100 books like Fall

Mailer’s opus dramatizes the cursed life of Gary Gilmore. In 1976, he robbed and killed two strangers. After being tried and sentenced to death, Gilmore insisted on being executed, to the disagreement of the justice system, who wanted him to remain alive. Written simply and with great compassion, the novel is disturbing, yet ultimately thought-provoking and redemptive.

After you read the book, you need to see Once Upon a Time... In Hollywood.

In the summer of 1969, in Los Angeles, a series of brutal, seemingly random murders captured headlines across America. A thin trail of circumstances eventually tied the Tate-LeBianca murders to Charles Manson, a would-be pop singer of small talent living in the desert with his "family" of devoted young women and men. What was the motivation behind such savagery?

The murders marked the end of the sixties and became an immediate symbol of the dark underside of that era. Vincent Bugliosi was the prosecuting attorney in the Manson trial, and this book is his riveting account of how he built his case from what a defense attorney dismissed as only “two fingerprints and Vince Bugliosi.”

The meticulous detective work with which the story begins, the prosecutor’s view of a complex murder trial, the reconstruction of… show more.

A doctor interviews an elderly Japanese yakuza (gangster) as he recalls his life. Adhering to his own criminal code, the yakuza exudes a wayward nobility as he discusses the choices he made. Bob Dylan saw romance in this and quoted from the yakuza’s dialogue on his album, Love and Theft.

This is a superb and beautifully written book about one of Britain’s most notorious serial killers – Dennis Nilsen. 

Brian Masters bases his text on documents, letters, and other materials that Nilsen sent, or shared with him and whilst the two would later fall out – Nilsen was a notoriously touchy and narcissistic man, this remains a detailed and forensic account of him and the crimes that he committed. In my own work I got to know Nilsen well and would often check out some of the things that he claimed to me by returning to Killing For Company.  

Smith, professor of communications at the University of Arkansas, examines the stories that Southerners have told about themselves—the “myths” of the South. The Old South/Lost Cause/New South myths “controlled Southern culture and Southern rhetoric for one hundred fifty years,” he argues, but by the mid-twentieth century, the strain between myth and reality finally became too great and “a period of mythic confusion,” ensued. By the 1970s, however, Southern artists, scholars, journalists, politicians, and preachers—both Black and white—had forged a new myth, based on the themes of distinctiveness, racial civility, and community. When Smith wrote, he was confident that there will always be some myth of the South, that it won’t become a mere quadrant of the U.S. with a "dysfunctional amythic culture." We shall see.

This path-breaking book was a huge inspiration to me as I began to dig deeper into the relationship between culture and labor in contemporary China.

By the time Sun’s book came out in 2014, anthropologists, sociologists, and political scientists inside and outside China had already carried out extensive studies of the largest migration in human history and the scorching inequalities that mass movement of people has generated. But Sun shows in compelling detail that this exodus from the Chinese countryside is a deeply cultural movement, too.

Blending ethnography with probing and compassionate analysis of poetry, videos, photography, and activist protest, Sun argues that culture can be the crucible of political consciousness for working people trapped in the grinder of underclass life. I’ve returned to this book again and again.

This book is a must for those who want to explore the social phenomenon of media scandal.

What I liked about the book was that it is not only about theory – the authors discuss scandals and controversies revolving around Kurt Cobain to Michael Jackson, and from O.J. Simpson to Magic Johnson. In this volume, I personally loved John B. Thompson’s chapter “Scandal and Social Theory”, which was an eye-opener to me, and later it contributed to building my own theoretical framework.

The book taught me a lot about what happens when personal desire goes beyond moral boundaries in the lives of social elites worldwide. The book was written in 1997, but it still stimulates much discussion about this fascinating subject.         

This is a book I wish I had written, far and away the best book about coverage of the Second World War in Europe. 

It is based on a wealth of archival research and features both celebrated reporters like Ernie Pyle and Edward R. Murrow, and less well-known ones like Homer Bigart and Don Whitehead. Although award-winning scholarship, Casey’s work is accessible to any curious reader. Casey is English but understands well the American military, the American press, and American culture generally.

Casey explores the war in the Pacific theater in a subsequent book, The War Beat, Pacific: The American Media at War Against Japan.

If you’ve ever wondered if people today are dumber than people in the past, you should watch Idiocracy. And then read this book. It shows how we’ve devolved into people who look at lists of the best five books and never actually read those books. In 2008, for a column for the L.A. Times, I had her take a quiz from the author of the book How Dumb Are You?: The Great American Stupidity Quiz and she got two wrong. I got 11 wrong. The point is: Read her book instead of mine.

Manufacturing Consent is the book that forms the basis of the discussions and arguments picked up and built upon in my own book—which even riffs on the former book’s name. Herman and Chomsky’s work has become a classic in the field of propaganda. It’s an essential roadmap for understanding how broadcast media, from newspapers to television to film, are so often controlled by the 1 percent. This, the authors argue, regularly results in news coverage that is skewed towards the goals of the powerful. They don’t pull any punches in building what they term “the propaganda model”—liberals, conservatives, democracies, and autocracies—all powerful organizations and individuals are involved in concerted efforts to mold public opinion.