Here are 82 books that On the Swing Shift fans have personally recommended if you like
On the Swing Shift.
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When I covered the White House as a young reporter I was always more interested in understanding what was happening in the upstairs residence than in what briefings we were getting from the president’s advisers in the Roosevelt Room. I was raised with the understanding that in the end everyone is equal and that no one, no matter how powerful they are, gets out of the human experience. I think that’s what makes me interested in iconic women, from Elizabeth Taylor to Betty Ford. There’s nothing I like better than reading their letters and trying to understand what made them tick, and how they navigated their complicated and very public lives.
My friend Denise Kiernan shines a light on the thousands of women who worked on the Manhattan Project.
If you’ve seen Oppenheimer and you’re interested in the story behind the development of the atomic bomb, then this book will help you understand the hidden figures behind its creation. What I love the most about Denise’s writing is the way that she brings the mysterious origins of Oak Ridge, a Tennessee town created to house the people working on the bomb, to life.
At a time when the stakes couldn’t have been higher, women were at the center of the story.
The New York Times bestseller, now available in paperback—an incredible true story of the top-secret World War II town of Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and the young women brought there unknowingly to help build the atomic bomb.
“The best kind of nonfiction: marvelously reported, fluidly written, and a remarkable story...As meticulous and brilliant as it is compulsively readable.” —Karen Abbott, author of Sin in the Second City
At the height of World War II, Oak Ridge, Tennessee, was home to 75,000 residents, and consumed more electricity than New York City, yet it was shrouded in such secrecy that it did not…
After teaching high school English for thirty-one years, I retired and began my second career in writing. I have published five novels and one collection of poetry. When I met Jane Tucker in 1974, she became a good friend, fellow church member, and my dental hygienist. I had no idea she had worked as a welder on Liberty Ships during World War II when she was only sixteen years old. After I learned this in 2012, I began my journey into learning all about the Rosies during World War II and writing my fourth novel Becoming Jestina. Jane’s story is an amazing one, and I still talk to her regularly.
I recommend this book because it gives a broader picture of the women who changed the way women participate in society forever. It wasn’t just building bombs, liberty ships, and planes that women had a part in. It was everything! When I’ve talked to women who lived during that time, and when I read this book, I realized how many ways women changed during that period of history.
Our Mothers' War is a stunning and unprecedented portrait of women during World War II, a war that forever transformed the way women participate in American society.
Never before has the vast range of women's experiences during this pivotal era been brought together in one book. Now, Our Mothers' War re-creates what American women from all walks of life were doing and thinking, on the home front and abroad. These heartwarming and sometimes heartbreaking accounts of the women we have known as mothers, aunts, and grandmothers reveal facets of their lives that have usually remained unmentioned and unappreciated.
After teaching high school English for thirty-one years, I retired and began my second career in writing. I have published five novels and one collection of poetry. When I met Jane Tucker in 1974, she became a good friend, fellow church member, and my dental hygienist. I had no idea she had worked as a welder on Liberty Ships during World War II when she was only sixteen years old. After I learned this in 2012, I began my journey into learning all about the Rosies during World War II and writing my fourth novel Becoming Jestina. Jane’s story is an amazing one, and I still talk to her regularly.
Since I taught school for thirty-one years, this book was especially fascinating to me because it involved two young teachers spending their summer in 1943 working on a production line at a San Diego bomber plant. It enlightened me significantly on how difficult it often was for women during that time to be accepted in what was usually an exclusively male world of work.
In 1943 two spirited young teachers decided to do their part for the war effort by spending their summer vacation working the swing shift on a B-24 production line at a San Diego bomber plant. Entering a male-dominated realm of welding torches and bomb bays, they learned to use tools that they had never seen before, live with aluminum shavings in their hair, and get along with supervisors and coworkers from all walks of life.
They also learned that wearing their factory slacks on the street caused men to treat them in a way for which their "dignified schoolteacher-hood" hadn't…
After teaching high school English for thirty-one years, I retired and began my second career in writing. I have published five novels and one collection of poetry. When I met Jane Tucker in 1974, she became a good friend, fellow church member, and my dental hygienist. I had no idea she had worked as a welder on Liberty Ships during World War II when she was only sixteen years old. After I learned this in 2012, I began my journey into learning all about the Rosies during World War II and writing my fourth novel Becoming Jestina. Jane’s story is an amazing one, and I still talk to her regularly.
No list of books about women’s work during World War II would be complete without Penny Coleman’s book. If you just want an overall picture of how eighteen million women, many of whom had never before held a job, entered the workforce in 1942-45 to help the US fight World War II, then this is the book for you! The book is illustrated with black and white photographs. It is an ALA Best Book for Young Adults.
Illustrated with black-and-white photographs. When America's men went off to war in 1942, millions of women were recruited, through posters and other propaganda, to work at non-traditional jobs. In defense plants, factories, offices, and everywhere else workers were needed, they were--for the first time--well paid and financially independent. But eventually the war ended, and the government and industries that had once persuaded them to work for the war effort now instructed them to return home and take care of their husbands and children. Based on interviews and original research by noted historian Penny Colman, Rosie the Riveter shows young readers…
I’m a writer of sapphic horror and romance fiction, and a professor of nineteenth and twentieth literature and Women’s and Gender Studies. I’ve been an avid reader of ghost-focused fiction since I was a little kid. This fascination was, in part, encouraged by my horror-loving parents, but I think I’ve just always loved being scared, and for me, the scariest thing imaginable is a haunted house. I’ve read widely in the genre, by turns spooked, thrilled, and baffled, and this reading eventually encouraged me to write my own haunted house novels. If you love a chilling tale, you’re going to love the books on this list.
This is a significant departure from the notion of a “haunted house” most of us are familiar with. We expect an old house, haunted by the past, far from humankind, and left to rot and fester in isolation somewhere remote. The haunted house in Siddons’s novel, however, is right in the middle of an upper-class neighborhood in Atlanta, and it’s a brand-new build. Rather than being haunted by the ghosts of the past inhabitants, the house itself is a force of evil, corrupting all who cross its threshold in terrible, terrifying, and often deadly ways.
An unparalleled picture of that vibrant but dark intersection where the Old and the New South collide.
Thirtysomething Colquitt and Walter Kennedy live in a charming, peaceful suburb of newly bustling Atlanta, Georgia. Life is made up of enjoyable work, long, lazy weekends, and the company of good neighbors. Then, to their shock, construction starts on the vacant lot next door, a wooded hillside they'd believed would always remain undeveloped. Disappointed by their diminished privacy, Colquitt and Walter soon realize something more is wrong with the house next door. Surely the house can’t be haunted, yet it seems to destroy…
I love crime fiction, but the genre can be very much a boys’ club where women are sometimes reduced to femmes fatales or victims who need to be saved. When I look at my bookshelves, I realize how many of the books I’ve read are written by men about men. There’s nothing wrong with stories about men, but I have a lot of strong women in my life, and I’ve learned so much from listening to their perspectives. As a writer, I like pushing myself to try and create strong female characters who find themselves ensnared in a crime and have to figure their way out.
Amanda Kyle Williams quit school at sixteen, was diagnosed with dyslexia at twenty-two, and read her first book at twenty-three. She overcame addiction and wrote while working odd jobs, becoming a best-seller with her Keye Street series.
My wife heard Amanda speak at a dyslexia conference and told her about her husband who wanted to write books; later when I met Amanda at the Decatur Book Festival, she smiled and said, “Oh, yeah, you’re the writer.”
I love her protagonist Keye, a private investigator in Atlanta and former FBI profiler. She’s funny and gutsy and wrestles with her own demons. Don’t Talk to Strangers, the third in the series, is as good as the first two. Amanda died of cancer in 2018, but she left behind a tremendously inspiring legacy in both Keye and her own incredible story.
If you like Karin Slaughter you'll love Amanda Kyle Williams...Two girls tied in death. Found next to each other in shallow graves in the remote wilderness outside Whisper, Georgia. One has lain there for a decade. One for only sixty days. Now their bodies have been uncovered and there is only one person who can help the local law enforcement find their killer. Former FBI profiler, bond enforcement officer and private detective. Keye Street. Her experience lets her see clues others can't find and now she is going to have to use all her skills if she is to stop…
I was only fourteen when my father, a District Attorney in rural Georgia, was murdered by criminals later known as members of the Dixie Mafia. While I was reading a daily newspaper interview several weeks after the murder, I was surprised to find myself as a topic. My mother told a reporter that “(He) has his father’s gifts for words. Maybe one day he will write a book about it.” Nearly thirty years later, I did write the book. After the pain of that memoir, I turned to fiction, where I placed young protagonists coming of age who faced the corruption and murders of the rural south in the 1960s.
Stuart Woods's first book may be his best. Again, the setting of the book is rural Georgia, describing the terrain where I grew up and even mentioning the real cities where the fictional events took place.
I love the story because of my own growing up in small-town Georgia where my uncle was Chief of Police and other members of my family were attorneys. The flavor of the politics and how a murderer is discovered reminds me of the willful blindness and corruption that must take place for such perverse murders to happen.
Stuart Woods’s Edgar Award-winning debut novel—a classic American mystery saga about three generations of lawmen tangled in a web of passion, secrets, destiny, and murder in their small Southern town...
In the winter of 1920, the first body is found in Delano, Georgie—the naked, brutalized corpse of a young boy. It is a crime too horrific to be ignored, the first of many that will span four decades—embroiling three police chiefs in a remarkable manhunt that will expose the hatreds, fear, and festering wounds beneath the surface of their sleepy God-fearing community.
I’ve been an avid horror fan since staying up late and watching old monster movies on the television when I was a kid. Zombies were always my favorite and after reading hundreds of zombie books I thought I could write with a unique perspective. Drawing from years of military, trucking, and prepping experience, I wrote the Zombie Road series as a tale that offered more hope than doom and gloom. Most of the characters are based on real people so they have real personalities, real hopes and dreams, and real flaws. If you decide to read the series and want to be surprised by the story arc, don’t read too many reviews, just dive right in.
Pierce writes intelligent military zompoc because he’d been in the thick of things during the Rhodesian war. He knows a thing or two about writing battle scenes because he’s done a thing or two in real life. This story is different because it isn’t about a tiny group of survivors trying to make through the apocalypse. It’s bigger in scope and encompasses one governor and the national guard doing all they can to hold the line against the undead hordes. Intelligent writing and “believable” scenarios set this military thriller apart from many of the rest.
In the midst of a Zombie apocalypse and nuclear horror the libertarian governor of Georgia must impose martial law and act against her personal beliefs to enable the people of her state to survive. Ultimately new problems arise: mass insanity and almost universal PTSD. Virtually everyone is armed and suicides actually threaten human viability. In Georgia the National Guard, State Defense Forces and militia fight a series of desperate battles while the central government unleashed a frenzied and ill planned nuclear response that almost completed what the re-animates had failed to accomplish. With Washington buried in radioactive dust, US Army…
I love crime fiction, but the genre can be very much a boys’ club where women are sometimes reduced to femmes fatales or victims who need to be saved. When I look at my bookshelves, I realize how many of the books I’ve read are written by men about men. There’s nothing wrong with stories about men, but I have a lot of strong women in my life, and I’ve learned so much from listening to their perspectives. As a writer, I like pushing myself to try and create strong female characters who find themselves ensnared in a crime and have to figure their way out.
Brian is a fellow Georgia author and a friend. I was gobsmacked by his first novel, Bull Mountain, so when he asked if I would blurb the sequel, Like Lions, I didn’t hesitate a nanosecond.
There are evildoings galore: violent criminals, drug-running, revenge killings, and a hunt for buried millions. But our hero Sheriff Clayton Burroughs is a damaged soul, dependent on alcohol and painkillers, so three powerful female characters step up to the plate.
I loved Clayton’s wife Kate, fiercely loyal and protective of her family. Vanessa is a shadowy outsider, both deadly and compassionate. And Twyla Viner is the aging matriarch of another criminal family that has a bone or two to pick with Clayton. The lions in this book are the women, and they rule this jungle.
"A book filled with unforgettable characters and a tension that heightens with every chapter." ―The Wall Street Journal
A powerful follow up to multiple award-winning debut Bull Mountain.
Brian Panowich burst onto the crime fiction scene in 2015, winning awards and accolades from readers and critics alike for his smoldering debut, Bull Mountain. Now with Like Lions, he cements his place as one of the outstanding new voices in crime fiction.
Clayton Burroughs is a small-town Georgia sheriff, a new father, and, improbably, the heir apparent of Bull Mountain’s most notorious criminal family.
I grew up a farm kid and then worked as a park ranger fresh out of college. This background draws me to the history of American preservation, where so much that seems natural also has deep cultural roots. I find the American South—with its combination of irony and tragedy, beauty, and flaws—the most fascinating place on earth to study. Or maybe I’m just pulling for the home team.
This history of Providence Canyon in southwestern Georgia explores a seemingly ironic state park: one dedicated to preserving a network of massive erosion gullies formed by poor cotton farming. But Providence Canyon is so much more than ironic, as this book beautifully illustrates. Yes, improvident farming harmed the land—as was the case across much of the South—but the spectacular gullies of Stewart County came from the intersection of human abuse and terrifyingly fragile soil structures. And they are somehow sublimely beautiful, despite their grim past. The park is perhaps the perfect place to witness the way in which human and natural actions are always tied together. Come for the gullies, stay for the lessons!
Providence Canyon State Park, also known as Georgia's "Little Grand Canyon," preserves a network of massive erosion gullies allegedly caused by poor farming practices during the nineteenth century. It is a park that protects the scenic results of an environmental disaster. While little known today, Providence Canyon enjoyed a modicum of fame in the 1930s. During that decade, local boosters attempted to have Providence Canyon protected as a national park, insisting that it was natural. At the same time, national and international soil experts and other environmental reformers used Providence Canyon as the apotheosis of human, and particularly southern, land…
