100 books like Butterflies Belong Here

I am inspired by people who break barriers to succeed. Ichthyologist (fish biologist) Eugenie Clark is such a person. She became a deep-sea diver at a time when not many women were in the water actively doing ocean research. All ocean creatures interested her, but her specialty was sharks! During her 92-year lifespan, she made many dives both in submersible vehicles and with SCUBA.

Because of her work, she became known as the “Shark Lady.” Once, while diving, she rode on the back of a 50-foot whale shark. I have only seen sharks in large aquariums, such as the Monterey Bay Aquarium in California, but thanks to Eugenie Clark’s underwater research, I have learned many surprising things about them in the wild. 

I love this book. I visited Zoo Miami when the author and Italian illustrator launched their beautiful collection. I don’t get tired of leafing through the pages and gazing at Daniele Guido’s art. He uses human hands as his canvas, turning them into wild and wonderful animals. The author, Silvia Lopez, brings insightful facts to raise awareness and awe for Earth’s precious wildlife. Sure to be appreciated by both animal lovers and artists, this inspiring collection showcases sixteen amazing animals, such as pythons, Komodo dragons, and polar bears incredibly lifelike on the hands. Silvia Lopez provides insightful facts about each and has received a BookList starred review and a few other awards for it. 

One look at the cover of this visually stunning, expertly crafted nonfiction picture book sparks the notion that the elusive giant squid has much more to teach us than what meets the eye.

Next, this opening line from the prologue plunges the reader into the squid’s mysterious world so the rest of the book can fulfill the cover’s promise:

"Down, down in the depths of the sunless sea, deep, deep in the cold, cold dark, creatures, strange and fearsome, lurk."

I was hooked from the get-go, and I know Fleming and Rohmann’s innovative pairing of poetic expository text with darkly arresting illustrations—with every word and brushstroke remaining faithful to the facts—will engage any reader lucky enough to pick up this book.

Who doesn’t like chocolate? No Monkeys, No Chocolates explains to the reader how we lucky humans ended up with what has to be one of the most popular treats in the world. Although the author writes about the entire process, starting with cocoa beans and ending with trees, wildlife plays an important part in our final chocolate treats, hence, the title. Midges, anoles, maggots, lizards, and of course, monkeys all play a part in getting the cocoa beans to grow, pollinate, and become new trees. One part of the book is straight nonfiction with serious explanations about the process, but illustrations of bookworms on the bent corner of the book give it that bit of metafiction to delight the younger readers who may not want to sit through every word.

“Do you understand the sadness of geography?” is the epigraph by Michael Ondaatje to this short story collection, I would ask the same.

Memory and desire are central emotions in the lives of South Indian immigrants who move. The sense of dislocation belongs equally to the ones who go and the ones who stay and is woven beautifully in these stories.

In one, brochures about marvels in a retired home in Tamil Nadu are flaunted by a daughter who lives in Atlanta and cannot take care of her mother in India. The mother had encouraged the daughter to seek fortune in America but longs for the old life when the children did not move away.

The contradictions are powerfully rendered in all the stories and they speak to me.

I am actually only part-way into this book, but I love it so far. I have always loved Charles Dickens, and learning more about his family interests me. This book is about his 10th child, Edward. He was a difficult child and was sent to the Outback. He lived among the aborigines and mostly convicts. It is a life story about how he handled it and tried coming out on top. I recommend this book because it gives hope and encouragement to all people. Young and old.

I love the writing in this collection of short fiction and memoir.

It takes us traveling along the life journeys of migrants from many cultures to many destinations, for a variety of causes and motivations. I deeply empathize with and appreciate the migrants’ well of complex emotions of loss, torment, and fear, while maintaining a layer of hope that kept these people going.

Having lived in various corners of the world has taught me to be respectful and open to people who are different from me culturally and ethnically. I believe the world will be a more peaceful place when we gain a better understanding of people outside of our own experience

This book serves such a purpose of educating us in this aspect.

Drawing on history, literature, and a wealth of primary sources, World of Our Fathers paints a comprehensive portrait of the first major wave of Eastern European Jews to come to America—and specifically, New York—following the assassination of Alexander II.

In this massive but deeply engaging work of art, Howe does nothing less than recreate a lost time, place, and culture. With chapters covering immigration, ghetto life, labor politics, and the Yiddish theater, among others, this is essential reading for American Jews—and anyone else interested in their story.

Unfortunately, the word “gulag” is all too apt for describing U.S. carceral systems.

While this book came out nearly twenty years ago, I picked it because its gut-wrenching descriptions of what goes on inside U.S. immigration facilities still reflect contemporary reality.

Journalist Mark Dow draws on interviews with detainees, guards, and immigration officials to document the atrocious material conditions, violations of human rights, and abuses routinely experienced by detainees.

He details how guards are conditioned to treat all detainees as criminals, regardless of who they are, and how using private companies helps shield facilities from scrutiny and accountability. Given the horrors revealed in this book, it is especially alarming that the detention system has more than doubled since its publication.

Early on David Levinsky, the immigrant Yeshiva boy, the budding intellectual, learns that America is the land of winners and losers, and if he is to be the former, he has to abandon his old self like the ear-locks he left on a barbershop floor in his first days in this new world. To be an alrightnik he must learn to dance the American dance. And dance he does, but his fabulous success as a garment manufacturer has left something unresolved in himself. His search for love at a Jewish resort in the Poconos is a chapter better than anything Philip Roth ever wrote.