64 books like Killings

Florida-based historian David Courtwright is best known for his analyses of the history of drug addiction and the drug business in the United States, but this volume is a fact-filled page-turner on America's lethal violence problem. Courtwright describes a frontier culture in which a reputation for violent capability was an essential social asset and persuasively explicates its similarities with the situation that faces single young men in America's underserved inner cities to this day. The interdisciplinary scope of Courtwright's scholarship guarantees that any reader will learn a great deal from his book. I found it unputdownable.   

Rebecca and Russell Dobash had studied men's violence against their female partners for decades and were already heroes of the women's movement when they began interviewing incarcerated killers in Britain. Two fine books have resulted, one focused on men who killed women, the other on men who killed men. It is the former, especially the section on intimate partner homicide, that I find most captivating. The Dobashes skilfully blend national statistics with the self-serving testimony of their interviewees, who minimize their lethal acts as things that "happened" rather than things that they did, and apparently believe themselves to be the victims. These insights are essential.    

I loved this book because it was the basis of the incredible show, The Wire. Before starting the book, I always wondered if in-depth journalism could be written as a thrilling story, and Mr. Simon's incredible work proved it absolutely can be.

Despite it being over 700 pages, I couldn’t put it down. The reality David Simon showed in every word and every page, in all its flawed and uncomfortable humanity, was nothing short of mesmerizing. The details were so memorable that I felt like I was walking the same streets he described. This book inspired me a great deal.

People share a complex core of humanity that transcends cultural differences. Rather than being incomprehensibly strange, the passions that move people in "exotic" societies are all too familiar. Compendia of homicide cases in tribal societies that are in many ways different from the one we inhabit support this claim, and my 5th pick is a particularly readable example. Anthropologist Verrier Elwin amassed court records on 107 homicides among the "Bison-Horn Maria" of central India in the first half of the 20th century. The Maria then lived as slash-and-burn horticulturalists and part-time hunter-gatherers, and were, like other "tribals," left to their own devices by the British Raj unless a violent death provoked state intervention. The killings described here are tragic, and the protagonists, though sparsely introduced, fully human.     

Win By Two is the true story about a Kansas City drug dealer and a private school teacher, bonded together through basketball. This is a powerful story about race, leadership, and what can happen when people get outside of their comfort zones and build bridges in their community. It also challenges our internal biases that we may not even know exist.

I’d never read a novel like this. The chapters are similar to diary entries, telling the fictional story of a middle-aged white woman who moves into her childhood home. Over the years, due to “city planning,” East of Troost (an actual neighborhood in Kansas City, Missouri) has become nearly all-black. Readers will wonder: Why the heck did the narrator decide to move back there? How will she be treated? Will she have any friends? You’ll enjoy finding out. 

Maybe Next Year, by Dave Hughes, a coming-of-age love story of two young men that touched my heart. It's all about Bryan and Chris, two high school guys that have been best friends for several years, and what happens when they discover their feelings for each other are more than friendship. They come from two very different family backgrounds and will have a lot to navigate.

The Deep End is funny, pensive, and suspenseful. The plot is intriguing, the characters are unique and fascinating.

The setting is 1974 Kansas City. Julie takes us back to this era with all its fun and quirkiness and introduces us to the elite world of the Country Club along with the people who share the same problems as the rest of us.

The first paragraph will hook you! “My morning swim doesn’t usually involve corpses. If it did, I’d give up swimming for something less stressful like coaxing cobras out of baskets or my mother out of bed before ten.”   

Lois Ruby is a YA veteran who has more than 20 books to her name, many of them historical fiction, including the beloved Steal Away Home, which appeared on basically every year-end best list back in 1994. She also happens to be my mom. And her latest book, which takes place during the “red scare” of the 1950s, is among her best. It’s a tense story about a baseball-crazy 13-year-old boy whose parents are accused of being communist sympathizers, turning his life upside down when he’s supposed to be studying for his bar mitzvah. The clock-ticking backdrop, leading up to the notorious execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg for supposedly passing on nuclear secrets to the Soviets, gives the whole book terrifyingly high stakes.

I’m a native Kansan. I have a special appreciation for books about my beloved state. So, finding this superb work about African Americans moved me to tears. Painter writes about the great migration from the South after the Civil War. Kansas was literally regarded as “The Promised Land” due to the Homestead Act and the promise of free land. Painter is unflinching in her telling of the violence that occurred to prevent black people from leaving. The Exodus to Kansas was feverish and dangerous. She tells of heroics required to leave the South, due to black people's “fear of future evil, and their dread of renewed slavery.”