Here are 100 books that FDR's Funeral Train fans have personally recommended if you like
FDR's Funeral Train.
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I am a presidential historian with a particular focus on their deaths, public mourning, and the places we commemorate them. My interest in what I like to think of as “the final chapter of each president’s amazing story” grew out of frustration with traditional biographies that end abruptly when the president dies, and I believe my books pick up where others leave off. More than a moribund topic, I find the presidential deaths and public reaction to be both fascinating and critical to understanding their humanity and place in history at the time of their passing and how each of their legacies evolved over time.
Candace Millard is an expert at the historian’s craft. Her dramatic prose read more like a novel and captivated me from the first page.
I also appreciated how she elevated a previously little-known episode and widely forgotten president in American history, opening the door to consider how our national story could have been different had President Garfield’s full potential been realized.
She inspired me to become a writer and continues to inspire me to this day.
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • The extraordinary account of James Garfield's rise from poverty to the American presidency, and the dramatic history of his assassination and legacy, from the bestselling author of The River of Doubt.
James Abram Garfield was one of the most extraordinary men ever elected president. Born into abject poverty, he rose to become a wunderkind scholar, a Civil War hero, a renowned congressman, and a reluctant presidential candidate who took on the nation's corrupt political establishment. But four months after Garfield's inauguration in 1881, he was shot in the back by a deranged office-seeker named Charles Guiteau. Garfield…
I am a presidential historian with a particular focus on their deaths, public mourning, and the places we commemorate them. My interest in what I like to think of as “the final chapter of each president’s amazing story” grew out of frustration with traditional biographies that end abruptly when the president dies, and I believe my books pick up where others leave off. More than a moribund topic, I find the presidential deaths and public reaction to be both fascinating and critical to understanding their humanity and place in history at the time of their passing and how each of their legacies evolved over time.
Fifty years after its publication, this book remains a classic.
As a historian of Presidential deaths, I appreciate the deep and detailed research of Grant's tragic and triumphal final year. Pitkin’s book is all the more impressive because he bucked popular sentiment at a time when Grant’s reputation was at a nadir due to the popularity of the myth of the Southern Lost Cause. Pitkin practically places the reader in Grant’s New York brownstone and the Mount McGregor cottage as the heroic general completes his memoirs while enduring immense pain to provide financial security for his family.
This book helps explain why the public honored Ulysses Grant with the largest tomb ever built in American history, before or since.
Early in 1885 Americans learned that General Grant was writing his Memoirs in a desperate race for time against an incurable cancer. Not generally known was the General's precarious personal fi nances, made so by imprudent invest ments, and his gallant effort to provide for his family by his writing. For six months newspaper readers followed the dramatic contest, and the hearts of Americans were touched by the General's last battle. Grant's last year was one of both per sonal and literary triumph in the midst of tragedy, as Thomas M. Pitkin shows in this memorable and inspiring book. The…
I am a presidential historian with a particular focus on their deaths, public mourning, and the places we commemorate them. My interest in what I like to think of as “the final chapter of each president’s amazing story” grew out of frustration with traditional biographies that end abruptly when the president dies, and I believe my books pick up where others leave off. More than a moribund topic, I find the presidential deaths and public reaction to be both fascinating and critical to understanding their humanity and place in history at the time of their passing and how each of their legacies evolved over time.
April 1865 was one of the most consequential months in American history. After the fall of Richmond and Lee’s surrender to effectively end the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln was tragically assassinated while Jefferson Davis attempted to escape to keep the war effort alive.
I was riveted by the dual history of the American and Confederate presidents, as Swanson’s storytelling matches the drama, tension, and uncertainty of the moment.
On the morning of April 2, 1865, Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederacy, received the telegram from General Robert E. Lee. There is no more time - the Yankees are coming. That evening, shortly before midnight, Davis boarded a train from Richmond and fled the capital. But in two weeks time, John Wilkes Booth would assassinate the president, and the nation was convinced that Davis was the mastermind of the crime. No longer merely a traitor, Davis became a murderer, a wanted man with a one-hundred-thousand-dollar bounty on his head. Over the course of several weeks, Union cavalry led an…
Tap Dancing on Everest, part coming-of-age memoir, part true-survival adventure story, is about a young medical student, the daughter of a Holocaust survivor raised in N.Y.C., who battles self-doubt to serve as the doctor—and only woman—on a remote Everest climb in Tibet.
I am a presidential historian with a particular focus on their deaths, public mourning, and the places we commemorate them. My interest in what I like to think of as “the final chapter of each president’s amazing story” grew out of frustration with traditional biographies that end abruptly when the president dies, and I believe my books pick up where others leave off. More than a moribund topic, I find the presidential deaths and public reaction to be both fascinating and critical to understanding their humanity and place in history at the time of their passing and how each of their legacies evolved over time.
While Candace Millard’s epic book of 20th President James Garfield’s assassination helped bring the old story to a new audience, 25th President William McKinley’s assassination remains little known. Beloved in his time, perhaps McKinley’s light was dimmed in the long shadow of his larger-than-life successor, Theodore Roosevelt, but it’s a story that people should know, and Scott Miller tells it masterfully.
Miller’s book illuminates the first tragedy of the new century and deserves a spot on the bookshelves of anyone interested in American history.
A SWEEPING TALE OF TURN-OF-THE-CENTURY AMERICA AND THE IRRESISTIBLE FORCES THAT BROUGHT TWO MEN TOGETHER ONE FATEFUL DAY
In 1901, as America tallied its gains from a period of unprecedented imperial expansion, an assassin’s bullet shattered the nation’s confidence. The shocking murder of President William McKinley threw into stark relief the emerging new world order of what would come to be known as the American Century. The President and the Assassin is the story of the momentous years leading up to that event, and of the very different paths that brought together two of the most compelling figures of the…
I teach environmental education at Warren Wilson College outside Asheville, North Carolina, where I’ve raised my two daughters in a 900-square-foot campus rental with an expansive view of the Appalachian mountains. My students work in jobs ranging from managing the herd of cattle to growing vegetables for the cafeteria. After the sudden deaths of my parents, I decided to take this one-year journey to revise my final wishes with climate change and community in mind as a legacy to my children and my students. I’ve written five books, including the forthcoming Love Your Mother: 50 states, 50 stories, & 50 women united for climate justice (April 2023).
I placed at least 30 post-it notes in this book as every page includes practical and compassionate advice for planning an affordable and sustainable green burial. This book’s pragmatic step-by-step suggestions were especially useful as I took my one-year journey to revise my own final wishes with climate and community in mind. The author operates the first green funeral home in the Portland, Oregon area, and she draws on her experiences to help you avoid exorbitant funeral expenses while helping the Earth and your community.
Funeral expenses in the United States average more than $10,000. And every year conventional funerals bury millions of tons of wood, concrete, and metals, as well as millions of gallons of carcinogenic embalming fluid. There is a better way, and Elizabeth Fournier, affectionately dubbed the “Green Reaper,” walks you through it, step-by-step. She provides comprehensive and compassionate guidance, covering everything from green burial planning and home funeral basics to legal guidelines and outside-the-box options, such as burials at sea. Fournier points the way to green burial practices that consider both the environmental well-being of the planet and the economic well-being…
My name is Cecilia Ruiz and I am a Mexican author and illustrator living in Brooklyn. Apart from desperately trying to make more books, I teach design and illustration at Queens College and the School of Visual Arts. I’m fascinated by visual storytelling and its evocative power. One of my idols, the French filmmaker Robert Bresson, says that art lies in suggestion. Bresson believed that things should be shown from one single angle that evokes all the other angles without showing them.All the books in this list do that—they show us death but they make us think about the mysterious and poetic ways in which life operates.
This is a book I would have loved to write and illustrate. “The bird was dead when the children found it.” says its opening line.
There are many children’s books that deal with grief and loss but The Dead Bird is one of a kind. The kids in the story didn’t know the bird when it was alive. They only meet the bird after it has died and yet, they have a funeral for it. They sing for a bird that once flew and no longer will. They cry for a life that was, but no longer is.
With child-like simplicity and directness, Robinson’s illustrations capture the human need for ritual and closure in the presence of death.
A New York Times Best Illustrated Book of 2016! This heartwarming classic picture book by beloved children's book author Margaret Wise Brown is beautifully reillustrated for a contemporary audience by the critically acclaimed, award-winning illustrator Christian Robinson. One day, the children find a bird lying on its side with its eyes closed and no heartbeat. They are very sorry, so they decide to say good-bye. In the park, they dig a hole for the bird and cover it with warm sweet-ferns and flowers. Finally, they sing sweet songs to send the little bird on its way.
The authoritative but accessible history of the birth of modern American intelligence in World War II that treats not just one but all of the various disciplines: spies, codebreakers, saboteurs.
Told in a relatable style that focuses on actual people, it was a New Yorker "Best of 2022" selection and…
Raised alongside three feral younger brothers in the rash-inducing, subtropical climate of Cairo, Georgia, I am a lifelong resident of the South. A circumstance, no doubt, leaving an indelible mark on my voice as a writer. At this point in my writing career, I write what I know. As a reader, I enjoy exploring the rich stories woven by Southern authors, capturing other places, people, and experiences beyond my own frame of reference. Ultimately, as a Southerner, I endeavor to reconcile the South’s troubled past of racial and social oppression with the romanticized notion others have of this place I call home.
This gothic fairytale is a favorite. Exploring the universal themes of good and evil, William Gay’s prose poetically weaves a sinister tale of Fenton Breece, an undertaker who abuses the dead.
This novel takes the reader on an eerie backwoods odyssey lush with peril and a grotesque cast of characters. I am inspired in my writing by Gay’s assignment of myth to place as he has done with the wilderness he calls the Harrikin.
Suspecting that something is amiss with their father's burial, teenager Kenneth Tyler and his sister Corrie venture to his gravesite and make a horrific discovery: their father, a whiskey bootlegger, was not actually buried in the casket they bought for him. Worse, they learn that the undertaker, Fenton Breece, has been grotesquely manipulating the dead. Armed with incriminating photographs, Tyler becomes obsessed with bringing the perverse undertaker to justice. But first he must outrun Granville Sutter, a local strongman and convicted murderer hired by Fenton to destroy the evidence. What follows is an adventure through the Harrikin, an eerie backwoods…
I grew up in a family of beautiful, accomplished women at a time when most women stayed home. But the spectacular women in my mother's family also suffered spectacularly, and I was determined to understand family life at its very roots. I studied anthropology and, over a 15-year period, lived in a remote part of the Eastern Highlands of Papua New Guinea among a group of Gimi women who spent most of their time apart from men. I shared women's difficult daily lives, participated in their separate rites, learned their myths, and, through my writing, have devoted myself to giving them voices of their own.
A fascinating in-depth look at why ideas of Dead White Men of the late 19th and early 20th Century—Émile Durkheim, Arnold van Gennep, Robert Hertz—still matter and are, indeed, indispensable for understanding funerals and death rituals in places like Borneo, Bali, Thailand, early Egypt, Africa, and America.
By examining mortuary rites cross-culturally, the authors expose elements of a 'deep structure' in ritual that may be universal, thus offering the 'thrill of recognition' of ourselves in others.
This revised edition of a cross-cultural study of rituals surrounding death has become a standard text in anthropology, sociology and religion. Part of its fascination is that in understanding other people's death rituals we are able to gain a better understanding of our own. The authors refer to a wide variety of examples, from different continents and epochs. They compare the great tombs of the Berawan of Borneo and the pyramids of Egypt, as well as the dramas of medieval French royal funerals and the burial alive of the Dinka 'masters of the spear' in the Sudan, and other rituals…
Each summer when I was small, I visited my gram. During the day we would go off on one adventure or another—and at night, she enticed me to sleep with the promise of a story. Most often, she read Grimm’s fairytales to me. Full of darkness and also hope (!), they were, and still are, some of my very favorites. And they inspire what I most enjoy writing and reading.
In this fantastical story, which is a companion to Furthermore, a lonesome girl scrubs the skin of the dead to ready souls for the afterlife. (Sounds properly spooky, doesn’t it? I love when books give me chills!) And when things are especially dark, as they are for Laylee, friendship shines all the brighter once it is found.
Our story begins on a frosty night . . . Laylee can barely remember the happier times before her beloved mother died. Before her father, driven by grief, lost his wits (and his way) and she was left as the sole remaining mordeshoor in the village of Whichwood, destined…
It didn’t begin with Donald Trump. When the Republican Party lost five straight presidential elections during the 1930s and 1940s, three things happened: (1) Republicans came to believe that presidential elections are rigged; (2) Conspiracy theories arose and were believed; and (3) The presidency was elevated to cult-like status.
We are Egyptologists with over six decades of combined experience translating hieroglyphic and hieratic texts and exploring the deserts of Egypt. We are passionate about bringing ancient Egypt and its incredible religious beliefs to life, from translating the funerary compositions in the royal tombs of the Valley of the Kings to writing a new biography of Akhenaten and Nefertiti, often branded the "heretics” of their time. One of our most exciting recent discoveries was the earliest monumental hieroglyphic inscription, a five thousand two hundred and fifty-year-old billboard! We share our adventures on our Instagram @vintage_egyptologist—enjoy the vintage fashion and be enlightened by the Egyptological captions.
Who doesn’t want to read about ancient Egyptian cannibalism? The title seems sensational, since no actual cannibalism is involved—at least as we might conceive of it in the world of the living—but Eyre employs the standard designation for the specific spell in the Pyramid Texts, the oldest major corpus of religious texts to survive from antiquity. A reader new to ancient Egypt might well read the translation of the Cannibal Hymn at the beginning of the book and be utterly confused. By the end of the book, however, the secrets of this 4300 year old text, including its relationship to butchery rituals and the mundane aspects of animal husbandry, are revealed.
The text of the Cannibal Hymn is here examined in its performative and cultural context. In its verbal recreation of a butchery ritual, style and format are typical of the oral-recitational poetry of pharaonic Egypt. It poses questions about the nature of rites of passage and rituals of sacrifice.
