100 books like Josephine

I love Gregory Christie’s artwork. His naïf style illustrations may seem crude and simple at first glance, but I think they are incredibly rhythmic and powerful.

His images pair seamlessly with the book's lyrical text, which depicts the awful hardships that enslaved people in New Orleans endured and the joy they felt on Sundays when they were free to play music, dance, and spend time together in Congo Square.

Bryan Collier’s watercolor and collage illustrations are amazing. They are warm and joyful, just like Troy Andrews’s story.

In the book, Andrews, aka “Trombone Shorty,” recalls growing up in the Tremé neighborhood of New Orleans. He remembers playing non-stop a broken trombone he found on the street and eventually—as a young kid—getting to play on stage with the legendary Bo Diddley at the city’s Jazz Festival. This is an inspiring story and a visual delight. 

The illustrations in this book are fantastic. They are filled with pastel blues, reds, floating circles, and overlapping shapes. They are very atmospheric. It feels like I’m listening to one of John Coltrane’s melodies.

The text is musical, too. The short and lyrical lines focus on the sounds that Coltrane heard as a boy and the events in his early life that inspired him to become a Jazz giant. The book’s ending is great. It is very satisfying. 

Brian Pinkney’s scratchboard and oil pastel illustrations are full of energy. They capture Alvin Ailey’s movement and grace. Both the art and the text are thoughtful and very well-researched.

The book shows Alvin Ailey leaving Texas as a young man, discovering dance in LA, and creating the first modern dance company that celebrated the heritage of African-American people. I especially love the illustration of Alvin Ailey arriving in New York with the buildings in the background as if “his dreams soared higher than the tallest skyscrapers.”

The book has a beautiful full-circle moment that shows how Alvin Ailey incorporated gospel traditions from his church in Texas into one of his company’s first suite of dances. 

I can’t remember a 600-page book that I’ve ever read so fast and yes, so hungrily. Baker’s trajectory defies credulity. Above all, it is the paradigmatic story of a Black American targeted by racism in her own country, who found acceptance and fame (and in Baker’s case, so much more) in Paris. From the slums of St. Louis, at nineteen she became an instant sensation with her dazzling performance at La Revue Nègre. She strolled the Champs Élysées with a cheetah and, during the war, hid Jewish refugees in her château in the Dordogne. In the 1963 March on Washington, she spoke alongside Dr. Martin Luther King, the only woman to address the crowd that day. With exhaustive research that never weighs down the narrative, author Jean-Claude Baker, her unofficial thirteenth child who worked for her towards the end of her life, paints a portrait of a hugely complex woman.… show more.

If you’re new to the history of Paris, this is an ideal book to start with. It’s a sweeping account of this fabled city’s story, from Roman times to the turn of the twenty-first century, but while lofty in aim it’s charmingly fun to read, the author being adept at packaging wide-ranging information into a fast-paced narrative. One neat feature is the way Jones highlights certain Parisians or Paris locations, giving them breakout sections that allow readers to delve deeper into the likes of Madame de Sévigné, Rose Bertin, and Josephine Baker. You realise that Paris is so much more than the sum of its stones. Yes, it’s about beautiful monuments, but just as much about the people who have breathed such life into Paris that their spirit lives on to this day.

If we want to understand medieval or modern Paris, we need to gain some familiarity with all of the stages along the way. Robb provides some episodic portraits of some of those stages, and the chapter on the eighteenth-century architect Charles-Axel Guillaumot is one of the most arresting discussions I’ve ever seen of how the actions of those living in one epoch can reverberate for generations to come. Guillaumot literally saved Paris from collapsing in on its medieval past by bracing up the swiss-cheese-like network of tunnels that had been left behind by its medieval quarry workers.

This is an intimate, first-person account of 1920’s Paris, and the life of one of the most central characters of the period—the model, singer, and artist, Kiki of Montparnasse as she was known by all. Born in Burgundy in 1901, christened Alice Prin, and raised by her grandmother in abject poverty, at age twelve she was shipped off to Paris to live with the mother she had never known.

The young Alice’s fierce survival instincts immediately translated into a precocious thirst for experience. At fourteen she had her “first contact with art” when she began posing nude for a sculptor. Thereafter, she assumed the name and embraced life as the irrepressible Kiki. Lover of Man Ray, beloved friend of Soutine, Jean Cocteau, and many other artists of the period, she became the toast of Montparnasse, one of the century’s first truly independent women. Man Ray, Foujita, Kisling, and others immortalized… show more.

You may know this book as The Hunchback of Notre Dame, but you probably don’t really know it. Films, most notably the Disney cartoon, have grossly distorted this novel, often having Esmeralda ride off into the sunset with Phoebus. But the novel is really a very dark, Gothic story of love and lust, and one of the first existential novels. Frollo and Quasimodo both love Esmeralda, but she loves Phoebus, and he only loves himself. In the end, everyone dies, allowing their lust to destroy their common sense. Hugo wrote it to help popularize and save Notre-Dame Cathedral from falling into further disrepair. It influenced British author William Harrison Ainsworth to write The Tower of London, thus revitalizing British Gothic in a new way just as it did French Gothic.

The first time I went to Paris, I found a copy of this book at a bouquiniste on the Quai de la Tournelle. I can honestly say it has never left my bedside. Colette, born Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette in 1873, was a ferocious talent, a novelist, memoirist, journalist, and colossal French cultural figure until her death in 1954. Earthly Paradise is an autobiography in essays, and hers is an extraordinary story. Born in small-town Burgundy, she was a showgirl at the Moulin Rouge, a traveling performer, was married twice, lived as a lesbian for a decade, had a facelift in the 1920s and at the height of her literary fame, opened a beauty salon in Paris. She was to the core a sensualist and though she claimed to dislike feminism, she was a tower of female strength. But the reason this book—just one of her fifty-five—endures is her achingly gorgeous writing.… show more.