100 books like A Scandalous Life

As somber and sobering as the Icelandic landscape it takes place in, this tale of the last person condemned to die in that remote country at the turn of the 19th century is one of endurance and hope in the face of injustice.

In vivid and atmospheric writing, Kent brings a little-known historical figure into a new light, leaving us with a new and lasting legacy for someone few knew or cared for before.

Kent has resurrected Agnes into an unforgettable, all-too-human being whose place in history would surely be among those forgotten without her sensitive and moving book,

As quirky and atmospheric as the family it portrays, Booth is a brilliant ensemble piece about the family of Lincoln’s assassin, John Wilkes Booth.

Beautifully and bravely written in omniscient point of view, it weaves the lives of this eccentric family together into a comprehendible whole. If you ever longed for ‘the rest of the story’, this is it. I have my fingers crossed for a sequel – or at least another amazing book from one of my favorite writers.

Beautifully written and masterfully crafted, the story of Anne Askew, the real central character in Prize for the Fire, brings us to the brink of understanding the power of belief and commitment in a medieval world turned up-side-down by politics and religion.

To the brink, but it would be impossible to get closer than that to Anne’s personal core principles she would rather die for than not relinquish. Questions about faith, fidelity, and fealty are woven across Anne’s short life, exposing the chasm between conviction and practice in the world controlled by fear of power and doctrine.

A fascinating dive into the life of a woman with a huge impact on the world today that few have people have heard of.

Gertrude Bell was an extraordinary woman, a fearless risktaker with a vision she pursued against all odds. In a time when women kept to their place, Bell forged a path of her own while managing to become accepted and lauded in a very male world. You will be amazed by what she achieved.

Forget the movie with Nicole Kidman, which was barely watchable. This is the real story.

A simple yet elegantly written memoir about growing up in mid-century as a Palestinian Arab Bedouin. Diqs’ focus is not on politics but on family, tribe, and tradition as he details his boyhood and his people’s dislocation and transition from nomads tending their sheep to an agrarian, village-based culture. Diqs’ written memories provided me with a profound and intimate awareness of the details of Bedouin life before the partitioning of Palestine and the petroleum industry’s impact on the Middle East.

I reviewed this novel, and I really loved it. Many folks think they know what migrants experience from the news, but this novel tells the story with a different spin: an Egyptian Bedouin who tries to get to Italy via Libya.

Living in Libya is as absurd as it is dangerous. The narrator is a hassler, but you still feel sorry for him when he almost gets killed by a customer for using cheap spray paint in a body shop in Libya. Besides the body shop, he works as a bootlegger, cook, and a concrete-block maker before he makes a harrowing crossing on a flimsy boat across the Mediterranean.

Once in Italy, he gets a few jobs in construction but then falls into a gang of drug dealers. He is Egyptian but pretends to be an Iraqi named “Baffo.” One crazy thing happens after another until he needs to make… show more.

Yes, that T.E. Lawrence, of “Lawrence of Arabia” fame.

Turns out that not only was he an exquisite writer, but his account of his years as a British officer who self-embedded with Arab tribesmen during the First World War provides deep lessons for business success.

For starters, just because you’re highly intelligent and educated (Oxford, in his case), don’t assume you must agree with your superiors or yourself about the true motivations and interest of your customers, until you get to know them intimately.

Walk a mile in their shoes – or perhaps thousands of miles in their sandals – and then you might get insights about how to best work with them that might surprise you, and run counter to your prior presumptions.

The Desert and the Sown is perhaps the most personal of all Gertrude Bell’s travel books revealing a deeply affectionate engagement with the people and places of Syria. It is the first of her books that I read while researching the subject of Bedouin tribes in early 20th century Syria. I wanted to know what connection the Bedouin tribal elites had to the major trading cities such as Damascus, Homs, and Aleppo. There, in her description of Damascus, she revealed the evidence I had been looking for: “In Damascus the sheikhs of the richer tribes have their townhouses; you may meet Muhammad of the Hasene or Bassan of the Beni Rashid peacocking down the bazaars on a fine Friday; in embroidered cloaks and purple and silver kerchiefs fastened about their brows with camel’s hair ropes bound with gold…” I can just see those tribal leaders now in my mind’s… show more.

Thesiger was a British military officer, explorer, and writer, who, in the second half of the 20th century, traveled on foot, horse, and by camel across Arabia, the Middle East, and Africa. Rub' al Khali, the Empty Quarter, is the largest sand desert in the world, a desolate, dangerous plane of rolling dunes, with a very limited number of waterholes. At the time of Thesiger’s travels in the late 1940s, this desert had been traveled exclusively by the local Bedu. What makes this book intriguing is the description of the harsh landscape and the people that live in it. Thesiger traveled the desert with a purpose (he wanted to find out more about a locust with some ecological relevance), so he and his guides voyaged huge distances. As the reader turns the pages, the overwhelming sense of adventure and Thesiger’s lust for the unknown become contagious. Many books have… show more.

In Tents and Pyramids, Khuri describes how Arabs’ ways of seeing and dealing with reality have implications for power in the Middle East. He juxtaposes tents—the low horizontal Bedouin ones—against vertical hierarchical pyramids. Khuri argues that authority is not built into the tent approach—rather the strategy is to act as equal groups with leaders who are only “first among equals” and isolated individuals are the vulnerable ones. The second group, imagined as hierarchical pyramids, has no standardized rules for succession and ends up being the ones who conquer the rest. To stay in power these autocrats need strong militaries to keep the public from holding them accountable. Although Khuri’s framework doesn’t always hold up, it offers a useful way of imaging the region’s power structures.