Here are 100 books that Burst fans have personally recommended if you like
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I am an ex-lawyer, ex-army officer, and ex-Hollywood film editor who loves stories about females in danger who dig deep to solve problems and survive. I can’t claim to be an expert, but I marvel at the breadth of female styles–from delicate, feminine, and sweet to brave, adventuresome, and tough. I have edited films about various women characters, from Charlize Theron’s killer in Monster to Cate Blanchett’s spiritual medium in The Gift and Diane Lane’s brave romantic survivor in Under the Tuscan Sun. I have three successful step granddaughters: an accountant, a lawyer, and one getting a PhD in computer studies. Smart, talented, and interesting women people in my life.
I held my breath as Cornelia Fort, in the middle of giving a flight lesson, spotted a plane heading straight at her. I grew more tense as I realized she was caught up in the Japanese bombing attack at Pearl Harbor. And I was inspired by the success of Jaquie Cochron and Nancy Love in putting together a corps of women pilots to help with the national shortage in WWII.
These women, known as WASP, learned about flying despite the resistance of some instructors and officers. Several dozen WASP died as they flew everything from P-51 fighters to B-17 bombers across the country to be shipped to Europe. I loved seeing the women form bonds of friendship that outlived their organization.
“With the fate of the free world hanging in the balance, women pilots went aloft to serve their nation. . . . A soaring tale in which, at long last, these daring World War II pilots gain the credit they deserve.”—Liza Mundy, New York Times bestselling author of Code Girls
“A powerful story of reinvention, community and ingenuity born out of global upheaval.”—Newsday
When the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor in December 1941, Cornelia Fort was already in the air. At twenty-two, Fort had escaped Nashville’s debutante scene for a fresh start as a flight instructor in Hawaii. She and her…
I am an ex-lawyer, ex-army officer, and ex-Hollywood film editor who loves stories about females in danger who dig deep to solve problems and survive. I can’t claim to be an expert, but I marvel at the breadth of female styles–from delicate, feminine, and sweet to brave, adventuresome, and tough. I have edited films about various women characters, from Charlize Theron’s killer in Monster to Cate Blanchett’s spiritual medium in The Gift and Diane Lane’s brave romantic survivor in Under the Tuscan Sun. I have three successful step granddaughters: an accountant, a lawyer, and one getting a PhD in computer studies. Smart, talented, and interesting women people in my life.
I loved this book despite the butterflies in my gut as I read of Tracy Crosswhite’s pain about her sister, Sarah, missing for years. I shared Tracy’s pain about the devastating murder trial.
I rooted for Tracy’s hard work to become a homicide detective so she could track down killers. And I squirmed when authorities found Sarah’s body in the Northern Cascades in Washington State and when Tracy learned dark secrets about her past.
The first book in the series that has garnered millions of readers across the globe, from New York Times bestselling author Robert Dugoni.
Tracy Crosswhite has spent twenty years questioning the facts surrounding her sister Sarah's disappearance and the murder trial that followed. She doesn't believe that Edmund House-a convicted rapist and the man condemned for Sarah's murder-is the guilty party. Motivated by the opportunity to obtain real justice, Tracy became a homicide detective with the Seattle PD and dedicated her life to tracking down killers.
When Sarah's remains are finally discovered near their hometown in the northern Cascade mountains…
I am an ex-lawyer, ex-army officer, and ex-Hollywood film editor who loves stories about females in danger who dig deep to solve problems and survive. I can’t claim to be an expert, but I marvel at the breadth of female styles–from delicate, feminine, and sweet to brave, adventuresome, and tough. I have edited films about various women characters, from Charlize Theron’s killer in Monster to Cate Blanchett’s spiritual medium in The Gift and Diane Lane’s brave romantic survivor in Under the Tuscan Sun. I have three successful step granddaughters: an accountant, a lawyer, and one getting a PhD in computer studies. Smart, talented, and interesting women people in my life.
As an infantry veteran, I felt especially drawn to the daughter’s loyalty and love of her dad; I shared her passion for exploring his diaries and traveling to the places in Hungary he described when his bomber was shot down in WWII.
I was thrilled at each stage of the daughter’s search for her dad near Budapest, and I tensed as she tried to decide which locals were on her side and which were out to deceive or harm her. I loved her passion to find the woman who had saved her dad’s life and I marveled at the wonders and charm of the two halves of the city, split by the Danube.
Getting caught in the middle of an international art theft ring wasn't supposed to be part of the deal Kat Lawson made with her dying father. But when her father receives a mysterious letter informing the former WW2 navigator/bombardier that his downed B-24 has been found and asking him to come to Hungary, Kat suspects this is all part of some senior rip-off scam. Her father insists she go, not only to photograph the final resting place of his plane but also to find the mother and son who risked their lives to rescue him and hid him in a…
I am an ex-lawyer, ex-army officer, and ex-Hollywood film editor who loves stories about females in danger who dig deep to solve problems and survive. I can’t claim to be an expert, but I marvel at the breadth of female styles–from delicate, feminine, and sweet to brave, adventuresome, and tough. I have edited films about various women characters, from Charlize Theron’s killer in Monster to Cate Blanchett’s spiritual medium in The Gift and Diane Lane’s brave romantic survivor in Under the Tuscan Sun. I have three successful step granddaughters: an accountant, a lawyer, and one getting a PhD in computer studies. Smart, talented, and interesting women people in my life.
I love the craggy Maine coast, and I love spy stories, so this book thrilled me from page one. I was intrigued and unnerved when a dead body showed up on retired CIA agent Maggie Bird’s snowy front yard. I was scared by the clear warning that Maggie’s past as a spy was about to suck her back into the spy trade and into mortal danger.
I felt disaster about to strike as the story took me to exotic and scary locales, from mini streets in Bangkok and Istanbul to more urban settings from London to Malta. I struggled to figure out who the real murderer was, and I was shocked to learn the truth.
A retired CIA operative in small-town Maine tackles the ghosts of her past in this fresh take on the spy thriller from New York Times bestselling author Tess Gerritsen.
Former spy Maggie Bird came to the seaside village of Purity, Maine, eager to put the past behind her after a mission went tragically wrong. These days, she’s living quietly on her chicken farm, still wary of blowback from the events that forced her early retirement.
But when a body turns up in Maggie’s driveway, she knows it’s a message from former foes who haven’t forgotten her. Maggie turns to her…
I began studying women’s lives in college (1960s), but recently realized that I (like others) passed myself off as a gender specialist, but had been ignoring men’s roles, beliefs, and behaviour in gender dynamics. I was put off by the studies that too consistently showed men as always violent and controlling. Many studies emphasized men at war, men abusing women, and gay men with HIV/AIDS; there seemed no recognition of positive masculine traits. Recognizing also that men had different ideals about their own masculinity in different places, I examined men’s lives among international elites and in communities in the US, Sumatra, and Indonesia, where I’d done ethnographic research.
Erotic Triangles returns to a part of the world I know well, though the topic is alien to my own natural resource emphasis. Yet I found it fascinating for its symbolic analyses of West Java’s musical and art worlds – intertwined intimately with the relations between men and women and among men. Its emphasis on triangles was the inspiration for me to structure my own analyses as a harp (another ‘triangle’), within which the strings signify traits that men value in a given culture. Spiller’s analysis inspired my own analogy between the creation of harp music and the clusters of values that influence men’s identities, their personal and cultural ‘songs.’
In West Java, Indonesia, all it takes is a woman's voice and a drumbeat to make a man get up and dance. Every day, men there - be they students, pedicab drivers, civil servants, or businessmen - breach ordinary standards of decorum and succumb to the rhythm at village ceremonies, weddings, political rallies, and nightclubs. The music the men dance to varies from traditional gong ensembles to the contemporary pop known as dangdut, but they consistently dance with great enthusiasm. In "Erotic Triangles", Henry Spiller draws on decades of ethnographic research to explore the reasons behind this phenomenon, arguing that…
I’m an information junkie who loves to dance. I fell in love with folk dancing at age 6, European archaeology at 11, linguistics and cognition at 21—and could never drop any of them. My scientist-father always said, “Follow the problem, not the discipline,” and I began to see how these fields could help answer each other’s questions. Words can survive for millennia—with information about what archaeologists don’t find, like oh-so-perishable cloth. Determining how to reconstruct prehistoric textiles (Women’s Work: The First 20,000 Years) then led me to trace the origins of various European folk costumes, and finally even to reconstruct something about the origins of the dances themselves.
I selected this book because it finally offered me some answers to questions I’d asked myself all my life: Why am I so driven to dance? Why does dancing make me feel so euphoric? McNeill found himself asking this last question when forced to go through endless military close-order drill (a sort of dance!) as a young draftee. Whence these surprisingly positive effects of “keeping together in time”? Over the course of his later life as a historian, he tracked down a fascinating array of anecdotal and cognitive answers. The relation of this phenomenon to unique details of how the human brain is put together was then further addressed by Oliver Sacks toward the end of his book Musicophilia, where I first learned of McNeill.
Could something as simple and seemingly natural as falling into step have marked us for evolutionary success? In Keeping Together in Time one of the most widely read and respected historians in America pursues the possibility that coordinated rhythmic movement--and the shared feelings it evokes--has been a powerful force in holding human groups together.As he has done for historical phenomena as diverse as warfare, plague, and the pursuit of power, William H. McNeill brings a dazzling breadth and depth of knowledge to his study of dance and drill in human history. From the records of distant and ancient peoples to…
As a parent, a former educator, and a children’s museum administrator, my passions have always centered around children and encouraging them to believe in themselves. I wrote my book to empower my own grandchildren with a growth mindset, which, in simple terms, means to believe in our own abilities, accept challenges, learn from our mistakes, and persevere. It is the belief that our abilities and talents are malleable as opposed to the view that we are either good at something or we are not. Adapting a growth mindset has been valuable in my own life, as well – it’s not just for kids. Please take a look at these books to give yourself and the kids in your life a healthy new perspective.
Giraffes Can't Dance has stayed with me since my first reading. The enchanting rhythm and rhyme, along with the truth and silliness of Gerald’s experiences, are universal - every child and adult can relate to his disappointment. Learning to keep going and embrace his own strengths is a valuable gift that we all need to learn.
Gerald was a tall giraffe whose neck was long and slim, But his knees were awfully bandy and his legs were rather thin . . .
Gerald the giraffe longs to go to the great Jungle Dance, but how can he join in when he doesn't know how to tango or two-step? Everyone knows that giraffes can't dance . . . or can they?
A funny, touching and triumphant story about being yourself and finding your own tune, with joyful illustrations from Guy Parker Rees. This chunky board book edition is perfect for little hands.
I am a philologist with a passion for Atlantic cultural history. What started with a research project on the African-American Pinkster tradition and the African community in seventeenth-century Dutch Manhattan led me to New Orleans’ Congo Square and has meanwhile expanded to the African Atlantic islands, the Caribbean, and Latin America. With fluency in several foreign languages, I have tried to demonstrate in my publications that we can achieve a better understanding of Black cultural and religious identity formation in the Americas by adopting a multilingual and Atlantic perspective.
In this fascinating study, Chasteen examines the historical experiences that molded Latin American popular dance from an Atlantic perspective. It delves into the “deep” history of Latin American culture and analyzes the development of dancing culture in its socio-historical context. This is not only a well-researched, but also a well written and oftentimes funny book that is broadly accessible. It is a must-read for any new scholar interested in the field of Black performance culture. Although the focus is on Latin America, Chasteen’s study reveals connections that are also of great importance to understanding the historical development of Black dance culture in North America.
When John Charles Chasteen learned that Simon Bolivar, the Liberator, danced on a banquet table to celebrate Latin American independence in 1824, he tried to visualise the scene. How, he wondered, did the Liberator dance? Did he bounce stiffly in his dress uniform? Or did he move his hips? In other words, how high had African dance influences reached in Latin American societies? A vast social gap separated Bolivar from people of African descent; however, Chasteen's research shows that popular culture could bridge the gap. Fast-paced and often funny, this book explores the history of Latin American popular dance before…
I specialize in writing Young Adult Fiction with an emphasis on the Romance genre, and my debut novel, Kismat Connection, releases from Inkyard Press and HarperCollins in Summer 2023. Growing up as an Indian American, I remember searching for bits and pieces of my identity in the media. Most of the time, I wouldn’t find any representation at all—so it wasn’t long before I decided that if I couldn’t find the representation that I so desperately wanted to see, I’d have to make it myself. Kismat Connection was born from this moment in my life, and it will forever serve as the foundation for my career in publishing.
This is a young adult romance novel featuring Radha Chopra, a world-renowned Kathak dancer, who gives up her love of dance when a family betrayal comes to light. Radha is instantly a protagonist to root for, a strong, independent, and fierce Indian woman that we so rarely see in contemporary Western media. Nisha Sharma champions such genuine desi representation in this story, and it is absolutely a must-read for all—but especially for passionate and creative Indian American teenagers.
Radha was on the verge of winning the world's biggest kathak dancing competition when a family betrayal shattered her dreams, and her confidence. Now, she's made a deal with her mum: study dance for a year at the Princeton Academy of Arts and Sciences and then leave that world forever. But if she's not a dancer, what is she? Could learning to cook - a way to connect with her absent father - become her new passion?
Jai, captain of the academy's Bollywood Beats dance team, is putting his hopes of going to medical school on hold because money is…
Stories help us understand ourselves, another culture, or a new student sitting alone at a nearby desk. While teaching, working side by side, and living on the Navajo Nation for nearly twenty years, I wanted to share some of the special and surprising aspects of their culture—especially the kindness, wisdom, and the laughter Navajo people shared with me. Laughter is a holy gift for the Navajo people. First Laugh shows the reader why this is true.
My books have been given a variety of national and international awards but the best reward is when a child looks up while reading one of my books, quietly grins, and then proudly says, “I am in this book.”
This book was one of the first—and still one of the best—picture books to describe the importance of jingle dancing and powwow today. The setting is contemporary. The story is engaging. The author, Cynthia Leitig Smith, is a tribal member and weaves many authentic details into the story.
New York Times bestselling author Cynthia Leitich Smith's lyrical text is paired with the warm, evocative watercolors of Cornelius Van Wright and Ying-Hwa Hu in this affirming story of a contemporary Native American girl who turns to her family and community.
The cone-shaped jingles sewn to Grandma Wolfe's dress sing tink, tink, tink, tink…
Jenna loves the tradition of jingle dancing that has been shared over generations in her family and intertribal community. She hopes to dance at the next powwow.
But with the day quickly approaching, she has a problem—how will her dress sing if it has no jingles?…
