45 books like In the Wake

As someone raised in small-town USA, I had to come to terms with the fact that I was taught a white-washed, largely inaccurate American history. It was up to me to re-educate myself.

As someone who can get bogged down by long lists of dates and details, How the Word is Passed gave me a modern lens for understanding the history around slavery. I was gripped by Smith’s lyrical, humane approach.

This is the sort of book that makes the world better.   

This brilliant, best-selling book turned award-winning documentary is so fantastic for unraveling a revisionist history of the “tired old lady who wouldn’t move to the back of the bus.”

Not unlike the way I show how Dr. King’s memory has been sanitized and defanged, Theoharis shows how Parks’ memory has been voided of her long history of radical activism, and her unyielding pursuit of racial and social justice.

I thought about this book a lot as I was writing my chapter on the hidden Black women, the “sheroes” of the Civil Rights Movement who present-day Black feminist activists are resurrecting in public consciousness.

I love a good dystopian novel, and this hit all the right notes for me. At first, everything seems perfect in Jonas’s tightly-ordered world—only everyone is hiding something. Jonas is different, but he doesn’t know how.

I loved how thought-provoking The Giver was. It got me asking questions about what it means to be a part of a community, a friend, and a member of a family. What risks are we willing to take for the ultimate good, and what crosses the line?

I found Jonas’s story fascinating and felt genuinely concerned for him throughout the book.

I am, to put it lightly, obsessed with the way Octavia Butler revolutionizes the timescape and invites us to speculate about worlds that could be. In this and so many of her books, her vision of Afrofuturism is one that reminds us that our ancestral pasts and our imagined futures are always connected. 

I thought a lot about the future when I wrote my book, and I share Butler’s conviction that there is collective healing and liberation in revisiting and reimagining the past.

I also love that my neighborhood library in Pasadena is the one Octavia Butler used to frequent!

This book is a really fun investigation by a brilliant journalist who leads readers through a thorough yet skeptical look at the Silicon Valley-based movement known as “radical life extension” or “transhumanism.”

From hobbyists, to hackers, to scientists, to venture capitalists, a broad contingent of people in and around the “tech” space are convinced today that techno-scientific advancement will eventually allow humanity—or at least a certain small cadre of the wealthiest and savviest humans—to live forever.

There are heavy ideas here, and the book will give you a lot to think about, but it manages to be a breezy read despite the often troubling subject matter.  

Ariès was a masterful medieval historian, and in this slim volume, based on a series of lectures he gave at Johns Hopkins University, he traced big cultural shifts in the way Western culture has thought about death and dying.

Medieval traditions lauded a so-called “tame death,” in which the dying person calmly accepted their fate, received visitors at home, and directed the rituals and ceremonies that would accompany their impending demise. Death was a normal part of domestic life, witnessed by young and old alike.

This is eventually contrasted with the modern way of dying, in which people die in hospitals, not at home, hidden away from most of a society that has come to believe people need to be shielded from sad and upsetting matters like illness and death. It is a fascinating work of history and a powerful critique of contemporary mores around mortality.     

I was blown away by this thought-provoking philosophical examination of the relationship between the living and the dead.

Burial, Hans Ruin points out, is the most ancient cultural-symbolic practice in all of human development. In burying the dead, and through the attendant rituals accompanying burial, we are caring for them and communicating about or with them. Ruin looks at a variety of ways that such care has been accomplished and debated over time, from prehistoric graves to ancient Egyptian pyramids to Sophoclean dramas from ancient Greece.

All of these examples are put to use as part of a larger meditation on what it means to live ethically; as he puts it “there is no social space entirely outside the shared space with the dead. To learn to live is to learn to inhabit this space in a responsible way. Life is a life after, as inheritance, ancestry, legacy and fate.”     

This book is not about death on its own but images of death, and the roles to which they are put by the press and politicians.

Focusing on iconic photographs of death from events such as the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake, the Vietnam War, and the September 11th attacks, among many others, Zelizer charts a growing discomfort over time with images of death in the news. As technology improved, such photos became more graphic and intimate, and norms around the increasingly professionalized field of journalism came to render them mostly off limits.

Despite the general squeamishness of Western journalists and readers towards such images today, however, we do still see them during major world events and important breaking stories. It’s also true, Zelizer points out, that images of death in far away places are often shown in American newspapers with less concern.

There are important lessons here for all of… show more.

This novel about an African American family struggling to survive in early 20th century America touches upon many things, including African American soldiers coming home from WWI, the Great Migration north, and the world of 1930s Harlem.

It’s historical literary fiction and a mystery, but it’s ultimately a stunning novel about the lengths a mother will go to protect her family. Holloway is emerita professor of English and Law at Duke University, and I loved talking to her about her retirement career as an author!

Balto explores how the Chicago police, from 1910 to the 1970s “built an intricate, powerful carceral machinery whose most constitutive feature was an extreme racial selectivity.” Black people are over-policed and under-protected. Balto focuses on policing and anti-blackness. Black Chicagoans’ complaints of torture and “aggressive prevention patrol” by the police went on for decades and was essentially ignored by those in power. Balto tells the story of a racially repressive police force. In two decades, from 1945 to 1965 the Chicago police grew more punitive as the department doubled in size. Black communities were targeted by the CPD, in large part, because black was equated with criminality.