100 books like A Man's Place

An instant best-seller when it first appeared in 1978, Montaillou uses Inquisition records of the cross-examinations of Cathar heretics and their Catholic neighbours and kin to recover the religious, social, emotional and sexual lives of medieval Pyrenean villagers.

Shepherds, mayors, matriarchs and servants, priests and laity, come vividly to life as they recount their work and pleasures, friendships and enmities, doubts and beliefs. 

Montaillou is the most influential example of what was then a speciality of the French Annales school of history, namely, studies of everyday life (la vie quotidienne) in a particular historical milieu.

Since then micro-histories, detailed accounts of social microcosms and what they tell us about the wider worlds in which they were embedded, and the historical shifts or transformations to which they bear witness, have become the bread and butter not only of local but of global historians.   

On a cold winter night in 1960 the families of Dachuan village were forced out of their homes to make way for the waters of a huge new dam. Some managed to retrieve a few bones from the family graves to take to their new homes. But the ancestral temple that had been at the heart of village life and identity for centuries was lost to the rising waters. 

For decades Maoist policy suppressed all religious expression in China, but the reforms of the 1980s saw many forms of religious revival, including the triumphant reconstruction of Dachuan’s Confucius temple, its rituals, ethics, and ancestral spirit tablets. 

Jing’s book is an outstanding study of social memory, its powers of resistance to crisis and oppression, and its mobilization as a resource to rebuild community and history. A unique window onto the travails of modern China, it also invites us to reflect on… show more.

The Berber village of Tadrar clings to the steep slopes of the High Atlas. Lives are hard.

Women, men and children labor to bring precious water to homes, fields, and byres, to coax barley from narrow terraces, keep houses warm, feed families, tend the sick, and support the mosque and school. Most younger people go to the city for work, at least for a while, sending money home to help their families. 

So how do families and individuals view their options, their place in the village and in the world?

Vivid interviews and observations stud Crawford’s affectionate and perceptive account of how people in Tadrar decide to become involved in the larger world economy, and their views on what it does for them and to them. 

This too is a tale of three village generations grappling with historical change.

Here the story is about changing ideas of stewardship of the land, an enthralling account of farming ways in flux and of the intricate, back-breaking, and unpredictable work of restoring degraded farmland to health.

The Rebanks family run a hill-farm in a Lake District village. Rebanks’ grandfather started with horse-ploughs. A tractor replaced the horses, yet he still knew the individual ways of every ewe and cow and farmed lightly on the land. But Rebanks’ father, caught in market pressures, industrialized his farming methods.

Progress became the mantra of all the village farmers, including the young Rebanks himself.

Today, although they recognize the precarity of their livelihood and the damage to the land, most see no alternative to intensifying production. When Rebanks decides to switch to regenerative farming to preserve the land for future generations, his fellow… show more.

A year before my own father died, I had read Blake Morrison’s tragicomic memoir about his father. I had marked several passages but the page I had book-marked with a card from a London restaurant contained the following lines: “I’ve become a death bore. I embarrass people at dinner parties with my morbidity. I used to think the world divided between those who have children and those who don’t; now I think it divides between those who have lost a parent and those whose parents are still alive.”

That line haunts me even more powerfully now, and I cannot think of a more true line.

A writer’s book about a writer-father. In this remarkable memoir, Amis pays tribute to Kingsley Martin. The book is truthful about the anxiety of influence and about the collision of ambition, the competitiveness between writers, even when they happen to be father and son.

What made the book touching was Martin Amis’s love and sorrow not only for Kingsley Martin, his biological father but also for his literary father, the novelist Saul Bellow. Bonus: Amis’s probing, ruthless, but always burnished sentences: “The trouble with life (the novelist will feel) is its amorphousness, its ridiculous fluidity. Look at it: thinly plotted, largely themeless, sentimental, and ineluctably trite.”

When Susan Cheever was a young journalist, her father, the novelist and short-story writer, John Cheever, would often say to her that she ought to put her experiences down on paper. “I write to make sense of my life,” the father said to his daughter to explain why he kept a journal.

This book is Susan Cheever’s attempt to make sense of her father’s life: his decline and dissolution, especially owing to his alcoholism, and his struggle as a writer to nevertheless find coherence and control in life through the exercise of his art. 

Every Father’s Day, someone or the other on my social media feed will post Robert Hayden’s wonderful poem “Those Winter Sundays.” The poem takes me back not only to the many acts of kindness and unheralded small sacrifices that my father made but also to the ambition and the anxiety of Seepersad Naipaul on behalf of his son away at Oxford and starting in life as a writer, a writer who later in life will win the Nobel Prize.

The poignant part of this drama is the father’s own ambition and anxiety about making it as a writer. It doesn’t happen. Instead, the son receives a telegram with some terrible news. He sends his family a telegram in return: “= HE WAS THE BEST MAN I KNEW STOP EVERYTHING I OWE TO HIM BE BRAVE MY LOVES TRUST ME = VIDO”

How many people know what happened to Marie Antoinette’s daughter? This book focuses on this tragic, formidable woman and her extraordinary life, from her birth in a crowded bedroom where they had to break the widows to provide fresh air to her fainting mother, to her three year imprisonment during the Terror, to her secret escape from France after the murder of her family. She found refuge in several European countries and married her cousin, the Duc d’Angoulême. Many historians claim that on the abdication of his father (Charles X, a brother of the executed Louis XVI), he became King for twenty minutes and his wife, thereby, became briefly the last Queen of France of the senior Bourbon line. 

This book made me want to study with Lynn Hunt. 

Divided into “The Poetics of Power” and “The Sociology of Politics,” the better known first half explores rhetoric, symbolic forms of political practice, and imagery in novel ways that have influenced both my scholarship and my teaching. 

But I was even more struck by the second part where Hunt considered the backgrounds, age, occupations, and experience of Revolutionary political actors in four French cities as a way to understand the political geography of the Revolution, networks, culture brokers, and the emergence of a new political class. 

This approach shaped my dissertation and first book, but, more importantly it made me think about the link among and between cultural influences, socio-economic backgrounds, and the lived experience to understand the French Revolution.