forced to confront insurgent white Southerners determined to obstruct advances in equal rights through whatever means possible, including violence. That intransigence caused increases in military supervision of governments, leading the author to state, “Military Reconstruction therefore exposed the necessary interdependence of democracy and coercion. (180)” There’s the irony—that expanded freedom required military control of governments. The author is a very good writer, having won the Flannery O’Connor Award for a short story collection Spit Baths.

I found this book inspirational as I wrestled with my own research on violence against Black people after the Civil War. Williams deals with the legacy of violence and the wounds left physically and emotionally when people—in this case African Americans—receive little justice for crimes against them. She demonstrates time and again the need to bear witness and testify to these crimes so that there may be the possibility of an accounting. It took courage for African Americans to report crimes to the Freedmen’s Bureau, to testify in front of Congress about Klan violence, and to battle against lynching while often facing violent repercussions. Even though justice rarely occurred, this testimony mattered in leaving a record that challenged the narrative of white supremacy and, as the author maintains, providing political education for the Civil Rights Movement.

As a writer, this book enabled me to get inside the mindset of Eastern Oregon Klan members in the 1920s. The heart of the book is the weekly meeting minutes of a local KKK chapter, which allowed me to see through the eyes of the men who made up this organization from May 1922 through April 1924. Their concerns included recruiting new members, supporting Klan-friendly political leaders at all levels of government, preventing Catholics from employment in teaching and other positions, and supporting a state bill that would ban Catholic schools. All this helped me create realistic characters with social and political views that are very different from my own.

One of the most important investigations of America’s far-right White Supremacist movement. This highly informative  volume, which I used while doing my own research of the movement for various projects, is based primarily on the  actual words/views voiced by White supremacists with whom the author lived for many months. Fascinating and  disturbing. 

I value this book for its thorough description of the many elements that made the Klan of the 1920s so ascendant: its hostility toward immigrants, big city liberal elites, intellectuals, Jews, Catholics, and fear of the many changes in society. The author says she began writing an article about 20th-century American social movements, but because of the 2016 election, expanded it into this book. Similarly, I felt the same urgency to complete my trilogy and get it out to the public at that time. Just as I tried to portray 1920 parallels with our contentious politics today, Gordon concludes by illuminating correlations between the 1920s KKK and contemporary right-wing beliefs, and their similarities and differences regarding European fascism. Bigotry-fueled fear waxes and wanes in America.

I love Hill’s passion for elucidating our history in order to combat prejudice. She approaches the origins of fear and intolerance from diverse perspectives, starting with violent clashes between 1700s explorers and indigenous peoples of Oregon’s Pacific coast. She describes the long history of stealing Oregon land from natives, and how the US Civil War contributed to the exclusion of African Americans from Oregon in its state constitution. Later she shows how D. W. Griffith’s movie The Birth of a Nation was instrumental in the re-emergence of the KKK in the 1920s, and WWI propaganda against Germans and fear of Bolshevism contributed to Klan hatred of immigrants. In later chapters Hill brings us up to the present summarizing anti-LGBTQ political initiatives and the Black Lives Matter movement.

Ring Shout is historical fiction on a whole other level of weirdness, in the best possible way. It’s 1922 in Macon, Georgia, and a ragtag group of Black women and their allies are fighting back against the Ku Kluxes. But not all Ku Kluxes are just men in white hoods. Sure, they all start out that way, but a malign supernatural influence spread by the white supremacist film The Birth of a Nation has started transforming them into bone-white, red-eyed, nine-foot-tall demons. Yes, Klansmen as literal demons. It’s a bit on the nose, but it totally works. Ring Shout is both unapologetically political horror writing and a superbly well-crafted novel. 

As a fiction writer trying to depict 1920s Portland, Oregon, I found limitless inspiration from this book. Chandler and Kennedy give the background leading up to Prohibition, chronicling the women’s temperance and suffrage movements; the establishment opposition to the International Workers of the World, the Wobblies; the organized crime in the city and police corruption; and the rise of the Ku Klux Klan. When George Baker became mayor in 1917, he took advantage of all these elements to control a system of corruption that kept him in power. While the book does not focus on the KKK, it offers important details about its powerful influence on this particular city at this time in history.