100 books like Cold Snap

I love this book for how honest it is, whether one is poor or wealthy, you will find yourself understanding Violeta somewhere in her life, spanning 100 years, Violeta Del Valle, the main character of this South American treatise, shares her story; which includes wars, comedy, passion, pain, travesty (during the socialist occupation), loss of souls, and the sage review at the end of a woman of that many years giving her view of her life in Chili, Argentia, Los Vegas, Miami, and farmland in between.

Beginning at birth, we learn the pattern of wealthy families, and others, in the role of women in 1920 until today, with much the same familiarity of our America during that same period, though with greater comfort, such as running water, plumbing, and more jobs in such areas as manufacturing, etc.

This book is detailed from the outlook of a woman born of wealth,… show more.

How did my ancestry help define me? My great-grandfather created a dairy farm outside of Tacoma, and my mother grew up impoverished in Indiana during the Great Depression. These experiences shaped my family, but how far into the past do such influences arise?

I have been fascinated by history and genealogy since childhood, and even my professional role as a paleoanthropologist is an extension of that interest in prehistory. Christine Kenneally addresses in direct language the implicit questions I was seeking–what roles did genes, ancestry, and history play in shaping me and the populations around me? It is not hard for me to identify with the values of the Puritan farmers from whom I descended, but before I read this book, I didn’t appreciate the persistence of historical experiences in shaping a community. For example, the slave trade instilled a modern community's suspicion of strangers in the worst affected areas… show more.

As a U.S. labor historian, I’ve read loads of books on the unionization of mass production during the Great Depression.

Labor’s New Millions stands above the rest for its power to make you feel like you’re right there at the picket lines, union halls, and other venues that the journalist Mary Heaton Vorse visited as she gathered material for this book about worker uprisings that put the Congress of Industrial Organizations on the map. As she shows in vivid detail, whole communities rallied to build the CIO, and campaigns for justice on the job spilled over into other realms.

Housewives going toe to toe against police, kids hand painting their own picket signs, strikers chanting “Freedom! Freedom”: Labor’s New Millions brings to life all of this and much more. 

Ribuffo could have portrayed his subjects—three mid-century Christian fundamentalists—as social or cultural misfits. Instead, he made a powerful case that these men—and others like them— were a product of the American mainstream. First published in the 1980s, when the so-called new Christian right was in its ascendancy, the book encouraged readers to check any temptation they might have felt to dismiss Protestant fundamentalists as political outliers who would disappear of their own accord. Generous almost to a fault, Ribuffo gave me plenty of advice during my own research to avoid any suggestion that there was anything un-American about fascist sympathies in the interwar years. 

Financial crises are not only catastrophic because of their devastating economic consequences. They also unleash radical political forces undermining the foundations of our free and open society. Widely praised for his work on Germany in the interwar years, Harold James is the best historian to describe the vicious circle of crisis, radicalization, and national isolation in the 1930s and to discuss the question: can it happen again?

On top of having written one of the most profound novels of the 20th century, Zora Neale Hurston was a fierce and fearless proponent of authenticity in literature and art – and she paid the price for that.

Boyd’s biography of her is the best, delving into this complex woman who was both deeply of her time and way ahead of it. Boyd quotes Hurston in one of my all-time favorite lines by a writer responding to a demeaning critic: “I will send my toe-nails to debate him…” An inspiration for all creative people facing rejection for being true to themselves!

This is a little-known gem by three-time Pulitzer Prize winner Thornton Wilder (best known for his play Our Town). Published in the 1935, it’s a contemporaneous account of Depression-era America, following the misadventures of traveling salesman and religious zealot, George Brush. 

Coming off as preachy and self-righteous, George sparks ire and outrage wherever he goes. Yet, he’s a sincere and decent person. At the end of his misadventures, George is humbled and begins to broaden his views, making him a complex, sympathetic character.

Though renowned during his lifetime, Wilder has been largely forgotten in favor of flashier contemporaries. All of his works are worth rediscovering, but Heaven’s My Destination is closest to my heart as it was a major inspiration for my own book.  

Barbara Small’s novel is about the interwoven lives of a Black family and a White family facing the challenges of surviving while raising their children in the Jim Crow South during the Great Depression.

The vivid language and sense details of Faith’s Reckoning transported me completely into the very different worlds the characters experienced in this riveting page-turner. What I loved most was how they transformed their suffering into a desire to improve the worlds they inhabited, not only for themselves but also others. The personal reckonings they made by changing their lives evoked a depth of empathy that has changed me.

These characters continue to stay in my heart, and like friends I cherish them still. In fact, I hope to see a sequel and a movie one day!

This is the story of four (European and American) central bankers fighting the dramas and crises during the lead-up to the Great Depression. When crisis looms, Bank of England Governor Montagu Norman puts on a disguise and boards a cruise ship to consult with his friend Benjamin Strong in New York. If only financial crises could still be fought that way today! I liked it because I used to be a central bank governor myself!

The author is a sociologist who rode the rails, on and off, alongside homeless youth in the early 1930s. He did not disguise himself or pretend to be “one of them.” Instead, he chronicled their stories in oral histories that are intimate and thorough depictions of how young men and women existed on the road, what was important to them, what they yearned for, how they protected themselves, and each other. As a sociologist and chronicler of groups within society, the author remained true to his obligations as an academic not to glorify, white-wash, or romanticize what he saw. As a result, the experiential dimensions of this book are incredibly robust and meaningful.