100 books like Dreams from My Father

I was intrigued by the title, so I had to read it. And because Trevor Noah was reading the audio version, I had to listen. His story was poignant, heartbreaking, and, at times, hilarious. I found myself literally laughing out loud. His life experience couldn’t be farther away from my own.

I learned so much about South Africa, its history, its people, and its culture. I love a good inspirational rags-to-riches story, and this book did not disappoint.  

This book was published after the demonstration at Tiananmen Square, Beijing which ended in bloodshed. With this book, I felt finally somebody was giving an honest account of life in China in the 20th Century and  under the Chinese Communist Party.

But this is no regular history book; it is Jung Chang’s personal account following the lives of three generations of women in her own family: Jung Chang herself, her mother, and her grandmother. They endured so much, but I was struck by how united and loving they remained. They managed in the face of adversity to keep their humanity, inner strength, and incredible courage.

I felt empowered by these women, from the grandmother who had endured the torture of having her feet bound as a young girl to the author who showed admirable courage to tell us exactly what China was like right up and through the dark years… show more.

Coates’s semi-autobiographical examination of life for black men in American society, and more broadly in American history, is an education. Like Zinn, Coates calls America on the hypocrisy inherent in its highest ideals and its most cherished conceits.

As Coates himself later said about Zinn, "He knocked me on my ass." The two - while not always on the same page in their critical examinations of the American experiment, are clearly kindred spirits. They both want America to do better and clearly believe it can do better if it is honest about itself - but will it be? This is the question left ominously dangling by both Zinn and Coates.

Although presented as a novel, this book is a memoir of Brown’s life growing up as a Black boy in Harlem in the 1940s and 50s amid poverty, violence, and addiction.

Marlene was in Paris in the summer of 1969 when a young white American man gave her a book to read. Brown’s story smacked me in the face. He lived in an America that was foreign to me—poverty, addiction, violence, incarceration. His experiences growing up on the streets of Harlem were so different from mine in suburban New Jersey.

What I remember most is my wonder at Brown’s description of “conking” his hair—straightening it with chemical relaxers that damaged his hair and burned his scalp. His description has stayed with me for all these years as a reminder of how little I knew and know about the lives of Blacks and their position in a white world.

I love digging into the corners of history that are under-explored or never taught in schools. Isabel Wilkerson’s book tells one such story: the Great Migration of almost six million black people from the American South to the north and west of the country from 1915 to 1970.

The author, a prize-winning journalist, did her homework, digging deeply into various sources. But rather than drowning the reader in data, she illuminates this very big story with stories of three individuals who left everything they knew to start fresh. The migration changed them and changed America.

Her approach was inspirational, and her writing was breathtaking.

Wilkerson’s scholarship on race and injustice is certainly not a secret, but I still find some colleagues who have not yet read this book.

To convince people to pick it up, I promise that its language is poetic and imminently accessible, and I share the two pieces that have remained top of mind for years: first, Wilkerson’s research about the lessons Nazi Germany took from the racial caste system of Jim Crow United States, and second, the way she crafts an analogy of a crumbling house to make the case for reparations for racist harm, which—like cracks in the foundation of a house you just bought—may not be your fault but are still your problem.

I am forever grateful to Wilkerson for gifting us her insights and rhetorical tools, conveyed so skillfully in this tremendous contribution.

Perhaps the most “realistic” novel of this bunch, Ralph Ellison’s National Book Award-winning novel follows an unnamed black narrator’s life in a small southern town, as detailed through his memories, dreams, and desires.

Ellison didn’t intend to write a “protest novel,” apparently, but it has become exactly that: a protestation of the inequities of an American system designed to keep Black people in the shadows. The novel’s voice, though singular, is representative of an entire social movement. A perfect novel. 

I was born in my parent’s house which, like all in our area, had no central heating. That was the reality of giving birth in the forties and fifties in England. Jennifer’s memoir of midwifery in working-class Poplar, in the docklands of London, gave rise to one of the most popular TV series. The BBC has taken the story beyond Jennifer’s memoir but the tone is the same. The TV series, like the book, tackles difficult social, cultural, and economic issues, with insight, compassion, and humour. I aimed to tackle issues of class, gender, and race in my memoir in a similar tone.

When I grew up in Luton, to cross the path of anyone who wasn’t white was rare. When Pakistan-born Safraz moved there, in 1974, the population of the industrial town was changing rapidly. Safraz’s memoir recounts with poignant humour, the effects of racism but also the friendships and the MUSIC! It’s been turned into a moving film Blinded by the Light by Gurinder Chadha. Prejudice is not white – it is human. Safraz married Bridget, a union initially disapproved of by his mother and siblings because she was a non-Muslim white woman.

I read Life on the Color Line as a junior in high school. I was amazed by William’s intimate account of having lived, first as a white boy in America, and then, as a Black boy in America. His life story illuminates not only the fiction that “race” is biological and immutable, but the powerful reality of white supremacy. Little did I know when reading Williams’s book that I would one day give birth to a son this society deems to be white. This is, in many ways, a painful book, but it is also one about the power of love and community. The love and community Williams found is what led him to share his story, which is a necessary and crucial reminder to challenge racism at its root.