96 books like High Society

Frank McCourt's classic book, the memoir of his childhood, is proof in the pudding that the origin of humor is the suffering of the low-status character. And that’s only one reason why I love it.

He had me at “Above all -- we were wet.” His descriptions of the impossible and undignified conditions of his childhood, where children had absolutely no control over anything and adults were at the mercy of life itself, brought me so close to him that I think I started believing we were actually related and scribbled him into the family tree as a long-lost uncle.

McCourt captures the hapless quality of gullible, unsupervised children let loose on an unforgiving world with a buoyancy that comes through every sentence and rises above the brutal conditions of his childhood. 

And the truth he finds in the details, from the brutality of religious authority figures to the abject… show more.

Everybody loves this book because it, of course, has become an international classic of literature and one of the best works F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote, which takes the reader on a time-traveling secretive world of the upper-class set in New England life in the 1920s.

In F. Scott's work, we are casually and comfortably introduced to an America where new money met old money, and the tender tightrope one had to walk in order to vie for position, marriage, and peer acceptance in a world founded on wealth and prestige.    

I first encountered Noel Ignatiev’s ground-breaking and hugely influential book, How the Irish Became White, after I moved from Ireland to America to work at UConn.

I was electrified by its thesis and found it very helpful in thinking critically about Irish-American identity and history. After all, that had become my heritage too once I crossed the Atlantic.

Ignatiev opens by outlining how the Irish fled to America from a motherland under British occupation and a colonial caste system that dehumanized them.

He argues that in America the new immigrants embraced a hierarchy based on race, as a result of which the oppressed became the oppressors: for Ignatiev, the Irish assimilated by becoming more brutal in their oppression of African Americans than the nativists, gaining “whiteness” by refusing to make common cause with Black fellow workers.

How the Irish Became White challenges the dominant story of how the Irish succeeded… show more.

If, like me, you want to read an account of Irish America that is incisive but that also makes you laugh out loud, then I can highly recommend Irish America: Coming into Clover.

Written by former Boston Globe staff writer Maureen Dezell, this sharp portrait of contemporary Catholic Irish America from an insider to the culture explodes every cliché. Irish America: Coming into Clover is accessible history at its best, but it doesn’t just examine the past.

Dezell also considers the status of post-1845 famine Irishness in contemporary America, which she sees as being in deep contrast (both socially and racially) to its former status: in the nineteenth century, the Irish were only conditionally “white” and were initially subject to hostility from American nativists.

Dezell stresses that today, by contrast, the Irish are among the most educated and affluent Americans. This polish is on display in Dezell’s own creative language:… show more.

This novel sparked my lifetime obsession regarding Mexican Revolutionary Francisco “Pancho” Villa and the U.S. Army’s eventual pursuit of Villa deep into Mexico following his presumed attack on Columbus, New Mexico.

In some ways evoking aspects of Hemingway’s A Farewell To Arms, this is a blood and thunder coming-of-age novel set against a wartime backdrop and narrated by a young (and future silent movie cowboy star) Tom Mix, who on a romantic whim, decides to cross the border and fight with Villa to overthrow Mexico’s despotic president.

I believe I reread this novel perhaps six times within a year of its 1982 release. Irving also knows something about effectively mixing fact and fiction as the convicted (and incarcerated) author of the notoriously fake Autobiography of Howard Hughes.

I’ve thought of Sharon Stone as a rebel since seeing her breakthrough film Basic Instinct. Every interview I’d read since then convinced me that I was right. This memoir shows why. The title comes from her life-and-death fight with a brain aneurysm which derailed her film career but not her life. Right off the bat, Stone’s memoir makes the distinction between lace-curtain Irish and kitchen-sink Irish, her family standing on the kitchen sink side. This class distinction and loyalty to her roots in Pennsylvania are part of her honesty, her fight against the phoniness of the film industry, and the appeal of this story. It’s also her strength as her family comes to her side when her career is jettisoned by serious illness.

McClintick makes the Hollywood boardroom scandal that began with David Begelman’s forgery of Cliff Robertson’s name on a $10,000 check, into a compulsively readable account of power run amok amongst  Hollywood-Wall Street executives. An expose of theft, cover-up, and blackmail, it is also a beautifully written, incisive portrait of men and women seduced by the glamor and power of Hollywood fame.

I’ve added this book to this list because I love Joan Crawford. I love Hollywood and all the gossip, glitz, and glamor that goes along with it.

This particular story is told by her daughter Christina about how a photograph is perceived to be happy, but what really happened, as told by the author, is two different stories.

A true vaudeville legend personality exposed, which makes it a great beach read.

Rebecca Prime is one of the contributors to my book and her book is a fascinating sequel to that volume. It covers the careers of several blacklisted filmmakers who fled Hollywood and America, seeking to find new work and life opportunities in Europe. Impeccably researched and elegantly written, Prime’s study tells the story of a generation of creative workers that was lost to the USA but which made a vital contribution to European and British cinemas. As she details, many of the exiled filmmakers faced almighty personal and professional struggles to adjust to their new circumstances, and while a few (e.g. Joseph Losey and Jules Dassin) would eventually achieve fabulous success, many other exiles found it difficult to secure regular and fulfilling work opportunities or personal happiness.

Isabel Rosario Cooper was not just a movie starlet during the golden age of Hollywood; she was also preyed on by General MacArthur. The book shows just how difficult it was for Asian American actors to make it in Hollywood and leads one to wonder if things have really changed that much today.