61 books like Love Wins

As a professor of criminal law, I often taught the case of People v Stephenson (1932), in which the Indiana courts affirmed the murder conviction of one D.C. Stephenson after a woman whom he had brutally assaulted, sexually and physically, tried to take her own life by swallowing poison.

But until this book, I never knew who Stephenson was—one of the most powerful leaders of the resurgent Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s—nor why the courage of his victim, Madge Oberholtzer, triggered the Klan’s eventual slide back into insignificance. This book, set a century ago, delivers an ominous chill of recognition along with reasons to hope. Its motifs are men who believe that they are above the law, the ease of recruiting respectable citizens into a cult, and the difficulty women have being believed.

I have a hunger for the human stories that hide behind the technical language, historical excursions, and occasionally baffling reasoning of Supreme Court decisions. There are a few legal journalists who excel at showing us these hidden lives; Anthony Lewis of the New York Times was one of these.

This book was his masterpiece, an account of the relationships among impoverished four-time convicted felon Clarence Gideon, his lawyer Abe Fortas (later to be named to the Court), the members of the Warren Court, and the law of American criminal justice. The 1963 decision in Gideon v. Wainwright, which established that persons facing serious criminal charges must be provided with lawyers, is inspiring reading, but the larger story that Lewis tells us is both more intricate and more moving.

Fifty years ago, a federal judge in Washington State issued a decision that upended the fishing economy and culture of the Pacific Northwest. United States v. Washington, which was eventually upheld by the Supreme Court, held that treaties between the government and the tribal peoples of that region must be respected and ruled that the tribes had a right to 50% of the annual catch. 

Wilkinson, one of the lawyers who advised and represented the tribal peoples, imbues his account of the lawsuit and its aftermath with Indian values and culture. Importantly, this form of storytelling includes numerous oral histories. They could serve the right reader as a sort of spiritual guide to how to behave when you, a peaceful person, find that your rights are being violated with apparent impunity.

 I love the blend of reporting and remembering in this book, as well as the skill Iversen brings to weaving them together. In 1992, a federal grand jury indicted the management of the Rocky Flats nuclear weapons plant northwest of Denver. The grand jury’s two-year investigation into the safety and environmental violations at the plant also produced a detailed and damning report, emphasizing the government’s efforts to cover up the danger that the plant posed to its employees and to people who lived nearby. The latter population included Iversen’s family.

Her childhood home, organized around the need to overlook her father’s alcoholism, drove her and her siblings outdoors into what looked like idyllic, pristine Colorado outer suburbia. There, they wandered about, rode their horses, and swam in the local creeks and lakes. Reading this, I could see some of what was coming. But it still surprises—and enrages.

This is the first of a trilogy of which any book in the series is worth reading. In this farce written long before marriage equality, a gay man hatches an outlandish scheme to throw a wedding, just for the expensive gifts. What follows is a comedy that incorporates blackmail and the mafia. You read this novel for pure pleasure, enjoying the clever one-liners while the plot spirals out of control. Flamboyant, camp, and ridiculously funny.

I highly recommend this book because it is a great history lesson about the first gay marriage in 1971 when Jack Baker and Michael McConnell struggled to get a marriage license in Minnesota. They appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, but the case was dismissed. It wasn’t until 2013, when Minnesota made it legal for gay marriage that Jack and Michael’s marriage was finally publicly acknowledged. Two years later, in 2015, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of marriage equality.

This story resonates with me personally because my husband and I live in Minnesota, where we were married in 2014. 

This book tells an incredible story—not just of a same-sex marriage in the early 19th century, which would be remarkable enough, but also of the extent to which this couple was accepted by their community and family. Cleves found a motherlode of diaries and letters that document their lives together, their ability to earn a living during an era when most women relied on male breadwinners, their mutual love of reading and writing poetry, and the ways they sought to reconcile their love with their religious faith. I can’t emphasize enough how many times I paused to marvel at what Cleves had found in her research, and the care with which she reconstructed the lives of these two women who loved one another.

This is the first book to feature gay grandfathers, an overlooked and under-represented population in the literature. It is based on the author’s actual family experience, which allows the reader to experience the real emotions experienced by the characters. The author carefully takes the reader on a journey that will be relatable to anyone with an LGBTQ+ family member. This is a story that needs to be told and Schanke and Schanke do it beautifully.

In this follow-up to Prince and Knight by Daniel Haack, our two heroes fight a dark shadow spread over the kingdom. Their love is tested when the prince saves the knight’s life from beasts and monsters. When they reach the Shadow King, the cause of the darkness,  he sees the love between the prince and knight, which gives him hope for the future. He realizes that it’s okay to love someone of the same gender.

The book has beautiful messages of acceptance, forgiveness, and being proud of your own authentic self. The illustrations are charming, like an animated film.

The ship in this book (a submarine, in this case) features in unsettling flashbacks.

Miri’s wife, Leah, is a marine biologist, and on a routine trip to the bottom of the ocean, a malfunction on the sub means she and the crew remain down there much longer than anticipated. When she returns, she’s not the same. Armfield’s writing is stunning, perfectly encapsulating the strangeness of life at the bottom of the ocean.

This is an eerie but incredibly moving book about relationships and grief.