70 books like Charity and Sylvia

Annette Gordon-Reed’s book introduces readers to the enslaved family of a Founding Father, Thomas Jefferson.

What I love about this book is that it upends the traditional picture of Jefferson while neither vilifying nor excusing him. It’s a full picture of a complicated man and the fascinating people who were part of his life. After all, the historian’s task is not to make heroes or villains but to show the full complexity of human beings.

At the center of the story is Sally Hemings, the half-sister of Jefferson’s wife and the mother of some of Jefferson’s children. The book also shows how a careful historian can interpret and evaluate different kinds of evidence, including documents, oral history, and DNA.

The Artificial River is so well-written, and features so many surprising and illuminating insights about early America, that I have assigned it many times in undergraduate classes. Sheriff speaks trenchantly about the concept of progress that inspired—and continues to inspire—so many of us. Yet by looking at how that concept played out over the course of the building of the Erie Canal, one of the most massive public works projects of the early Republic, she also shows the ways that Americans’ views of the common good were transformed. In a series of brilliantly executed chapters, Sheriff demonstrates the extent to which Americans’ embrace of market capitalism undermined their commitments to the good of all, and their willingness to accept that some of their fellow citizens would live in permanent poverty. It is a book that speaks as much to contemporary ideas about progress and self-determination as to those ideas in… show more.

Helen Jewett was a sex worker living in New York in the 1830s. She worked in a brothel under a matron, which should have been a safe enough situation—she wasn’t out on the street, at least, and others knew when she had clients. Early one morning, however, others in the house wake up to realize there’s a fire in Helen’s room, and that she’s dead. Was it a murder committed by her last client, a man quickly identified as Richard Robinson, or was it a suicide? If she hadn’t died so brutally, we wouldn’t know Helen Jewett’s name, so she’s become another victim only known for her murder. Cohen reminds us that she’s more than just her death.

We often think of the Age of Revolutions as linked to the Enlightenment, with its emphasis on reason and science. But as Juster demonstrates in this fascinating book, it was also an age of prophecy. If they were sometimes dismissed as crazy, hundreds of male and female prophets found significant followers during the 1790s and early 1800s—followers who saw in those prophetic visions inspired ways to live in and face the challenges of a growing democratic society. Even those of us who knew about some of the ecstatic religious practices of the Second Great Awakening found ourselves marveling at Juster’s recapturing of a world of visionaries during an Age of Reason. Ultimately, she inspires us to connect the emerging democratization of the early nineteenth century to the profusion of charismatic and sometimes unsettling religious leaders. A wonderful piece of scholarship that is also a dream to read.

This is the first book to feature gay grandfathers, an overlooked and under-represented population in the literature. It is based on the author’s actual family experience, which allows the reader to experience the real emotions experienced by the characters. The author carefully takes the reader on a journey that will be relatable to anyone with an LGBTQ+ family member. This is a story that needs to be told and Schanke and Schanke do it beautifully.

The ship in this book (a submarine, in this case) features in unsettling flashbacks.

Miri’s wife, Leah, is a marine biologist, and on a routine trip to the bottom of the ocean, a malfunction on the sub means she and the crew remain down there much longer than anticipated. When she returns, she’s not the same. Armfield’s writing is stunning, perfectly encapsulating the strangeness of life at the bottom of the ocean.

This is an eerie but incredibly moving book about relationships and grief.

In this follow-up to Prince and Knight by Daniel Haack, our two heroes fight a dark shadow spread over the kingdom. Their love is tested when the prince saves the knight’s life from beasts and monsters. When they reach the Shadow King, the cause of the darkness,  he sees the love between the prince and knight, which gives him hope for the future. He realizes that it’s okay to love someone of the same gender.

The book has beautiful messages of acceptance, forgiveness, and being proud of your own authentic self. The illustrations are charming, like an animated film.

This is the first of a trilogy of which any book in the series is worth reading. In this farce written long before marriage equality, a gay man hatches an outlandish scheme to throw a wedding, just for the expensive gifts. What follows is a comedy that incorporates blackmail and the mafia. You read this novel for pure pleasure, enjoying the clever one-liners while the plot spirals out of control. Flamboyant, camp, and ridiculously funny.

Today, most people marry for love, or at least hope to marry for love. However, the idea of the love match as the preferred form of marriage is a relatively recent development. In Marriage a History, Stephanie Coontz tells the story of marriage’s transformation from an economic arrangement into an emotional one and covers everything from caveman unions to the modern fight for same-sex marriage. The book is filled with colorful examples and amusing anecdotes, such as the story of one aristocratic mother’s dismay when her son actually falls in love with his intended bride (she worries this will hurt her economic bargaining power) yet ultimately, it leaves the reader contemplating the very serious question of what it means to fall in love and whether love has, or should have, anything to do with marriage.

I highly recommend this book because it is a great history lesson about the first gay marriage in 1971 when Jack Baker and Michael McConnell struggled to get a marriage license in Minnesota. They appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, but the case was dismissed. It wasn’t until 2013, when Minnesota made it legal for gay marriage that Jack and Michael’s marriage was finally publicly acknowledged. Two years later, in 2015, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of marriage equality.

This story resonates with me personally because my husband and I live in Minnesota, where we were married in 2014.