100 books like Negroland

This is a book you wouldn't want to lend to a friend, but you might want to buy it for a friend! It’s a genre-defying memoir of a grieving daughter that I found inspirational and validating in the wake of my own parents' deaths. Helen MacDonald loses her father and embarks on a journey to find, adopt, and train a goshawk, one of the fiercest and most feral predators on Earth...a remarkable metaphor for her own wild grief.

As her relationship evolves with the goshawk, Mabel, they learn together the beauty and terror of being alive. I found great inspiration here because it taught me that you can talk about hard things in a lyrical, uplifting way, leaving your readers to soar on the last page, not jumping out of windows. 

There is nothing like this groundbreaking memoir—it is as good as it gets—and it has probably influenced every memoir since (including my own).

Kingston is a poet, and I find it impossible not to sink into the striking, gorgeous language and imagery as she describes growing up between multiple worlds: the China her parents emigrated from, the California of a first-generation daughter of immigrants, the ghost-filled China of her mother’s “talk stories,” and her inner life and growing awareness. She weaves family stories, famous myths, and her own girlhood experiences into a beautiful and unforgettable narrative.

I probably re-read it once a year.

Maggie Nelson just dazzles me. Her prose is so sharp and thoughtful, her thinking so idiosyncratically brilliant, her images filled with light. The Argonauts is both memoir and inquiry, a story of how Nelson and her partner Harry, who is in the midst of a gender transition, became parents, a story fraught with obstacles and veined with wisdom. Nelson’s voice mixes erudition, visceral power—especially when she writes about sex and the body—and formal innovation. The Argonauts caused a splash when it came out, and for good reason—its unflinchingly honest portrayal of one queer couple’s creation of family together is beautiful, brave, and yes, deeply fierce. 

Written by a prominent British ceramicist, this memoir is remarkable for its research and depth into the background of the writer’s forgotten Jewish heritage and five generations of his ancestors, the Ephrussis, who immigrated to Paris where, in the Nineteenth Century, they built a banking dynasty from Vienna to Paris.

After inheriting a collection of 264 netsuke—Japanese wood and ivory carvings—de Waal starts digging into the past to uncover the mystery behind the netsuke and why they survived when most of the family perished at the hands of the Nazis.

This is another WWII story that illuminates the tragic events of the period and the life of wealthy patrons of the arts and their interaction with artists in Paris.

Mining contemporaneous news accounts, personal letters and diaries, and dozens of in-depth interviews, scholar Marcia Chatelain explores the impact that the Great Migration had on a generation of young Black Chicago women, who coped with coming of age in the urban North while shouldering the expectations and aspirations of their uprooted parents. Anyone new to Chatelain’s work should also check out her next and equally original book, Franchise: The Golden Arches in Black America, a study of the deeply mixed legacy of McDonald’s restaurants in Black neighborhoods that won the 2021 Pulitzer Prize for History.

Having lived in Chicago for more than a decade, this first-hand glimpse of two young boys growing up in the inner city changed my perspective and understanding of the realities of domestic urban poverty. A moving and powerful read, you can follow the journey after There are No Children Here in Kotlowitz’s follow-up story, An American Summer: Love and Death in Chicago.

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.

Many believe the myth that post-war public housing was constructed to help house the poor.  Hirsch focuses on the business and educational leaders who created urban renewal and public housing legislation to reveal their actual goal – to grab valuable land and displace African American residents who they viewed as threats to their investments. Like white working-class Chicagoans, these elites sought to exclude Black Chicagoans, but the white working class used riots and overt violence against Black residents who dared to enter their communities, while elites simply changed the laws to enable their more genteel form of ethnic cleansing. Published in 1983, Hirsch’s book pioneered whiteness studies. It remains a brilliant, scathing work on the mechanics of white supremacy and the racial politics of urban space.  

This is an extraordinary book: stories, in the voices of those who experienced it, about living in public housing projects in Chicago before these homes were demolished starting in the 1990s. Of course, there are memories of crime, gangs, drugs, violence, police brutality, sickness, and death: sometimes understood as the product of urban life, capitalism, and racism, but also as the product of individual mistakes and failures. But mostly these witnesses tell of community, of self-respect and determination, of learning to survive and even resist.

Students in my urban history class in a prison education program in Illinois reminded me that “urban” in their world—which was often precisely the world of High-Rise Stories—meant not the city as a whole, but the inner city, the world of the street, of the marginalized, of people of color. This is a compelling window into that story, told by people who lived it:… show more.

Carol Haddix served as the former editor of the Chicago Tribune’s food section and is a personal friend and colleague of mine; we are both part of Les Dames d’Escoffier Chicago, an international society for women in food service with chapters around the world. This literal tome is a homage to all things Chicago and food. It’s a bookshelf must-have if you live in the area, have lived here or want to live here!